RE: what are we supposed to say again when christians ask us where we get our morality?
May 14, 2014 at 5:33 am
(May 13, 2014 at 6:58 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote:I can empathize and sympathize with others, and I would not want to be killed. I am aware that some people kill themselves, but usually it is because they are in a poor state of mind. Therefore I think it's reasonable to think that people do not want to die, and that being killed is bad from that standpoint.(May 13, 2014 at 1:55 pm)Tonus Wrote: They would be moral to the members of the society that defined them as such. I would not call them good, as I would not personally think that it's good to kill a person in either circumstance.Why would you not think that? If the act could be stipulated as good or bad why do you have an opinion either way on its goodness?
Statler Waldorf Wrote:I think there are two levels; that of the individual, and that of the society or community. A person on his own can use his sense of empathy or sympathy and his life experiences to form opinions on what is good or bad, or right or wrong, and these provide his moral framework. The more isolated he is, the more varied those might be. A society forms laws and cultural attitudes in a similar way, but they do so more via committee. It probably takes longer for a society to determine a set of morals, but those can also be in effect much longer.Tonus Wrote:My point is that few actions can be judged independent of context. Perhaps there are no actions that could be objectively labeled as bad. I pointed out one action that I cannot make conform to that idea.Contextually how are you defining what is right and wrong? Who determines whether enough justification was given for the action? Thanks for your thoughts; they’re interesting.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould