Morality doesn't come from religion.

Chipz said:
Packs of wolves know not to murder their pack.
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Murder is a human concept. You're anthropomorphizing them now. If you mean that they know how to cooperate, well of course they do. Cooperation does not equate to morality. You can cooperate to commit immoral acts.

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.
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That's ridiculous, especially in math. You can do the equations right there for yourself! You don't need to rely on anyone to tell you anything. Mathematics is the only place where proof actually exists.


:rolleyes:
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Brilliant. I'll take that to be the human equivalent of a wolf raising his leg and exposing his genitals as a form of submission.
 
Arioch said:
Humans predate religion. Human evolution ensured that cooperative behavior is hardwired into us. Cooperative behavior has since been labeled "moral". Ergo morality predates religion.
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So one tribe of humans cooperating to destroy another is de facto "moral"? The ends justifies the means? Seems equating morality with cooperation is both a consensus morality as well as intuitive self-justification, both of which decried by your referenced video.

Or are you also attributing morality to animal behavior which could easily be explained by mirror neuron activity? If other at least equally plausible explanations exist, then choosing between them is conjecture absent any corroborating evidence.
 
JDawg said:
Murder is a human concept. You're anthropomorphizing them now. If you mean that they know how to cooperate, well of course they do. Cooperation does not equate to morality. You can cooperate to commit immoral acts.



That's ridiculous, especially in math. You can do the equations right there for yourself! You don't need to rely on anyone to tell you anything. Mathematics is the only place where proof actually exists.




Brilliant. I'll take that to be the human equivalent of a wolf raising his leg and exposing his genitals as a form of submission.
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I'm done with you in this thread, you don't care about valid points..just just want to disagree.
 
@Syne --

So one tribe of humans cooperating to destroy another is de facto "moral"?
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Yes, it is moral to fight for survival(and all fights in that dim age were for survival). Is it ethical? Maybe not, it depends on the circumstances. However you're arguing against a straw man here because this is not what I said.

What I said is that because humans predate religion, and because the cooperative behavior that is hardwired into us is what even your religion has deemed "moral", morality predates religion. Of course, morality very likely predates humans as well, virtually all primates share most of the behavioral traits that we've come to describe as moral.

You wanted evidence that morality predates religion, well the very fact that humans predate religion means that morality predates it.

Seems equating morality with cooperation is both a consensus morality as well as intuitive self-justification, both of which decried by your referenced video.
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They most certainly are, but unlike you I don't make the mistake of equating morals with ethics. I can make an ironclad ethical case against murder, however I can't do that from a moral standpoint because, like it or lump it, morality is subjective to both the standards used and the circumstances encountered.

Now, about the mirror neuron phenomenon you noted. While that might explain a minority of animal behavior, it certainly doesn't explain a multitude of animal behavior that can only be described as "morality". Such as the cetacean tendency to help injured and sick pod members breath and eat so that they can recover. Or the fact that various species of elephant display a ritual treatment of their dead. I could go on, but it's obvious to anyone who knows a bit about animal behavior that you're merely grasping for straws here.

Despite what you might want to think, it's a fact that morality predates religion.
 
Chipz said:
That's why we created the word "hermeneutics".
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We (they) created so much. Hammurabi created ideas encoded in Canaanite texts which hermeneutics then deciphers, returning his plain meaning. What then necessitates hermeneutics?
Chipz said:
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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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.
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If I stop at a stop sign, unwittingly preventing the crash that would kill a family with 6 kids, am I acting out of innate or rote learning? If either produces the same moral result, what difference does it make how I acquire this behavior?
Chipz said:
Packs of wolves know not to murder their pack.
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Cooperation led to early human cultures. As previously noted:
Humans predate religion. Human evolution ensured that cooperative behavior is hardwired into us. Cooperative behavior has since been labeled "moral". Ergo morality predates religion.
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Chipz said:
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.
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That would facilitate learning. Of course you were always free to learn it yourself. Some people do. The difference in the pedagogy of math and religion is huge. A math assumption, e.g., "knowing that 1+1=2...." imposes a trivial trust burden, as compared to religion, e.g., "knowing that God created the world..."
Moral behaviour is the superset of cooperative behaviour.
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This assumes that wolves are moral, and/or that we did not acquire cooperative instincts in our ancestral DNA.
 
Aqueous Id said:
We (they) created so much. Hammurabi created ideas encoded in Canaanite texts which hermeneutics then deciphers, returning his plain meaning. What then necessitates hermeneutics?

