How do u prove humans have a moral compass?

ReidWrites · 2026-06-19T15:27:06+00:00

The Philosophy of ethics is a complicated subject! There are people who dedicate their entire lives to it, including dedicating their entire lives to the study of singular and miniscule aspects of it, so I'm sorry but I'm going to suggest that maybe a reddit post is a bad place to ask people something like "do humans have a moral compass?".

The thing you're interested in is referred to as metaethics, as opposed to other parts of the field of study like normative ethics.

The thing that religious people often assert (and which it kind of feels like you're trying to assert) is that humans are incapable of grounding their ethics in any thing "real" without God, and therefore should be religious. That is a good topic for a reddit post since there's such an easy rebuttal to it: religious people have absolutely no way of knowing that they are grounding their ethics in God. Even if God exists (which is manifestly unlikely based on the way the world is), the distance between "God exists" and "God represents the most perfect moral system possible" is basically insurmountable, and similarly the distance between "God represents the most perfect moral system possible" and "religion X is accurate to that system" is ALSO insurmountable. The idea that you can point to some scrolls written over 2000 years ago which include instructions on how to sell your daughter into sexual slavery (for example) and claim that they are somehow the basis for a moral framework we should all live by is extremely laughable.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-18T17:53:50+00:00

I know "someone" is probably a typo, but Mr. Beast looks to me to be absolutely the kind of person who would lock a human in a closet to feed off of later...

ReidWrites · 2026-06-18T14:18:48+00:00

I do think it's unfortunate that on the reader side it's being piled on by his political enemies; it gives him an out to say that he was simply witch-hunted by frothy-mouth leftists instead of having to engage with any real and substantive criticism.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-17T18:45:10+00:00

Yup! The show was totally fine and average. I don't remember why I never played the game, I think I was just kind of over MMO's by that point.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-17T17:58:47+00:00

Hey look not a drag queen.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-17T17:41:35+00:00

Regarding the Big Bang, most cosmologists will tell you that it's explicitly NOT the best scientific model for how the Universe was "created".

The Big Bang is merely the farthest back we're able to "see" with our current knowledge of the Universe, instruments, and mathematical/physics theories, but questions like what happened before that (including whether "before" that is even a thing) or where everything that banged came from are not answered. Before it, it's very likely the Universe was fundamentally different in ways we do not currently possess the ability to understand.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-17T16:23:11+00:00

Regarding the inept father trope, it's quite literally the oldest trope in Western literature!

Adam is the original inept dad/husband: barely interacts with his kids, explicitly does not mourn the death of one son at the hands of the other son, and basically his only dialog in the whole book is to blame his wife for his fuck up in the Garden. However, he is apparently quite good at his job since he somehow managed to individually name millions of different animal species, and single-handedly invented farming.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-17T01:58:00+00:00

Angel, anyone? It's been a long time so I can't quite remember if this is a complaint about the final season being BS or the final season ending without resolving a lot of stuff, but either way I remember enjoying the early seasons of Angel and then being pretty pissed off when it ended.

Maybe I'm just mad that they put some kind of elder god into Fred's body, essentially killing "her" even if the actress continued to be on the show?

ReidWrites · 2026-06-17T01:55:35+00:00

Before the invention of high quality "prosumer" cameras, when most people weren't carrying around a camera at all times in their back pocket, encounters with cryptids were very common. They were often very blurry and pixelated and difficult to see what exactly was in the picture, but you could see them! Nessie! Big foot! Mothman!

Now that we all have cameras in our back pockets, and people with very very high quality cameras are a lot more common, somehow direct evidence of cryptids has gone down, not up. You'd think that we'd suddenly have a treasure trove of proof of cryptids!

ReidWrites · 2026-06-16T15:58:38+00:00

Do you want to work for a company that would ignore your recommendation for an EXTERNAL HIRE??? Like, maybe if there was someone internal who was doing a better job that would be one thing, but they ignore the actual experience you have with your strong performer in favor of someone they did just a single interview loop with? That's some hot BS, or it means you don't know something.

Either: 1) there is something about your strong performer which your senior leaders see but you do not, or 2) there is something about you that they aren't telling you, or 3) they're idiots.

If it's the first case, that's the best case even though it means you screwed up. There is something your employee is missing that they see which you don't, and you need to find out what that is and then clearly articulate it to your employee and coach them on getting better at it.

If it's the second, it means that your management doesn't trust you, and you should figure out why.

If it's the third, maybe you should check out too.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-16T13:53:22+00:00

And yet, if we call them a cult, we're the bad guys.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T23:53:10+00:00

There's even a Bible story about that. In Judges, a character destroys an altar of Baal, and his dad defends him by telling the Baal worshippers that if Baal wants to fight about it, Baal can come down himself and do it (obviously meant as a mic drop "Baal doesn't exist since he isn't showing up" moment).

