So can I conclude that whenever my posts are ignored, it’s because they are such good posts? 
You can conclude anything you wish to conclude, I was only expressing an opinion.
Love
Difficult Questions!
I won’t claim to know their answers fully.
Using the analogy of the family, when a parent sees a child behaving badly, what would be the most loving thing to do? Giving the child a reward would certainly be wrong, and would reinforce the negative behavior. Therefore, the best solution is to discipline the child. Discipline should be given with an intensity consistent with the severity of the consequences of the negative behavior, and the level of undertanding (and perhaps malice) the child has. The child must be conscious that he or she did something wrong and of the consequences of that action. Also, he or she should understand that the parent LOVES them, is not angry, and wants he or she to learn to behave well.
With a few modifications, this would be a practical basis for law enforcment.
Legitimate needs. The UN has a list of them, could someone please share them with us? I don’t recall them off the bat. I remember food, clothing and shelter being high in the list. I’m pretty sure that in most psychology textbooks, self-realization and love are in there somewhere.
As for picking and choosing what parts of the Bible to accept, I agree with you, it’s an all or nothing situation. Either you accept everything, or nothing. Before you start living under Old-Testament law, however, remember that those laws were intended as the laws to govern the theocracy of Israel, and ever since Christianity began, they have been superseded by the law of grace. These laws were never binding to non-Jews. They’re only guidelines. (Its still a sin to break the 10 commandments, but the ritual, social and dietary laws have been put aside, slightly by Jesus, and more so by the apostles)
As for who is your neighbor, the people who heard Jesus say these things had the very same question. The parable of the good samaritan is the answer. Everyone whom you encounter, even a stranger of a different social class is your neighbor. The word might be better understood as “fellow humans”.
Genetic reactions that preserve our social bonds with other individuals can certainly have a positive affect on individual survival. By preserving our social bonds, the advantages gain by social cooperation, our individual genes gain that much of an advantage. Not saying there isn’t a ‘tug and pull’ between self-interest and group/social-interest. There is. Walking that line is what it is all about when living in a group as a social animal. Solitary animals can instinctually act with reckless self-interest. Social animals cannot.
Here is an example I read somewhere – sorry I forget where – but think it was in Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. ---- It went something like this:
We have a flock of birds infested with ticks. No bird can pull the ticks off their own backs but the two birds, working together, can remove all of the ticks off of each other. Assume there is no advantage to either bird other than this. The disadvantage to each bird is the energy expended in pulling off the ticks of the other bird. Energy that will have to be replaced. Birds take turns pulling off ticks. Now if ‘Bird 1’ expends the energy to pull ticks off ‘Bird 2’ but ‘Bird 2’ does not reciprocate – it seems that ‘Bird 2’ is ahead of the game. All of ‘Bird 2’s’ ticks are gone without expending energy. Having no advantage ‘Bird 1’ will not pull ticks from ‘Bird 2’s’ back again. Others who witnessed this ‘injustice’ will recall ‘Bird 2’s’ behavior when their turn comes since it is in their self-interest to do so. Now, if this behavior is repeated too many times by ‘Bird 2’ – he will die due to tick infestation. So – if with a calculating, cunning ‘Bird 2,’ a bird who wants to cheat, he had still better either be secretive or selective when doing so – or his calculating, cunning genes will stop with his tick infested death. Cooperating genes live for another day.
Taking the ‘bird example,’ our reaction to other people in ‘moral situations’ depends on this same sort of genetic ‘give and take.’ A ‘give and take’ response encoded in our genes that the ‘large majority’ of us have inherited. A set of responses for our child and genetic kinfolk, another for our dear and true friends, and yet another for total strangers. Why? It appears that it would generally be in our interest to help those around us whom we know and whom we can count on for help in return (or who carry our hand-me-down genes.) In our interest to be distrustful of those who are not members of our clan.
