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jadaryesterday at 4:40 AM5 repliesview on HN

Exactly. But, I would add ethics comes from worldview. The idea of teaching some sort of “secular” ethics has never made sense to me … even if you could pull it off it would never stick. Education is meant to make moral people, and that requires transcendent moral principles that come from somewhere outside of us — namely YHWH, our creator. Anything else is merely borrowing from our worldview — which is good as far as it goes but will always fall short.


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godelskiyesterday at 5:15 AM

  > The idea of teaching some sort of “secular” ethics has never made sense to me …
An intro ethics class won't shy away from religion, it comes up a lot. You'll most likely even discuss differences in different sects of Christianity. You should also have the discussion of if morals are universal (and if so, which ones) or are all made up.

Secular just means you discuss more than one viewpoint. The idea of teaching morality from only one perspective never made sense to me. You won't even get that limited viewpoint in Seminary school, even though it'll certainly be far more biased

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mckn1ghtyesterday at 5:05 AM

You don’t need religion for ethics or worldview. How about: we all appear here on this rock, none of us know why, we’re all in it together, we all struggle, none of us know if we’re alone in this universe or what the universe really is. This unifies us all and puts us on an even playing field. We should be compassionate to one another as we all come from the same circumstance. We can create a concept of god to explain it, or accept that we don’t know for sure and maybe never will. God is a choice, but not the only one.

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yoyohello13yesterday at 5:45 AM

All of our current leaders as using God to justify their terrible actions. So religion doesn’t seem to be very good at teaching morals either.

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Tarq0nyesterday at 1:55 PM

Transcendental moral principles can still be secular.

One that I find compelling is that Rawls' veil of ignorance lets us imagine that we might be on either side of a conflict, and that therefore moral actions are equitable to both sides. This gives us a secular morality that doesn't come with the baggage of religious outgroup dynamics.

donkeybeeryesterday at 11:18 AM

First prove yhwh. Then prove your favorite book is a direct transmission from yhwh. Disprove the claims of other peoples favorite books, there is a lot of competition there.

Demonstrate the telephone line by which this so called yhwh communicates his words and prove how and why it no longer does.