Agreed. I find that people who argue that religion is necessary for ethics tend to ignore the history of their religion and the fact that the original text largely serves as a jumping off point for religious philosophers to connect older “secular” texts to this new religion. Modern Christianity is a complex combination of Platonic, Aristotelian, Syrian, and Roman ideals which are taken out of their original context to align with the Bible even though the original writers would say they knew nothing about Jesus. The base texts which many of these ideas are based on make almost no appeals to God and focus more on what it means to live a “good life”. To be fair a lot of great ethical arguments are made by Christian writers but I think that’s more just a consequence of their cultural upbringing and the fact that the thing the New Testament really added to the discussion was that your ethical responsibilities generalize beyond yourself and your friends/family.

Religious ethics are just as fluid and complex as secular ethics, it’s just that the concept of God makes people think they can claim that their way of thinking is the only one that’s real. I would guess if you self-reflect though you’d see that even within one lifetime the definition of what’s moral in a religious context changes as well.

Yes exactly.

Golden rule does not need the existence of any god.

There are godless religions too that have strong ethical traditions. They are not religions in the Abrahamic sense.

At this point theists often try to smuggle God back in as the source of morality through culture.

But I agree, empirically religion and moral behavior seem at best uncorrelated.

Bible is quite permissive of killing if it's in the name of god. Genocide is quite a recurring theme.

Agree an option for consideration.

I don’t think religion is the only path, but that it has functioned as a prosocial positive-sum cooperating/compassion technology/mechanism in many cultural contexts. Not without downsides, of course.

That many today relatively reflexively default to ~‘we can all be nice to each other; this is obviously the (only) moral approach’ without stated precepts/priors/fundaments upon which that morality is moored I think tends to implicitly borrow priors from Western Christian tradition, albeit incompletely and sometimes critically so. Sam Harris’ recent appearance on Ross Douthat’s ‘Interesting Times’ podcast was IMO an example of this.

Option D: God may exist but has no perceivable after consequence and doesn't take part in any aspect of our day to day lives which are governed by physics (Deism)

Option E: God may or may not exist but once again, has no effect on our lives. (agnosticism)

So all option C), D), E) [I don't think that the concept of hell/heaven exists in it] have the same impact IMO that esentially there isn't any consequence on our day to day live and we are all gonna be just void when we die. Nothingness,

From here, we can approach towards what is the meaning of life and add onto the existenialism to find ones own meanings and that itself becomes a bedrock of morality

I personally fall somewhere along C), D), E) myself but I don't like to wonder about where exactly because it doesn't really have an impact on my life. I also sometimes fall into B) (God is outside me) in times of troubles to somehow get out of trouble or find strength if I am unable to find within myself during that time.

Logically, it might not make sense for me to believe in god during times of troubles if I can't have logic find the same meaning during not times of troubles. But I do think that humans are driven by emotions not logic at its core so its best to be light on yourself.

Also I feel gratitude towards the universe rather than god and the things which help me in my life during times of joy sometimes.

I also sometimes believe in rituals/festivals because they are part of my culture/community and it brings me joy at times.

But I have enough freeway leverage within all of this that I dictate this as my choice of life and If I see any religious figure person or anything being misused or see faults in any rituals being cruel. I don't feel dear to them and can quickly call anything out and be secular in the sense that I respect other people's rituals to be in co-existence with mine as long as they are peaceful about it because the element of coexistence is only possible within the elements of being peaceful/society being cooperative at large and I hold both people of my community/outside my community to the same standard and am quick to call out if new faults start to happen from my community but also from any other community. (Calling spade a spade)