Sorry, I'm not being clear. I'm assuming that social groups with higher trust for other members are more likely to be successful. In older societies, religion was often the basis of this trust. In more modern societies, this trust is based more on secular law. I'm postulating that one role of forgiveness is to help distinguish between the ingroup and outgroup. My claim is that forgiveness has a more useful role in the older religion-based societies because distinguishing between the ingroup and outgroup to know who to trust is more important in a religious-based system for gaining social trust than in a legal-based system. Thus, I'd expect forgiveness to play a lesser role in modern secular morality than in older religious morality.

I'm assuming that large social groups need some kind of enforcement mechanism punishing defectors to preserve these shared cultural norms. Divine punishment is a low-cost method of doing so, but we are richer now and so can afford the more effective and expensive government and law based enforcement of norms.
I guess. Seems to me that in general legal systems with more discretion are less effective as the opportunity for corruption is higher and punishments are less predictable. Since criminals are such a smaller segment of society than sinners it also seems less important to reintegrate them into society than for religious sinners. But I don't want to say forgiveness has no role now, just a lesser one.
Yeah, growth probably isn't the right framework here, I'm being kind of anachronistic. Maybe more as a way of signaling inclusion in a religion (and thus the attendent benefits of social trust) for those who don't follow its rules very well.

I think this is relevant: https://www.earth.com/news/domestica...ack-mentality/

Yes, nice find.

The foundation of Christianity is that moral values are objective. Any attempt to base a moral system on subjective values is incoherent. This seems so self evident to me that I'm always surprised when people consider relative moral systems .

The Christian teaching is that God is willing to forgive, but it does require belief and acceptance from the forgiven. It requires no "works" as in good deeds to earn the forgiveness..

Reread John 5 and Romans 2. If you haven't been doing your good deeds, this would be a good time to start. I certainly wouldn't chance it.

Do you have the objective truth for every possible moral situation you come across? If not what do you rely on when you dont know the objective moral truth and you have to make a decision?

Nothing there contradicts Ephesians. Perhaps you should be more specific.

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Eph 2:8-9

Just because moral ambiguity may exist in our mind is not an argument against objective moral values. This should be obvious, by definition objective moral values exist independent of the human mind.

Never said it was.

Right and when you dont know the answer to a moral dilemma you use your subjective reasoning. Or sometimes you base morals on subjectivity.

Never said you said it was. Just pointing out a fact.

No, that is not how I reason.

When I'm faced with a moral dilemma or moral ambiguity I reason and base my course of action on objective moral values. One of three things may happen:
1) I may make a moral choice in-line with objective morals.
2) I may wrongly make a moral choice not in-line with objective morals.
3) I may be faced with incomplete information and make an ambiguous moral choice.

Again, none of this argues against objective moral values. It just means we as humans work with incomplete information. Making moral choices based on incomplete information is not the same as making moral choices based on subjective moral values. I don't do the later.

Again im not arguing against objective moral values.

Well at least with your incomplete information making you can understand that going though life without the objective moral truth can be done.

No, I disagree. Moral dilemmas and moral ambiguous situations are not the norm. Most moral decisions we make are clear. We can live life knowing whether or not the majority of our moral choices are in line with an objective set of moral values.

You are not disagreeing with me there.

John 5:28-29, references that if you don't do good works, then you mustn't be saved.

Romans 2:7 states the same thing in ever so slightly different words.

Basically, if you are ****ing off instead of feeling highly motivated to do good works (and therefore actually doing good works), then you are incorrect in believing that you have been chosen.

If you made a speech that was say, 750000 or so words long, I'm sure you'de agree that context was important.

It is important to note that both verses you quote are in the context of dealing with The Law. In John Jesus was speaking to the Jews, and in Romans Paul was speaking both about the naturally ingrained law within the human heart(Starting at Rom 1:20) and Judaic Law. In the Bible the law is basically a synonym for good works.

In the case of Romans (chp 1-7) we can see that Paul is telling his readers that if you rely on the law of any kind you are lost. Paul's technique is to show ..
1) All are under the law - Jew and Gentile.
2) If you rely on the law you will judged by the law.
3) No one can meet the high standards of satisfying all law.
4) We are saved through grace and not by law.
He is actually making the point contrary to what you are saying when he culminates in Rom 5:1 and Rom 7:24-25.

