That's half an answer. What is the other half? What is it that you have left, after you take the history, metaphysics, authority and all away? — Banno

You have reality. Religion is built into the real in the indeterminacy of our world. Indeterminacy here another name for metaphysics, but in this case, it is, if you will, warranted metaphysics, or, metaphysics that is "discovered" not invented, and by this I mean something really very simple and undebatable: All propositions have their truth value revealed to be indeterminate because there is nothing in the revealed world that steps forward to make a definitive claim, which is why philosophy has its insufferable persistence. Just ask any question you please, and follow through with inquiry and you end up where, as Hillary Putnam put it, where ideas run out.

So, the human condition is indeterminate on all fronts where knowledge stakes a claim. Our existence is entirely indeterminate in all of its affairs, and this deserves repeating, because it is rarely given its due, to, well, stand before all things and realize our familiar systems of explaining the world are without ground. It is standing before the world without the presumption of knowing; THIS is, I argue, the essence of religion. And there is nowhere this is experienced so deeply as in ethics.

There is no god. — Banno

As sexy as it can feel to 'know' it - I know you know this is unknown.

If there is no God.... there is no good. — Hanover

There is good here, now. That much we know. 'Good' is a malleable word.

No one can say there is a god. No one can say there is no god. It's silly to say those things. I think you both know it's silly.

'God', the word, will always be sacred to some folks and be the acme of nonsense to other folks.

'God', after all, is a word, and likes to play games.

brilliant tune, don't you think? — Banno

Clings to tonic in a milksoppy way. What is this song afraid of? It has to learn to be brave if it wants grow up to be a real song.

Clings to tonic... — ZzzoneiroCosm

Pretentious twaddle. Simple suits a folk tune.

I think this is a good summary of the ongoing debate here. And for all our rehashing of this theme I'm not sure we've really explored it in depth. Maybe I haven't been her long enough or paid close enough attention. — Tom Storm

Yes, you and are correct, and I will accept my share of the blame, for lowering my replies to the repetition of old moral arguments, and being distracted by musical critique.

A few times I've attempted to summarise by listing those things that might have taken to role of the "stipulated anchor" posited in the article. I'll do that again, this time explicitly.

There was, in no particular order,

• @ZzzoneiroCosm's 'Thou", which I think too obtuse to be of any use.
• Ritualistic practice, which stands as necessary but not sufficient in that while there are no religions without ritual, there are rituals without religion.
• Ethics, a source of too much conflict to offer a foundation for our understanding of religion.
• The supernatural, which being itself indefinite could not serve as a suitable definition.
• The ineffable, about which little can be said, which doesn't seem to stop folk.

There was also

's diagram, which I didn't understand the first time I saw it, and which remains obscure to me. And 's material conditions look to be missing a large part of what is particular to religion.

A bunch of notions that seem incapable of producing any account that would serve to define the concept of religion. All of which happily suits my prejudices that concepts in general and the concept of religion in particular cannot be clarified in any helpful way. All we have is the way we use the term.

Religion fills gaps in human knowledge.

Interesting article that this thread is based upon. I'd like to see you keep developing that with someone. Can't be me. I barely have time nowadays to read, but this thread was time well spent.

Kudos.

Yes, you and ↪Wayfarer are correct, and I will accept my share of the blame, for lowering my replies to the repetition of old moral arguments, and being distracted by musical critique. — Banno

It wasn't intended as a criticism of anyone. :wink: I'm easily distracted and have participated joyfully here in my own hobbyhorses...

I must confess the concept of religion is hard for me to understand, but having been brought up in the Baptist tradition, my sense is that most religion is like supporting a football team. People and their dreams coalesce around shared symbols and lore and vary in their level of interest or fanaticism. It's generally about social contact and feeling like they belong to something special. Oh, and sometimes god is invoked...

↪Wayfarer's diagram, which I didn't understand the first time I saw it, and which remains obscure to me — Banno

Allow me an interpretation, then. The point of this diagram is that, despite the obvious and (many would say) irreconciliable differences between different traditions, there is a common structure that can be discerned.

Each ring forms a nested hierarchy, or level of being, within which the higher circles include but transcend the inner or lower circles.

In Christian-English terms, on one side, the hierarchy is Body-Psyche-Soul-Spirit (in terms of the individual) and on the other side, Nature, Angels, God, Godhead (in terms of of the cosmos).

This structure is replicated for other cultural forms (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, etc).

