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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library Like your culture has nothing to do with libraries. I am not moving any goalposts. You are giving me a pig's bladder full of air, and I am trying to describe the stadium.

Cladking, Much science and knowledge was written down and recorded and stored and shared for the benefit of humanity in some ornate libraries in Europe. By religious men, for religious reasons. Same guys that were concerned with establishing and maintaining our moral values. Regards, TAR http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Pictures+of+ornate+libraries+in+europe&id=4F7CF9412A71F3AFE3D77EE285EE5BC14DA61EA5&FORM=IQFRBA Dimreepr, Name a society where religion played no role. Regards, TAR

? Illogical? "You wouldn't be able to set up a religion in a group of people with no morals." Agreed, in the sense that Moses would have made no progress with the group he brought the tablet to, if the group did not see the sense in the rules. Disagreed, in the sense that if morals already exist, without religion, you would not be able to find a group without them. So logically it is your argument in a bind, not mine. Certainly the morals that religion promotes are sensible and workable (for the most part) or they would not take hold in a population. But they are choices that the individual imposes on his/her society, as much as they are choices that the society imposes on the individual. Your argument is more saying that you can have religion without god, then saying you can have morals without religion. Which is my argument. I am presupposing there is no God. I am presupposing there is religion, and working from there, in a logical fashion, to understand the role that religion has played in forming our morality. There are very few instances of people we would consider moral individuals, that have not been influenced by the teachings of religions. If you say that they can be good, without believing that it is God that is their final judge, then fine, this works for me as well, but where did "we" get these ideas? We know we did not get them from the God of the Bible, because although the rules make a lot of sense, the guy writing our names in a huge book makes only figurative sense, and NO literal sense. But without the figurative sense of either being listed in the book, or burning in hell, why would anybody feel that their behavior was being judged to such an extent as that it would matter to anybody after they died? Why do we promote the "Olympic Spirit", if it is automatic and sensible to begin with? We have to actually do the thing, to show others that it works if we all believe in it. Tolerance and love, sacrifice for higher ideals, are things with a basis in the teachings of all the religions of the world. Subjegating ones own personal desires for pleasure and power to a greater, common power, that subordinates even the rich and the powerful, is central to democracy and communism, capitalism and despotism. The King's power is given to him by the people. We know this, because there is no God that would give him any power that is not also given to his subjects. But there exists in the White House, a throne, that gives tremendous power to ANYBODY that sits in it. So we, as Americans, all together give this seat its power, with the idea that there is a greater good that we serve, by doing it. It cannot be the God of the Bible that has created the seat, literally, so it must be the God of the Bible that has created the seat figuratively. It is sensible and workable that we have leaders that by proxy do our bidding. But they must operate under a code of behavior that is imposed from above them, by the people below them. While this can obviously happen without a God, since there aren't any. It cannot happen without the ideal being defined. And religion's job is to define/grasp the ideal and then subjegate yourself to it. And what better power to hook your ideals to, then the power of the universe. Regards, TAR

dimreepr, I am suggesting that religion already was responsible for morals. Now that we have them, we can do without the accompaning hogwash. Much like you need the forms in which to pour the concrete. Once the cement sets, you can take the boards away and the sidewalk does just fine, without them. Any particular person can arrange his or her own relationship with the universe, and decide for themselves who or what is to be the judge of them. But if you know the world, and I know the same one, by the same senses and in the same manner, and we recognize each other as sharing the thing, then it is a common thing, that we share. Someone, somewhere along the way proposed we were in it, by and for something greater, and this notion persists, even in the non-religious. But someone must have been the first to know the difference between good and evil... otherwise all would just be good, or all would just be evil, or all would just be nondescript. I am saying that you can not "get to morals" without a path. And in the history of this world, that path was through religion. The holding of a common set of beliefs about what it was all about, and all for and what a mortal human's relationship with the place was "supposed to" be. Regards, TAR2. Can you have a sidewalk without a form? Well yes you can, most sidewalks don't have forms. Can you have a sidewalk without a form? Well no you can't, you need the boards to form the shape the cement will take, when it sets.

