Share your personal journey of faith, skepticism, or atheism, why you believe in God or trust in science instead. This is a place for SUPPORT and AGREEMENT only, not a place to tell someone their experience and feelings are wrong, or why we disagree with them.
chrisso99 wrote:The fact that every society has some sort of very similar "moral" code is pretty clear proof God/Religion has nothing to do with its development. If it did, you'd expect to see moral cores vary as much as religions and cultures vary but they don't. They are fairly consistent. No stealing, no raping other people's wives/daughters, no killing people for no reason, everyone work together when necessary, etc. Religions were built around morality, not the other way around. Furthermore, morality is neither unique to humans nor intrinsic to every human.
As smart and resourceful as humans are, it would be impossible for our species to survive without being part of groups capable of cooperating on complex tasks. If your groupmate is raping your mate while you're stealing his food, it's not likely you are going to work together to kill that Wooly Mammoth together the next day. Other animals that work together in groups also have codes of acceptable behavior and even dogs understand concepts like fairness. I think it's pretty safe to say that chimps, baboons, and dogs don't have gods or religions.
Certain humans have no sense of morality or ethics whatsoever. True sociopaths are pretty rare but their brains literally work differently than normal humans. Jesus can't cure them. Nothing can. They just are what they are. Some will mostly behave in a legal, if amoral, way because they don't want negative consequences and be successful business people, politicians, doctors, etc. Some will eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. No religion can change the way their brain physically works and make these people actually feel emotions and empathy or change.
All of this is exactly what you would predict if morality had a natural origin vice a supernatural origin.
Yes I think you are mostly right. Plus some parts (considerable parts) of organized religions are built around protecting and preserving the status quo, because - really - stability is better than chaos for society as a whole. There are positives to that, as well as certain known negatives ('opiate of the people').
and yes, turtle, it seems to me also that Russian novels take a certain despairing view of human nature!
What I've heard is that a sociopath makes a quite successful and reasonable supervisor/commander/chief of whatever, except that people don't quite enjoy working for them!
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
Supposedly evolution is responsible for such great diversity and because there is so much commonality it reaffirms evolution, as in a common ancestry or starting point. Then it seems that commonality in the great diversity of religion would also point to a common ancestry or starting point. Why is it not then just as obvious and true that it all had a common starting point, morals, life, and religion? IMO, it is all echoes and permutations of the original. Which could easily then be a common creator.
If commonality and similarity proves a lack of a common starting point, as Chrisso has asserted, then the theory of evolution is silly.
Isn't the world wonderful...I am all for rational optimism and I am staying positive.
klp wrote:Supposedly evolution is responsible for such great diversity and because there is so much commonality it reaffirms evolution, as in a common ancestry or starting point. Then it seems that commonality in the great diversity of religion would also point to a common ancestry or starting point. Why is it not then just as obvious and true that it all had a common starting point, morals, life, and religion? IMO, it is all echoes and permutations of the original. Which could easily then be a common creator.
If commonality and similarity proves a lack of a common starting point, as Chrisso has asserted, then the theory of evolution is silly.
You are comparing apples and oranges. You make it painfully obvious you don't know what you are talking about , either that or you are choosing to be deliberately obtuse. Plus, this is a support forum, not a criticism or debate forum.
No, actually I think that is a valid observation: from outside.
It falls apart from 'inside' the science of evolution but it is a VERY common kind of idea, and it is the same sort of idea that put 'Darwinian evolution' together with theories of social history, and came up with eugenics and 'social Darwinism', which isn't science at all, but social engineering.
I have a T-shirt someplace which says that 'science doesn't care what you think, it is true anyway' (or something like that). Which is why 'evolution' is a science, and social engineering based on false analogies isn't.
There is, however, a superficial resemblance between evolution and 'religious development', but it is kind of like the similarity between, say, sharks and dolphins. They look a LOT alike - but are nothing alike, either. One is a fish and the other is a mammal. They just look alike on the outside.
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
Someone on the old Internet Infidel Board used to always argue that if God did not exist there was no need to have morals or act right, since morality and acting right was just an opinion in the eyes of the beholder. We basically gave him all of the arguments why we should still have laws and morals, ect even if God did not exist and he would not listen. Eventually someone said "Well, you just go ahead and try to rape murder and steal since you think there is nothing objective about it and we'll just get a gun and put a bullet in your head to stop you from being immoral, even if its just we mere humans opinion of what is moral, because you have nothing objectively speaking to tell us we can't.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.----Karl Marx
One of the biggest known differences (outside the physical ones) between the human species and the other primate species, is our extreme 'sociability'. Humans are FAR more mutually cooperative than other primate groups. And one of the ways you 'police' that is by removing or disciplining group members that fail to be sufficiently mutually cooperative.
Murdering, stealing, violence against others - these are all 'fails' on the mutual cooperativeness of the group. They are aberrations, and human societies don't tolerate failures of mutual cooperation nor do they tolerate extreme aberrations from the group. The larger our population grows, the more 'groups', because past a certain size, it is very hard for us to manage that feeling of cozy fellowship (the number is below 1000, actually, and about 30 is actually ideal - this is why megachurches always have 'house groups' and why military forces around the world rely on a unit system of individuals which is typically around 30).
Humans WANT to be part of the group. If the group itself wasn't actively promoting the kind of behavior it wants, the individuals in it would be cheerfully SELF disciplining so that they would 'fit in'.
What humans do that is 'different':
We actively 'teach' the younger members (other primates learn by watching, but active teaching is minimal or rare).
We point out things to others - no other primates 'point'. (interestingly, DOGS have learned to follow our 'pointing' behavior. Wolves can't figure us out.)
Those are behaviors that can be observed. Most other differences involve the way we think, which isn't quite so observable!
Cooperative behaviors are a clear advantage to survival. Groups with members that were best at cooperating were best at surviving. Bingo. Evolutionary pressure.
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.
Also notice that the great moral rules for social cohesion----don't murder, don't physically attack for no reason, don't steal, don't rape, don't hurt someone's kids take care of just about 90 percent of the problems you may find in a small group setting. It really isn't that hard.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.----Karl Marx
agricola wrote:Granted - and yet, do remember that we were all raised with the notion that moral/ethical behavior was inextricably tied to religious belief. I have even had people flat TELL me that if they didn't have a belief in God, then they would certainly rob, cheat, steal and worse, because the only thing stopping them - the ONLY thing - was their belief that their actions were being 'watched' and that there would be an inevitable consequence.
So how do you (anybody) hope - ever - to reassure people like that, when they are obviously going to firmly believe that anybody without a belief in God is, basically, a crime wave waiting to happen and a person totally without a shred of honesty about them, too?
They will not believe a word you say. They will not believe that, just because you behaved well yesterday, that you might behave well tomorrow.
Also - granted - such folks are (thankfully) a small minority of religious believers. But in a world of 7 billion, even a small minority is a large number of people.
Given that these people are out there, I believe that the only way to persuade them differently, is to give them enough examples from their own acquaintance to use 'experience' to teach, since 'doctrine' contradicts (for them) the idea that moral/ethical behavior can exist without the eye in the sky and punishment afterward.
They have those Russian novels to look at - you know 'without God, all is permitted' and also the example of Leopold and Loeb, who reasoned that without a god, it would be a neutral decision to murder a child, because they happened to be curious about what a dead person would look like.
People like this have an intellectual defect in my opinion and may perhaps be borderline psychopathic. It just is not that hard to understand, at least to me, why you should have morality without God. What would happen if we had no morality/law is good enough reason.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.----Karl Marx