Again, as Pinker wrote in *The Blank Slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature –
“…genes have metaphorical motives – making copies of themselves – and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into the human brain – heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness.”*
> From TSDaddict:
>
> With a few modifications, this would be a practical basis for law enforcment.
What’s the point of looking for a practical basis for enforcement if we haven’t even gotten a practical basis for law? In my mind, both the law and the basis for its enforcement would follow from the same reasoning.
Someone commits murder. Assuming the golden rule, he’s demonstrating his desire to be murdered himself… so the State hasn’t any qualms against fullfilling that desire.
> Legitimate needs. The UN has a list of them
What makes this list legitimate? I don’t think many people look at the UN as a moral authority.
> As for picking and choosing what parts of the Bible to accept,
> I agree with you, it’s an all or nothing situation.
That’s only the case if you use the Bible as a justification for Biblical morality. If you pick something out and show it to be a reasonable moral law by your own lights, you can pick and choose all you want, and feel no obligation to follow those parts of the Bible you find immoral. BUT, if you know you have your own moral system, you’re probably not going to have the compulsion to prepend “The Bible says…” to your statements… since you’d know that its appearance in the Bible is irrelvant. The same for any fetching passage in any other work, by any author.
I think this is what people who believe in objective morals always seem to miss: it is totally not arbitrary which culture we live in for precisely this reason.
True, but that doesn’t mean moral facts exist per se, by which I mean, “Anyone would agree that such-and-such is totally wrong/right/immoral/etc.”
Must you, though? A great portion of the US’s culture thinks that, generally, drug use is wrong. We punish dealers more harshly than users. Yet, for example, I do not think it is wrong, and I am not prepared to accept it as fact, even within my own culture. But maybe I’m being to nitpicky.
Do you suppose you’ve just stumbled upon a moral action that is universal? If we suggest that morals are largely relative to culture, and yet all cultures agree that people should be moral, is this just an artifact of the definition of “moral”, or something more subtle and objective?
I think you and I disagree here most. Since it is always an individual that decides what that individual’s action should be, and since we presume that individuals should act morally, it is always the individual who must decide what is moral in any particular situation. As I see it. 
But this brings us to where we also disagree, and that is that cultures are the strongest arbiter of morality.
Sorry for my long absence. I am back to respond to erislover’s remarks about the Golden Rule.
erislover, you seem to think I am saying that we should choose the Golden Rule (and you don’t seem to think it is a good choice).
My position is that we are born with an internalized Golden Rule - the instinctive impulse to respond empathetically. In that sense, the Golden Rule chooses us.
One caveat: I would agree with Tigers2B1’s observation that our empathetic impulse varies in strength depending on how closely-related to you the “other” in question happens to be. Very strong for family members, a bit weaker for members of the same community, weaker still for other members of a nation, and weaker still for humans in general.
I believe the only difference between cultures is that we may disagree in the details of how the Golden Rule should be applied in situations involving competing empathies. (I.e., situations where a person must chose between two courses of action, either of which will cause harm to someone.)
Even your human sacrifice hypothetical fits this model. Let’s say I am an Aztec. I believe that unless a human sacrifice is offered, my people will suffer the wrath of the gods. Any empathy I might have had toward a helpless captive will be easily overcome by my self-interest combined with my empathy for my fellow Aztecs. (If we don’t sacrifice this guy, we will all suffer.) Also decreasing my empathy for the captive may be the fact that he and his tribemates have killed some of my fellows. My empathetic response to the death of my fellows causes me to view the captive as a threat to my community. My empathy for my group overcomes my empathy for the captive.
(This example also shows how religious leaders and politicians may hijack our empathetic impulse to serve their own ends, by the way.)
In other words, a culture which accepts human sacrifice does not require a “nation of sociopaths,” it requires a nation of people who are misinformed about the consequences of their actions.
We all have an internal Golden Rule, IMO, but we may differ as individuals, and societies may differ, in the details of how that rule applies in complex moral situations involving competing empathies.