If I stop at a stop sign, unwittingly preventing the crash that would kill a family with 6 kids, am I acting out of innate or rote learning? If either produces the same moral result, what difference does it make how I acquire this behavior?

Cooperation led to early human cultures. As previously noted:


That would facilitate learning. Of course you were always free to learn it yourself. Some people do. The difference in the pedagogy of math and religion is huge. A math assumption, e.g., "knowing that 1+1=2...." imposes a trivial trust burden, as compared to religion, e.g., "knowing that God created the world..."

This assumes that wolves are moral, and/or that we did not acquire cooperative instincts in our ancestral DNA.
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This appears to be masturabatory at this point, count me out. It's gotten to the point where you don't even read the words before you or try to put context to statements.
 
Chipz said:
I'm done with you in this thread, you don't care about valid points..just just want to disagree.
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Chipz said:
This appears to be masturabatory at this point, count me out. It's gotten to the point where you don't even read the words before you or try to put context to statements.
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So as soon as someone gets the best of you, you bail?

Typical CheskiChipz. Back to the ignore list with you.
 
Chipz said:
The subject of the thread is "Morality doesn't come from religion", which is simply untrue; billions of people have been deriving their morality from religion for thousands of years.
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The thread title seems to ignore the whole massive subject of religious ethics, or perhaps is suggesting that religious ethics doesn't have any force or impact in people's lives. (The point of this thread isn't exactly clear.)

It's clear that religious ethics aren't the only kind of ethics. It obviously isn't, since non-religious people typically behave just as ethically as religious people do.

But I do think that it's false to suggest that religious ethics don't play an important role in many religious people's lives.

All the talk about social instincts is well and good. I think that the human conscience does originate there.

But ethics aren't just our innate feelings of having a conscience. Ethics are conceptual elaborations on those non-verbal feelings, their systematization and justification into explicit verbally-stated principles of right and wrong.

Historically, those conceptualized elaborations have often taken religious form. And I expect that blurring together religious and ethical thinking was probably typical in prehistoric times.
 
gmilam said:
Not only does morality predate religion, there's evidence that it even predates humans.
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I'm not sure that we should collapse animal social instincts together with conceptualized and verbalized moral systems. The former might ultimately be the driver of the latter, but they aren't entirely identical.

I'm speculating, but I would hypothesize that conceptualized religious ideas probably started to appear roughly simultaneously with conceptualized ethical thinking. The significant variable in both cases would have been the growth in the human ability to think and communicate in abstract concepts.

Prior to this time, back in the days of Homo erectus perhaps, the precursers of both ethics and religion were probably already developing in unconceptualized and unspoken forms, in social instincts individually expressed as feelings of conscience, and in an inchaoate sense of the uncanny (or alternatively, the holy) and a growing tendency to project human-style agency, purpose and intention into inanimate events.

I think that human religiosity is probably very old. Homo erectus sometimes collected human skulls, though it's unclear whether they just liked to eat brains or whether they felt that the skulls of the dead had some unspeakable (by them anyway, we talk about everything) power or significance. Neaderthals sometimes practiced what appear to have been ritual burials that may have been associated with beliefs in an afterlife or some other long forgotten religious ideas.
 
Arioch said:
@Syne --

Yes, it is moral to fight for survival(and all fights in that dim age were for survival). Is it ethical? Maybe not, it depends on the circumstances. However you're arguing against a straw man here because this is not what I said.

What I said is that because humans predate religion, and because the cooperative behavior that is hardwired into us is what even your religion has deemed "moral", morality predates religion. Of course, morality very likely predates humans as well, virtually all primates share most of the behavioral traits that we've come to describe as moral.

You wanted evidence that morality predates religion, well the very fact that humans predate religion means that morality predates it.
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So from conflict avoiding primitives (due to the steep cost and ease of dispersing so as to avoid competition for resources) to common human conflict, the initial aggressors had a survival imperative, deemed moral, for attacking other humans? Or is it much more likely that the reward finally outweighed the risk of such conflict (due to better weapons, numbers, and/or tactics)? Can we consider that a moral reason for conflict, or just self-serving? Such initial conflicts would not have been a survival imperative, otherwise the non-aggressor would not have survived as such. Even among aggressors, non-aggressors do survive.

So this cooperative behavior cannot be justified as moral and doesn't even benefit the survival of the species, as it promotes the survival of the most aggressive against its own species.

They most certainly are, but unlike you I don't make the mistake of equating morals with ethics. I can make an ironclad ethical case against murder, however I can't do that from a moral standpoint because, like it or lump it, morality is subjective to both the standards used and the circumstances encountered.

