Those aren’t “universal taboos”; those are the results of thousands of years of progress (a great deal of which was fought tooth and nail by religion). They are presently so widespread because societies that forbid such behavior are more successful and more pleasant places to live, not because they are somehow intrinsic to the universe. Plenty of societies haven’t considered those things wrong at all.
I didn’t say all prohibitions have this characteristic, I said that prohibitions often do (especially in more primitive cultures).
See. There’s a perfect example. Humans are evolved to survive in discrete populations, not as a universal human mass. To simplify, we are tribalistic. What’s “moral” is what’s good for our own tribe. Murder within our own in-groups is destabalizing and counter to our survival. Murdering those hairy-ass heathens on the other side of the waterholes is good for our tribe.
People tend to still be like this, we just have giant tribes now. We still have no problem killing other tribes for oil. War doesn’t count. war has never counted.
These people certainly seem both sane and perfectly comfortable with abusing children. Therefore, they don’t seem to accept this “objective moral law” you claim is known to everyone.
“For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means ‘boy player.’ The men like to boast about it.”
OK, this IS a subject for a totally different thread (or threads- one for GD & one for the Pit) but in the really homophobic world of extreme Islam, how does this crap get a pass? Is the Taliban cool with this or is that one of their excuses for their ruthlessness?
I do not believe I, or anyone, knows the will, or mind of God,all is just Belief or faith in what another person taught or one thinks for themselves. God has nothing to do with it, it is a human concept!
As a post script to my last post,you answered that your self; the high jackers thought (or believed) they were doing God’s will because they believe in jihad,taught most likely by some other follower of Muhammad or used their own beliefs.
Because if you go around killing off the competition, and I realize I’m in the group you call “the competition”, and other folks likewise realize they’re in that group with me, we’re sensibly going to band together against you in pure self-defense; go-it-alone type who aren’t wired for that approach tend to get picked off without spawning, in part because they (a) unimaginatively run afoul of such groups or (b) lack such a group to watch one’s back when a competition-killing loner comes a-callin’ in the night.
And, again, factor in sympathy on top of pure self-interest and guys like me and mine are going to step in when such a killer starts preying on innocents even if we’re not in “the competition”. That said, though, I think you can build a pretty good straight-up case for enlightened self-interest on institutionalizing this sort of taboo:
Iimagine you’re completely selfish, and you get to propose any laws you like for the society you’re living in. Do you want to bar your fellow citizens from murdering you? Yep. Do you want the right to murder with impunity? Well, sure; it’s probably not as important as that first part, but for the sake of argument let’s say it’d be awesome. And now imagine plenty of other people feel the same. What deal can be struck? What can we all agree on? What social institution should be full-throatedly advocated? What slogans preached? What examples set? (And, okay, let’s imagine a freak who says, no, it’s cool; I’d rather be free to murder than ban others from murdering me. Populate a culture with enough of those folks and it dies out. Populate it with enough folks who can sign on for a do-unto-others modus vivendi and it keeps on keeping on.)
Here’s an example of why your definition fails: God is not a shoe. While this does tell me something, namely that God is not a shoe, it tells me absolutely nothing about what God is.
You wrote to Dio:
What does this actually mean? What does it mean to say a non physical ___ interacted with the physical?
Your asking this is bizarre - the idea that quantum processes can be uncaused follows directly from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. There’s a good write-up of the history on the Wikipedia page about the Bohr-Einstein Debates. It was settled long ago.
Define “enjoyed.” If the action was not harmful to the child, or at least potentially harmful, then it’s acceptable.
Thousands of years of progress, from a low population base, within societies who did not recognise the prohibition toward such behaviour? Come on, you don’t really believe that.
1> Evolutionary theory wold tend to encourage activity such as murder at a tribalistic level because it eliminates competition for food, mates etc. Yet even in remote trabalistic societies man has found such prohibitions.
2> Such behavioural prohibitions ARE universal. Murder is considered ‘wrong’ in virtually all societies. As is child abuse.
1> Your initial paragraphs refer to a ‘retaliation’ response. But that doesn’t disguise the fact that evolutionay impulses contradict the world as we know it. Universally, sane people acknowledge that it is wrong to take the life of an innocent without cause. Yet evolutionary theory would suggest that we benefit from the removal of competition. If this is not clear, consider eugenics, which evolutionary theory would propose we should allow, yet objective morality dictates we abhor.
2> Your final paragraph describes the direction of many modern societies. Yet we still hold to some immutable moral laws.
1> The response related to the questions. Your question is ‘what is God’? For the purposes of this discussion, God is a super-natural entity that is seperate from the natural universe.
2> The claim has been made that an entity that is seperate from the universe could not interact with it. My position is that that is absurd, and no-one has been able to logically argue the claim.