According to my anthropological studies, a common cross-cultural maxim is “the turnip is the root of all evil.”
The Buddha said it 500 years before that!
Monavis
There are no do-overs. Nobody is going to fix my fuck-ups. Wrongs cannot be magically wiped away with a simple, “I’m sorry.”
So I live my life as to minimize my fuck-ups. I don’t want to spend my (comparatively) few years on this Earth causing harm or unhappiness to myself or others.
Also, in the words of Woodie Guthry I treat horses good, and I’m friendly to strangers.
I’m an atheist and am not going to add any new info that hasn’t been posted already over the last two pages as to where I get my moral code from.
But I want to add the satanist point of view. =) I picked up a copy of the Satan Worshipper’s Bible (can’t remember the name… the one Anton LeVay wrote way back when) at a used bookstore many years ago. Read through it out of curiosity.
The first half isn’t that bad… he talks about church goers who then go to strip clubs and are therefore hypocrites and he didn’t want to end up that way. That he also felt it was important to treat others well, but that they needed to stay out of others’ personal business.
In other words, if two (or more) consenting adults wanted to have unmarried sex/orgies/etc then it was up to them and no religious group should tell them it was wrong, as long as they didn’t force their beliefs on others. That monogamy should be a choice between two people if they want to be monogamous, and if they are open with each other about not being monogamous that’s ok too.
He was also big on revenge being perfectly acceptable. Not to harm others first, but that if someone harmed you that you had every right to retribution to prevent the offending party from hurting you again. That it was the way the world worked and we may as well be honest about it.
It’s not until he then followed it all up with “but since humans need to pray and have rituals we may as well pray to Satan” that he totally lost me. I have as much faith in a fictional devil as I do in a fictional deity.
The lobohan moral code:
Make other people happy if it’s not going to make you unhappy.
Make yourself happy, but consider how your actions will make others feel.
Ultimately this has to be factored into the framework that you only get one chance to feel and experience life, then it’s eternal oblivion. Put as much happiness into your brief window of consciousness as is possible. At the same time, respect that others are looking to do the same.
If involved in a zero sum game where only one person can win, and winning will make you happy, try your best. If the other guy loses and is unhappy, well he should have practiced harder.
Atheists get their morality from the same place believers do: Social consensus and constantly evolving social standards .
The idea that religion is the source of morality, or that it is necessary to produce moral individuals, is one of the big lies propagated on behalf of religion. Religious believers delude themselves that morality comes from their God.
The problem is that The Golden Rule of Jesus is a platitude that provides very little guidance in the real world. OF COURSE we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us, but once you have admitted that, what do you do with it?
I am sure the people who heard Jesus say that found a it was a wonderful idea. They went home and told their wives (who remained in the home and obeyed their husbands) and their slaves (yes, they had slaves). Then the man of the house took a wooden rod and gave a severe beating to his child who had misbehaved (for the bible clearly tells us that we will spoil the child if we spare the rod).
Now flash forward two thousand years. We still agree that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But how many of the above elements would our society consider moral behaviour? What has changed and why?
Take slavery. There is no specific condemnation of slavery in the Bible. Indeed, if you want to make an argument FOR slavery, the Bible will supply enormous support. The Bible even contains instructions on how and when you can sell your own daughter into slavery. So why would 99.9% of people in our society call slavery evil and immoral?
Because our social consensus has changed.
Take the 10 Commandments. Are you seriously going to believe that when God told Moses “Thou shalt not steal” nd “Thou shalt not kill”, it was the first time humanity had an inkling that murder and theft are wrong? The Egypt from which the Hebrews had just left had NO LAWS aginst thses things??? Come on!!!
The Bible actually orders the Israelites to not only observe the sabbaath but to force everyone in their country to do so. But in most westrn democracies, forcing another human being to observe your religious sabbath would be illegal, an a violation of their civil rights.
Where did we get the idea of civil rights? When did we decide we should not burn people as witches?