Mike, As is my MO I like to draw an example from my own experience to try against your thoughts. I work as a "solutions tester" in a company that deals with information. We, as a company, at least the people in control of the servers and the code, have access to a lot of information that "we" know is sensitive, and we CAN NOT use for our own purposes, as it would erode the trust of the people that have entrusted that information to us. In this regard, a "theory of mind", that there is another that cares what you do with the information is an absolute MUST. And from this I can only conclude that we have already accumulated quite a few examples of knowing both that we personally are an island, and that no single man is one. I am not suggesting that we are not on the verge of launching a ship into the sea. I am suggesting that we are already on the sea in a boat chrisened by some bottle of champagne at a previous watershed launch. Regards, TAR

Moontanman, I thought the science guy had the best approach when I heard a sound bite prior the debate, where he was suggesting his strategy and saying he was going to talk about dinasours, figuring there can't be but one or two kids on the planet that don't love dinosaurs. I thought at the time it was a slam dunk and I didn't even watch the debate, nor have I read any of the threads here on the debate, but this one. But if fossils are a conspiracy to your soon to be PHD friend, have her go to the Grand Canyon, and give you an estimate when she returns of how long it would take the Colorado to erode that much rock, and have her give you a run down of the geological history that the layers exposed on the sides reveal, that must have occured BEFORE the grove was carved by the river. If her whole story adds up to only 4000 years, and it is anywhere close to sensible (which it won't be) then I would agree with her, that creation 4000 years ago is remotely possible. But anybody standing on the rim of the grand canyon will "feel" its age and hence the Earth's age, and she will know it's been around for much longer than the creation story in the Bible, and the lineage depicted from Adam to Abraham and Moses and such would allow. Which is true then. Every word of the Bible, or the Grand Canyon? There can be no conspiracy involved if its just her standing at the rim, and grasping what she is looking at. Then perhaps you could ask her if she ever read the book, and whether she agreed with all the male oriented rules, and various proscriptions it laid down. And just for fun ask her which books she figures the Bible should consist of, since the Tora seems to have some books not carried into the old testament that the new testament follows. Ask her perhaps the difference in truthfullness between the books the Council of Trent decided should go in, and which should be left out, and which translations with varying intent and meaning should be the "true" words of God. Or just as well, ask her what the neatest dinosaur was. What was her favorite one? Regards, TAR

dimreepr, But in terms of fairness and reciprocity and all, we unfortunately have a good test of human nature going on in the Ukraine right now. I thought Obama's chiding caused a truce and the parties would sit down and work a comprimise. The deaths are 4 times as outragous during the truce than before it. Now Obama is picking sides and calling for the Government of a Soveriegn Nation to pull their troups out of their own city. The moral lines are somewhat scattered and askew. I don't even know what the disagreement is about. Just know it shouldn't be working out this way. The opposition shouldn't have attempted to take over another building during a truce, and the Police should not have been told to fire on their brethren. But where is the automatic human morals, what do they become when loyalty is in the mix? Even without knowing what is going on, I have a guess, just from hearing that there are split loyalties, some to the West and some to Moscow. I have not yet had the opportunity to ask an aquaintance at work, who is from the Ukraine, for his take. Nor am I sure I should ask him. And I have not researched it to gain any facts, so its just a guess, but I think the situation not unfamiliar in human history, in fact not unfamiliar in the history of my own country as we threw off the British yoke. I was speaking, a year ago, to a woman in my company from Latvia, as well as the gentleman I mentioned from the Ukraine, about language. Under the Soviet Union everybody learned Russian in school. Once the Soviet Union split up, Ukranians went back to learning Ukranian and Latvians went back to Latvian. But even in our history in the U.S. we had Tories, loyal to the crown. Unity and respect for authority is a good thing, morality wise. Hegemony and oppression is a bad thing, morality wise. Seems like this Ukranian situation, here in the 21st century, where we think we have risen to some high moral ground, points out that there is a large grey area where the difference between right and wrong has something to do with whose side you are on and what "common" code you are going by. Such is probably also the case with demostrations against Globalism (which I never before understood). I thought is was a good thing, for everybody to get together and work under a common set of rules. Thought it natural and good to work in this direction, to go in that John Lennon direction, for the sake of peace, and understanding, tolerance and forgivness and love, and "human nature". But it appears that this is not such a simple thing after all and there is good in both listening to your parents AND in rebellion against them, and correlarily some "bad" in each, depending on who you wish to please, and who you wish to upset. But which is right, to stand by Western priciples and voice outrage and make threats against the Ukranian government, and be the self appointed police of the police, or to stand aside and let Ukranians decide who they are to be loyal to and who is going to run the place under what set of rules. I think we might have a similar problem in Syria. The King is not running the place that way we would rather he did. But he is the King of his people, and his country. And the rest of the world is neither his subject, nor is he the rest of the world's subject. If morality is natural and automatic then everybody already has it, and it is somewhat immoral to suggest that you have it and the other guy does not. But you still can not say religion has nothing to do with it, because the way things seem to turn out, there are a bunch of people that think like you do and hold your values and morals, morays and laws, and there are a bunch of people who do not. How would this situation possibly arise if a common set of beliefs was not at some point agreed upon by the whole bunch that thought the other bunch was wrong? "Anything goes" is not going to get a group of any size, from couple to gang to state, to nation, to Global size groups very far. You have to agree on the standards you are going to go by. And sometimes stand your ground and fight for what you believe. Regards, TAR As I pointed out in an earlier argument I am a bad guy in the eyes of more people than I am a good guy, by virtue of my sex, my age, my country, my "lack" of religion, my political registration, my ignorance of certain facts, and any number of behaviors and affiliations and criteria you might wish to choose. So still I think I am a good guy. Even though I fail to meet most people's standards. I wonder who, under this situation that puts me in a bad light, to billions, when you add up all the individuals and bunches that find me lacking in one way or another, I think is left to properly judge me as "good"? Whose side exactly do I think I am on, that I can say I have good morals?

