VAM!

And here I just assumed the frilly panty picture was intentional. :p

I thought it was intentional as well - like I'd been rick rolled with a kevy panty pick on purpose! It was funnier to find out he didn't realize it though. I kept mentioning it and he like - what's this thing you have with my frilly butt? :D

I feel like I rickrolled myself

Regarding the bus ads that say we should all just be good, this person Tim Wildmon (who I never heard of) is saying that that only works as long as there is agreement as to what good is. And if you think about it... he's right.

Did you ever stop to think where your values come from? Most non-religious people will say something like "from my heart", "what I feel is right" or "from my concience". What they are not thinking about is that morality is learned, and that their sense of right and wrong has been formed by a culture whose values come from organized religion, a fact of history whether they are conscious of it or not. This has worked pretty well in modern times, with predictable results, as the major religions like Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism all share basic rules.

The problem is, the great majority of the time, people who do bad think they are doing good. A stark example: two Palestinians, a Muslim and a Christian, share the same government and economic circumstances. The Muslim can be recruited as a suicide bomber and blow up a bus filled with children he doesn't know, because he believes he is doing something good and will go to Heaven. The Christian believes he would go to Hell for the very same act. Same biology, same physical environment, but opposite ideology. (Whether this is a perversion of Islam or not is not relevant to my point).

So I don't trust people's "hearts" to lead them to do good; murderers from Jim Jones to Mao felt they had people's best interests at heart and sold their new, better ideologies as a replacement for the traditional religions that went before. And it seems that people do need and seek someone or something to guide them. So better it be a supernatural loving force than a corruptible human leader, or each corruptible person's own feelings.

Even though I am a non-religious person myself, I can't ignore that so much of the good in our society is based on Judeo-Christian values, and I have to agree with Voltaire who said:

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

At last...I have found a label for myself.

I'm a Non-Theist !!!

Excuse me while I run to the nearest hilltop, shove Maria Von-Trapp out of my freakin' way and shout "I'm a Non-Theist" until it echoes from every canyon and rattles every tole-painted cowbell in the valley.

Wow, what a relief, now I have a label, I am validated - complete.


Note: How Stoat chooses to treat people has nothing to do with his religion or lack of it...he knows they could one day judge him, and he is entirely comfortable with that possibility.

Just because organize religion has been the source in the past does not mean it's the only possibility. We have, for instance, a pretty damned good set of laws in the US that do not rely on belief in God. Whether they were inspired by religious beliefs to begins with is irrelevant as to whether belief in God is a necessity for goodness.

The framers of the Constitution, while obviously influenced by religious belief because that was their background, made a conscious decision to leave god out of the Constitution. They instead created a set of guidelines that did not require belief in their, or any, god to make sense. It all boiled down to, essentially, "freedom and morality ends where your actions affect other people."

I was raised in a culturally religious environment in that I learned about my religion (Judaism) and participated in the traditions. However, my parents are not strongly religious people and their interest in it for themselves, and their children, was pretty much only to the extent that it was a tried-and-true, convenient shortcut for instilling a sense of community. They never relied on it as the arbiter of morality, and as long as I can remember, my sense of morality was, "Be good because it's the right thing to do," not "be good because god said so."

There was discussion in another thread recently of how religion, though it has been associated with many bad acts throughout history was not necessarily the source of or cause for these acts. People at times are apt to do bad things to other people, and while they might claim religion as a reason for their acts, it is likely that without religion, many of the same things would have happened, though they would have been given a different rationale.

I think something similar is at work in the question of religion and goodness. There is an obvious utility to society in ideas such as treating your neighbor the way you would like to be treated, and so if there were no religion to use as a framework to teach and enforce that notion, it would have been taught and enforced in another way. So sure, it is accurate to say that our values historically come from a religious source, but we were going to come to those values one way or another, because they are needed for a functioning society.

If modern morality derives from ancient religion, where did ancient morality come from since societies have been around longer than the religions we're now relying on?

I'd argue that rather than even the godless sneaking peaks at religion for how best to behave, religion instead simply declared themselves the inventors of how people generally behaved anyway.

As evidence of this I'd offer the fact that when societal norms change extensively it is frequently religion scrambling to catch up and then eventually stamping the new norm with the label "proper god-fearing behavior."

Any society is going to form rules to survive. I would argue (even though I believe in God) that religion was a useful tool to give the ruling person/group ultimate power to implement those rules. Hammurabi declared his laws as divinely inspired, but it certainly seemed to help keep his people in line and cement his authority. I think that humans are largely social animals, and I tend to follow the idea of social contract as our motivation to stay out of trouble, trouble being whatever is deemed a negative social action by the larger group.

Even moreso, moral and ethical standards change in ways that foster the continued survival and flourishing of a group. Back in more tribal times, morality, laws and religion tended to be highly "us vs. them" (out of brutal necessity) with "us" given divinely favored status. In this very different world, the in-group grows ever larger and more inclusive, and our laws and morality slowly shift to accomodate.

Back in the day, "thou shalt not kill" meant "don't kill one another within our tribe." Read your Bible and you'll find that ruthless slaughter of the other guy was not just the norm, it was commanded by the deity.

Of course, the classic "reciprocal ethic" (the Golden Rule) predates any Judeo-Christian tradition by centuries. You'll find it in ancient Mesopotamian religion, Hinduism, Taoism, and on and on. And even that core ethical notion is (and always has been) open to debate.