(June 11, 2014 at 9:10 pm)YaAli21 Wrote: You say if it was legal, are you suggesting that your countries governance guides your morality? Let me take this a step further and suggest that if me and my sister wanted to have intercourse and be married, would you support this? Or would you think it wrong? We are both consenting and promise we will wear condoms to prevent a defective child. Incest in all Western countries is illegal.
Why are you conflating what is legal with what is moral? In my country, private gun ownership (outside of very specific circumstances) is illegal; in other countries it is not. Even if I were to be born and raised in such a country, I would find the ownership of firearms immoral (at least I hope I'd be the same me who thinks that). At one time, it was perfectly legal to send little children up chimneys, into dangerous factory machinery etc and to sell your wife via public auction, a rope halter about her neck. These things I find immoral.
So no, I don't get my morality from a country's laws. They, in the main, simply happen to agree with my moral perception. The thing is, laws and statutes don't appear out of a vacuum. They are arrived at via a process of discussion and debate by a consensus of people, elected to represent the common individual and ultimately accountable to them. It's by no means a perfect system and is open to abuse (can anyone say USA-PATRIOT?), but it does have the virtue of being subject to revision.
On the other hand, so-called moral laws as presented in that Big Book of Multiple Choice (the bible, for the record) are not. Prohibitions against same-sex relationships and abortions are hopelessly and cherry-pickingly entangled with those against certain dietary practises, the role of women in society, hair and clothing styles, and so on. This plus the fact that everyone who tries to make the case for them has a different interpretation of what they're supposed to mean makes them utterly useless as moral guides. Far better to scrap the lot and go with a system that imbues a person with a mechanism for determing what is moral, rather than a list of pronouncements about morality; as I've often said, what happens when you run across something that's not on the list? Moreover, how can you determine whether the items on the list actually belong there? At some point in all this, we have to defer to an inbuilt sense of morality - why not cut through the crap and start from there?
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
