Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight
And here's what's pretty alien to me. If you don't believe in god, where does your definition of this supposed universal morality come from?
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Let me be more explicit than that. "It came from my religious upbringing" isn't what I'm looking for. Because that doesn't answer the question. It explains why you believe in it, but it doesn't answer the question of where it comes from if you think it exists. If you got it from religion, where did religion get it? And the only end to that questioning is god.
But you don't believe in god. So this "universal" definition of good and bad is not, afterall, universal. You'd LIKE it to be universal because you feel like it works pretty well, but it simply isn't, unless you believe in god (and even then, if you believe in god and think his word is universal, then his word doesn't match your definition of the universal good, but that's another story).
And so the genesis must have been human. There must have been enough people who WANTED the idea that not negatively affecting others is good to be universally held. So religion was created to explain and reenforce that desire. And despite the fact that Darwin has given us a far simpler and sustainable explanation for that, people are reluctant to accept it because relgion "has worked so far", ignoring all of the ways religion certainly hasn't worked.
Sigh, I bet I'm really pissing off some religious people reading this thread.