I would suggest no religion OR philosophy has any claim on the truth.
If you refer to "absolute" truth, I would agree. We can, though, pursue the truths that can be demonstrated within the empirically verifiable universe. Outside of that is the realm of faith; it is also a realm which does not interest me at all. There seems little point to me in pursuing what cannot, by definition, be caught. I would rather try to understand that which can be understood.
We cannot "know", in any absolute sense, whether killing people is "right" or "wrong". We can know that a society in which people freely kill each other would be very unpleasant to live in. That is why we proscribe killing, except when sanctioned by the state, and that is why we have continually refined the grounds on which the state can exercise that sanction.
Or to use AJ's favorite child molester as an example. We do not know what God thinks of molesting children, since we don't even know if there is a God. We do know, both through common sense and through numerous studies, that this behaviour has a host of undesirable effects on children. So we prohibit this behaviour, and punish those who indulge in it; not because God says it's wrong, or because we have gained access to some absolute revealed truth of its wrongness, but because we know it has undesirable effects. |