Sounds like a game of rock paper scissors. I wonder if the Polynesians have a similar circular game, and what their three powers are. The steel comes from the mountain. The paper comes from the forest. The technology comes from what we put on the paper. Why do we not have a power in the game, that comes from the sea? Water erodes rock, rusts steel and turns paper into rather a soggy mush. Perhaps its just too strong to be used in the game, as nothing defeats it. Even the sun merely vaporizes it gives it more storm type power.

Dekan, A police force with principles and morals and ethics, that goes by a common complex system of beliefs as to what is right and what is wrong. Consider yourself sitting at a red light at 3 o'clock in the morning. You hear nothing coming on the cross street. You see nothing coming on the cross street. Red light cameras have not yet been installed. There are no police around, everybody is asleep. Do you go, or wait for the light to change? Which choice is the moral decision? Should a pedestrian emerge from the shadows, and step off the curb, as you pulled out into the intersection, would he/she think you were being a good citizen or a bad one? We "fear" what others think in somewhat an analogous fashion to not wanting to burn in hell. And we need no police to tell us when our behavior would please or displease our parents, or the mayor, or the pastor, or our friend from Italy, or our cousin Matilda in upper New York state. There is not such a fellow as Zeus. There are not enough police to watch everybody, all the time. It appears the only logical determination is that we watch ourselves, judge ourselves, and care very much about the judgement of cousin Matilda, as well. Regards, TAR2 We "go by" our own judgement, but know we are not alone, and there are other "judges" out there. If we account for ALL the judges we know are out there, and consider that even all of them, taken together, are also judged...the question remains...by whom are we all judged. 15 or 20 years ago I solved this riddle. God is proxy for our collective judgement. Take it figuratively or take it literally, it is still true. Even if there is no Zeus sitting on a big throne on Mt. Oympus in the clouds. 26 people died in 24 hours in the Ukraine. Police and opposition. Obama said, if you don't stop the violence, the U.S. and its European alies will impose sanctions. They called a truce and sat down and talked. Just heard two more have died, regardless of the truce. That's not right.

Mike, Well, I accept your apology, but you didn't cause me any distress. I already accept that there is bad stuff that happens, did happen and will happen. I already accept that we cause our own problems, and many of our solutions have unintended or unwanted consequences. What's the old adage about not being able to make an omelette without breaking a few eggs? I have known, since an insight I had 40 some years ago, that you can't move or breath in this world, without disturbing it and using oxygen that someone else could have used. It is not likely that anyone here has shit that does not stink. So I take such things as a fact of live, that you forgive of yourself, and forgive of others, and you just try and build the outhouse downwind. It is unavoidable that that logically means that your smells are going to waft in the direction of the wind and disturb your neighbors that live in that direction, and disturb you, when the winds shift. You just hold your nose and go ahead. I would like to reiterate the beauty and peacefulness and pleasantness of the good feeling I had, looking at my dad, with his wife's arm around him, looking at that peaceful beautiful Saar river scene at the location of the absolute worst events of his life, where pain and fear and death and near death, had been so very very strong and present. And I use it along with my working for the Japanese, and protecting the Germans to illustrate, that we figure it out, and fix it. We have been doing it for a long time and followed many a rainbow. The end of the rainbow "always" moves as we move, and does not seem to have a fixed end that you can actually get to. In regards to the island analogy you have to be able to not consider that it is one island, because it isn't from the outside, only when you are on the island are you surrounded by the sea. When you are on the sea the island is your goal. Regards, TAR2

