this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Like the Romans used to drink from lead cups. Something like that.


(it appears that the moderator is removing any replies with which he disagrees. It might be a piefed issue. But all the removed replies are top level and upopular. Stranger coincidences have happened I suppose.)

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[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Assuming everyone who disagrees with you must be stupid is a great way to never question your own beliefs and therefore never learn.

Here, I'll start:

The reason they don’t is way more simple: reading and processing Scripture takes time and effort, assimilating basic moral principles and doing good whilst avoiding evil/immorality is counterproductive to getting the bag and going as far as possible in the hedonistic downwards spiral to Hell.

Why do you assume morality must come from scripture, and that people would not try to seek it through other means? And if morality can only come from your religion's scripture, what about the scripture of other religions?

[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not stupid, just choosing pleasure over some more important things (or at least arguing for it). And the "moral directional arrows" can be found/understood in the absence of scripture, ofc, but you have to commit to it and have the ability for it and more often than not people are too preoccupied with everything else to have enough mental resources to explore these topics in earnest. And, because of that and God knows it, scripture is useful. Idk about other religions, it's all up in the air and everything must be judged by its own merits. The more moral sense it makes, the more weight does the ideology hold, warranting more and more exploration. At the end of the day, anything outside of the realm of the material (so, not just religious beliefs but all sorts of moral claims) will be argued about, and the ones with enough wisdom seem to agree enough. Some basic Daoist tenets are pretty damn wise, for instance, and so were Diogenes and Marcus Aurelius to their own degrees, it would be silly to disagree with them just because they're "not in my books".

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Interesting. I think there is a lot of truth in your perspective. Do you think religion is a logical conclusion of moral thinking, or just compatible with it?

[–] ArgumentativeMonotheist@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Damn, I did not expect this uhh cordial reply ITT, ty! 😅

And I think Abrahamic/Mosaic/Jesuit/Muhammadean monotheism (not just religion because Roman polytheism is one of those and it has their main deity turning into animals to rape women, so you can see that some "supernatural beliefs" are completely disconnected from morality) is slightly independent of moral thinking in a vacuum (even if most of the teachings revolve around morality and not, idk, cooking and bricklaying), but moral thinking is cemented with the idea of an all-wise, all-kind (so fair and understanding, because what else could the OG intelligence be), omniscient judge, not so much because of the judgement itself but because it implies a strict, non-debatable moral evaluation of every act in binary and not wishy-washy terms. Having God's existence in the back of your head and knowing full well He wants you to do good and avoid evil (and much of it has already been discussed ad nauseam in Scripture and in the divine message so it's not like we're all in dark here, even if one has never thought deeply about it) necessitates objective morality, and believers know it.

So it doesn't matter how good it feels, how socially acceptable it is, how well hidden it is, or how you simply dgaf about others (and regardless of whether you successfully avoid doing it or not), any morally responsible and mature person knows doing X (or doing X in Y circumstances, in some cases) is wrong. Most people are not thinking about anything that deeply, so they can just refer to the word of God and prophetic lessons for insight, but the possibility for understanding moral laws without them is still there.

The main problem I find when discussing these topics goes beyond (or is at the source of) faith and just plain ignorance though, as people just have attitude problems: if it's a behaviour they enjoy and they don't want to stop, they'll make all sorts of excuses for them, rationalize them to the end, and that can only happen in a background of moral relativism and childishness ("omg don't tell me what to do, my truth is my truth, you don't know me..."). A mature, serious, intellectually honest person would just say something like "yes, I know I shouldn't do X, I know it's bad for me and for others, I know it can only lead to tragedy, but I'm having issues avoiding it/I'm not ready yet/I'm an honest brat". But, if you go through this thread, you'll see those kinds of statements are basically absent here. And then you have two or more childish moral relativists (because this is Lemmy, a Western online space) and they think their position is acceptable/mature because they're a majority, lol. The fools. Anyway, sorry for such long posts, I need to learn some brevity. 👋