Morality without a deity.

@darfius said
Although I applaud little Suzy Q for being the only one brave--or in her case stupid--enough to actually address what I say. I'm starting to wonder if it's even worth my time being here, as people are either too afraid to deal with my arguments or too dishonest to admit their power.

@ghost-of-a-duke said
Or perhaps you are simply a misguided ignoramus.

All evidence seems to support such a hypothesis.

@kellyjay said
What evidence is that?

@whodey said
Man is oppressive by nature, not cooperative. Most men who have walked the earth have either been a slave or of military use for their beloved leader.

@ghost-of-a-duke said
I do find it a little odd to be honest that you don't seem to recognise the role of cooperation in our human journey. How have we got to where we are today as a species if it wasn't for cooperation? Look around you. Everything in your eye line is the result of humans coming together. Let's examine your 2 points:

1. 'Man is oppressive by nature, not cooperative.' - ...[text shortened]... are either slaves or soldiers? Or has perhaps our innate sense of cooperation taken us beyond this?

@kellyjay said
You keep saying cooperation as if that is the definition of morals. Is that what you think? Morals are nothing more than getting what we want by working together? We can oppress while in cooperation with others. Isn’t morals more about right and wrong, good and bad? Working together can take us into very dark places, it’s recognizing that where the discussion should be.

@ghost-of-a-duke said
You keep saying 'God' as if that is the definition of morals.


(Again though, for the third time I believe, I have tendered 'cooperation' as the starting point for the foundation of morals, not as a definition of morality).

@wolfgang59 said
The first written law codes may reference the local deities to give them gravitas
but are not due to those deities. (Or do you think those deities existed?)
Man created the laws.
Man created the deities.
btw ... about 5,000 years ago. Mesopotamia.

@suzianne said
Nevermind that most "speciation" doesn't produce "transitional" fossils, since the transitions themselves become their own species.

@kellyjay said
I brought up God once in this discussion and responded about God once, you are suggesting I keep saying God why?

I never denied that you have been saying cooperation is the starting point, it seems unlikely to me since cooperation towards what I think we could say was selfish ends, like robbing or some other escapade, automatically follows we feel the need to not be selfi ...[text shortened]... ything, instead of morals, man could become more selfish instead of selfless. What is the reasoning?

@Ghost-of-a-Duke

I mostly only read and/or contribute to one or two threads at a time (I have a life, too 😀) To catch up on old long ones is too tedious, but I found it quite fascinating to read the three pages of this thread.

Some time ago I chatted to a paleantologist/anthropologist and she suggested that at one stage of our planet's development, the top predator/carnivor was the Saber Toothed Tiger. They found caves of previous STT dwellings where the bulk of the bones were human skulls. Our predecessors must have made up most of their diet.

Until they learned to cooperate and defend themselves - and later fight back.

So the OP is entirely correct scientifically. There would have been no "us" if we had not started to work towards a common goal.

Of course, we can speculate as to what went wrong later. Maybe Orson Wells hit the nail on the head in "1984". Power corrupts, etc...

But thanks for this topic, GoaD.

@darfius said
Could it be that dudes 5,000 years ago were smarter than you (yes) and they understood that laws had to be based in an objective morality to be worth the cuneiform tablets they were hewn into?

@darfius said
Huh? Methinks you don't grasp the concept of transitional. The point is we should be able to connect the morphological dots between all or at least most species with fossils showing the "transitions" between species. No dice. So it turns out the incestual Darwin, sponsored by the incestual British royals to provide an intellectual and physical basis for their occult theories of spiritual evolution, was probably making sh** up. And not very convincing sh**.

@caljust said
@Ghost-of-a-Duke

I mostly only read and/or contribute to one or two threads at a time (I have a life, too 😀) To catch up on old long ones is too tedious, but I found it quite fascinating to read the three pages of this thread.

Some time ago I chatted to a paleantologist/anthropologist and she suggested that at one stage of our planet's development, the top predator/carn ...[text shortened]... Wells hit the nail on the head in "1984". Power corrupts, etc...

But thanks for this topic, GoaD.

@KellyJay

God needs nothing from man, only the man made gods do.