Not only wasted time, but also wasted intellectual energy. Many theologians and apologetics are often smart people that could use their intellect to more useful (i.e. right direction) domains.
Moral questions are religious questions. Can suffering be scientifically observed and quantified? The "right direction" is a fairly large, old, and subtle debate without an easy or obvious answer. While I'm totally on board with the idea that furthering scientific knowledge is a net positive, we're definitely suffering these days from an overabundance of powerful technology and a deficit of "right direction" for that technology. Thinking deeply about what exactly the right direction is in no way strikes me as wasted intellectual effort.
Organized religion would like you to think that 'Moral questions are religious questions.'
That's just flat our wrong.
Morality is fluid and has been re-defined by people living in tribes or larger societies.
One can argue fairly well that we would already live in a more just world if we would have skipped that non-sense of believing in a higher being.
For example, we now agree slavery is kinda bad. Yet, not too long ago the bible was used to justify slavery around the world.
Who's to thank for this progress? Certainly not religion.
> For example, we now agree slavery is kinda bad. Yet, not too long ago the bible was used to justify slavery around the world. Who's to thank for this progress? Certainly not religion.
The Christian religion (including the Bible, but not always by the subset of Christianity which holds that the former is entirely contained in the latter) was likewise used to justify abolition, and this, like justification of slavery, goes back to the fairly early days of organized Christianity.
What does it say that it was actively used with authority (and horrifyingly is still being used) by both sides of the slavery debate? Shouldn't the literal word of the most moral being in the universe be clear regarding slavery, at the very least?
> What does it say that it was actively used with authority (and horrifyingly is still being used) by both sides of the slavery debate?
That Christianity isn't a unified hive mind?
> Shouldn't the literal word of the most moral being in the universe be clear regarding slavery, at the very least?
Arguably it should be, but then the idea that the Bible is the literal word of God is not, itself, a doctrine shared by the whole, or even majority, of the Christian community (it's a doctrine primarily of the evangelical and fundamentalist branches of Protestantism.)
If they claim to have direct communication with the creator of the universe, like all christian communities do, they should have at least a minimum standard of congruence. Or is he just having a laugh with some of them?
> If they claim to have direct communication with the creator of the universe, like all christian communities do, they should have at least a minimum standard of congruence.
Well (1) all Christian communities do not claim that all Christian communities have direct communication of that kind (in fact, Christian communities often claim that other such communities are deficient, and perhaps willfully so, in there regard), and (2) I don't even think all Christian communities claim that even they themwelves have communication of the kind that would support any conclusion much stronger than that that community’s authoritative teachings are free from error (certainly not that any subject of a specified degree of material impact should be addressed.)
They would love to claim a whole lot more, and in fact originally and for a long time they did. But I know that with so little to back them up, that is what they've been resorted to claim.
Moral questions are moral questions, and they are hard. Religion has just convinced you, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary, that you should equate religion with morality, when only one look at their 'holy' places and institutions should suffice for any one to conclude they are not in the least related.
Moral questions are (or at a minimum involve subordinate questions which are) outside the scope of empirical science; in this way they are similar to many religious questions (and the categories overlap), but they are not the same as, or a subset of, religious questions.
Moral questions are not outside the scope of empirical science. Religious moral questions are outside the scope of any meaningful questions. (see the various god-related commandments in the 10 commandments, none of those make sense to non-believers)
> Moral questions are not outside the scope of empirical science.
Yes, they are. Science can answer is, it can't answer ought.
(It can help reach practical conclusions from moral axioms applied to concrete facts, but that's not really answering moral questions: the choice of axioms is the thing that answers the moral questions, and science can't help you there.)
