(June 9, 2015 at 1:41 am)robvalue Wrote: I'm not sure what you mean. Where do I want to go?
Evolution doesn't "say" anything, and clearly we don't all value each other. It's an explanation for the fact that we do, on the whole, value each other. That isn't to say that this notion of value is itself a "good thing". It's an observation.
First off, I'm speaking in very generic terms. I'm talking very casually and haphazardly about how people think rather than in 'battle mode' where every point needs to be analyzed and defended.
Where I'm saying "you" want to go (casually speaking), is that if someone says "Why be good?" they would like to conclude that an answer exists for everyone. Because we're taught people should be good whole lives. So when the discussion comes up, that's often the starting point.
I've been taught we're all supposed to be good, now I just need a way to arrive at that conclusion.
vs.
Should "good" even be a priority when deciding how to behave?
That's what I think happens with a lot of religious people, is that they start with an assumption that skips over a lot of questions that need to be answered first.
This would explain why people are changing so little as religion falls out of favor. Because most of the conclusions are ingrained already. Nobody is saying "Whoops, the entire foundation of our belief system is gone, time to rebuild from the ground up." Instead a compartmentalized area containing the God and Religion stuff is cut out, but everything else more or less stays the same.