Eλευθερί
Junior Member
@eleutheri
Posts: 3,710
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Post by Eλευθερί on Sept 9, 2018 8:09:56 GMT
We are social animals. Morals are cultural traits that evolved among our ancestors over millennia.
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Sept 9, 2018 12:47:31 GMT
Countries consider things moral and immoral based on their laws. Cultures, on the other hand, may have set up their own moral standards. Morals do not need a religious component, but any decent religion will need a moral code of some kind.What religion is that Cool? Any decent one would seem to indicate there are several wouldn't it? What confuses you about the statement?
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Post by faustus5 on Sept 9, 2018 13:53:20 GMT
Morality starts with biological evolution in social animals. Even chimps have been shown to have a sense of fair play and will become angry and agitated when they perceive that sense to have been violated. Once you have language and culture, norms and practices evolve in a new sphere.
With biological evolution, strategies formed by an organism's moral sense are encoded in its genes. Failure and success is physically measured by whether the genes which encode those strategies survive into the next generation.
Once you get culture, what counts as a successful or failed moral strategy gets trickier to measure. The important thing to grasp here is that the units of culture (memes, if you will) do not necessarily exist for "our" benefit. Memes are "selfish" in just the way a gene is "selfish"--all they "want" is to keep being replicated and live in as many human minds as possible. That is literally the only thing which dictates success or failure from the point of view of the idea itself.
What makes arguing about morality and ethics so maddening is that our minds are just a collection of these competing memes, and those memes or ideas determine how we judge practices from the point of view of how they benefit us. The minds of Christians in ancient times were full of memes which regarded slavery as a perfectly acceptable practice, with memes dictating the good and bad ways to "do" the institution properly. Modern Christians have minds with memes dictating that under no circumstances is slavery acceptable.
It isn't a case of "anything goes"--strategies can have objectively measurable successes or failures relative to whatever metric you choose, but what is guiding your choice of a metric is going to be just another collection of memes. There is no way to step out of your body and your culture and arrive at a completely dispassionate, "objective" judgment: trust me, if some alien civilization exists out there which evolved so that eating a certain percentage of their young each generation was essential to their survival, their priests and theologians would tell us that the goodness of infanticide was a god-ordained "Natural" law, and their philosophers would have all kinds of competing arguments for why the practice was rational and praiseworthy.
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Post by captainbryce on Sept 9, 2018 16:36:20 GMT
Well I don’t see your answer. So you can either repeat (copy and paste) it here, OR you can link me to the answer... CoolJGS☺ Yeah, I didn’t think so...LIAR!
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Post by mrellaguru on Sept 9, 2018 18:41:22 GMT
Sometimes this is brought up in religious debates.
Aren't morals the product of group consensus and don't require a religious basis?
Each country has different morals. Something that is immoral in one country is considered okay in another.
Some morals are going to be more or less universal because they make a cohesive society possible in the first place. I doubt there are any countries with no prohibitions on murder, theft and the like.
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Sept 9, 2018 20:30:42 GMT
Well I don’t see your answer. So you can either repeat (copy and paste) it here, OR you can link me to the answer... CoolJGS☺ Yeah, I didn’t think so...LIAR! Lol at the fake time limit mandate.
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Sept 9, 2018 21:22:37 GMT
Any decent one would seem to indicate there are several wouldn't it? What confuses you about the statement? You have skirted around the question. Which religion is decent? At a minimum - Mine. However, your question has nothing to do with anything I said, so why would pose the question in order to for me to skirt around it? It sounds like a new thread topic.
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Sept 10, 2018 0:11:44 GMT
At a minimum - Mine. However, your question has nothing to do with anything I said, so why would pose the question in order to for me to skirt around it? It sounds like a new thread topic. This was your statement: You brought it up, so I asked what decent religion has moral code. You have now claimed yours, which is Christianity. To which I will now ask, why is Christianity decent with its moral code and why do you say at a minimum? It sounds like you don't exactly trust this Christian moral code, if it is at a minimum. The definition of "Any"
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Post by drystyx on Sept 10, 2018 0:37:26 GMT
So far, I haven't seen one post on this thread that approaches the term of "morals".
So far, every single post has been either about "mores", or off on another tangent.
Laws and social customs are based on "mores", not "morals".
Morals are not subjective. They're totally Universal, and every human knows them from the start. That's why humans feel bad when they shoot their first animal or skin their first fish.
It has zero to do with mores, zero to do with evolution. In fact, morals defy Evolution. Human mores also defy Evolution. It's a miracle that humans aren't extinct when the species is totally motivated by jealousy, a trait that has to be detrimental to survival of the species, as humans want to eliminate those among them who are quickest, best looking, wittiest, most capable, etc.
Now, mores come from said jealousy and hatred, and from demons. Mores are often misdiagnosed as morals, and we have just seen proof of that on this thread by the many feeble minds who have not distinguished the two. It's obvious the atheists are in denial, as usual, and the theists are afraid of making the atheists cry, as usual.
Morals are from the supernatural. Denying that is denying reality. It's been proven time and time again. If it wasn't supernatural, there would be no "morals".
