[quote]chobothx wrote:
[quote]Fletch1986 wrote:
^
Remember that people not only evolve genetically, but culturally as well in a sense. Those types of behaviours that hurt a society will make the society ‘die’ off if they get out of hand.
Even in the animal kingdom, there are often social behaviours that allow animals to survive/thrive.
Take a tazmanian devil for instance. They have extremely powerful jaws that can cause great harm to one another should they choose. But they don’t and they often share food. If they didn’t, there is a good chance that they would not be successful as a species. Granted, this is just one solution to a problem in the animal kingdom and just like in the animal kingdom people can have differing successful solutions to the same problem.
Not sure if the last sentence is relevant, but it was on my mind.
In large part to me, morality is often a question of social benefit and continuing our species and often this involves getting along with your fellow man/woman. Personally for me (I don’t speak for all atheists), there really isn’t a good reason to continue our species and improve society I just do it because. Maybe it’s just something hard-wired into me.
The fact that there seems to be little to no correlation between spiritual belief and moral action lends to the idea that morality is something more related to the environment one grows up in and the way that person is wired than their belief system.
As far as belief systems go, I feel that it is something related to what I coin ‘cultural evolution’. Those religions that tell societies to do harmful things and can’t adapt tend to die off and those that are helpful continue on. That’s one of reasons that despite being atheist, I hold the bible in high esteem. Much to most of it is solid advice for individuals and societies as a whole.
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Let us assume for a moment that evolution is true. (Which I do not… I believe in micro-evolution / natural selection (the elimination of excess genetic information), but I believe there is a lack of sufficient scientific data / research in macro-evolution (the process of which beneficial genetic information is created through mutation))
Is not your own thought that people not only evolve genetically and culturally a product of this evolution you speak of? Therefore any statement you make will never be objective because of the underlying foundation of determinism that impregnates all of Naturalism.
But let us put that minor point aside for a moment while we dig a little deeper into your morality.
Your next statement proves my previous point about all Secular morality being pragmatic, utilitarian, subjective or emotive. This is a serious pitfall for the evolutionist, because the moment you bring up some sort of ‘beneficial’ reason for keeping these savages around, I can give 2x the reasons for their just extermination. (see previous post on elimination of Blacks + Hispanics for the ultimate good of the United States)
Next you say that the notion that there is little to no correlation between spirituality and morality. At this point many Naturalists / Humanists / Secularists bring up all the atrocities that ‘religion’ has brought into the world, namely the Crusades, or if one is feeling ballsy, he’ll talk about the Theo-Political ideology of Islam (which is not really a religion, but I digress). I will concede that point, that what those individuals did in the name of Christianity was an atrocity, and ought to have never happened, but I do have an explanation. You cannot find any logical ties from their proposed spirituality to their immediate actions. Christianity has, and never will propagate through violence, for salvation begins from God, not with the sinner. But I will not go into the theology of Calvinism vs Pelagianism.
However, the atheist will often neglect to speak of the atrocities that have taken place in the name / ideology of atheism. We can move from the nihilism adopted by Hitler championed by the atheist Friedrich Nietzsche, to the avowed atheist Stalin, Lenin singularly appointed Stalin due to his hatred for all notions of God, moving on to Mao Tse Dong who tortured / killed millions who was influenced by the atheist Karl Marx, moving onto the Killing Fields of Cambodia created by the ideology of Jean Paul Sartre…
“What he did not foresee, and what a wiser man would have foreseen, was that most of the violence to which he gave philosophical encouragement would be inflicted by blacks not on whites, but on other blacks. By helping Fanon to inflame Africa, he contributed to the civil wars and mass murders that have engulfed most of the continent from the mid-sixties onwards to this day. His influence in Southeast Asia, where the Vietnam War was drawing to a close was even more baneful. The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the deaths of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intelectuals knowns as the Angka Leu (The Higher Organization). Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant, and one an economist. All has studied in France in the 1950’s where they had not only belonged to the Communist Party, but had absorbed Sartre’s doctrines of philosophical activism and “necessary violence.” These mass murderers were his ideological children.” - Paul Johnson, Historian
Additional quote for thought…
“If we present man with a concept of man that is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present him as an automation of reflexes, as a mind machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instincts, heredity, and environment, we feed the despair to which any man is prone. I became acquainted with the last stages of corruption in my second concentration camp in Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment, or as the Nazis like to say “of blood and soil”. I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek, were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or the other in Berlin, but rather at the desks of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”
Basically what I’m saying is that evil people will twist seemingly good ideologies to suit their own personal desires whether or not they believe in Nietche type atheism, Christ, Alla, Vishnu, or whoever/whatever. That person is going to be good or evil based on their environment and the way they are wired rather than their religious/non-religious belief system.
Self-awareness in my opinion is a quality that the process of evolution worked into our brains. This is a tool that can be used to attempt to determine our origin and apply logic in ways that other animals (to our current knowledge) cannot do.
