Just because people have been wrong in their understanding of right and wrong many times and in many places does not mean objective, factual things cannot exist and be said about them. I’m sure that if we sat down the entirety of humanity to talk about it, we’d reach consensus about everything major and simple and concessions about anything minor and complex (and we’d understand the Ted Bundys of the world and their utterings in the similar fashion to our understandings of people born with major genetic defects… without the moral disgust, ofc).
I don’t think you do necessarily… if you’re very clever, honest, empathetic and/or honourable, but it will certainly keep you more accountable and remorseful even in that case! And for the vast majority of people, who simply don’t have any of those qualities to the necessary degree to competently move around in the world righteously, belief in God and fear of the Day of Judgment will be the main/only barrier to stop them from transgressing greatly. It would certainly help in this amoral, self-serving, anti-intellectual, post-truth USA, for example (and don’t say these people believe in what Jesus believed in or anything like that, cause any cursory reading of the Sermon on the Mount could show you these so called religious people don’t conduct themselves in any prosocial, selfless way, nor do the believe God will judge them for their atrocities/troublemaking).
By far, society is more moral than it’s ever been. There have been ups and downs and some people are better than others, but if you look at all the atrocities that have been justified by the morality of the time, we’ve made a lot of progress as a whole.
Just because people have been wrong in their understanding of right and wrong many times and in many places does not mean objective, factual things cannot exist and be said about them. I’m sure that if we sat down the entirety of humanity to talk about it, we’d reach consensus about everything major and simple and concessions about anything minor and complex (and we’d understand the Ted Bundys of the world and their utterings in the similar fashion to our understandings of people born with major genetic defects… without the moral disgust, ofc).
So why do you need an external creator to believe in them?
I don’t think you do necessarily… if you’re very clever, honest, empathetic and/or honourable, but it will certainly keep you more accountable and remorseful even in that case! And for the vast majority of people, who simply don’t have any of those qualities to the necessary degree to competently move around in the world righteously, belief in God and fear of the Day of Judgment will be the main/only barrier to stop them from transgressing greatly. It would certainly help in this amoral, self-serving, anti-intellectual, post-truth USA, for example (and don’t say these people believe in what Jesus believed in or anything like that, cause any cursory reading of the Sermon on the Mount could show you these so called religious people don’t conduct themselves in any prosocial, selfless way, nor do the believe God will judge them for their atrocities/troublemaking).
By far, society is more moral than it’s ever been. There have been ups and downs and some people are better than others, but if you look at all the atrocities that have been justified by the morality of the time, we’ve made a lot of progress as a whole.