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Post by Terrapin Station on Sept 10, 2018 0:55:32 GMT
Morals come from individuals' brains. Consensuses are after the fact. Consensuses are not the origin. However, environment, including others' utterances, which can be reflective of consensuses, can influence moral views arising in individuals' brains. Nevertheless, moral stances are always of individuals. They're not of collectives, societies, etc. Collectives or societies can't actually think, and moral stances are a type of thought. Only individuals think. Thinking is a phenomenon of particular brains. What seems to be the dominant moral view of a given culture is just a statistical norm for that culture.
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Post by Terrapin Station on Sept 10, 2018 0:57:23 GMT
Morals are not subjective. They're totally Universal. Oops! You couldn't be more wrong.
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Sept 10, 2018 1:04:15 GMT
So which one is it that is decent, or what makes it decent? So to be clear, you insist on taking something that is indefinite and make it definite and solitary. It's been months since you've been this weird.
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Sept 10, 2018 12:11:16 GMT
So to be clear, you insist on taking something that is indefinite and make it definite and solitary.It's been months since you've been this weird. That's just my point, morals are not definite, solitary or as a matter of fact objective. Decency does also not extend to only those that follow a religion either. I'd say Cool, you are being the weird one, because you are not coming forth with an answer and evading, same as you have done with captainbryce , in regards to what is being asked of you to defend your statement of what religions are decent and why? You would need to define morals to me, what they are and what makes them decent. If you agree that they are subjective, as in your answer here, how do you even prove they exist?
If you had actually bothered to read my whole post rather than bolding the part you've been wasting my time with, you would have seen your point had nothing to do with me.
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Post by drystyx on Sept 11, 2018 21:47:31 GMT
So far, I haven't seen one post on this thread that approaches the term of "morals". So far, every single post has been either about "mores", or off on another tangent. Laws and social customs are based on "mores", not "morals". Morals are not subjective. They're totally Universal, and every human knows them from the start. That's why humans feel bad when they shoot their first animal or skin their first fish.
It has zero to do with mores, zero to do with evolution. In fact, morals defy Evolution. Human mores also defy Evolution. It's a miracle that humans aren't extinct when the species is totally motivated by jealousy, a trait that has to be detrimental to survival of the species, as humans want to eliminate those among them who are quickest, best looking, wittiest, most capable, etc. Now, mores come from said jealousy and hatred, and from demons. Mores are often misdiagnosed as morals, and we have just seen proof of that on this thread by the many feeble minds who have not distinguished the two. It's obvious the atheists are in denial, as usual, and the theists are afraid of making the atheists cry, as usual.Morals are from the supernatural. Denying that is denying reality. It's been proven time and time again. If it wasn't supernatural, there would be no "morals". Interesting post, but please know, that mores spring forth from morals, which are used as grounding. Morals ARE subjective. Anything born of the mind—which is everything—is subjective. It is just semantics you are explaining away here then. They are one and the same and intangible.
How institutions may feel some should act is about moralistic grounding, which can't be grounded when they are subjective and the mores are what we see and define around us as societies construct of attitude and behavior, which is based on these morals. What is seen as moralistic to one may not be to another and that is where judgment and condemnation also plays a part and where most institutions falter with reason, due to their own delusion of thinking that their morals are real.
Putting words together in an incoherent way doesn't tell anyone anything. You want to believe morals are subjective, so it appears, because you follow that statement with incoherent garble. We all want to believe the brain explains everything, but that is a pipe dream. The brain is merely an organ. The morals come from the spirit "reading the meter". Mores have never come from morals. They should, but they never have. If they had, then Jesus wouldn't have had any trouble with Pharisees, sadducees, and high priests. If they had, the Catholic church would not have been part of the very persecution of the church. The list goes on. Mores come from Satan, because they are of this world. A study of History, and simply reading the news, is undeniable proof of this, and yet people still want to deny it. Again, proof of Satanic influence that envelopes us all. I'm no different. I'm just willing to admit it, because I look for truth. Morals are supernatural, because the "morals" are basic. Morality is treating other "meter readers" as well as one can. There is no subjectivity to morality. There may be subjectivity to perception of how to treat other meter readers well, but not in the morality of treating others with a golden rule. For example, one may be mistaken in seeing someone struggling while walking, and picking her up and carrying her to a door, while in reality she is recovering from a condition and needs to walk for physical therapy. That is not saying "morality" is subjective. The morality is still objective. The perception and deduction is almost always incorrect, because demons are always at work in all of us. "Sadism" is the opposite of morality, and is from demons. Sadism has no benefit to the species, because it is simply abuse that serves to wipe out superior members of the species, the exact opposite of instinctive animal behavior. Sadism and fear is the cause of mores. Animals detect true weakness out of instinct. Humans try to create their own story of who to treat badly out of sheer convenience. The same "meter reader" personalities who lynched negroes in the nineteenth century are the exact same ones demanding that white people be denied opportunities today. The only reason they don't "lynch" any more is because it's easier to be prosecuted today. The day that stops, they will lynch as they did before, because they are obeying "mores" not "morals", and "mores" are of Satan. It would be nice to deny the reality of morality, because we don't want to feel responsible. It's nice to blame everything on something else, in this case the "brain". That's insane and naïve, and if there wasn't a devil trying to make us do that, we wouldn't do that.
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