Secular values, how would you summarise them?

[macdoc]

Love as thou wilt

Kushiel

you DID want a summary yes?

[Onomotopeia]

First to note: "secular" simply means "separate from religion." There are multiple sets of actual secular values.

I 100% agree that the rules are whatever we invent. It behooves us, then, to invent good ones. Secular humanism, for example, reasons out values based on our interests as individuals and as a society. Morals are what are good for people. That's the beginning and end of them. These values change over time as our interests change, as we learn more about what is good for us and as our needs change. A set of rules in a book simply cannot provide the flexibility necessary to fix our values as we change and learn new information.

When logic is your basis, rational discourse is how you agree on rules. Lo and behold, it turns out that when we band together and agree on logical, reasonable, secular rules, society gets safer, and we get happier. It's called the social contract. It's pretty easy to see why it's a good idea for us to band up against people who murder other people, for example. I agree to stop Jim from killing Bob because I want Sally to stop Margaret from killing me. We need no gods or books needs to tell us that. It follows from our needs, and is the most logical, reasonable way to make a happy, healthy society that can adapt to a changing environment. Rational people have been doing this for hundreds of years now and have dragged religion kicking and screaming into the modern age.

The big problem with religious values is that since they are given and not reasoned from anything natural. This means two things: first, for those religions where the lawgiver does not release updates to his book over time, the values and rules cannot change as peoples' needs and knowledge about the world change. (Witness the quandaries about genetic engineering and contraception.) Second, communication between people who have different lawgivers, different books and different intepretations of the same book is impossible. All the Muslim can say is "my God says X" and the Christian "my God says Y." Neither of them can tell the other, "yeah, but my thing makes more SENSE." That's just not how you came up with the law in the first place--the reasons are irrelevant. What God said, is law.

[Thinking Aloud]

Welcome Onomotopeia!

[enkidu]

Onomotopeia, it doesn't have to get any more complicated than you have stated
Now we await apologetic snake oil sophistry for rejoinders.

[Onomotopeia]

I've been thinking about this some more, trying to come up with lists. A few realizations I've had:

(1) Secular vs. religious is not a great distinction by itself. If someone claims superior aliens gave us laws we should follow, is that secular or religious? (Seems secular to me, since it's not backed by a religion.) If a religion says "God says you should apply the principles and rules of Secular Humanism," does that make all secular values religious? I think it does.

Rational vs. irrational might get us further. I will use secular humanism's "let's do what's best for people" instead of secular for the rest of this.

(2) Solely religious values are generally either wrong (slavery) or unprovable (the afterlife). The secular guide is evidence of what If an idea is solely religious, that means if the religion stated something that made more sense, it would get adopted and become secular. The only values that are left are those which can only be justified with faith (which have no demonstrable value in this life). They need you to believe that God is supermoral, that he communicates those morals to us, and you must believe in some undemonstrable things such as the soul, heaven, and hell.

(3) If religious morality were significantly ahead of secular morality, it would be evidence for revelation. I cannot say whether it would be enough evidence to believe in God, but I think it would be a powerful statement that a higher being had communicated to us. Unfortunately, what we find in Christianity is the opposite: we have to remove and revise more and more of its rules as secular thinking advances. Very few Christians in first-world countries believe slavery is OK anymore, but the Bible was used to justify it for nearly two millenia of Christianity and much more of Judaism. It's gone now, and it didn't go without a fight. This is an indictment of the statement "God spoke through the Bible" and hence of the religion in general.

(4) Many solely religious values have negative value, sucking up time, energy, money, increasing credulity and causing a rejection of the best thinking of the age.
"No work or fire on the Sabbath."
"Pray every day."
"Give 10% of your income to the church."
"Spread these beliefs to as many people as possible."
"When you see an alternative to this belief, be strong and reject it, because it's from the Devil."
"It is a good idea to believe certain things without any reason to (faith is good)."
"Being gay is bad."

The only solely religious value I can think of that might be ahead of the curve is "no abortion," because that's such a thorny problem.

(5) Religious values are unexpectedly inconsistent. Religious morality disproves God, or at least proves that God is not speaking in any of his books. If God was supermoral (knew what was right) and could communicate that to us, it'd be damn clear what the right thing to do was. Yet religions and splinters of religion teem like insects. Their books and interpretations of books are mutually contradictory and it is unclear which is right, indicating that God (presumably a superb communicator) is either absent or unwilling to let us know how to behave. He doesn't update his book and leaves bad laws in there (slavery), and he doesn't correct people who continue to use those bad ideas.

(6) Secular values are hard to make. It's not impossible by any means. It's certainly iterative (give our best shot, see if it works). But it's hard. Gathering evidence as to what laws and rules of thumb work is hard, because it's hard (though not impossible) to measure effects like happiness, and you have to correct for so many interrelated factors (environment, countries, cultures, families, attitudes). Even figuring out what our needs are is hard, because there are so many different people, because we don't realize many of our higher needs until our lower needs have been met, and because our needs change with our environment. But in the end, there is no special revelation, no one who is going to tell us how to live our lives. It's simply the only sensible way to go about it.