Morality... is it a prison or a tool?

takes forever to even be sure it was stolen.

 

holy. Firk. how did that happen?

 

how many bikes do u Firking need in one country ????

 

All of them.

 

You cycle to the train station, take the train, then take your second bycicle from the other train station

there are 17 million people here and we have an average of 1.1 bicycle per person.

we'd need less if PEOPLE STOP STEALING THEM

 

man, that's really cool. So it's basically public transport & bikes? How many people actually own cars?

 

oh a lot of people also own cars but in cities and for trips to the store the bicycle is easier, less likely to have parking issues.

this one shows a different place with more cars and it outlines people and a pigeon that don't or do use the rules

 

At its most basic, it simply means that only the strongest survive a situation. This can happen naturally without purposeful interference (natural selection), or it can happen artificially. Eugenics is an artificial version.
Also, when I say "fittest", I don't mean just physically. I mean the people with the most potential to increase the survival of the species, this includes people with the highest levels of intelligence, insight, scientific understanding, emotional balance, etc.

Shame, from what I understand, is a cultural thing. It's ingrained into us by others, rather than being instinctual. Shame from nakedness is most definitely something we are trained into. Nakedness is rarely actually harmful to the progress and survival of a person or species, except for the artificial morals we build around it.

Meat is a great source of nutrients that's easy to get and digest. The nausea we get from seeing "gore" or "violence" only really exists when we are not numbed to that sort of thing. If you're a hunter for example, it won't nearly bother you as much. Our instincts tell us that "gore" and "violence" are things we should avoid for our own safety. Because of our current cultures though, there's rarely a need for everyone to be trained out of that instinct in order to provide nutrients for ourselves and others.
So, no, it can be easily argued that that has nothing to do with "morals" and has everything to do with survival instincts.

When we go against what we've been mentally conditioned into believing you mean.

Citations? I'm not sure what to be looking for.

That's some "new-age" stuff right there. (recycled from older civilizations actually).
People claiming to be outside of the "moral spectrum" (a spectrum? that's a less common way of viewing morality), tend to do so because they see morality as no longer useful to them. They can be mistaken, but maybe they realized that morality serves little true purpose and that without morality they can just do whatever makes them happy and helps them survive.

There's little to no point in having only a personal moral code. You should either force it on to others under the pretense of progress and survival, or you should ignore it. Truth/morality by majority opinion or experience isn't reliable. If X # of people all say the dress is blue, the dress has not been determined to be blue. If Bob says that his act of killing Joe is good, and you somehow killed someone under the same circumstances with the same nuances, the goodness of Bob killing Joe has not been determined.
The concepts of "good" and "bad" are arbitrary and typically based on the surrounding people, and generally only to fit in (survive) with what they have already decided what was necessary for survival, even if they're wrong.

 

If one removes God the Creator from the element of morality, then yes, the good guy is a sucker and the immoral person wins by cheating, lying and stealing. But then again, it has always seemed to be this way. However, in eternity, there is a price we must all pay for being immoral. If you believe we are all vapor after we die, with no eternal repercussions, which certainly seems to be the resounding opinion on these forums, then go ahead and do whatever you have to do to get ahead.

For me, I choose to try and live as morally good as possible as defined by God, not men mind you, so therefore I'm always answering to a higher call where the meaning of morality has been defined.

One final thing though, please do not assume moral people are stupid just because they do the right things and do not exploit others or opportunities that may certainly be defined as immoral. Just because a person chooses not to exploit a situation does not make them an idiot.
This is a lame example, but I told a patient of my company that the charge for our service would be $60. For whatever reason, maybe they forgot or was confused, they gave me $70. I returned $10 to the client and they were thankful. Now, while it may not have been completely immoral to keep the extra $10, I was certainly going to take the higher road and be honest about the charge being $60. Some would have taken the extra $10 and not thought another thing about it. For me, in that situation, honesty (morality) was greater than the extra $10 I could have gained out of that transaction.

