Or we're yeast in God's bread.
Yeast: They're given a paradise where their primary purpose is to breed profusely, and to consume sugar and make carbon dioxide and alcohol. We're also quite proficient at doing these things.
Then the yeast all ends up dying in a place which may in fact be very near to a fire, and then you get to "be with" God.
:hmm:
All this talk of global warming - God's just preheating the oven.
"I'm not gonna say that slavery's ok. However,
if you were to have slaves, and
if you decided to beat them, here are some good pointers on how to beat them most effectively."
(Yes, the Bible does also describe permissible ways to beat slaves.)
So how can we apply this to our own laws?
"I'm not going to say anything about murder being good or bad. But,
if you were to kill someone, hiding the body is going to be really important. If you were to coat the body with a fast-hardening epoxy resin, preferably purchased with cash, and then you bound the epoxied body to a sack of bricks and disposed of it in a deep lake, it would be pretty tough to trace it back to you. But I'm not going to say anything at all about the ethical implications of murder.
For an overview of the simplest ways to bloodlessly kill someone, please see Table 3:1."
Nope, I see absolutely no endorsement of murder in any of that. Murder's just something that people do at the time this is being written, so I guess it's prudent to give them some helpful information so they'll do it right.
I just can't help but think of how mangled some of the meaning has to have been in being translated.
I happened to think of the "Better Nate than lever" part of that "longest joke."
That only really works in English. Translate that, and it's pretty likely that it's not going to come out anything close to "Better late than never" in how the two phrases sound (An "
oronym," evidently

).
It's bad enough just keeping word meanings straight in our own language.
Calculus: A branch of mathematics that deals with rates of change.
Also a hard deposit that forms on your teeth; tartar. Not to be confused with cream of tartar, which is also nothing to do with tartar sauce.
Lumen: A unit of measuring luminous flux.
Also a biological term for the inside of a tubular structure.
While we're modeling other laws after the Bible's shining example...
If you go to jail for life, all of your offspring will also be held guilty of your crime, and shall be punished for your crime, as will all of your descendents.
But at some point, the warden's son was killed, which, it was said, was so that the inmates' crimes would be forgiven.
Everyone in the jail still has to stay there, but once they die of old age, they'll be posthumously forgiven. Their offspring still have to stay in the jail though; they too will be forgiven, but only
after they die.
What a dandy system that would be.
Morality without religion: The Universe's properties were conducive to permitting our formation. As collections of atoms that have the ability to discern their own existence and form, we've also noticed that we dislike certain things, such as activities which either
do threaten our continued existence (bodily harm), or things which mimic threats to our continued existence (torture). So, one way to minimize these sorts of occurrences (suffering) is to establish systems which strive to guide the behavior of these numerous complicated collections of sentient atoms, in an attempt to attain that desired minimization of suffering. As individuals, we also determined that the wellbeing of the whole is not the sole priority; individuals also carry some value, and so great effort will sometimes be used to aid and protect a single person.
That's about what we've got for a sense of ethical behavior. Is it 100% objectively perfect? I'm going to say that it's quite likely that the answer is "no." That doesn't mean we need to adopt an all-or-nothing mentality and discard it until we simply stumble upon perfection.
Purpose: The laws of physics present in this Universe were such that it's possible us to exist. And here we are. Might as well make the most of it.

And yet, here I am on this forum. Ok...a revision:
Might as well make
something of it.