[QUOTE=Miller]
All these lengthy, elaborate, carefully thought-out answers in this thread, and it’s my post you respond to?
[/QUOTE]
What can I say, my love-empathy endorphins got all fluttery when you posted. ;p
To all who found this offensive, I wonder why you empathize with this, when I specifically stipulated that I was speaking for no one else?
jackdavinci I applaud you for seeing through to the spirit of the argument.
It is very interesting how many atheists appealed to shame as a method of argumentation. I never once said anything about eternal punishment, and yet many posters automatically assumed that it was eternal punishment that guided the ideas. Rather the central theme was ‘behaviorism’ something perfected by the Jesuits hundreds of years ago. “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”, certainly eternal damnation played a part in the behavioral conditioning of the Jesuits, but it’s not a necessary component of behavioral conditioning. One can condition behavior without eternal consequences. Simple reward/punishment scenarios in the short term used when a child has no context for alternate behaviors can work sufficiently to determine the adult’s behavior.
So, if my behavior is determined by such concepts that were inculcated in my behavior by religious or pseudo-religious institutions throughout my life, based upon a Judeo-Christian framework, then it is right to question them. Whether it is, the Golden rule, the Ten Commandments, or “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The United States Government is based off of European institutions which were informed largely by the legalism of the Catholic church which in turn was informed by the legalism of the Roman Empire, where the secular functions of state were considered a religious matter. It is only recently that we have attempted to separate the idea of the state from the idea of the religious culture, to limited success, as the state is based off of the ritual of more ancient institutions. So if the progenitor institutions are religious in nature, then the edifice was born of religious concepts. So if I am to question the foundation of that edifice then I should be questioning it’s structural integrity as well, no?
As for love and empathy being emotions. I see a mistake here. Are they feelings themselves or things being felt? Many people would balk at the reduction of love to being merely an emotion. To the religious person it’s something real that is being felt as opposed to the feeling itself. With empathy, empathy is definitely not an emotion, it is the capacity to approximate the emotions of others, so the emotion being felt is that of identification with the other. This seems to be confused with sympathy. Just because I can empathically feel what you are feeling does not mean that I have to care. Sympathy means that I actually care about what you are feeling.
As for the self-interest, certainly there are evolutionary reasons for altruism, but it assumes that I care about the fate of the next generation for that to matter. When I am dead, what does it matter?
As smilingbandit pointed out, there seemed to be a rather religious resentment to what I said, with appeals to some sort of moral understanding that is ‘self-evident’. Isn’t it a common trope to say that common sense isn’t actually all that common? It is interesting to me that many of the posts were devoid of rational appeals and merely appeals to shame with, “what’s wrong with you, you sick pervert?”, to, “well I am better than you because I don’t need a magical sky pixie to tell me right from wrong.” The flaw here is that I am not competing with you, I do not care if you think you are better than me or not because you have not established the rules that govern comparison. You arbitrarily and solipsistically prefer your position. That’s understandable, I am doing the same thing. The difference is I am not attempting to coerce anyone to my view here. I am not attempting to trigger shame behaviorism that has been ingrained by the pseudo-religious institutions to inculcate socialization. If I abandon those behavioral triggers, then the attendant shame as an accessory is also released. So it may be self-evident to you, but how can I even tell what it is that is self-evident? By what measure can I even tell that you all are agreeing that there is a common morality. Maybe there isn’t really, and you are all simply agreeing due to the social imperative to agree that there is such a thing as morality. You know how to behave contextually because you have been programmed to behave that way, and the tests of morality don’t really come into play that often so it’s easy and costless to claim to agree. Maybe the self-evident morality that many of you share is wildly different at it’s core because it’s derived from different amalgams of logic and emotion.
As for whether or not deriving morality from God is any more logical, that’s irrelevant. The notion that God gives you morals isn’t subject to rationality, it doesn’t matter. The rules were put in place by God, and you have some leeway to obey them or not. This is not perfect free will, as you cannot do anything you want. I doubt most of you can blow up a car with your mind for instance. So if it is your will to do so, your will is not free, it is constrained by rules that are immutable, at least for you. Maybe one or two of you CAN make cars explode with your mind. The unquestioning acceptance of a ‘self-evident’ morality doesn’t seem to show that there is any sort of logic behind the notion of free-will. You implicitly accept rules governing your behavior, rules that were largely decided by priests in temples millenia ago. It’s pat and simple to say that people acted a certain way before certain religious institutions came into being, but there is no method of verifying such a notion. Many cultures have very different notions of morality. Aztec temples soaked with the blood of 80,000 sacrifices, hardly resemble the same moral system as a Judeo-Christian culture. The oldest historical documents are notoriously disputed for authenticity of content, whether we dispute whether Abraham really existed, discuss the validity of Herodotus’s histories, or look at Egyptian hieroglyphics. The earliest writings on ethics and such were largely defined by religious institutions, from Jewish priests, to Hammurabi, to Zoroaster, and Akhenaten. We have no way of knowing what sort of moral or civil structure prior civilizations and tribes had. It is simply dogmatically accepted that morality derives from something other than religious behavioral inculcation. I would tend to believe that such behavioral inculcation is NOT natural based upon watching the social abuse in animal tribes that govern who gets to eat and breed, and by observing human history with as much attention that was devoted to inculcating moral behavior in the populace. I don’t think it follows that altruism is necessarily natural to the human condition. Certainly, we can argue that religion evolved naturally, but different threads evolved simultaneously and came into conflict in a violent dialectic with the victory of the superior system being decided in a trial by blood.
