Morality: Where do you get yours?
May 10, 2012 at 7:37 am
(This post was last modified: May 10, 2012 at 7:59 am by Creed of Heresy.)
Morality, I find, is not a learned trait or an evolutionary one; it is, instead, both. Everyone has their own moral code, some don't have it at all, and some simply don't even bother developing their own [coughxtianscough. Cough ahem] at all. I often find myself wondering what exactly gave me my own moral code. If morality is learned, believe you me; I would be a sadistic little fucker.
I get the impression that we have a natural instinct towards morality but how we define it is learned. Like seeing or hearing; we do it automatically but we don't really get HOW, it just happens! Then, later in life, we learn how the eyes and eardrums work, and the "how" becomes answered, even though we know the "why." So. WHY are we moral is an easy enough question; simple morality leads to survival of a species via cooperation and altruism. If we were immoral from the dawn of our intelligence, we would've self-destructed. But morality is a logical paramount; it must exist. The reasons for the morality we are free to judge for ourselves, of course, and as creatures capable of innovation, we are capable of creating our own morals as we see fit, but also as creatures of logic, we are highly likely to create those morals based on what makes the most sense to us.
Personally, my moral standing comes from a simple rule of "would I want this done to me, yes or no? If yes; proceed. If no; do not." Obviously I can over-ride these rules in small cases; I wouldn't want someone waking me up at 6am if I was hung over...but sometimes you need a laugh at 6am!
Morality is, to a rational person, the ultimate breaking point when it comes to DEBATING with theists. Debating, all caps, because that is the key word. Not arguing, trolling, or flaming with/by/against theists, because if they come to do that...well, chances are they're never going to see reason, anyway. But in a genuine debate with an open-minded individual seeking logical understanding, morality is one of the cinching points. Morality in its most basic forms can be witnessed throughout the animal kingdom, and in many ways tend to be reflected within humanity, giving further evidence to evolutionary theory and our close relation with the other animals on this atmosphere-covered plant-rock. The argument tends to be that morality was given by god along with free will and that people choose to be immoral.
This is a fallacy. I daresay almost everyone here is a moral individual to some extent. I ask you; go against your own moral code. Not just in a small way; in a BIG way. Try it...and see what a struggle it is to do so. The bible makes it sound like people just up and abandon their morals overnight. Nobody...I retype this for sake of reiteration: NOBODY can do that. At all. It's one of those things that can take months, years, hell sometimes decades. And when it does, it's usually because of outside influences anyway. But even the sheltered goody-two-shoes catholic schoolgirl will find herself breathing heavily and struggling to contain a building urge in the presence of a pair of attractive shirtless males paying attention to her...even the Amish send their young men into the city when they come of age to experience a night of wild debauchery, to have their own experience before returning to the homestead. Why is all this? If god's moral law was truly the absolute one, the most powerful one, then it would be the most difficult moral code to break with. I, for one, cannot bring myself to shoot another man, regardless of whether or not he just looked at me funny. I might get into a fistfight, but I'm not ending his life. Breaking that moral code would be damn near impossible...if not simply something I could never do. Yet god's "moral codes," with their ridiculous demands, are the complete opposite; they're impossible to FOLLOW, not break!
How, then, is it that the morality we see in nature in primitive animals so much easier to follow than the ones supposedly instilled in us at the moment of our "creation?"
We all know the answer, of course: Because they weren't. They weren't instilled in us when we were created because we WEREN'T created. The biblical moral codes are impossible because they are codes made by men who tried to force their OWN moral ideals upon others...moral codes that have no logical or reasonable foundation, and in all truth were not even probably followed by the men forcing them upon others.
Me, I'm happy with humanist morality. It makes genuine sense in a sense of social, biological, civil, and ethical realms.
As Christopher Hitchens and others have pointed out: Are the religious basically saying that if they did not have their holy books telling them to not do these vile, murderous deeds...that they WOULD do these vile, murderous deeds? A troubling thought, indeed...
I get the impression that we have a natural instinct towards morality but how we define it is learned. Like seeing or hearing; we do it automatically but we don't really get HOW, it just happens! Then, later in life, we learn how the eyes and eardrums work, and the "how" becomes answered, even though we know the "why." So. WHY are we moral is an easy enough question; simple morality leads to survival of a species via cooperation and altruism. If we were immoral from the dawn of our intelligence, we would've self-destructed. But morality is a logical paramount; it must exist. The reasons for the morality we are free to judge for ourselves, of course, and as creatures capable of innovation, we are capable of creating our own morals as we see fit, but also as creatures of logic, we are highly likely to create those morals based on what makes the most sense to us.
Personally, my moral standing comes from a simple rule of "would I want this done to me, yes or no? If yes; proceed. If no; do not." Obviously I can over-ride these rules in small cases; I wouldn't want someone waking me up at 6am if I was hung over...but sometimes you need a laugh at 6am!
Morality is, to a rational person, the ultimate breaking point when it comes to DEBATING with theists. Debating, all caps, because that is the key word. Not arguing, trolling, or flaming with/by/against theists, because if they come to do that...well, chances are they're never going to see reason, anyway. But in a genuine debate with an open-minded individual seeking logical understanding, morality is one of the cinching points. Morality in its most basic forms can be witnessed throughout the animal kingdom, and in many ways tend to be reflected within humanity, giving further evidence to evolutionary theory and our close relation with the other animals on this atmosphere-covered plant-rock. The argument tends to be that morality was given by god along with free will and that people choose to be immoral.
This is a fallacy. I daresay almost everyone here is a moral individual to some extent. I ask you; go against your own moral code. Not just in a small way; in a BIG way. Try it...and see what a struggle it is to do so. The bible makes it sound like people just up and abandon their morals overnight. Nobody...I retype this for sake of reiteration: NOBODY can do that. At all. It's one of those things that can take months, years, hell sometimes decades. And when it does, it's usually because of outside influences anyway. But even the sheltered goody-two-shoes catholic schoolgirl will find herself breathing heavily and struggling to contain a building urge in the presence of a pair of attractive shirtless males paying attention to her...even the Amish send their young men into the city when they come of age to experience a night of wild debauchery, to have their own experience before returning to the homestead. Why is all this? If god's moral law was truly the absolute one, the most powerful one, then it would be the most difficult moral code to break with. I, for one, cannot bring myself to shoot another man, regardless of whether or not he just looked at me funny. I might get into a fistfight, but I'm not ending his life. Breaking that moral code would be damn near impossible...if not simply something I could never do. Yet god's "moral codes," with their ridiculous demands, are the complete opposite; they're impossible to FOLLOW, not break!
How, then, is it that the morality we see in nature in primitive animals so much easier to follow than the ones supposedly instilled in us at the moment of our "creation?"
We all know the answer, of course: Because they weren't. They weren't instilled in us when we were created because we WEREN'T created. The biblical moral codes are impossible because they are codes made by men who tried to force their OWN moral ideals upon others...moral codes that have no logical or reasonable foundation, and in all truth were not even probably followed by the men forcing them upon others.
Me, I'm happy with humanist morality. It makes genuine sense in a sense of social, biological, civil, and ethical realms.
As Christopher Hitchens and others have pointed out: Are the religious basically saying that if they did not have their holy books telling them to not do these vile, murderous deeds...that they WOULD do these vile, murderous deeds? A troubling thought, indeed...