That is the basis for Huston Smith's argument that there is a common structure, and that, therefore, the religions are agreeing and disagreeing about something real.

That is also compatible with John Hick's pluralistic model outlined in his Who or What is God?

The question will be asked, that if this purported structure is real, then why can't it be validated by science?

The response is to consider that these are the kinds of structure which are only perceptible to one particular form of terrestrial intelligence, namely, h. sapiens (and even then not every individual member of that species). As the modern scientific model is predicated on the exclusion of factors that cannot be objectively and physically sensed and measured, then naturally this is out-of-scope for the scientific method. In positivist terms, it will therefore be categorised as nonsensical.

However in my view it offers a coherent undestanding of 'mind and cosmos' as it provides for a vision within which h. sapiens has a role, rather than being the 'accidental byproduct' as it is depicted by scientific materialism. And if indeed it can be discerned across so many cultures and periods of history in the forms of literature of those traditions, then that literature should be regarded as evidence and not simply dismissed as myth.

...having been brought up in the Baptist tradition... — Tom Storm

It should be noted that the cross-cultural perspective of a John Hick or a Huston Smith or a Mircea Eliade is vastly different to the mainstream ecclesiastical Christian view, which must always start from the premise that Christianity is the 'one true faith'. That is what differentiates that kind of understanding from the stereotypically religious outlook.

I was raised as a Christian and we celebrated Christmas. Now I'm an atheist. I still bring a tree into my home during the holiday season, but I don't do it to celebrate the birth of some man that claimed to be the son of a god. I do it because it is fun for me and my family. So it's not a religious ritual. — Harry Hindu

:up: Right there you've done an exposé of religious scams. All the religions of the world piggyback on fun things to do. The Trojan horse, my friend. Here's a gift for you! Wait a minute, what's the (malicious) payload?

It wasn't intended as a criticism of anyone. — Tom Storm

Nor was it taken as such. You presented an opportunity to reconsider the topic. Cheers.

I'm also looking for ways to break the cyclic nature of these threads. TO that end it is well worth recognising it when it occurs.

You are a Jew if your mother was a Jew. Judaism is not even based upon your belief system. — Hanover

So the very first human was a Jew? Wouldn't that make every human a Jew and therefore meaningless? If not then how did the first Jew become a Jew?

"Religion" is not a term with an essence. — Hanover

This is the same as saying, "religion" is just scribbles on this page.

All we have is the way we use the term. — Banno

To use something we must have a goal in mind. What is the goal in using the term the way we do?

So the very first human was a Jew? Wouldn't that make every human a Jew? If not then how did the first Jew become a Jew? — Harry Hindu

If you're asking for the biblical account, no, Adam wasn't Jewish. The Hebrews were chosen to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai after fleeing Egypt, so the story goes.

If you're looking fur a more historically accurate account of when rabbinical Jewish law developed dictating who is a Jew, I'd assume after the 1st century CE after the fall of the second temple.

I'm also not advocating here the Orthodox definition of who is a Jew over other viewpoints, but only indicating it is one. The Reforn have a very different view

This is the same as saying, "religion" is just scribbles on this page. — Harry Hindu

There can be 20 potential criteria that every religion has, with 2 particular examples not having any overlap, meaning 2 examples would not share an essential similar trait

My point here is that even if you wish to maintain your antiquated essentialist views, your above criticism does not logically follow.

Pretentious twaddle. — Banno

And the insults begin. Take care.

If there is no God, there is no teleos and there is no good. "Good for what? " is a meaningless question if there is no what, no aim, no objective. — Hanover

"Good for what"? God? What is the end or purpose? God?

Good is not merely an instrumental term. What is good is not necessarily good for something.

Why does life need to have an end or purpose beyond life? How is that purpose known? How do you know it is a purpose that is discovered or given to us rather that one we make?

It is rather that you want to look only at what religion looks like, not what it is at its core. Religion can be contextualized in many ways, but its power to rule a society's thoughts and feelings lies with its foundational claims and the indeterminacy found there. Human being lives within a deficit, not in politics nor in social cohesion or any other way you would observe it as taken up and entangled in our affair; but un all things. If you look for a material conditions, keep in mind that, as with philosophy, religion essentially is not about some vast corporate administrations that wield power and influence. Such are the things (basically, Kierkegaard's complaint) that corrupt it, and if THIS is what you think religion really is, then you are missing the mark of your OP. You have to move to another order of thinking.

