It comforts the living.
I don't think your naturalistic morality holds water, dohn. If you arge a naturalistic derivation or source, then I think it is you who is arguing "post hoc, ergo propter hoc,"
What have I assumed, that was to be demonstrated, about natural emotions being a feasable source of the urge to morality in humans?
and are only able to do it by ignoring evidence such as the kind laid out in the immediately foregoing.
Even if I accept the "evidence" that funerals have no central explanation arising from perfectly understandable human impulses of the living to feel comforted from grief, it still does not follow that this is a necessary demonstration of the existence of God's absolute moral laws.
It seems kind of silly to me to argue that any human impulse I can't readily explain is therefore proof of God's Transcendent Moral Laws--it could just be the universe having hiccups.
It seems kind of silly to me to argue that any human impulse I can't readily explain is therefore proof of God's Transcendent Moral Laws--it could just be the universe having hiccups.
I didn't know the universe could get the hiccups, dohn. You should do stand-up.
My main point in writing my last had to do with the universal human practice of showing honor and respect for the dead, first and foremost; funerary practices follow from that. There doesn't appear to be much survival value in honoring one's dead.
Let me try to drill down on this point. There is an epic poem composed about 2600 years ago that maybe you've heard about. It's called the Iliad. The Homeric epics were designed to be recited, in spoken language, to a live audience. There is one scene in the Iliad that was exceptionally horrific to the sensibilities of the ancient Greeks, inspiring pathos, consternation, and pure moral outrage. That is the scene where the triumphant Achilles, having just slain Hector, ties up the lifeless body of his victim to the back of his chariot, and drags him around the walls of Troy. The humiliation and mutilation of a corpse was pure anathema to the Greeks. The outrage was so profoundly visceral that the Greeks had to say that such a thing was hybris against the gods, and surely would be severely punished by them. Why?
Yet today we still feel the same way about corpse mutilation. Certainly Americans were enraged, horrified by the images of our dead service members being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu not so long ago.
This horror of corpse abuse appears to be virtually universal. But why is this so? How are the survival prospects of human beings aided by this visceral, human emotional response? To the extent that such abuse tends to inspire the spirit of revenge, one can argue that from the standpoint of survival, this human response hurts, not helps, survival prospects, for it is the pretext for further violence.
If morality has a purely natural source, related to survival of the fittest, then how do we account for such useless (in those terms) but universal human traits as abhorrence of corpse mutilation?
You concluded: "It seems kind of silly to me to argue that any human impulse I can't readily explain is therefore proof of God's Transcendent Moral Laws--it could just be the universe having hiccups."
Silly? You ridicule human nature. And you ridicule God, who made it. dohn, you have a very strange sense of humor indeed.