Why be good?

[robvalue]

AFFT:Me too!

The law is only meant to put boundaries on the more extreme amounts of harm that can be caused, and to represent some sort of consensus about what is "really bad". But I find some things that are legal to be far more immoral than some things that are illegal. I would imagine most people's moral character is much stricter than just what the law imposes on them.

Wallym: the fact that we can live in relative peace, in some parts of the world at least, I think shows we are generally "good". If we weren't mostly evolved to be discouraged from harming others, society would not work like it does. To be honest, I am amazed sometimes at how well society does work. However, humans can be quite easily led, and being shown that not hitting people means you don't get hit is enough for people to accept it's a good idea.

@all: Secular morality is superior because it can adapt and evolve. It can learn from the mistakes of the past and strive for a better society. Stubborn religious dogmatic morality learns nothing. In reality it does change, grudgingly, but by having to find ridiculous ways to re-interpret the rules that it already has. God seems to not care at all when people just reverse his rules. Weird huh?

And of course, religious "morality" often gets conflated with "sin", which is in fact nothing at all to do with morality, it's about caring more about the feelings of a deity than what the effects of your actions are here on Earth.