I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:
Many of my moral values arose from my upbringing, as opposed to biology. This is evidenced by the fact that biologically similar people living in different places and epochs have different ideas of what's right.
Therefore many of my values originally came from the society that raised me.
Society's values were strongly influenced by Christian values, and many of our core moral prohibitions are inherited from Christian tradition.
The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda.
Also my values may drift, and most drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values.
A good recipe for countering this insidious deterioration of values is to consciously pull them back toward their original source, as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.
That means editing my values to more closely match Christianity. QED.
Your brother makes an excellent point, which is something I’ve always found amusing about atheists: despite their professed godlessness, their values have an uncanny resemblance to those of their Judeo-Christian heritage.
Not many atheists and secularists are willing to turn the other cheek when someone hits them, not look lustfully at the opposite sex, give everything to the poor and care not for the future. Neither are many Christians.
As an example, I have no trouble imagining a scientific civilization that is brutally unegalitarian, aggressive, atheistic, polygamous, Eugenicist, Darwinian, etc. in its values; in fact this would be my preference.
Look at The Domination. This would fit your vision better than the Sith.
I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:
What do you think?