Ask, the same question about God: what are the material conditions (and by this it is actualities that confront us prior to abstract thinking) that gave rise to this? Was Freud right? Yes, but Freud was a meta-psychologist. Not a philosopher.

Why does life need to have an end or purpose beyond life? How is that purpose known? How do you know it is a purpose that is discovered or given to us rather that one we make? — Fooloso4

But ten, this asks further, what is made and what is given? The line is hard to draw, granted, but certainly NOT all is made (notwithstanding Rorty). Our forward looking world's teleology is not absent of things truly given in the metaphysical sense, and not all metaphysics is nonsense.

Right there you've done an exposé of religious scams. All the religions of the world piggyback on fun things to do. The Trojan horse, my friend. Here's a gift for you! Wait a minute, what's the (malicious) payload? — Agent Smith

And when the you lie there annihilated by your own foolishness at the horse's feet, THEN the religious event has its grounding. It could have been Trojans, the plague, the Nazis, and on and on. One never settles for the incidentals if the question is a philosophical one.

There is good here, now. That much we know. 'Good' is a malleable word. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Good is a contingent word: it depends on what it means given the context. But religious good is absolute. For this, one has to look at metaethics: You know, the GOOD! And this is not merely a fanciful idea.

A bunch of notions that seem incapable of producing any account that would serve to define the concept of religion. — Banno

One can describe how we use language (or maybe just gesticulate), but that doesn't account for WHY we use language. Having an abstracted conversation of "what does the word "religion" refer to?" as if there is one answer (or even two) for all contexts (time, place, audience, etc.) will lead to disappointment. The article itself delves into this problem of "why 'religion'" and I think if you sit with that awhile, you might come closer to understanding what it refers to. Not because there is some essential meaning in the word, but because you might come to understand how it was effectively employed before and how you (or someone else) might effectively apply it in the future.

Despite this murkiness, all three of these versions are “substantive” definitions of religion because they determine membership in the category in terms of the presence of a belief in a distinctive kind of reality. In the twentieth century, however, one sees the emergence of an importantly different approach: a definition that drops the substantive element and instead defines the concept religion in terms of a distinctive role that a form of life can play in one’s life—that is, a “functional” definition.

. . .

What is counted as religion by one definition is often not counted by others. How might this disarray be understood? Does the concept have a structure? This section distinguishes between two kinds of answer to these questions. Most of the attempts to analyze the term have been “monothetic” in that they operate with the classical view that every instance that is accurately described by a concept will share a defining property that puts them in that category. The last several decades, however, have seen the emergence of “polythetic” approaches that abandon the classical view and treat religion, instead, as having a prototype structure.
. . .

A central theme of his essays is that the concept religion (and subcategories such as world religions, Abrahamic faiths, or nonliterate traditions) are not scientific terms but often reflect the unrecognized biases of those who use these concepts to sort their world into those who are or are not “like us”

. . .

In some cases, the point of rejecting thing-hood is to deny that religion names a category, all the instances of which focus on belief in the same kind of object—that is, the slogan is a rejection of substantive definitions of the concept (e.g., Possamai 2018: ch. 5). In this case, the objection bolsters a functional definition and does not deny that religion corresponds to a functionally distinct kind of form of life.
. . .

Like the concept of witches or the concept of biological races (e.g., Nye 2020), religion is a fiction (Fitzgerald 2015) or a fabrication (McCutcheon 2018), a concept invented and deployed not to respond to some reality in the world but rather to sort and control people.

. . .

These post-structuralist and nominalist arguments that deny that religion is “out there” have a realist alternative. According to this alternative, there is a world independent of human conceptualization, and something can be real and it can even affect one’s life, whether or not any human beings have identified it. This is true of things whose existence does not depend on collective agreement, like biochemical signaling cascades or radioactive beta particles, and it is equally true of things whose existence does depend on collective agreement, like kinship structures, linguistic rules, and religious commitments. A realist about social structures holds that a person can be in a bilateral kinship system, can speak a Uralic language, and can be a member of a religion—even if they lack these concepts.

This realist claim that social structures have existed without being conceptualized raises the question: if human beings had different ways of practicing religion since prehistoric times, why and when did people “finally” create the taxon?

. . .
— "SEP

The article is, in the end, an effort to understand the ways in which we come to describe a particular, though grantedly vague, relation.

And though I was entirely self-aware of the futility of trying to define religion for everyone else when I made the post on the meaning of religion, you can see the hallmarks of religious existentialism and ideas (not to mention language) referenced in the article.

