In general I also think that the categories of good and evil should be ignored to analyze behavior.
Unfortunately they are deeply ingrained in how humans do reason.
But then there are things that differ from individuals that do things that are considered bad to individuals that don't.
Having monetary incentives is for example something that
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Some say there is indeed a sturdy moral baseline: their religion.
For a very significant percentage of the population, good and evil are defined in scripture
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If that would be true you wouldn't have one the one hand Christians who hate gays and on the other Christians who think that loving everyone is the thing they ought to do.
If you just watch how the actions for people who "believe" in the same scripture differ it's pretty obvious that the scripture doesn't define good and evil.
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The message changed from “follow the scriptures, and you will learn a better and more loving way to live” to “do what we say, or we’ll hurt you.”
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No.
It changed from stone everyone who works on Sunday to just judge people badly who work on Sunday's over time.
But once you have accepted that scripture doesn't define morality, is scripture worthless?
No it isn't. When you ask people to recite the ten commandments they behave better afterwards. The do that regardless of whether they are religious or aren't.
The very act of thinking about how to behave is the thing that's important.
Having role models and heroes does change actions to be more moral.
It's no random occurrence that the most successful religions like Christianity, Islam and Buddhism all have a clear human role model.
The same way identifying somebody who steals as a bad person makes you effectively less likely to steal yourself.
A good talks in that area:
Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom | Video on TED.com