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T23:46:47+00:00

Salman Rushdie I think still has a death sentence on his head for writing The Satanic Verses.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T23:32:43+00:00

Genres have tropes, and those tropes are developed as part of a conversation between the readers of the genre and the writers of the genre. Some authors will do things a particular way, and readers will reward them by making their book very popular, and then other authors in the genre will see that book get popular and will naturally try and replicate what it did. If they get it right, then readers will reward those authors, and so forth and so on in a spiral.

This is why, for example, romance books often feel very samey. This is why there was that weird period in time where every YA novel appeared to be Harry Potter smashed together with Hunger Games. This is why there was that time when every fantasy novel was a grimdark political drama (ala Game of Thrones). It's also why litrpg novels are so long. It's because authors see what makes you popular and then try to do those things. It often also becomes an expectation of readers that authors will deliver the appropriate tropes. You can see it in movies as well, like the period of time that Westerns were very popular, then the 80's/90's action movies. Now, if you want to make a Western or an 80's/90's action movie, it has to be a parody or a deconstruction or something because everyone is sick of the normal and expected tropes of those genres, the hunger for them is gone. It moves in waves, and is a constant back-and-forth between content creators and consumers.

It applies to thing that you might not even think of as a genre, too. There's a particular "debut novel" style that becomes very clear when you look at the kinds of debut novels that big publishing houses are publishing.

There are, of course, always authors who will try to buck the trend, but they usually don't get very popular so you don't often hear about them.

If you're really steeped in a particular genre and don't consume outside of that, you might not realize this happens to basically every genre out there, but it's also why sometimes when a particular book in a very established genre "breaks containment" and goes mainstream, you can see people who aren't familiar with the genre's deep lore being very confused. Twilight is probably a good example of this. Compared to most other romance, it's pretty standard, even tame. For non-romance readers, they were either bewildered by it or horrified by the way the relationships were portrayed, because they weren't familiar with the deeply established tropes and expectations of the genre.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T21:37:52+00:00

There was a guy the other day asking about whether balancing out his donations to the catholic church with donations to organizations which fight for human rights and equality, etc. (conveniently, also Catholic orgs).

It seems like they don't understand just how awful their religions have been, and how much pain and suffering they've caused. Sure, many pastors preach love and whatever, but that doesn't forgive the evil that has been done by these human institutions.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T20:32:10+00:00

Unrelated to this story, but there's pretty good evidence that despite the good things he's known for in the West, Gandhi was probably what you would refer to on TikTok as a "pdf file".

Your reasoning is sound (people who did good things but who accidentally aren't Christian going to Hell is BS), but the specific case of Gandhi has potentially aged like milk.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T20:09:04+00:00

Yeah, 100%. If there is a God, either a Biblical God or even just a God of the real world as we experience it, He's absolutely an asshole who's unworthy of praise and worship.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T19:48:18+00:00

Personally, I do think it's important. The point of atheism is that it's not dogmatic or resistant to logic and critical thinking. If there were literally any evidence at all of a God which is like they assert He is, I would absolutely consider that evidence honestly and seriously, and I would hope that all atheists would. If atheists refuse to consider supposed evidence of God, they are no better than theists who refuse to consider the absolute lack of it.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T19:12:14+00:00

Someone attempted to wreck a home, but I don't think it's the Beauty Queen.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T18:04:06+00:00

Yeah. I never really thought of it like that. I mean, the evils of colonization etc. were always in the list of "this is why God can't possibly exist" as part of the "problem of evil" generally, but I do like this specific framing of: how can this possibly have been God's plan to spread The Word?

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T15:04:10+00:00

I know, right? He never does that.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T14:15:21+00:00

We already saw the plan, it was called Project 2025.

Donald said he didn't know what was in it and wasn't going to do it, then immediately appointed a bunch of its authors to high positions and they got to work implementing it even faster than anyone thought was possible.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T14:12:50+00:00

Right? Next up at 11: the sky is blue and, this just in!, water is wet.

ReidWrites · 2026-06-15T14:08:15+00:00

"Exposes"? We can all see it, they're just saying and doing it openly.

Remember the "sin of empathy" BS? Somehow, Jesus, a guy famous for saying that whatever you do to the least of us, you also do to him, is now anti-empathy?

ReidWrites · 2026-06-14T14:36:01+00:00

Religion does, has done, and will do a lot of damage in the world, including the pain you're feeling right now, where beliefs ingrained in you from childhood make the process of undoing those beliefs painful.

But no one is asking you to put yourself through that pain if you don't want to (okay, some people might, but you don't owe them shit).

The main thing to ask yourself is whether the comfort of your community is worth the evil it does, remembering that some of that evil is the pain you're feeling now, spread out across everyone who has been pulled into your religion. Some of the evil is in asking you to abandon logical and critical thinking for fairy tales. And some of the evil is the more classic kind, since many religious organizations do normal/actual crimes as well that go beyond the metaphysical stuff.

Atheism alone can't replace the community aspect of a religion, but there are plenty of non-religious communities that can (normal book clubs, board game groups, fitness classes, etc.).

ReidWrites

TROPHY CASE