are you an atheist?

Morality comes from evolution, the higher brain functions of mammals versus reptiles, things like compassion, raising your young, etc. are evolutionarily recent phenomenon.

not that i've ever met an ethical snake, but why can't reptiles have morality?

distracts from gerbil-eating

reptilian moral imperatives: eat! don't be eaten! reproduce! repeat as needed!

you forgot sleep

snakes can't make pals? (i never had a pet snake but people who do seem to like them all the same)

morality is a collective endeavor, something that governs relationships between members of a group. snakes don't belong to groups, not even family units (cf. Aimless' reference to raising young etc.)

interesting to consider the question for social animals tho... say, ants.

Plus that snake would eat you if it thought it could get away with it.

someone better warn slash

pet snakes are fed, making them docile. the snake owner supplies the palsy-walsy feelings.

Adam B referenced raising o' young.

oh sorry

huh. where DO ants fall in this taxonomy of morality?

interesting to consider the question for social animals tho... say, ants.

you already kinda answered this:

I think morality is a relative social construct developed to ensure the survival and cohesion of the tribe/country/species

well right I was just idly thinking of what other animals moral systems would look like. QUEEN GOOD, OTHER ANTS BAD

if you're going that route though, snakes could just as easily have some kind of snake laws

snake laws: eat! don't be eaten! reproduce! repeat as needed! (& sleep! <-- added to mollify shakey)

SNAKE SHALL NOT KILL SNAKE

Snakes are always shouting?

A GIS on "snake eats snake" reveals the truth about that law's effectiveness.

Some obsucure English scribbler once said, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so", and it inclines me to think that there is a universal morality 'cause we can quibble about the details but we all bascially accept that there is something called morality. Otherwise what would good be, what would bad be? Arguing about that is half of human existence, solipsism, narcissism and sociopathy are outliers (if only just).

We all fall short of our moral codes from time to time. xp

Glycon sez: bring me gifts, have awesome hair like me.

QUEEN GOOD, OTHER ANTS BAD

That's not so far off from ours. You're human and you get it. It's a crap shoot and their 'morality' still prevails against an indifferent and often hostile universe.

http://cdn.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/120821/81346940.jpg

I killed it.

http://www.answersingenesis.org/assets/images/articles/am/v4/n3/fang-design.gif

Even's image was so appropriate to be the final image of an ilx thread that no one else had the heart to post after seeing its perfection.

Where's the morality gland?

Haha!

I would like to interrupt this thread to say I think this is funny. http://www.conservapedia.com/Theory_of_relativity

the citation for the mercury perihelion anomaly points to ... another conservapdia article! http://www.conservapedia.com/Counterexamples_to_Relativity which includes this gem:

15. The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46-54, Matthew 15:28, and Matthew 27:51.

i find it really weird there's such a prevalence in UK for atheism rah-rah stuff when it seems much more chill to be a self-proclaimed atheist there. Also, weird how much into the Simpsons they are. (in the UK not just atheists)

For people who aren't religious but aren't anti-religion (hey it provides a sense of community, bad things would happen regardless etc)...what seems to get overlooked is the way in which attitudes informed by religions seep into and affect virtually all aspects of society. What immediately comes to mind is viewing poor people as lazy and thus deserving their fate. God wouldn't reward greed and punish the industrious, after all.

i wonder if part of the issue here is that one side of this discussion wants to conflate religion and ideology and the other thinks of them as very different things. all i am ever trying to do on these threads is insist that religion, for all its ideological and fundamentalist tendencies, cannot be reduced entirely to ideology.

and i suppose the corollary of that (and something people like me should keep in mind) is that maybe atheism isn't reducible in that same way either.

What immediately comes to mind is viewing poor people as lazy and thus deserving their fate

what religion endorses this viewpoint again?

I don't think disdain for the poor is a religious idea per se. In fact, special consideration for the poor seems to be a theme running through most of the world's religions. The attitude you mention seems more like a fairly recent pseudo-religious gloss put on a basically Darwinian view of the world. xxp

religion and ideology go together like shit and stink

what religion endorses this viewpoint again?

Calvinists

For people who aren't religious but aren't anti-religion (hey it provides a sense of community, bad things would happen regardless etc)...what seems to get overlooked is the way in which attitudes informed by religions seep into and affect virtually all aspects of society. What immediately comes to mind is viewing poor people as lazy and thus deserving their fate. God wouldn't reward greed and punish the industrious, after all.

This is just cultural ... comes from strains of Protestantism iirc... poor = damned, rich = god's special little guys. Contrast with the social justice strain of Catholicism. If it's not god, it's Adam Smith, or Ayn Rand, or evolution, or genes, or pretty much anything we can dream of to give our thoughts, basises, emotions, prejudices, etc. authority.

every single religion I can think of (with the possible exception of Hinduism and it's caste system but even there it's a bit of a grey area) impels believers to care for the less fortunate. charity is a central tenet of the big 3 western religions, plus Buddhism, taoism etc.

Calvinism is one of the harshest (and smallest) denominations of Christianity, hardly emblematic of the faith as a whole.

Shakey the point isn't that any religion directly endorses it, but that a religious mindset allows people to take up that viewpoint.

Good thing religious tenets are never perverted then right?

i think it's a misreading of Calvinism to think it boils down to "fuck those losers they deserve it"--that weapon was often as not turned against the self.

i'd say that the mindset of charity being a spiritual obligation rather than one of the state is where most of the harm would come in.

If it's not god, it's Adam Smith, or Ayn Rand, or evolution, or genes, or pretty much anything we can dream of to give our thoughts, basises, emotions, prejudices, etc. authority.

Again, why not rally against one of these sources of thinking? And religious thought is so rigid, it biases and prejudices seem rubbery in comparison. God says it is so. Ok, that's the end of the "debate".

religion and ideology go together like shit and stink

i think they overlap quite a bit, but it's (imo) a misjudgment to conflate them. if anything (in christianity) they are often in tension. when jonathan edwards says "the only law is love" (a calvinist!) it's not hard to read that as a pretty radical statement AGAINST dominating ideologies of any kind that.

and yes that's the SAME edwards who wrote "sinners in the hands of an angry god" which kinda makes the point for the multivalency of religious belief.