Here's another, friendlier, exchange

with The Probligo [by email]:

>Perhaps there is something that ties from your comments on the objective moral standard ( I prefer "universal moral" ) through to the consideration of an "objective religion standard" ( better as "universal religion"?). If you have the inclination I would like to hear your thoughts, and anyone else, on the idea.
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>If I can state the moot in the following manner it might be clearer...
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>A "religion" is a system of beliefs and traditions held in common by a group of people.
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>The traditions are secondary to the core beliefs and provide scientific, historical, cultural, secular and supernatural explanations for the nature of the known world.
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>The core beliefs at the very heart of the religion directly determine and control the social conduct of the group. Such core beliefs give the foundation for the morals and ethics of the society.
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>Is that core belief the equivalent of the universal moral?
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In a society such as ours, where there is no overt punishment for breaches of dogma, the individual is left to decide on his own how much the core beliefs of his religion will determine his actions and to a great degree, how much of his religion he will even learn. That's why the freer societies, with secular governments have such a melange of cultural cross-currents. One of the problems, maybe, that moral -relativists and -objectivists have in understanding one another is that the relativists see morality in the way you describe, where objectivists don't include (or try not to include) a bunch of cultural accretions in what we're calling morality. It remains necessary to preach and teach it because we're all born ignorant, and therefore have to learn it somewhere and part of human nature is that we pick it up from our elders. We exclude a lot of sexual morality, unless there is a good reason for it. There are good reasons not to be promiscuous, for example--unwanted pregnancy and STDs primary among them--but having multiple sex partners during the course of one's life isn't evil per se, just risky. An Objectivist would say it's immoral to take unnecessary risks but moral to take necessary ones.

I think that illustrates the point that Objectivism (I'm capitalizing it here, because there are groups of organized Objectivists that, I'm pretty sure would agree with me, though the term, when capitalized also includes their metaphysical and epistemological beliefs) turns to science to learn what the nature of Reality is. As Francis Bacon said, "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Nature doesn't speak with a voice. It speaks through cause and effect. Action and consequence. And those things teach people quickly, when they are free to learn; i.e. when they aren't led astray by false teachings supported by artificial punishments. Of course, sometimes only the survivors are left to learn the lesson that something doesn't work. Then it's important to tell the stories, so that others don't repeat the mistakes.