 

So when you come down to it there are points I agree with and points I disagree with here so let me start with the disagreement

1. You need god /religion to know what's right, I think that's taking away credit from your human nature and not acknowledging that the moral right is often set by the standards around us...so let's say you were born in a place where drugs and stealing was the only way to survive then that becomes the morally acceptable code in your mind regardless

2. I don't think the good guys are suckers I just think that too often bad people never get what they deserve and just the promise that they'll get justice In a next life ((religious beliefs)) isn't enough for me. I am not an evil man or at least I like to think I am not but I'll do anything to reach a goal I set and if I am racing vs you for example and you cheat and get away with it, I can't let that person win without having tried to do everything I can to stop that including ...cheating

Here is what I agree with and salute you on:

1. Using your religion to inspire you to be good. A lot of people these days are self righteous pricks and may use religion to set the bar as they are right/saved etc instead of becoming a better person so for that I salute you

2. I believe in a kind of Robin Hood morality as in you should always help the poor and needy etc however all the cheaters who get ahead in life on the backs of the weaker people don't deserve you to walk away from that


In the end I suppose I believe in justice not morality and as r'as al ghoul said in the first Nolan movie: justice is balance aka once ur opponent changes the rules of engagement etc .. you adapt or you die.... and hope that there is justice in the next life

Also side note: I have nothing against religion just the coercion of people to adhere to it / believe in it

If it makes sense it shouldn't need to be enforced and should always be up for debate

And honestly i give the highest respect to people who practice any religion themselves and are very passive in nature. They do what they think is right but they don't think everyone else is wrong

 

thanks for proving my point. what you wrote there is WROOOOOOOONG.
you made a U turn further on, so I guess you are confused.

 

As rocky balboa once said

It ain't about how hard you hit, it's about how much you can get hit and keep moving forward

Those are the kind of people that survive any situation

 

I just think that the majority of people don't have the spiritual and intellectual depth to be outside of it without suffering the consequences. I, for example, did think once that I was capable of being beyond good and evil (back when I was 18-19)and indulged myself in various vile acts, fooling myself in the quite so typical style of teenage self-assertion that that way I'm getting rid of the morals that bound me, and I probably did have the intellectual part right but... It didn't really work out and just ended up with me accumulating a lot of hatred and anxiety which took a really long time to let go of. Honestly, I was an idiot and even though I read Crime & Punishment back when I was 16, I was too stupid to understand that the book quite explicitly said that you SHOULDN'T do it, cause, you know, for some reason I aestheticized it instead (probably Death Note played a part it that) and thought it would make me better and stronger. Well, it doesn't. And that's the problem with postmodernism -- people don't understand that some stuff is too big for your breeches and tend jump onto something without having any real knowledge or experience. I mean, even most new adepts of any spiritual teachings or people that've had a psychedelic experience tend to think that they're superior to other people (even I suffered from that intially) which is quite ironic when you think about it: you lost your ego only later on to become its slave.

Hah, that's some Kantian stuff right there. Although I agree with that to an extent, I don't agree that it's pointless. I mean, if you've built your own moral code and it helps you differentiate what's right and what's wrong and navigate through life and it doesn't harm other people in any sort of way -- by all means, follow it.

They are arbitrary but you can't get away from them or pretend like they don't exist. I mean, the binary oppositions are literally ingrained in all of our languages. How do you expect to get away from that? That's why I think that while living in a secular world, it's almost impossible to do so; it's not like you're able to communicate with most people without language (not sure about sign language but that's only a minority and it's safe to presume that it has binary oppositions too).

 

Just gonna note, one of the points of (most) religions is that there is only one "true" morality. As to the question of human nature, how does that take credit away from it? Human nature, as defined by science, is simply instinctual. There's little to nothing to take credit "from" if a/the religion is true.
So by definition, if no religion is true, and only the "material realm" exists, than all "credit" for morality is based upon coincidental situations combined with survival instincts. In other words, there's really nothing to give credit to for "naturalistic" morality, because "nature" isn't a force or being, it's just a referential term.
If religion is true, than there's nothing (usually) to take credit away from in terms of the religion dictating morality (whatever "authority" it relies on), because the only "true" morality is the (typically) spiritual one from the religion, and you're either wrong or right. In that case, any "morality" we claim credit to is either a lie, or is vaguely connected (spiritually?) to the "true" morality.

So no, one can only claim credit for morality when you've set up an arbitrary rules system for whatever reason.
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"Good" vs "Bad". Only defined by morality. If you follow a religion, you have clear guide lines (usually...), otherwise, it's arbitrary. So either a religion is right, and everyone gets their "just reward", or it isn't, in which case no one really gets "what they deserve", because there's nothing to to really say what you deserve except yourself.
Basically, with your own personal moral code or one simply "derived" from the people around you (which would have come from a religion or someone's personal moral code, which could be the same thing), any time you talk about "getting what one deserves", we're really just saying that you don't like what happened/happens/is happening, and we might as well be children declaring "it's not fair!".

