What past humanity? There are hunter gatherer bands roaming around the Amazon right now. They seem to exhibit at least as much "upstanding behavior" as the evangelicals sloshing around the US.

Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc. I don't see how irrational beliefs about burning bushes, virgin births, walking on water, resurrections result in "upstanding behavior". If this were the case evangelicals would be the epitome of "upstanding behavior", but they are not.

Considering how violent are cultures of hunter-gatherers, I’d say that they are much less morally upstanding. But, they provide a good data point here: the hunter gatherers are typically highly religious. It’s just their religions are pretty bad at creating positive societal outcomes. Not all religions are created equal in that aspect.

> Scandinavia is fairly secular and has many nice attributes, the US is off the charts in terms of religion, violent behavior, gun deaths etc.

If you look at the reality instead of aggregated statistics and packaged narratives, you will find that gun deaths in US very much are not of the charts in places where religiosity is off the chart. If anything, these two things are negatively correlated: the more religious a place is, the fewer gun deaths (despite no scarcity of firearms among the religious).

We can debate what off-the-chart means, but when we cross-reference the states with the highest gun death per capita (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...) with the states that are the most religious (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/02/29/how-religio...), we find a lot of overlap.

Correlation is not causation, but I can't see how we can claim these two are negatively correlated.

Look, I’ll make this straight, because there is a lot of willful ignorance here. Overwhelming majority of gun homicides happen in large cities, where the religiosity is low, and very few in suburbs and rural areas, where religiosity is high. Moreover, people committing those gun homicides are very rarely practicing religious people, and neither are most of their victims.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/26/black-men-a...

WW2 killed 75 million people. Tell me again, who has the more violent culture?

Normally in the US it's about 1 in 17,000 according to the CDC

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind...

In Sweden its more like 1 in 83,000

Ancient stats are a little hard to come by and different groups were more or less warlike losing between an estimated 1 in 100 to 1 in 3000

Big events like WW2 are very noticeable but ancient people were in fact very violent because not shockingly people are violent.

As importantly is the context in which violence appears in ancient society driven not my large scale political movements but by resource scarcity. A continually expanding human population in the absence of modern civilization would not have achieved present population size but they would certainly have continued to grow leading to greater scarcity and increasing conflict. That is to say that they were more violent on average already and they would be more so in the modern context.

Leibingsraum was explicitly part of the reasoning for invading France.

I know it's a natural instinct to defend modern living as more peaceful, and to some extent that may be true. But modern society has also created atrocities that ancient people could never dream of.

Also, I'm not aware of record of hunter gatherer societies that didn't have religion. Religion is probably something baked in. At least I know that it's baked into me, so I run with it and enjoy it. It's possible to be both rational and religious.

Except the person who is religious will always have a limit to their rationality, because they choose "believe in magic" instead of "knowing and not knowing".

I do not agree. Being religious does not necessarily mean that you will be "magic" instead of rational. One who is rational can do and figure out things fully rationally, independently from the relgious things and from "magic", just as much as you can speak two languages without having to speak both languages at the same time, or liking a book without having to believe that it is a true story.

Whenever you can shut down any discussion with "god willed this" or similar then rationality will suffer. How do you get around that problem? I feel the only way to fix that is to remove that ability from them, ie state that God is just nonsense and they can't just invoke his name to shut down discussions since people don't care about God. People are still dumb even without God, but they seem a bit less dumb.

Yes, but being religious does not automatically mean that you have to shut down any discussion with "god will this" (although some religious people are, not all religious people are).

There are less rational people among both religious and nonreligious. (Although, the nonreligious will not say "God willed this", that does not necessarily mean that they will not say a different answer that is just as worthless as the religious answer.)

The problem is that their religious peers would take their side, find "good willed this" to be a more reasonable argument than the facts, and thus they as a group wont accept the truth. Without organized irrationality they wouldn't create a support group of irrational peers to back up their irrational arguments so in most cases they would have to adapt. And such irrational support groups doesn't often materialize randomly, religion absolutely helps them. There are a few of those who aren't religious, but I condemn the irreligious ones just as much, Homeopathy is just nonsense etc.

So for me the rest doesn't matter, if an organization is first and foremost organized irrationality I'll argue that the organization is bad. Maybe you don't use it that way, but others do, and that hurts everyone.

Morality can be bootstrapped from selfish means. I don't need religion to understanding that punching someone in the face may end up with me getting punched in the face, and I don't like getting punched in the face. Primates exhibit similar behaviors without religion and merely having a developed sense of cause and effect.

However, IMO morality has a deeper source than organized religion. Human beings experience pain, hunger, will to live, and so on. We want to live in a society that allows us to thrive and we can deduce that if we were to kill people randomly then the same could happen to us. This applies to any other moral issue as well. This is social contract theory.

Edit: prior to the development of this philosophy along with liberalism, many people (in the West) were still Christian, but I'd say society was constructed in a less moral manner.

Toxicity on social and other online media, the prevalence of scams in online marketplaces, the willingness of people (even on HN) to be employed by businesses that cause environmental and social ills as an externality, etc. all point there being a very limited radius of innate human morality, even among modern civilization. While that isn't to say that religion is a good solution, it's hard to argue that some powerful mechanism to reinforce feelings of human fellowship and community at from the individual level to the societal level wouldn't be beneficial.

God wants to free His people from Egypt (why aren’t all people his people if he created them?) so he tells Moses to tell Aaron to tell Pharaoh that if he doesn’t free the Israelites God will punish the Egyptians - and eventually kill a bunch of kids.

Wouldn’t a better solution be to just teleport the Israelites to the Holy land and not kill children? Or possess Pharaoh and make him issue a decree. Put yourself in Gods shoes and see if you can’t come up with a better solution that doesn’t involve a bunch of innocents dying.

Ditto Noah’s arc, sodom and Gomorrah. Even in the New Testament he tells Joseph to hide from Herod to avoid the slaughter of the innocents but doesn’t stop the innocents being slaughtered.

Just no.

Normal human values were co-opted by various religion-based memeplexes to justify themselves.

> a purely scientific worldview produces no inherent sense of meaning, morality, or right v. wrong.

Absolute morality does not exist. Fundamentally, morality is selfish (i.e. relative).

I don't murder someone because I don't want to live in a society where I myself can be murdered. That's what all the religious bloviating boils down to. That's it. That's all that really is.

>Claims to have a statement about what morality ultimately boils down to.

Pick one bro. You can't even stay consistent within your own supposedly relative belief system. Morality clearly cannot boil down to some simple statement if its truly relative.