On Thu, 1 Feb 2018 19:17:51 -0800 (PST), Quadibloc
wrote:

However, religion, by its very nature, posits the existence of
God, and so it will put forward moral absolutes even in the
absence of secular ethical philosophers who propose natural law
theory.

Not all religions do this, or at the least, they do it to very
different degrees.

Religion is - one of the forces in this world that discourage
people from lying, cheating, and stealing, and it is a force that
encourages people to make charitable contributions, and so on.

A coin with two sides. Religion is also one of the forces of the world
that enables people in lying, cheating, and stealing.

(A recent study on charitable giving found that when you remove giving
to churches themselves- which is hardly charitable- nonreligious
people give more.)

If non-religious thinking goes to the extreme that you advocate of
being different from religious thinking, then it has the problem
that it will fail to provide moral guidance in a form that is
understandable to ordinary people.

Actually, if we can teach ordinary people to avoid dogma, it isn't at
all hard for them to understand the basis of humanism. The idea is
quite natural for modern, western people. A good deal of the conflict
we see in our societies today (most especially in the U.S.) comes from
the dissonance created by a religion-based moral code that is
increasingly seen as wrong by more and more people.

That our innate sense of fairness and
justice reflects something as absolute as mathematics - may or may
not be true, but it seems the best way for us to understand it at
this time.

This innate sense, which I refer to as our moral engine, does appear
universal. It has an organic basis (in brain structure) and even
exists in some other animals to some degree. But do not confuse it
with moral strictures, which are entirely invented by people and their
societies. A sense of fairness and justice does not in the least
preclude moral systems that support slavery and genocide, for
instance.

Humanism is the only basis I know of for defining moral strictures
that seems actually able to produce the sort of world most
enlightened, modern people seem to wish for.