Justice is derived from morality...

Then they don't really believe in their religion (depending on the religion). One of the points of religion is that you're either on the "right" or "wrong" side, so by definition, anyone outside of the "correct" religion is wrong. I think what you mean here is less of what the person thinks, and more of what they do, as in, thinking and saying that someone is wrong as opposed to enacting laws to force them to act "good" according to their religion.

... I derived what I said from dictionaries. What do YOU think is the correct definition?

I don't think "spiritual" and intellectual depth have much to do with escaping the consequences of abandoning arbitrary definitions of morality. Unless you're only referring to the personal emotional and mental pain and fatigue from fighting what was trained into you.
Also, quite an interesting personal story there, it gives some insight into your perspective.

Oh hey, you recognized it!
Kant was on to something, but his ideas still aren't fully satisfactory to me. Morality is pointless in and of itself, that is, it serves to reach no point on its own. Morality must be derived from something. We either derive morality from nature, in which case it serves the purpose of survival and evolutionary progress, or we derive it from a religion (which could also be just deriving it from nature...), in which case it serves the purpose of "enlightenment" or "salvation" or some other (typically spiritual) thing.
A "personal moral code", is arbitrary rules that you set up for yourself. The best ones are the ones that focus on survival, and are developed through life experience. The worst ones are the ones that seek to state that there is something more than just the self that is arbitrating, though this assumes that the premise is false.

If naturalism is true (am I using the right term? maybe I just mean atheism...), then we will be able to "escape" morality once we have progressed far enough to not suffer any consequences at all unless we so desire. Essentially, being able to survive no matter what, the ultimate end goal of "natural morality". The binary oppositions, while not always truly binary, can be easily (usually) derived from survival instincts.

(just a reminder, I'm playing Devil's Advocate for the sake of discussion, since few people here seem to be taking this stance and it seems necessary for the discussion to be productive).

 

if religions are true gods are immoral.
this does not seem to be a problem for most people.
luckily most seem to be able to be moral regardless.

survival of the fittest means the fittest survive. that is the most basic, by mixing in the word 'strong' you are muddying the waters as this would only be true if the strong are also the most fit.
it would also be a mistake to try and connect this with morality.

for morality you should instead look to shared risk/reward benefits, altruism, evelutionary stable strategies ( ESS) and social behaviour.

 

I'm afraid you've got a distorted view due to a lack of understanding of non judeo-christian religions. In hinduism and mahayana buddhism (specifically tibetian) they don't have that. They consider other religions just as legitimate and believe that they're one of the many paths to god/enlightenment.

Honestly, I think it's both. It's hard to see it cause it's amalgamated but I think we're getting there. Imo the best way of looking at morality is from an evolutionary and jungian perspective (i.e. religions are the product of the collective unconsciousness with all of its mysteries and dormant power)

How so? I mean, in Huxley's novel there's still morals (obviously, very different to the ones we have today although we seem to be getting there pretty quickly.) Human life isn't all about surviving, people need ideas to live for, dreams and aspirations that will make them soar to new heights. When these ideas are in conflict between people and there's no set standard, then you ultimately have chaos and people suffering from an existential crisis (which is kinda what we have today.) And yes, you are using the right word.

What do you mean? In russian, most of the words have sacral roots. English hasn't got too much of that left but in general, as far as I know, most of the sacral ideas are indoeuropean so you might understand this intuitively. For example, the word right and left can have multiple sacral meanings, left being the hand that you would use in rituals, magic etc. and right -- the one for everyday life. Today in our language the word 'left' in its figurative meaning could mean something out of the way or done poorly. Why is that? I thought a lot about it and I have absolutely no idea (neither do folklorists or mythologists for that matter). How do you explain that from a naturalistic point of view? There's a bunch of examples like that which only Jungian psychoanalysis can give a more or less adequate answer.

Yeah, I remember, and not few at all. Geressen is an avid materialist and he could've taken that stance if he wanted to. Sames goes for the majority of other peeps. But could you share your opinion on this and not the 'Devil's Advocate'?