Regarding the Case of John 5:28-29 ... Christ had just said in Joh 3:5 that a person must be "Born Again". John 3 basically explains the doctrine of salvation through Christ and not through good deeds. John 4 continues with the theme of salvation through Christ. Then in John 5 the Jews (law followers) were accusing Jesus of breaking the sabbath by doing a miracle. They were literally calling a good deed a bad deed. In John 5:29 Christ is teaching that there will be a resurrection and a judgment and people will be judged according to their deeds. He is not teaching against what he just taught in John 3 and John 4. His teaching is consonant with Paul's teaching i Romans and His previous teaching.

So we see Eph 2:8-9 stands firmly.

Were you a Christian at one time?

What do you mean by "objective" and "subjective" here? The reason I'm asking is because some construals of Divine Command morality seem to base morality on God's subjective desires and goals.

Also, can you give your argument for the incoherence of subjective values as the basis for a moral system? Or do you just consider this a self-evident truth that you either see or you don't?

The rest of your post wasn't worth responding to. You are reading the book in an attempt to believe what you want to believe. If that sounds rude, let me say that this is simply part of being human and that it is not your fault that you are human.

This question is worth it. The answer is that at one time I believed that I was. Of course, I must have been incorrect.

Objective moral values exist whether any human mind exists to hold them. A subjective moral value exists only in the mind of the inventor. Subjective moral values are relative to the individual.

The idea that moral values are do to the subjective whims of God is one of the horns of Euthyphro's Dilemma. I think that's a false dilemma in that moral values stem from God and His infinite nature of goodness. God is Good. He does not decide to be good, see John 1 4:8.

I don't believe an action is morally good because God commanded it, but I do believe God only commands morally good commandments. There is a significant difference.

A subjective moral system is incoherent because there is no way for a person to judge another person wrong since their response could just be that they have a different set of subjective values relative to me.

Or God told them to.

You are confusing the word "incoherent" with the word "universal."

I believe that morality is subjective, but I think you will find that I have absolutely no problem with judging a person to be wrong. I also think that preferences are not universal, and I can judge that poop is nasty despite knowing that dung beetles exist.

Maybe you are the one with the confirmation bias. I mean common sense would tell you that it can go both ways. You know, you being human and all, which of course is not your fault. LOL

So why did you stop believing? Did you participate in the paper being discussed in this forum?

What exactly are you responding too? God told who to do what?

Saying subjective morals are universal does not say anything about it's coherence as a moral system. How many people follow subjective values dose not tell us much

I never said people have a problem making moral claims about other people's behavior. People do illogical things all the time. The problem is that it's logically incoherent to claim all morals are subjective and then tell another person they are acting immorally. They can then just say, "My moral compass is different than yours." Then the only option you have to is to huff and puff and claim might makes right, but this is not based on any moral high ground.

You are here describing your own beliefs, which is fine, but I was more interested in your general definition of these terms. For instance, the reason I was bringing up Divine Command is because many people take the other horn of the dilemma and acknowledge that morality is ultimately based on God's own subjective preferences for the universe. Now, because God is God, these people still think that these subjective preferences are universal and binding on all people, but nonetheless, they are still based ultimately not on an external fact of the universe, but on the subjectivity of God. So I don't know if you would still consider this a subjective or objective morality.

A couple responses. First, this argument assumes that it is possible for another person to have a different set of subjective values. This is plausibly true when thinking of other possible worlds, but it could be false when restricting the set of persons to humans in the actual world. In fact, this was David Hume's own view, that while morality is ultimately based in our passions rather than reason, the nature of our passions have elements common to all humans.

Now, you might think that isn't good enough, that a morality worth calling it such must apply metaphysically to all creatures. Okay. But why? Here there is a deeper problem that many moral realists struggle to deal with. That is, they claim that subjective morality fails to be a true morality because true morality has the features of objective morality, such as universality. Well, no it doesn't - at least, not according to those who accept subjective morality as accurate. If you want to claim that subjective morality is incoherent, you can't do so by smuggling in an account of morality as objective.

For instance, many believers in subjective morality are also moral relativists. A moral relativist doesn't have the problem you claim here. Their moral claims are all indexed to a particular perspective. Yes, it is true that my claim that it is wrong for you to steal from me is based on my own moral attitudes or preferences, and you might have different ones, but so what? That is only incoherent if you think that moral attitudes and preferences are also supposed to all be congruent, but that is not an assumption of moral relativism. There are obviously practical problems in how to resolve conflicts between moral perspectives, but that is not a matter of incoherence.