Most democratic western states were imprisoning homosexuals within living memory. Yet nobody at the time felt they were failing to apply the Golden Rule in doing so. But today, nobody but a few ultra-conservatives would be in favour of jailing gays.
Where in the Bible or religion does it say that insider trading is wrong?
How about cruelty to animals? The Bible does not condemn it and the Golden Rule obviously applies to humans. The British, only a few generations ago thought bear-baiting (in which a chained bear is torn apart by a pack of dogs) was great fun. Frenchmen in past centuries used to set baskets of cats afire at fairs with the full approval of religion. What has changed? Why?
Morality is not and has never been really the product of religion. Society establishes its values. Religion may help a little by scaring people into good behviour with threats of hell-fire, but religion is not the font of morality.
So we all get our morality from the same source. If not, our jails would be filled with atheists and agnostics who, lacking religion, would be incapable of moral behaviour.
<snip> to save space.
I think you make a good point.
I was wondering what your thoughts are on why societies change their values? Where does the impulse to change values, come from? What causes the pendulum to swing from slavery to freedom, from woman being subjugated to the move toward equal rights, and civil rights? Why does our vision of human rights sift over time?
I’m not proposing an answer. I’m just wondering what your opinion is.
We KNOW it changes, but you are asking what is the ultimate motor? Frankly, you have me there.
Maybe one anecdote will help. Take cruelty to animals. My late dad (1917-1995) was, when I knew him, a kind man who would never have hurt our pets. He used to come in and feed our cats when we were on vacation and spoil them. But he once admitted that as kids in North America in the 1920s, he and his friends would love to climb into a tree, grab baby birds from nests, throw them down to the ground and stomp them. We kids asked him why he would have done that. He thought long and said, “Life was hard for us and so we made it hard for others”.
I am also reminded of the line in the movie “Mississippi Burning” where the FBI man from the south, in answer to the question of where racial hatred comes from, tells a story about how his father was “So busy hatin’ the niggers he never knew it was poverty that was killin’ him.”
Does it have something to do with the higher standard of living in a society?
For that matter why do I now regret that I used to impale worms on hooks and then pull those hooks into the mouths of fishes and kill them? It now seems to me monstrous and horrible (unless you need the fish to eat) and yet it did not seem so when I went fishing with my Dad in the 1950s. Why?
Economics.
And knowledge. Progress in general, really. There are modern societies with enormous amounts of wealth that actively practice oppression. A caste system isn’t slavery, per se, but the caste system falls far short of “all men and women are created equal”.
True enough. I didn’t mean to suggest that the change in values of a society due to economics is necessarily a good one or an enlightened one. Just that it causes a change in that it alters the day to day realities, thereby shifting perspectives and priorities. I don’t know if that generally results in more good or bad though, it just changes values I think. Slavery, for example, is of course an economic arrangement. I suspect the caste system is rooted in economics too, do you know?
Oh, my time expired LOL, so let me add this:
I think built-in heuristics of racial discrimination, for example, that our brains automatically do insofar as distinguishing appearances (http://www.salon.com/mwt/mind_reader/2007/10/31/prejudice/index.html?source=rss&aim=/mwt/mind_reader) can be made moot when there’s enough to go around economically, without which we back up into more primitive paradigms and seek scapegoats.
Take the beating of children (or wives).
In less than 200 years, western civilizations have quite literally gone from a situation in which the physical beating of children with a "rod"was either strongly recommended or commanded, (“Spare the rod and spoil the child”) to a situation in which you are a bad parent (and in some countries literally guilty of assault) if you so much as spank the child with your hand on the bum.
In my own fairly liberal western democracy, Canada, the Criminal Code said a man could NOT be charged with rape if he forced himself on his wife, at least as late as the early 1970s. I know, because I was studying law at the time. The law changed about 10 years later, as I recall.
One clue might be that I keep saying “western democracies”.
At this very moment, the Government of Canada is in trouble because Canadian troops in Afghanistan have been turning Taliban prisoners over to Afghan authorities where they are regularly tortured.
