Most western religions I know of are VERY adept at the “no true scotsman” defense. You can’t determine the religion’s position by polling the laity, or even the elites. All humans are fallible (with a very few exceptions, none of whom are likely to answer your question), and the true teachings of a given religion are filtered through confounding acts of sinners, devils, and non-believers.
I think your question framing shows a confusion about how religions and morality work. Most religions try to answer some moral questions, and succeed for some subset of people, for some subset of questions. They don’t end up with consensus on the difficult questions, and most of them will tell you that consensus isn’t the point—there’s an actual truth behind it, with some supernatural enforcement/judgement.
I personally think that’s a delusion, but if you’re looking for external answers, it’s among the more promising sources. What you can’t do is to apply skeptical / rational methods to this kind of truth. That framework is misleading, as some form of intentional misdirection will be used to make it fail (punishment for your hubris, evil people leading you astray, weakness of your faith making you doubt, etc.).
I agree that the analysis is pretty superficial and ignores the fact that religion is mostly a social phenomenon where dynamics like ‘belief in belief’ dominate. I also agree that religious people would be unconvinced that the argument was valid.
I mainly wrote the post because the argument seemed potentially nontrivial and I’m trying to learn to write (this is my first post). I guess this one was probably too superficial/confused to be worthwhile, so I’ll try to improve on that in any future posts.
Most western religions I know of are VERY adept at the “no true scotsman” defense. You can’t determine the religion’s position by polling the laity, or even the elites. All humans are fallible (with a very few exceptions, none of whom are likely to answer your question), and the true teachings of a given religion are filtered through confounding acts of sinners, devils, and non-believers.
I think your question framing shows a confusion about how religions and morality work. Most religions try to answer some moral questions, and succeed for some subset of people, for some subset of questions. They don’t end up with consensus on the difficult questions, and most of them will tell you that consensus isn’t the point—there’s an actual truth behind it, with some supernatural enforcement/judgement.
I personally think that’s a delusion, but if you’re looking for external answers, it’s among the more promising sources. What you can’t do is to apply skeptical / rational methods to this kind of truth. That framework is misleading, as some form of intentional misdirection will be used to make it fail (punishment for your hubris, evil people leading you astray, weakness of your faith making you doubt, etc.).
Thanks for the feedback!
I agree that the analysis is pretty superficial and ignores the fact that religion is mostly a social phenomenon where dynamics like ‘belief in belief’ dominate. I also agree that religious people would be unconvinced that the argument was valid.
I mainly wrote the post because the argument seemed potentially nontrivial and I’m trying to learn to write (this is my first post). I guess this one was probably too superficial/confused to be worthwhile, so I’ll try to improve on that in any future posts.