Now, about the mirror neuron phenomenon you noted. While that might explain a minority of animal behavior, it certainly doesn't explain a multitude of animal behavior that can only be described as "morality". Such as the cetacean tendency to help injured and sick pod members breath and eat so that they can recover. Or the fact that various species of elephant display a ritual treatment of their dead. I could go on, but it's obvious to anyone who knows a bit about animal behavior that you're merely grasping for straws here.

Despite what you might want to think, it's a fact that morality predates religion.
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Then, by all means, define the difference between morality and ethics. You're video indicates that there is an objective, rational morality that you now seem to be denying.

You haven't provided any facts (i.e. verifiable evidence). Only anecdotal and dubious correlations.
 
Yazata said:
The thread title seems to ignore the whole massive subject of religious ethics, or perhaps is suggesting that religious ethics doesn't have any force or impact in people's lives. (The point of this thread isn't exactly clear.)
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It would help if you watched the video. The point is that religion is not where morality comes from. It is a rebuttal to the argument that without religion, we would have no morality, and thus be savages. This isn't an attempt to say that people do not draw their ethics from religion, because that is clearly true.

It's clear that religious ethics aren't the only kind of ethics. It obviously isn't, since non-religious people typically behave just as ethically as religious people do.
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I'd argue they behave even more ethically than religious people do, as non-religious people tend to not have any doctrines in their lives that call upon them to discriminate certain groups of people, or treat certain groups as being lesser than them.

But I do think that it's false to suggest that religious ethics don't play an important role in many religious people's lives.
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No one is saying that.

But ethics aren't just our innate feelings of having a conscience. Ethics are conceptual elaborations on those non-verbal feelings, their systematization and justification into explicit verbally-stated principles of right and wrong.
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Exactly.

Historically, those conceptualized elaborations have often taken religious form. And I expect that blurring together religious and ethical thinking was probably typical in prehistoric times.
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Historically, people were ignorant, so yes, that is true. People's innate moral desire to protect others manifested itself as witch burnings and the killings of people whom we today know to be mentally retarded, because religion instructed people to do that. With a better understanding of the world around us, the same desire would manifest itself as protecting those people against what we know to be baseless persecution, and in the case of the mentally handicapped, caring for them. It's the same instinct, simply manifesting itself in a more objectively correct way.

This is why religious moral code is antiquated and incorrect in today's society. We know better. Yes, it's all well and good when the morals within a religion match with our own, but this is a coincidence, because justification for all acts, from utterly depraved to entirely valorous, are found within the texts.
 
Chipz said:
This appears to be masturabatory at this point,
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A master rabbitory? Or you missed the lavatory? In either case: too much information.
Chipz said:
count me out. It's gotten to the point where you don't even read the words
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What do you mean "it's gotten"? I replied to you once. Do you have me confused with someone else?
Chipz said:
before you or try to put context to statements.
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Take a bromo seltzer. The context I framed your remarks in is the context of the thread topic, asserting that morality doesn't come from religion...You posted here. I answered. You had a cow?

Somebody's not getting...oh, never mind, you answered that. As I was saying, before the interruption :

The videos neatly condensed the widely held view that morality arises out of human nature. My statement (before you went catatonic) was that the oldest moral code (in connection to modern religion) is probably Hammurabi. And of course that was civil law, no doubt the oldest of this format, that is, one in which the rules are laid down, with penalties specified for each kind of breach.

Hammurabi seems to have answered the mail as far as bronze age morality is concerned, proving that they didn't need religion either. Religion as we know it was (literally) just an afterthought.
 
Aqueous Id said:
A master rabbitory? Or you missed the lavatory? In either case: too much information.

What do you mean "it's gotten"? I replied to you once. Do you have me confused with someone else?

Take a bromo seltzer. The context I framed your remarks in is the context of the thread topic, asserting that morality doesn't come from religion...You posted here. I answered. You had a cow?

Somebody's not getting...oh, never mind, you answered that. As I was saying, before the interruption :

The videos neatly condensed the widely held view that morality arises out of human nature. My statement (before you went catatonic) was that the oldest moral code (in connection to modern religion) is probably Hammurabi. And of course that was civil law, no doubt the oldest of this format, that is, one in which the rules are laid down, with penalties specified for each kind of breach.

Hammurabi seems to have answered the mail as far as bronze age morality is concerned, proving that they didn't need religion either. Religion as we know it was (literally) just an afterthought.
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Perhaps your definition of 'religion' is limited to western religion?

JDawg said:
I completely missed the "masturabatory part. :roflmao:
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Isn't mocking typo the definition of trolling?
 
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