[jgilias]

We should be careful not to chastise people from the past from the viewpoint of our comfy and safe lives. It's easy to sneer at our ability to divide people into 'us' versus 'them' over meaningless differences, when it's not you worrying about a night raid where you get scalped and your wife raped.

[moate]

Meh. The vast majority of people subscribed to some religion or another and all the major religions say don't do rape or murder. I think it's reasonable to point out the moral failings of the past relative to their own morality.

Seems perfectly reasonable to say "these people did bad things". If you want to then go a step further and say "they did bad things because reasons" that's fine, but the bad things were still done and pretending that providing some context justifies it is just as flawed an analysis as saying it doesn't. The world is nuanced AF.

[jgilias]

We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to. I mean, even today there are still cultures around where literally kidnapping a teenage girl and keeping her hostage is the virtuous traditional way of getting married.

What I was trying to allude to is that it's easy to sit on our high horses and bash people from bygone times about how stupid they were for dividing people into 'we' and 'them' over minuscule differences, when they were mostly just faced with a simple choice - 'we' dead, or 'them' dead.

[wolverine876]

> We have literally no idea what kind of a morality the vast majority of people who have ever lived subscribed to.

Human beings have consistent morality, in many ways, across space and time. As the GP pointed out, look at all the religions and cultural rules against the same things and encouraging the same things, such as not harming others and respecting your parents. There are differences also, but the extreme relativism is plainly false.

[jgilias]

We really can not know this. We can only infer from cultures and religions in the relatively short timespan covered by written history. And even then, morality has changed significantly through time. A simple example - would you think that someone telling a story about someone else beating his wife to a pulp is something to laugh about?

Here, check out how the audience reacts just a bit more than 50 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyu44rsaZo

I think the only moral that may have been something close to universal throughout times would've been something like: "Don't kill a member of in-group without a good reason if you're not the head honcho."

Everything else? We have literally no idea.

EDIT: Really, watch the video, it actually applies to the discussion really well. It's basically an argument about morals.

[wolverine876]

> We really can not know this. We can only infer from cultures and religions in the relatively short timespan covered by written history.

That written history covers an enormous amount of ground, with records going back 6,000 years and in diverse cultures, from Sanskrit in what is now India to cuneiform to China for thousands of years, etc., and those records including older materials. Anthropologists have been studying different cultures for a long time and have plenty of evidence of what is consistent across them. Much is known about how morality develops in children. Etc.

Every human being understands it. You don't walk into a room in a strange culture and wonder, 'maybe these people think it's funny to poison each other' or 'maybe they are pure anarchists' or 'maybe they eat all their children'.

We can't have perfect knowledge of this question or anything, but to confuse that with no knowledge is absurd. For example,

> We have literally no idea.

Why is it important to you (and others) to try to push a transparent falsehood that empowers evil behavior?

[jgilias]

Yes. 6000 years, that's 3% of the time we have been around as species. It's not important for me to push anything, let alone something that would empower evil behavior. It's just that I really, really can not see how the idea that pretty much all human societies have similar morals revolving around 'be a good person' goes together with the following facts:

1. Tens of thousands of people are part of societies where initiation into the society entails killing someone. (Various gangs).

2. Hundreds of millions of people are living in societies where honor killings is a thing.

3. Depending on how you count, there have been more than twenty genocides in the last century. That's during 0.05% of the time Homo Sapiens have been around.

4. Hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people are living in societies where a blogger can get lynched for a blasphemous post.

5. There have actually been societies in recent times ending up literally poisoning each other.

6. Just some 5 years ago around 10 million people lived in a society where people were thrown off roofs for being gay.

The list is obviously non-exhaustive. And all of the above is basically going on now, I'm not even getting into what we know went on a few centuries from now. Burning innocent women on pyres for imagined slights, anyone?

Like... Do all these people know/knew they are evil according to our 'common' and 'universal' core morals? I bet they feel pretty good about themselves when lynching the blasphemer. It's just that I refuse to accept that our core morals are similar.

[wwtrv]

I think outright religious bans on murdering, raping or enslaving people outside of your community are fairly recent developments. Even the old testament is fairly ambiguous on this.

[wolverine876]

I think it's much more complex than that. The Old Testament both insists you must treat strangers well, but also describes slaves and conquering Jericho. 'Thou shalt not kill', etc. however, are blanket statements.

We need more evidence and research; the Bible is long and we can find a statement here or there that supports almost anything. But as I said, while there are variations, much is the same.

I'll even speculate that it's predictable - I doubt I could walk into 99% of human communities in the history of the world and not have a reasonable sense of the morals (social customs might be tricky though!).

[wwtrv]

I don’t necessarily think there is a contradiction, “thou shall not kill” should be be translated as “thou shall not murder” in the context of the old testament. The word for “kill” used in the commandment was not used in any passages of the bible related to warfare. There is even a clarification that this does not apply to killing other people in warfare or unarmed combat*

While the literal meaning of the 10 commandments has changed relatively little (mainly due to mistranslation or the shifting definitions of words) almost all of them mean would mean very different things to modern christian pacifist, a with burning 16th century calvinist, a 2nd century christian or a 6th century bc. jew.

I mean even regarding killing, while it’s easy for us, living in the modern world, to interpret it as a general ban on killing, a society which did not kill people under any circumstances would likely have been inconceivable in ancient times, it simply could not have existed since it would had been conquered and it’s members enslaved or exterminated by neighboring tribes.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill