RE: In Defense of Hell
The point of this is, if you lie, cheat and steal, you will objectively not do better than others. You dont need a religion to have laws, and breaking laws for most people leads to genrally undesirable outcomes. Humans are social animals and prefer company over lonliness, being a liar, a cheat and a theif leads ultimately to lonliness, and less optimal life chances and outcomes.
This is why we teach our children not to do these things.
Religion is not equivalent to morality, religion requires you to believe in specific things for which there is no evidence, examples are things like evil and hell. You dont need evil and hell to be a moral person, and therefore religion is surplus to human requirements.
There are no ghosts, its the stuff of childrens nightmares, believed in by people who were unfortunate enough not to have better ways of explaining what happens around them.
Note not having religion is not the same as denying the existence of god(s), or appreciating some people have a tendency to feel spiritual. Religion warps these things into a set of dogmatic rules that people must follow, or (for example) be terrified into thinking they will go to hell. The problem with that is no set of rules fits all situations, and certainly not sets of rules from thousands of years ago which are now morally bankrupt and most in the religion feel they have to ignore anyway. So this leaves the followers of religions at the mercy of whichever person has been put in charge of interpreting that religion at that time, that person may be benevolent (The Pope seems like a nice man), or they may terrorise (Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader if ISIS), but their election as the literal voice of god(s) is unquestionable. Controlling people in this way is immoral.
Is there an objective standard or not? Laws are not an objective standard, because every age has had its own laws. For example, the law in one time and place punished those who freed slaves. If "do the right thing or the laws will punish you" is the basis of morality, then it logically follows that the most moral person is the absolute dictator of a despotism.
But let me try arguing on your side for a moment. One could say that certain kinds of laws are superior to another, and that a despotic government is far inferior to a healthy republic. I would agree. I would further posit that there are, as per Montesquieu, different baseis for the different governments. Namely fear for the despotism, public honor for the monarchy, and civic virtue, that is, love of one's country or patriotism, for the republic. If this is so, it implies something quite amazing about the fabric of reality, that a government based on love is superior to others. I would find this hard to believe: that a purely natural world would permit altruism to be rewarded.
But back to your post!
Religion does not require believing in things that have no evidence. I would submit that the existence of God can be objectively proven by natural evidence (this is Catholic dogma). I also submit the doctrine of original sin as provable from experience. And, if we insist on science, the positive analysis of Eucharistic miracles.
All that aside, what does it mean to be a "moral" person if there is no objective morality? I'm generally moral by my own definition, and so, I would assume, are you by yours, and everyone by everyone's. It's arbitrary, with ourselves as arbiters.
I'm curious why you seem to absolutely deny the existence of ghosts, but the existence of divine beings is permissible without religion. (And indeed, the existence or lack of divinities is not based on religion, but the reverse is true) In some cultures, ghosts are worshiped as gods. And spiritual experiences imply some kind of spirit, no?
But one more question: If there is no one set of rules that fits all situations, then by what rule(s) do we decide if a ruleset's time is over? Or, more interestingly, why not assemble the Perfect Rules simply by discarding all those which are unnecessary and adding those that are?