Okay, but this thread focuses clearly on the benefits derived from embracing a particular moral agenda as that precipitates particular behaviors on this side of the grave as that precipitates what one imagines their fate to be on the other side of the grave.
Within any given community, sure, social, political and economic interactions are facilitated when rules of behavior are in place. Instead of, say, anarchy or a might makes right agenda.
But sooner or later this “general description” of morality is going to be tested in particular contexts in which conflicting goods confront us with the need to resolve them. This thread merely takes us beyond the here and now and confronts us with the there and then.
It’s analogous to traffic lights. It’s beneficial to have a system of traffic lights and for people to obey traffic lights. I’m not saying that running a red light would not be beneficial to a specific person who is late for work or to someone who is going to the hospital with a medical emergency. I can see those benefits. And I don’t claim that those benefits “go away” when I make an argument in favor of traffic lights.
If one looks only at individuals on particular journeys, one can argue that traffic lights slow down that individual in every case. But if there were no traffic lights, the journeys would be much slower and more dangerous, in most cases. If people routinely disobeyed the traffic lights, then the journeys would be much slower and more dangerous.
Therefore, there is a benefit to traffic lights when a large number of people are involved. It’s a result that only appears when there are interactions among many people.
Still, even something as concrete [and clearly necessary] as traffic laws are open to dispute given particular contexts. But rarely do these disputes reach the point where God and religion are invoked.
I suppose if someone was a selfish bastard and chose to completely ignore red lights and stop sign and speed limits, resulting in numerous accidents, resulting in numerous injuries and deaths to others, it might come up on Judgment Day.
But how to compare traffic laws with laws revolving around abortion or gun ownership or homosexuality or animal rights? There are some things in common, yes, but in other ways [re God and religion] things become considerably more problematic and consequential.
Indeed, we can take this into account when you name the conflict and demonstrate how your own moral narrative assures the greater “evolutionary advantage”.
Again, it’s not about me.
And it’s not about any specific individual, any specific conflict or any specific moral narrative. Evolution deals with large groups over long periods of time.
If there was no advantage to morality, then social animals would not be using it. It would have been abandoned if it didn’t work. Moral social animals are more fit to survive. That’s it.
No one is arguing that there is no advantage to having “rules of behaviors” – morality, laws – in any given human community. Instead, this thread was created specifically to explore this in regard to value judgments that come into conflict precipitating behaviors that then carry over into any particular individual’s belief regarding his or her fate on the other side of the grave.
As for God, let’s assume that a God, the God, your God is the one.
So you want to talk about my God.
How on earth can an exchange that revolves around the behaviors religious folks chose on this side of the grave derived from what they perceive their fate to be on the other side of it, not involve an understanding of what they believe about God?
My own conclusion that moral nihilism seems reasonable on this side of the grave resulting in oblivion on the other side of it, revolves precisely around my belief [here and now] that God does not exist.
But: I have no illusion that this is not in turn just another existential contraption derived from the manner in which I construe the meaning of “I” here as dasein.
Thus I am not “imposing” my own narrative on you. I am suggesting instead that your own narrative may well in turn be but an existential contraption derived from dasein.
You choose behaviors here and now. You have reasons for doing so. Those reason are connected to what you believe about God and religion insofar as “I” is sustained beyond the grave.
Here and now. There and then.
You’ll either discuss that in some detail regarding the behaviors that you do choose or you won’t.
And nothing could possibly be more absurd [to me] than someone accusing me of not being able to “imagine anyone thinking about it in any other way.”
That’s all I ever think about!
In fact, it is the existential implications of this that keeps shoving me back down into the hole I’m in.
And all you have to do is to keep clinging to the God that keeps you up out of it. Or, rather, so it seems to me.