 

Wanted to rebuttal, this has been (as always with you guys) a very interesting discussion...
Disagreement part:
1. God is the creator of morality. We ALL need Him to define morality for us because He wrote the book. If we don't all follow His standard then what happens is we have people growing up in drug dealers homes thinking that selling drugs to kids is a legit life and that they would never kill someone because that would just be bad. Or that trafficking children for sex slavery if fine because their parents didn't want them any ways. This mentality you guys are describing isn't morality at all, rather, its the lack of it. This is called justification. We always compare what we do to others and justify our means because someone else did something "worse" than what we did. This is why God defined morality, a clear path of what is right and wrong, and did not leave it to man to figure it out.

Lying is WRONG. Stealing is WRONG. Murdering is WRONG. Abortion is WRONG. Homosexuality is WRONG. Adultery on your spouse or someone else's is WRONG. Men can again justify their actions but this is God's standard, not mine, I just try to abide by it. Furthermore, I am just as human as you are. I just understand there is someone much higher than me that created all of this, not some weird space anomaly that just went insanely perfect, and therefore we should strive to do what He says and not man. Again, that would be like you coming to work for my company and taking orders/opinions from a co-worker instead of the owner.

2. That's justification my friend at its finest. See, you HAVE to resort to this sort of thinking because you do not give the Creator credit. That's the whole problem here. When God is removed from the discussion things go awry because man can no longer compensate. That's, again, why most of you believe in the completely absurd thought that this earth and its perfect design is instead some weird freakish space anomaly that just happened to go perfectly right and that we come from monkeys for crying out loud! BTW, as a sub-note, where are the half-men half-gorillas today? Why would evolution just decide to stop once it achieved its "proper" point? lol

Agreement:

1. Its funny you would accuse people of religion to be self righteous when that is what the sub theme of this ENTIRE thread is about. You guys are having to define morality therefore making you self righteous! LOL

2. Justification, unfortunately, once again.

Conclusion:
I don't "force" my religion on others but I do share it. Once again, that is a mandate from God. Here is ultimately the decision that everyone of us must make:
A) There is nothing out there but ourselves (or perhaps a deity that made us all and doesn't care one way or the other what we do) and therefore at the end of the day even murdering people is fine because it doesn't matter in the end.
B) We are not here by accident and that God created all of this. If that is true, then we answer to Him, have to follow His rules, and are subjected to the penalty for not keeping his rules.
Its really that plain and simple.

Again, here is another lame example:
You are travelling down a highway. You look but don't see a speed limit sign (you were texting when you passed it and missed it) so you decide to do 55 because that seems to be a good speed especially since there was a guy that just passed you doing at least 10 more mph than what you are travelling. Suddenly, a police officer pulls you over and writes you a ticket for speeding (the actual limit is 40mph). Would you be mad? Did he miss the other driver? Is your ignorance of the speed limit a legit excuse for not getting a ticket? Will you attempt to justify that your speed was fine because the other guy was much faster? Will the other driver ever get caught and have to pay the same penalty? (Which isn't your decision to make) Anyways, that's the gist.

Good talk as always,
Bond

 

according to god slavery is ok, women are property and we should stone people to death (including children) for minor infractions. nevermind the fact that he created bengs without free will that rebelled against him ( HOW?) and made stupid humans he ordered to love him (sad) that were forbidden from doing something despite him knowing they would do so anyway and were then punished for no good reason. but later he sacrificed himself to himself to rewrite rules he wrote which couldn't be rewritten by him unless he did.

it's all in the book.
it is very bad fiction.

 

lets start of by adressing the fact that there is no point to evolution and if you do not understand it do you want us to give you some pointers to some books you can read so you can achieve a high school level understanding of the subject before you try and talk about it again.

Humans also did not evolve from gorilla, we share a common ancestor.

How come there is French and Spanish if they both came from Latin? easy, geographical seperation and small changes over generations meant they diverged.

 

God, there's so many things wrong with this that I'm even surprised that Geressen decided to point it out to you considering how typical your arguments are. People like you are the reason that everybody despises christianity today. You ought to feel shame for being so ignorant and making a bad image for the religion that you supposedly follow. Christianity doesn't have to object the Theory of Evolution, The Big Bang of Theory or secular morality -- it only does when you understand the Bible superficially.