Our modern morals are essentially, to some degree, hedonistic. We think “do as you please without hurting others”.
Should an Abrahamic believer endorse this? I find many Christians say “lulz… live and enjoy it”, but is this consistent with Jesus’s teachings? The root of all Abrahamic belief, whether Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, is piety, humbleness, and duty to God. And to a large extent, Christians are supposed to “detach” themselves from the real world as the path of God is superior to the path of man.
It just makes me laugh, in honesty, that an Abrahamic believer would hold a relativistic/liberal view of life, as do most in contemporary Western society.
I’ve always wondered, considering the calculus of reward and punishment in Abrahamic religions with their belief systems, that they don’t all withdraw from the decadent, immoral, sin-tempting societies, to go live in a monastery or something away from it all.
What is a few decades of relative comfort and freedom compared to the risk of internal torture in the depths of hell? The bible and it’s traditions, for an example, have advocated the lifestyle of a hermit or monk to live entirely in God’s will and do nothing to offend him. No interactions with people eliminates most sin that lands you in hell. Interactions with nobody but other devout people in a highly structured environment might be even better.
Join a monastery, live virtuously (maybe hope for a quick and righteous death) and in return you go to heaven forever. That seems like an incredibly good deal, I don’t know why more religious people don’t do this.
What I’m about to write isn’t valid after around the eighth century BCE, and it is only a show of one perspective vantage point; and not the pragmatic one, but instead a slanted bias one toward an idealistic vision of society.
Look at this as not a counter, but instead a reflection provoked.
First, wipe out all ideas of God for a moment, as our time has upon it layers not yet achieved this far back.
We start with a simple form, life - the reflection of the awareness of its beginning and ending points; that such events exist, that this is a property of life, yet the thing itself of life is not capable of being grasped in hand.
If you take the concept of God, and relate it to literal breath of life - assertions about living adjust interestingly.
If you couple with that idea, the idea that that which the breath came from was the source of life; the unified body of higher being - then those assertions adjust even more interestingly.
Then the conversational context is akin to an air particle reflecting upon its motion with aim to find the most passive movement within the wind giving it motion.
We find this poetic relationship culturally in numerous pockets of ancient human history, and it is little wonder why.
But for the point of the topic, Vedic Hinduism itself had a symbol which could be thought of as the first imaginary number:
Aum.
A reasonably elegant summary of its meaning can be found at about.com:
The image is the image of breath breathing out and spreading into fractions.
The exact meaning of the fractions are irrelevant here (aside from note that they reflect variations of existence), but the nada bindu upanishad (dot with a semi-curve below it separated from the three joined curves) is note worthy in that the nada (the curved line) literally means an absence, or lacking - sometimes thought of as a form of nothing.
The bindu literally means dot, point, a singularity.
This is to say ‘from an absent point’.
The breath from the absent point, which is our life, and is therefore our states of experiences.
From here, it shifts and changes into various ranges of how to go about living in light of this perspective, but this is a regular standing point - in a variety of manners, in many ancient religions and beliefs of the 14th to 8th century BCE near east Asian region.
One of those regions was the Levant belt, from which, the herdsman societies of Canaan would survive the Sea Peoples wars in cultural isolation in the highlands of the region.
And from here, the Hebrew peoples would form and eventually achieve (all-be-it short lived) their dream of a self-governed kingdom.
Their ideals were not too different from those around them; for instance, they shared some root philosophical areas with the Hittite (the historical, not the Biblical) empire which preceded their smaller reigns.
And they also shared the symbolic breath-to-spirit origin perspective as most of the region; in some fashion similar to the Vedic vantage.
From this perspective, in one sense the stance of stating that the ‘path of god is superior to the path of man’, is practically benign - as if one were to say that the force of pressure at the nozzle is greater than at the distance of a single water droplet landing upon the ground.
In another sense, the statement implies the concept of focus.
The focus of the divine movement is a focus derived from the concept of life being a split breath from a single point of origin that once blew our life into existence.
To walk a life focused on what the metaphorical air particle above did - aimed to achieve the least resistent motion within the movement given to it by its originating force.
To say that this is greater, is somewhat a miss of the tangent - it would be more akin to saying that it is more sweet; more rich in experience.
And to this perspective, it can be understood for this as a truth; as it was their time’s greatest endeavor - the first instance of their cultural humanities wrestling with the nature of life as consciousness, in all states implied, from a singular point of origin.
Many today would still hold that the scientific endeavor is the greatest walk and the path of man is benign before it; the path of man being the daily governance of being human in human society.
Now, none of this exactly applies to your current demographic - the modern “Abrahamic believer”.
That said, ironically, in a world of globalization; the very old cultures may have some (not all) insights useful to believers today on how to see the world.
By the way, most of the dichotic setting of rejection of “this world” format of theological thought in the near east Asian areas arrived post-hellenism (more exactly, post-Alexander).
From this point onwards, it tumbled around into each subsequent culture and grew into the various forms we see today in modern Abrahamic off-shoots (and to some extent, somewhat in Indian off-shoots - though only by re-integration with modern-west; which is a hellenistic branch of cultural lineage).
In some sense, you could nearly state that the difference between modern Western and Eastern religion is the difference between where Alexander conquered (Southern Europe to ‘Middle East’) and where he did not (India, most notably; which already had Vedism and would birth Hinduism and Buddhism [to list a couple of many]).
Asking where the Greeks came upon the idea of ideal and actual; perfect and imperfect - this takes wondering off into the sophists’ origins prior to the 5th century BCE; no exact simple task.
So, is it consistent with Jesus’ teachings if one is liberal and respective of life?
There are many theories on that.
However, is it consistent with the cultural theologies which pre-dated and greatly influenced Jesus’ culture?
Absolutely.
Do as you please without hurting others is not a relativist view.
Also I do not think modern morals are hedonistic. If anything it would be more, do what you want without hurting others. Hedonism narrows the choices down to those things that give pleasure and generally physical pleasure.