. . .

One also sees a functional approach in Paul Tillich (1957), who defines religion as whatever dominant concern serves to organize a person’s values (whether or not that concern involve belief in any unusual realities). Tillich’s definition turns on the axiological function of providing orientation for a person’s life. ..

For example, the Thai villager who wears an apotropaic amulet and avoids the forest because of a belief that malevolent spirits live there, or the ancient Roman citizen who takes a bird to be sacrificed in a temple before she goes on a journey are for Durkheim examples of magic rather than religion, and for Tillich quotidian rather than ultimate concerns. . . .
— SEP

You are a Jew if your mother was a Jew. Judaism is not even based upon your belief system. — Hanover

If you're asking for the biblical account, no, Adam wasn't Jewish. The Hebrews were chosen to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai after fleeing Egypt, so the story goes.

If you're looking fur a more historically accurate account of when rabbinical Jewish law developed dictating who is a Jew, I'd assume after the 1st century CE after the fall of the second temple.

I'm also not advocating here the Orthodox definition of who is a Jew over other viewpoints, but only indicating it is one. The Reforn have a very different view — Hanover

Then you are not necessarily a Jew if your mother was a Jew and Judaism IS based on a belief system because now you've shown that what makes one a Jew is based on one's belief system.

This is the same as saying, "religion" is just scribbles on this page.
— Harry Hindu

There can be 20 potential criteria that every religion has, with 2 particular examples not having any overlap, meaning 2 examples would not share an essential similar trait

My point here is that even if you wish to maintain your antiquated essentialist views, your above criticism does not logically follow. — Hanover

No need to get feisty. It's not my fault that you are incapable of being consistent.

Then a religion would be defined as possessing at least one of 20 (not an infinite) potential criteria. I'm just trying to focus on one criteria - that a religion is the practice of believing an idea is true, when there is no evidence to support it, over all other ideas that either do or do not have evidence. Since it seems difficult for you to be consistent in your reasoning then maybe we should just focus on one criteria at a time and see which ones we agree and disagree on.

However in my view it offers a coherent undestanding of 'mind and cosmos' as it provides for a vision within which h. sapiens has a role, rather than being the 'accidental byproduct' as it is depicted by scientific materialism. And if indeed it can be discerned across so many cultures and periods of history in the forms of literature of those traditions, then that literature should be regarded as evidence and not simply dismissed as myth. — Wayfarer

It’s extremely generous to say that religion offers a coherent undestanding of 'mind and cosmos'. There is no shortage of roles for people to occupy and there’s no reason that we can’t find them ourselves. The fact that there are so many divergent meta-narratives indicates that they are myths.

but isn't a type of freeloading built into the human experience in as much as we benefit from the work/ideas/civilization of all who came before us, without making a single contribution? — Tom Storm

I think that moral behavior applies to the living and hope that those not living are beyond such concerns.

This is the same as saying, "religion" is just scribbles on this page. — Harry Hindu

Then you are not necessarily a Jew if your mother was a Jew and Judaism IS based on a belief system because now you've shown that what makes one a Jew is based on one's belief system. — Harry Hindu

Pretend for a moment, if you will, that we aren't talking about religion and instead are talking about government. One day you are born - from that moment onwards, you are a citizen of one state or another. You haven't made a choice, it doesn't matter what you believe, it doesn't even matter what your momma or pappa believes, but you are citizen of X. In some respects, this is tantamount to saying there is a metaphysical fact that you are a citizen of X.

What do we make of this fact? Do we say that because if there were no humans alive aside from you that you would not be a citizen of X it means that you aren't a citizen of X? Do we acknowledge that we can create facts through social convention? Do we hold the fact that you are a citizen of X to be something that has legitimacy only if claimed by group Y rather than group Z?

Non-voluntary membership in a group based upon the criteria of others is not unique to religion. Having the world treat you fundamentally different based upon those criteria is not unique to religion. The only difference between being a citizen of X and being a member of religion A is the extent to which such status changes your relationship to the world.

If your goal is to say that there are no such things as socially constructed facts (let alone socially constructed metaphysical facts), then great. Go be a mereological nihilist and describe your world that way. Relationships aren't for you.

If, on the other hand, you are willing to acknowledge that some pieces of papers (or binary configurations) are currency and that some are not, you seem to be engaged in that thing around here people like to say... "Special pleading" is it? Uniquely critiquing religion using criteria you do not apply in other contexts means that you are inconsistent rather than the other-way round.


P.S. Notice here that I do not invoke god/gods as some arbiter of metaphysical facts because god's take on the matter is either a) equally legitimate/illegitimate to that of any other authority and b) not useful if "unknowable".

However in my view it offers a coherent undestanding of 'mind and cosmos' as it provides for a vision within which h. sapiens has a role, rather than being the 'accidental byproduct' as it is depicted by scientific materialism. And if indeed it can be discerned across so many cultures and periods of history in the forms of literature of those traditions, then that literature should be regarded as evidence and not simply dismissed as myth. — Wayfarer

Mythologies that places man in the center is evidence of nothing more than the fact that there are mythologies that put man in the center.

Man, this "accidental byproduct", is capable of shaping and destroying our world. Our role and responsibility is not enhanced but is instead diminished by claims of cosmic significance. The focus is shifted from here and now to some imagined cosmic stage where we play a starring role. It all too easily becomes escapist self-glorification.

What goes on here has no describable significance for the universe. What we do here, however, can and does make a difference for our small, insignificant planet and its inhabitants.

Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed the entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved the entire world. — Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:1 (22a) Attributed to Hillel

Pretend for a moment, if you will, that we aren't talking about religion and instead are talking about government. One day you are born - from that moment onwards, you are a citizen of one state or another. You haven't made a choice, it doesn't matter what you believe, it doesn't even matter what your momma or pappa believes, but you are citizen of X. In some respects, this is tantamount to saying there is a metaphysical fact that you are a citizen of X.

What do we make of this fact? Do we say that because if there were no humans alive aside from you that you would not be a citizen of X it means that you aren't a citizen of X? Do we acknowledge that we can create facts through social convention? Do we hold the fact that you are a citizen of X to be something that has legitimacy only if claimed by group Y rather than group Z? — Ennui Elucidator

I don't see why we would need to use the term, "metaphysical" here. It's just a fact that I would be a citizen of X because being a citizen of X is a human conceptual invention - not something discovered in nature that has existed prior to humans, like planets vs dwarf planets, or life vs non-life when talking about the origins of life.

It also seems to me that more than one person would need to agree upon the definition of "citizen" and "X" for us to then agree that I am indeed a citizen of X, or else being a "citizen of X" is meaningless. Words are only useful for communicating shared experiences and understandings, or else what is the purpose of using a word that only you understand the way you are using it? What is the purpose of using words, or any external symbol for that matter, if there are no other humans alive?

Non-voluntary membership in a group based upon the criteria of others is not unique to religion. Having the world treat you fundamentally different based upon those criteria is not unique to religion. The only difference between being a citizen of X and being a member of religion A is the extent to which such status changes your relationship to the world. — Ennui Elucidator

That's the point in me asking the questions I am asking - of what criteria others are using to define "religion" so that I can then say whether I am religious or not. If they can't give me any criteria then they are simply moving the goalposts so that I can NOT be a member of their group. They haven't given me any reason to believe that I would be a member of their group if they can't define the criteria for being a member. When there are no criteria, or an infinite number of criteria, that define a concept then no one is religious or everyone is religious, which isn't useful.

If your goal is to say that there are no such things as socially constructed facts (let alone socially constructed metaphysical facts), then great. Go be a mereological nihilist and describe your world that way. Relationships aren't for you.

If, on the other hand, you are willing to acknowledge that some pieces of papers (or binary configurations) are currency and that some are not, you seem to be engaged in that thing around here people like to say... "Special pleading" is it? Uniquely critiquing religion using criteria you do not apply in other contexts means that you are inconsistent rather than the other-way round. — Ennui Elucidator

It seems that you haven't read my other posts in this thread. If you had you would have noticed that I made a distinction between socially constructed facts and natural facts. The former is invented by humans while the latter is invented by nature. Hanover is the one that is being vague and inconsistent in defining the criteria of what "religion" means. I'm the one asking for the criteria that's being referred to when using the word. Religion is a concept invented by humans, just as currency, states, and presidents are. What we need to be careful of is when distinctions between definitions of "religion" and "democracy" are along the lines of one's own religion or political leaning. We can't have only Muslims defining "religion", nor can we have only the left defining "democracy". The definitions of these terms can only be objectively defined by people that are not religious (atheist) or don't have a political leaning (a-political). In other words, they can only be properly defined by those that are not influenced by some group and can think for themselves. In asking different people of different religions or governments how they define "religion" or "government" you attempt to find the common criteria and start from there, but you have to already acknowledge that your religion or government is not the one true religion or government - that there might be other types but they all must share a common characteristic for them to be categorized as a religion or government.

