”To suggest that morals are tied to religion is simply wrong.”

No one has suggested that. My comment about theocracies was referring to the way religious morals direct lawmaking in theocracies, leading to things like death penalties for homosexual acts and zero tolerance of religious critique (denial of freedom of expression and persecution of political opposition).

You started off with a suggestion that on the surface implies that morals and ethics are unrelated to perceptions or definitions of harm and intent.

>Then again, maybe we should keep ethics and morals away from law and sentencing, and concentrate on harm and intent.

Morals, our value system developed by our own experiences that determine how we as individuals define right and wrong are the foundation of ethical boundaries that we impose on the groups that we form or join. Ethics are tied to morals.

Harm and intent are judgements that we make either as individuals or as group members when we look at actions and consequences (apply our moral and ethical guidelines) so that we can determine whether sanctions are necessary and reasonable based on our own shared value system.

Then you make a statement that appears to suggest that morals and ethics are unrelated when in fact, our individual morals form the foundation of ethical constraints that we impose on the groups in our societies just as they are the foundation for our religious value systems. In your either/or proposition here you apparently separate laws from morals. I disagree because laws, which follow from our own moral values and are just codified statements defining our own ethical framework so that we can all color between the same set of lines.

>Laws can be based on ethics, but moral judgments really should not be involved in their application.

Then you impose the burden of religion or theocracy with your last statement. This statement implies to the casual observer that since you reject morals (in the second statement) as a basis of laws in favor of laws based on ethics that those which are based on morals exist only under a theocratic framework. Since group ethics follow from shared individual mores this does not make sense.

>Unless you want to live in a theocracy, of course.

Morals, ethics, laws are entangled and require no religious framework for their application though as your examples demonstrate, it is possible to create a system where mores shared and recognized by all are subverted to serve a religious doctrine which is itself a permutation of an ethical system used to capture local groups and to impose a specific reward/sanction value system to aid compliance.

EDIT: I think that your use of "Unless" makes it easy for a reader to interpret the second statement as part of an IF/THEN type of statement implying a conclusion that you have defined in your third statement.

You're explicitly allowing ethics to form the basis of laws in the first part of your second statement and then using the "but" to disallow moral judgments as a basis. This is the IF part of the dialog.

The Unless follows and ends up defining the THEN part of the conclusion so that a reader can interpret your statements to conclude that IF ethics can be the foundation for laws THEN a system of laws based on moral judgments must form the basis for a theocratic system, of course.