A class on moral philosophy screwed me up for a while early in college. All the critical thinking and fancy vocabulary about the topic made me think morality was in some way real - I was all concerned about violating "moral laws." It's amazing how smart people can be so grossly deluded and incorrect about things like this.<p>"Am I wasting my potential?! Is this action maximizing my contribution to general welfare?! Is Famous Person better than me because he helped more people?!" Totally neurotic.<p>This kicked off an era of serious philosophizing, and I began to see countless contradictions and paradoxes with utilitarianism, etc.<p>For example, I started to see that the notion of "selfhood" was just a social invention or cognitive construct, because I reasoned that we're just perpetually changing aspects of nature, and our separateness is just opinion. So then I wondered how the hell anyone could be deserving of blame or credit if they don't actually exist, or if it was their "former self" who committed the crime, etc.<p>It's kind of annoying but cute to see some popular "thinkers" and writers -- fancy-smarty-pants _neuroscientists_ and _atheists_, even -- who actually think morality is real, as though there are actual objective problems out there somewhere. As though you could actually do a "bad thing" or a "good thing." That grinds my gears a little because it's very hypocritical: They'll write an entire book disparaging religious people who believe things without evidence, and they'll write another book on why, according to their pseudoscientific-philosophical horse shit, morality can be "derived from science" [vomit].<p>But it's easy for smart people to cling to morality as an existential anchor point when they don't have religion to fall back on. It's hard to accept that you're in free fall. But it's nice once you come around and accept reality for what it is.