The Harper Government is trying to say it never saw letters warning them of this. One Canadian observer said that the floors of the prisons where prisoners were “interrogated” were so covered with blood and human fesces (they had LITERALLY had the shit pounded out of them) that they had to put on special boots.
But the point is that this treatment of prisoners is pretty routine for these Muslim countries. It is only our ultra-liberal western and Canadian standards that are so offended by all this.
There HAS to be a cultural aspect to the evolution of social consensus.
Also, to my knowledge, no Church in Canada ever objected to the law permitting husbands to rape their wives. It was pressure from SECULAR women’s organizations and other humanist and human welfare groups that changed those laws.
I won’t say The Golden Rule because it was hardly original or unique to Jesus, but I will say I agree with the system, “because the system works, the system called, Reciprocity”.
And the rest is commentary.
All too high-powered for me.
My humble guide is trial and error. Everything else follows from that.
There’s something inside me that makes me feel bad if I’m bad and good if I’m good.
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‘Do unto others …’
Probably the first thing most parents teach their children, and, as posts indicate, it is for children. The lesson is that others have the same rights as the child and deserve to be treated well. Basic element of ethics and moral, but it obviously does not address exactly how to treat people. -
‘Before you judge another, walk a mile in his shoes.’
The second thing parents teach, usually in response to ‘He hit me first!’ ‘He’s a baby and doesn’t know any better.’ This introduce the concept that, while we all need to be treated well, the correct treatment depends on the individual. -
Enlighten self-interest. [Sorry, no quote].
If all the bedrooms have to be cleaned before the family goes to the beach, the family as a whole benefits by a child helping the younger brother to clean his room. This introduces the concept of community beyond the interaction of specific individuals. -
‘Honesty is the best policy’/‘It’s just a little white lie’
Introduction to the concept of competing ethical/moral responsibilities. [I come down squarely on the side of lying, by the way.] -
‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything’
Included as an example of a precept most people have rejected. -
‘From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs’.
That rights and responsibilities go both ways, between individuals and between an individual and the community, and that those r&r vary. [And sometimes, what someone needs is a sharp rap on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, or five years in prison.] -
‘All that is necessarily for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing’.
Sometimes we must take responsibility beyond our own actions; we must stand up against those doing wrong. [Note: this does not include decisions made by consenting adults; that’s no-one’s business but their own.]
8. ‘Virtue is its own reward’.
And this is the core of most non-theist ethical systems. One does not do the right thing for a reward, such as heaven, public acclaim, or even feeling good about one’s self [because sometimes, doing the right thing, like throwing a 19 year old slacker out of the family home, can make you feel pretty shitty]. One does the right thing because it is the right thing.
I hesitate to judge others, and I think the world would be a better and safer place if others hesitated as well. I won’t even use the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ [or evil]; I use ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.
Right is honesty, consistency, and modesty*; wrong is hypocrisy, greed, and moralism**.
- ‘good sportsman-like’ would be a good catch-all
** like a stereotypical evil televangelist
I follow my own biologically engineered moral feedback system. I feel bad if I hurt others, I feel good if I help them. My biological hardwiring predisposes me to to prioritize my immediate family (wife and kids) over all else (including myself) and after that it’s just about trying not to hurt anbody and maybe throwing in a good deed here or there.
Failing that, I’ve got a daimon as a backup system.
Hey! We go to the same church! 
No, really. It’s a great rule of life.
I think that is what it’s saying. In other words:
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Try to do to others what you think they would want you to do to them.
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The best way to reliably and consistently do this is to imagine what you would want them to do to you if you were in their place.
Example: I don’t like to get punched in the face - it hurts. Therefore, I will not punch my friend in the face because I can assume, as a fellow human being, that it also would hurt him to be punched in the face.
The Golden Rule is just a more concise and poetic way of saying all that. It’s not a weakness at all. I can’t think of a single situation that wouldn’t be covered by the Golden Rule, and I challenge anyone to come up with one.