I think in essence morals are someone else's idea of how you should live your private life over and above secular law
Can we test this as a particular application?
In other words, sin is an authority-based substitute for a real moral framework.
The underlying assertion:
• Sin is an authority-based substitute for a real moral framework.
The definition or resolution of a variable:
• Morals are someone else's idea of how you should live your private life over and above secular law.
Thus:
▸ Sin is an authority-based substitute for a [real framework] of [someone else's idea of how you should live your private life over and above secular law].
Nor was that stitch job going to work from the outset; its purpose is to use the redundancy to highlight the commonality of the definitions.
Sin is not without relationship to authority, nor, as such, other people. However, simply running around identity politics is its own question of redundancy.
One common aspect within variability about the meaning of sin is that the word describes fundamental offense against the way of things. As with my critique of Scheeres:
• Responding to conditioning in such a manner as to weirdly fulfill it.
• The relativism about Scheeres' assertion of her daughter's moral code is precisely what her Calvinist predecessors feared.
• There is most likely some foundational concept of right and wrong in that household.
A counterpoint to illustrate: The Bible provides a basis for arguments whereby a Christian accepts and even endorses the point of gay marriage in the United States; it has to do with Constitutional framework and what Jesus said. There is also a modernistic, not quite avant garde, libertarian argument casting the Christian savior as some manner of cynical prig, but that's just grasping after an excuse to not pay taxes, and at that point I'm back to a stoner comedy from a quarter-century ago. In any case, per marriage equality, the question becomes whether a given Christian can accommodate and assimilate that argument within the framework of their faith. To the other, though, how many atheists actually voted or argued against gay rights during that period? We turn to this prospect because an atheistic argument against human and civil rights for homoseuxals still appeals to some manner of fundamental or foundational right and wrong. The difference between "God" and some abstract fundamental principle amounting to, "just because", or, "that's the way it goes" is not simply the fact of atheism, but also the lack of any identifiable anchor°.
That identifiable anchor also presents a baseline for discussing what it is and does, and anything else related to it.
†
For instance, it is known that rejecting the idea of God does not preclude supremacism, tribalism, or other such irrationality. But on what would such pretense of iniquity be based? It is, of course, silly enough to say, of homosexuals, "Because God says so!" But the godless argument in court eventually reached the point where
dangerous inherent weakness about the beneficiaries of prejudicial discrimination became the justification for discriminatory outcome. Quite literally, the heterosupremacists argued that homosexuals, being unable to accidentally reproduce with one another, did not need access to marriage, which heterosexuals needed because they couldn't seem to stop reproducing outside a marital framework. Before we even get to the ouroboros of needing marriage because marriage fails to serve its purpose, there is the simple question of people being unable to either not engage heteroseuxal intercourse, or else have heterosexual intercourse without unplanned pregnancy. Yes, really, the argument against marriage equality once stooped to justifying reservation of marriage according to the inability of heterosexuals°° to not accidentally reproduce in a manner the argument itself perceives as disruptive to society. Functionally, since heterosexuals can't stop being dangerous, they need special rights.
The problem with that last is that it works by justifying the reservation of benefit as broad accommodation of disability, and that, when expressed, tends toward compelling delicate heterosexual sensibilities to feel even worse about themselves. And, yet, they did it to themselves, such as the juristic implications go.
One of the obvious complications about that "godless" argument is how, like the difference 'twixt Creationism and Intelligent Design, attorneys in that case were grasping after circumstantial and logical arguments in lieu of divine authority°°°. Quite clearly, it did not go well. And toward this end, I have before asked that people consider the conflict that arises if a Religion is the justification for a Prejudice, and an Atheist rejects the Religion but enjoys the Prejudice, justified by Religion, while lacking any rational justification.
There is a reason it is hard to find people arguing against homosexuals without a godling in their pocket. And, besides, as I sometimes remind, gays won because white men were among the winners, which isn't true in other civil rights disputes somehow left unresolved.
†
Turning back to Scheeres, yes, there is most likely a foundational notion of right and wrong underpinning their sinless code of conduct, but what is it?
One of our neighbors notes the Depression, and a notion of sin therefrom; the standards included in the brief description make a certain amount of practical sense. Nor should I need to invoke José Martí in order to suggest the notion of a sin against humanity itself. It is true, there is a sense of authority somewhere in the concept of sin, as the whole concept comes down to right and wrong. The ides of a sin against nature is so old that even monotheists parse it out, with Aquinas arguing that vices (sins) against nature are also offenses against God. We ought not require a medical journal publication circa 2006 in order to establish a separate context of sin from diverse Christian or Abramic theses.
But that's just the thing: Without some foundational sense of right and wrong, there isn't any substantial question of sin. The context of authority thus attached to sin is not someone else's idea of how you should live your private life over and above secular law, and within this context the question of morality
seeks its "real framework".
Surrendering the definition of sin to religious people one does not trust also allows writing off off future catastrophic negligence or explicit will as just another accident. After all, how was anyone supposed to know; or why is it any one person's job to decide? Those are the excuses go, at least.
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Notes:
° Floating on a sea believed deep and endless, the fact that no islands have suddenly appeared within the range of your vision does not mean the boat has not moved. Chuffing that of course the sea isn't endless, though, isn't even an excuse; an excuse would be refusing to drop anchor because one is guessing the sea is too deep for the line, especially as the real problem is that dropping and raising deep anchor looks like hard work. The metaphor can seem strangely apt; countenancing the question of fresh water for survival, we might wonder at Lazy Jane, to the one, but also a question of evidence and lack, as well as whether fresh water is one's instinct in such a consideration, or knowledge. To the other, if one pretends the same circumstance while floating about the hotel swimming pool, the question won't be knowing the difference 'twixt fresh and salt water, nor the water cycle. Rather, the question will be why one needs everyone to pretend being lost at sea, and if the answer is geez, let a guy play sailor and pirate, whydon'cha, that's just fine, but it's still fantasy; to the other, if one insists because someone else, over there, said so, the behavior of the one does not necessarily require any blame unto the other. And furthermore, if it turns out there is a cruise ship involved, we inevitably return to the central question of an endless and unfathomed sea.
°° Or anyone else trying to pass as such.
°°° That divine authority doesn't work in a court constitutionally bound to refuse establishing state endorsement of religious authority has always been a bit tricky according to the competing passions and interests of the religious who argued over such standards. Considered at historical scale, waning Christianist superiority under law over the past century, a decline that seems to have accelerated in the past fifty-seven years—(i.e., 1962 as the end of the Long Decade)—is part of the rootlessness and restlessness by which so many Americans feel so unsettled. Indeed, the loss of traditionalist sociomoral and therefore sociopolitical supremacy under law hurts all the way back, at least, to Buttonwood, which is a foundational event in the traditionalist economic structures so many people perceive broken; additionally, it is arguable that the surrogate myth after WWI, the new-world demand against isolationism, our rejection of George Washington, is also in potentially fatal disarray largely for the sake of self-inflicted wounds. Transcending the old ways means transcending the old ways, not simply usurping them. Divine authority is not prerequisite for asserting a general existential way of things, but the godless version of the same is merely the godless version of the same; as a matter of living effect, something goes here about same as the old boss.
