A couple of weeks ago there was a lot of fuss about where our morality comes from. To no surprise the name-calling, and mudslinging was rife…
MemeMan - February 28, 2013 at 13:48
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Shark
"Again where does you moral code come from?"
You're not new here... This has been explained to you ad nauseum... it comes from natural selection... pull your head out of your bottom my boy. “
j.r.neilson - March 1, 2013 at 15:15
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@shark - true, the unborn has no say in this act but morally the mother (and father) have a responsibility to the living - if you are in a situation where your family could suffer (to perhaps the extent of death) the moral choice would be to keep the family alive and lose the unborn, also what about situations such as rape, forced incest, underage mothers the moral choice is not as clearly defined... The one thing we do have in excess is people....
Clifford Warren de Vries - March 2, 2013 at 12:24
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@Shark - I have a question for you. I assume that all aborted babies go to heaven. Then in your believe system, heaven is the place to strive to go when you die.
So if they all go to heaven, why give them a chance to fail when they are already getting a free entry?
Let us evaluate this according what we do know today.
Our ability to work together in groups is one of humanities evolutionary adaptations which have helped us to survive and thrive. It is improbable that you would be able to find a person who is totally self-sufficient. Everything we have in our society, we have because we are able to work together. Humans are complex creatures and therefore we need rules to help us deal with the complexities of cooperative living. This is the beginning of morality.
The social contract is an inferred agreement between everyone in the community to help each work together. While this social contract is great at first glance, it is not sufficient.
Some question needs to be answered…
What happens when those who make the social contract do so to help their own interests rather than the interests of those with less power?
“Morality is simply our understanding of cause and effect coupled with our desire for the wellbeing of society and individuals in society. Those desires are born out of our sense of empathy and compassion for others. No deities involved.”
“What is Morality?
Morality is the belief or recognition that certain behaviors are either “good” or “bad”. Some morals are very easy to accept and only the fringes of society might question or reject them. These people on the fringes may be good or bad, the mere act of rejecting a socially accepted moral of the time is in no way an indicator of the persons goodness.
Moral Overlap and Contradiction
Some morals are harder to accept because they contradict or overlap with other morals. These types of moral situations are at the heart of the greatest debates of our time. Take abortion for example, this is an extremely heated topic and you will find that the morality of women’s rights conflicts with babies rights. In cases like these there are usually logical and compelling arguments on both sides in extremes and major ethical and moral dilemmas occur in the “gray areas”.”
Most feel that morality evolves from the choices that we make everyday, and not because of some automatic response due to evolution. If we account morality to evolution, then there is no clear way for us to define immorality.
We cannot call someone immoral because it can be argued that they are simply reacting the way that they are suppose to in order to further enhance their “fitness”. This morale takes away the very notion that makes us human, the fact that we are able to think and make decisions and defend our choices. When assigning morality to evolution, humans are reduced to non-thinking animals who are acting in a certain way with the sole purpose of passing on our genes. What a lot of horse excrement…
To continue, are morals the result of genetics? Most animals from what I understand, do not show a sense of morality but rather a natural instinct. So are we so special that we evolved to have morals from birth ? Or is the result of a higher capacity of learning? What came first, moral people who came together with other people to form civilization or did civilization arise because of people with different niches came to cooperate, which then educated humans to be moral since it generated a higher competence of sustaining life? Maybe that isn't the best example, it seems today that it is more morally acceptable to unrestrained. As we get older passes, people will leave that “unrestrainedness and hopefully mature. From maturing, their morals would change and if morals can change, then wouldn't that establish that morals are the result of an influence by society? If that's true, then we could be influenced that killing is right and what we perceive as evil is not in fact evil, but what we originally created evil to be.
Instead of evolution being a significant reason why humans have a sense of morality, it should be a combination of different reasons. It does make sense that humans as social beings needs to have some sort of “Code of Conduct” and that through this “Code of conduct”, it allows everybody to be more fit which would result in better productive results. So as our minds become more complex, we decide what that moral conduct is. But at the same time, morality is such a loaded word that it really cannot be boiled down to one definitive definition. Morality can be a code of conduct for one’s self, a religious/ social group, or society as a whole. And in all three categories it is defined differently and what is moral in one aspect might not be moral in the other aspect. And so therefore, morality is more a question for philosophers and psychologist and not so much biologist.
1. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition
2. http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/D.onM.html
3. http://www.godandscience.org/evolution/implications.html
4. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/evolmoral.html
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html
6. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1217
7. http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mccabe02.htm
To close of, The Bible doesn’t say God gave us morality, it mention that God guides us in those choices we make. It rest purely on the only thing God wanted from us. Love others as we love ourselves and love God with your whole heart.
Matt 22 : 34 -39
34 But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. 35 One of them, [n]a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the great and [o]foremost commandment. 39 The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
Let look what happened in the beginning
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%203&version=NASB
God guided man on what God’s Expressed Will was. Man decided to venture out of that Will
I will quote this again “If that's true, then we could be influenced that killing is right and what we perceive as evil is not in fact evil, but what we originally created evil to be.” Evil was to be outside the Expressed Will of God…Same error .. it is our way, or it is evil…(Our will or nothing)
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