If you had you would have noticed that I made a distinction between socially constructed facts and natural facts. — Harry Hindu

And this is responsive to why you aren't a mereological nihilist how? Facts are socially constructed whether about social relations or relations of atoms. The states of affairs, however, are what "is" independent of society. The question is to what extent the states of affairs are primitive (only the whole exists, e.g. atoms) or composite (wholes can have parts, e.g. people). If you believe that the states of affair are composite, I am saying that you are already acknowledging that the relationships of parts to one another cause things to exist or not. The question is why you privilege certain sorts of relations (things that are closer like people) over others (things that are further like countries) especially when you are likely to call things very far away from one another existent (like planets and solar systems).

I don't see why we would need to use the term, "metaphysical" here. — Harry Hindu

That is because you are not understanding metaphysical in the way that I am using it. It is something that is true of the states of affairs independent of how we think about them. Perhaps "ontic" would sit better with you?

The definitions of these terms can only be objectively defined by people — Harry Hindu

You don't seem to appreciate what a definition is - it is inherently emblematic of intersubjective agreement, i.e. not objective (existent independent of minds).

by people that are not religious (atheist) or don't have a political leaning (a-political) — Harry Hindu

You also don't seem to appreciate the difference between objectivity and disinterest. Further, you don't seem to appreciate that people are social, i.e. they are necessarily political and religious (by at least one definition).

but they all must share a common characteristic for them to be categorized as a religion or government. — Harry Hindu

This is exactly the problem that the "anchor" in polythetic approaches is intended to address. The problem with @Banno's post is that he plays fast and lose with words. He references a word ("religion") which is discussed in conceptual terms, highlights an approach which is intended to incorporate essentialism into a non-essentialist analysis of concepts, and then asks whether there is an essence to it. (It doesn't help that he vacillates between "concepts" and "definitions".)

Most of the attempts to analyze the term have been “monothetic” in that they operate with the classical view that every instance that is accurately described by a concept will share a defining property that puts them in that category. The last several decades, however, have seen the emergence of “polythetic” approaches that abandon the classical view and treat religion, instead, as having a prototype structure.

. . .

Polythetic definitions are increasingly popular today as people seek to avoid the claim that an evolving social category has an ahistorical essence.[14] However, the difference between these two approaches is not that monothetic definitions fasten on a single property whereas polythetic definitions recognize more. Monothetic definitions can be multifactorial, as we have seen, and they can recognize just as many properties that are “common” or even “typical” of religions, without being essential. The difference is also not that the monothetic identification of the essence of religion reflects an ethnocentrism that polythetic approaches avoid. The polythetic identification of a prototypical religion is equally ethnocentric. The difference between them, rather, is that a monothetic definition sorts instances with a Yes/No mechanism and is therefore digital, and a polythetic definition produces gradations and is therefore analog. It follows that a monothetic definition treats a set of instances that all possess the one defining property as equally religion, whereas a polythetic definition produces a gray area for instances that are more prototypical or less so.
— SEP

So it would be great if rather than rehashing why essentialism is dumb, we can move on to whether something can "refer" that is non-essentialist. (Where the answer is clearly yes).

Perhaps, since we don't see other social animals murdering their fellows — Janus

Of course they do.
See cannibalism and infanticide in animals.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism

As sexy as it can feel to 'know' it - I know you know this is unknown. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I know I exist.

Alright, so for all here who have settled upon relativistic morality — Hanover

The problem isn't relativistic morality per se, it's moral trivialism. Ie. the view that moral judgments are essentially trivial. This comes from viewing ethics/morality as a subcategory of aesthetics. It renders ethics/morality as a matter of "ethics/morality is in the eye of the beholder".

In order for our moral judgments to have weight, to seem relevant, they need to be assumed to have more to them than being the mere opinion of an individual person.

One need not posit an absolute moral authority in order to regard rape as wrong. — Fooloso4

No, but one needs to posit an absolute moral authority in order to regard one's moral judgments as relevant.

Ethics are either a code of conduct set by a culture, based on values, traditions and evolving attitudes, or they are handed down by a transcendent source - (deity or idealism). — Tom Storm

The issue is how can we or how do we consider a certain moral standard or moral judgment relevant, binding, as something that is more than mere opinion.