From “The Basis of Morality” by Tim Madigan in Philosophy Now magazine.
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In fact this can still be what is at sake when you bring God and religion down out of the theological clouds and implicate them in the actual existential interactions of flesh and blood human beings. The part where, among other things, The Bible meets The Communist Manifesto or The Wealth of Nations.
In other words, the part where actual individuals move back and forth between rendering unto God and rendering unto Caesar. That governing body otherwise known as the state.
And while in much of the world today you are not likely to meet Socrates’s fate, there are still any number of places where that is nowhere near out of the question.
And even in places like America where God and religion are particularly well-entrenched, you roll the dice when choosing behaviors deemed to be “unChristian.”
The point being that one way or another, a narrative will be found that rationalizes either rewarding or punishing certain behaviors. It just comes down to how intertwined the interests of sacred and the secular become in any partivular historical or cultural context.
The “politics” of religion.
Which reflects in part just how problematic it can be for the moral nihilists. It’s one thing to argue back and forth about the “transcending source” of morality, another thing altogether to suggest that there may well not be one.
Folks like Nietzsche got around this by eschewing God but then reconfiguring right and wrong into one or another rendition of the “will to power”. In other words, though God is dead, morality can still be manifested in those men who deserve to call the shots. Might makes right meets right makes might.
The crucial thing being that there is still a font that mere mortals can invest “I” in. In becoming one of the Übermensch.
Think Satyr and his clique/claque over at KT.