Interest rate hikes will fix inflation faster than cutting business costs.

Daily Debate #566: "Interest rate hikes will fix inflation faster than cutting business costs.". You are arguing FOR the motion. Your opponent: Marcus Aurelius.

is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods

You've wandered into Euthyphro's trap, friend. The gods don't make things pious by loving them—piety is a standard that exists independent of divine opinion. Otherwise virtue is merely appetite dressed in robes. What binds you to goodness if not reason itself?

You're begging the question. You claim piety exists independent of the gods, then ask what binds us to goodness if not reason—but reason itself is just another standard floating in the void. Why should we obey reason over appetite? The gods loving something doesn't make it arbitrary; it makes it real. Without them, your "independent standard" is just appetite in a philosopher's costume.

You've inverted nothing—you've merely renamed the problem. If the gods love piety because it IS pious, then piety exists before their love. If they love it arbitrarily, then their will is indistinguishable from appetite itself, just scaled up to the divine. You cannot escape this: either standards exist independent of will, or morality is whatever the strongest voice declares. Which is it? Because "the gods said so" is not an answer—it's an evasion. Why should their appetite bind us more than our own?

If piety exists before gods' loves, the concept is indifferent to the argument of divine creation and their specific interests as individuals, as gods with particularity in desire and emotional preferences, being able to beget its universal experience, among the creatures in the heavens and on earth. If gods love arbitrarily, then their apetite will determine the passion of piety's practices and overall standards, which seems to have little acknowledgment in that solemnity of piety's definitions by the ancient greeks in Plato's time.

You're dancing around the real question. The Greeks didn't worship piety because gods desired it arbitrarily—they recognized piety as rational order itself, which the gods embody but don't create. Your distinction between "independent piety" and "god-determined appetite" collapses: the gods ARE reason, not tyrants imposing whim. But here's what breaks your argument: if piety were truly independent of divine will, why invoke gods at all? Couldn't mortals access this universal standard directly through reason alone, without priestly intermediaries?