"Why Believe in God" ad campaign

[David E]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

Can electrons and phosphorus make a TV show? The concepts of "rights" and "morality" exist solely on the level of interpreting brain activity. So the answer to your question is that molecules and matter give rise to the ability of humans to think about the concept of rights.

Yeah but everything, both material and thought, is little bits. That doesn't mean that's the definition of a right, anymore than it's the definition of a chair, which is also made of the same stuff.

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

And, as a matter of fact, there is good evidence that there IS a universal morality. Responses to hypothetical moral dilemmas like these are very similar across cultures.

It's just amazing to me that you would put so much hope and emphasis on a hypothetical study about how people might unconsciously act on a bridge with 5 guys, when it's so obvious that whole tribes of people throughout history and today made a living pillaging and enslaving other tribes, and very consciously and deliberately act like they are in a completely different moral universe. I mean really, how do you account for the differences in Nazi and Jew, Imperial Japanese and Chinese, Muslim Palestinian and Christian Palestinan, Slave master and slave, and other blatant examples I keep pointing out?

Now the study might be true, that in a split second situation, there might be a common human reaction that is good or moral, but how often does that happen compared to the stuff I listed above that goes on all the time?