Just because some religions have incorporated morality into their teachings does not mean they invented morality. Not only does morality predate religion, there's evidence that it even predates humans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrAfqvIwt9E
Morality doesn't come from religion.
- Thread starter Arioch
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrAfqvIwt9E
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This makes several very good points but also neglects some points it comes so close to addressing.
What do you do in lieu of education? Humans are not born educated, so there must be some means of bridging the gap. Law cannot do this, as the only moral lessen it imparts is that it is only wrong if you get caught. Without something that "sees all", and works as a precursor to developing self-control and personal integrity, we have decades of cognitive development and education before any real moral lessens can even be taught. And even then without any example for developing true personal integrity.
And is it really a surprise that people seeking to consult the divine are consulting their conscience? Christianity has long held that the conscience is the "holy spirit", so why does anyone need a study to tell them this, as if it were some new data. This seems to only be playing to the lack of information the non-religious may have, which would lead us to question whether they have enough information on the subject, just as the video asserts, to form a relevant moral opinion on it.
Gods have always been an idealization of man. The idea provides us with a greater template of self-examination, where we learn to view ourselves objectively, without the inherent limitations of only viewing our behavior as seen by other people.
Such animal behavior can easily be explained as mirror neuron activity. So where is your evidence, not conjecture mind you, for morality predating religion?
Chipz (sock puppet of CheskiChips, and various other permabanned aliases) and LG are knocking down straw men. The argument is not that people have not justified their conduct from religious texts, but rather that morality itself is innate, in that as one becomes more aware of the world around them, they will begin to adopt a fairly uniform moral code.
This is why religious fundamentalism is considered a bad thing, and why Western societies ignore the parts of the Abrahamic religions that do not jibe with an enlightened culture. You don't see witches burned anymore, for example. If morality was not innate, by what authority would we draw these lines?
This is why religious fundamentalism is considered a bad thing, and why Western societies ignore the parts of the Abrahamic religions that do not jibe with an enlightened culture. You don't see witches burned anymore, for example. If morality was not innate, by what authority would we draw these lines?
The award for least effort at 'reading a post I'm responding to' goes to gmilam.
I only have one 1 perma-banned alias, thank you. Believe it or not, I understand the argument of morality being innate, for certain acts there's no question. Animals can recognize murder and behaviour that while beneficial to individuals are detrimental to their clan. Is that what morality extends to you for you? Or is morality a more difficult topic which cannot be fully learned in a lifetime by men who do nothing but tend to its study? I tend to think the latter. That there are brilliant men who have spent their lives studying right from wrong in the most delicate and precise cases, and I, having spent my time in other affairs can learn from them. Those men in modern society are often associated with religion, and I can learn from them.
If you believe all the morality you need can be determined by your own logic, you are arrogant and a burden on the rest of us.
There is nothing more arrogant than religious people telling us what is moral, after all their moral failures throughout history.
Show me a secular man whose walked this earth with the moral wisdom of Isaac Luria. Your misinterpretations of history are no excuse for your having an opinion on topics you've in the past admitted having done no reading about. You haven't even read one text, yet your opinions of their content is so unbelievably strong.
I don't have to know what material the emperor's clothes are made from, he's not wearing anything. And I don't need some Jew to tell me what God wants me to do. They admire a guy who was prepared to kill his son because he heard voices. Faith is itself immoral. I read that Luria claimed he could read thoughts, so he was also a fraud. It would take a believer to be so gullible. Jews cut off their children's penises, for fuck's sake!
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I already did, also addressed the legitimacy of their claims in post 25.
Not a burden to me, unless I'm not one of 'the rest of us'. Nor do I find this arrogant or a burden. I do find it arrogant to claim any kind of divine right, and when divine right interferes with rights of individuals and societies, I find that to be a burden.
The premise that morality need not be determined by one's own logic would appear invalid, insofar as a person can only arrive at a determination of what 'moral' means by use of logic. In other words, I think it's false to presume that a person who claims to operate from an external (religious) morality has disengaged their own logic. I doubt that it is possible to disengage logic. It may be impaired or wrong, but a person without logic would seem to be presenting brain injury. Even a drunk may demonstrate logic ("It's still early, I can have another drink") even though the logic may be impaired.
So when you say morality is arrived at externally (as from divine inspiration, scripture, etc.) how is that determination not also arrived at by an application of logic?
You can delete your own posts.
The videos review the ways religions impose fallacies, contradictions and error onto the societies' sense of morality. It is that false sense of religious morality that is imputed in the thread title. In other words, morality does not arise from premises known to be fallacious, contradictory and erroneous. Therefore, when religion imposes these onto morality, it no longer constitutes morality, but I suppose we are left to call it religious morality. Morality arises from natural causes, such as instinct, reason, and empathy.
The fact that billions of people have been following religious morality does not remove the blemishes, any more than the number of WWII Nazis practicing anti-Semitism removes the stain of their atrocities.
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Religious morality is the same as any other, except that it's written down in a book. It says nothing about emerging technologies. If you copy someone's consciousness into a computer, is it moral to shut that computer off?
Exactly. And he specifically made a point, that people who were ignorant, and blindly followed a bad moral code (such as punishing 'possessed' people) are less blameworthy than people who come later, with better information (e.g., Tourette's syndrome).
And since we don't imagine people punishing Tourette's patients, I would point to other examples. One of them was a celebrated religious leader who blamed the Haitian earthquake on God's wrath for their conduct.
So I think that speaks to your point about emerging knowledge. That minister knew (or could reasonably determine) that earthquakes are caused by natural processes. So he is more culpable than the religious people of long ago, because he is insisting on a putative morality that includes a severe form of denial.
That is one too many. Why the administration here rewards sock puppetry is beyond me. "Troll, plagiarize, and flame until you get banned--because you can just create a new alias and do it all over again, but this time with consent from the administrators!"
Interesting, because a second ago you didn't understand it at all.
Wait, animals can recognize murder? Since when? And what "clan" are you referring to? Or are you generalizing all animal groups as "clans"?
Again in English, please?
That just sounds like a bunch of low-minded nonsense to me. An excuse for ignorance, a cop-out for someone who doesn't would rather make vague assumptions than learn something.
They are? Like whom? Because it seems to me that the matter of morality is an easy one: it's in the book.
Piffle, followed by an absurd non-sequitur. How else would you "determine" your morality?
That's why we created the word "hermeneutics".
When one learns something, it becomes innate not rote. When one acts out something taught to him by someone else while they do not understand it at present but hope to one day understand it, that's called practice. When someone acts something out with no intent on understanding it, it's called rote.
Thanks for your opinion.
Packs of wolves know not to murder their pack.
Okay, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. But I'll say this; at times I simply had to accept the teachings of mathematics teachers under the assumption they knew better than I did and providing me good information was their intention.
Moral behaviour is the superset of cooperative behaviour.
Which is the same thing as using personal judgement.