Mike, Wierd, I have that canoe hanging off the ceiling of my garage. Except for you see the wood on the inside of mine where the one you pictured you see white. And I work for a Japanese Company and have been to Japan, and spent two years in peace time Germany as a soldier, protecting the country that shot my dad and took his dream of being a surgeon and the full use of his left hand (machine gun bullet through his left shoulder, lodged over his left hip) from him, against the threat of Soviet Tank invasion. Evil, lots of evil that has been done in my name, good, lots of good that has been done in my name. My dad and stepmom came over to Germany and I had scoped out the area and we rented a car and visited the hill where he was shot and found the spot where the pontoon bridge had been to facilitate the crossing of the Saar. We stood overlooking the river winding thru the peaceful and beautiful green valley and greeting a lone German man as he walked the trail, not far from the spot (which we did not find for sure) where the German pillbox had fired at my dad. Saddam was not exactly being a sweetheart when we destroyed his army, and he had left Kuwait ablaze with oil fires that burned for many a day and pumped who knows how much hydrocarbons into our air. I have spent the last 25 years of my life in the employ of the Japanese. I am friends with the same people I blew to smitherines. I practiced hiding under my desk and watched a bomb shelter be built near our town hall to prepare against a missle attack from the same country where my athletes are snowboarding for metals. The human spirit has come out victorious. We have figured it out, and fixed it. I watched what once was two beautiful towers with people from all over the world in them, putting up a tremendous pillar of black smoke that reached as far as sight toward CT, from a ferry port on the Jersey side of Hudson, and knew there was evil in the world and knew I was its enemy. I really do think that evil only exists when good men do nothing. (but I've just come from a morality discussion in "Philosophy" so I am off topic here.) We had to stop the Axis powers. We had to stop Saddam. Neither would cease and desist just because we asked them nicely. They had to be stopped big and ugly because they were a big and ugly thing to stop. Regards, TAR

dimreepr, From Wiki, "Religion is an organized collection of beliefs, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to an order of existence." I learned in college about the Dogon in Africa. They had a big thing about granaries and their shape and the womb and the primordial mother and such. The shape of the double edged drums they built with the strings laced thru holes all around the skins at the ends connecting the two ends in a manner where you can squeeze the hourglass shaped drum in the crook of your elbow against your body and change the pitch of the drum. My mom brought me one back from Africa and its sitting on my bookshelf. Regilion as I am using the word is generic and pervasive, understandable and real. It has nothing to do with the cruelity of sacrifice or slavery or homophobia or the stupidity of creationists. Or even God for that matter. The greeks had a whole bunch, the Hindu religion has even more, the idol worshipper that Mohammed bound together had many, and Mohammed said that there is only one, and he has no associates (like a son for instance). A system of beliefs that relate humanity to an order of existence is somewhat required when you talk about morals. Without a binding system of common organized beliefs you don't have nations and religions or moral values. It would be a crap shoot. Dog eat dog world. The strong would survive and the weak would perish. You would have a bunch of warring idol worshipping tribes. I know this, because that was what Mohammed was faced with. He had the Christians and the Jews with their organized system of beliefs and his people were without a guiding plan. So he took the ledgends that his people had, he took the stories of the Bible and rewrote them, keeping the main character, the universe itself, and making him the judge of us. He called himself a simple messenger and said the universe had talked to him like it had the other phophets in the bible, but he had received the final word, the clear word, the unadulterated truth of the situation, from the angel Gabriel, and he usurped the power of the universe and equated belief in his words with belief in Allah and being a believer would put you on the right path and being a disbeliever would place you in error and not worthy of a heavenly reward, but much boiling stuff poured down your throat for eternity. He said the Jews had gotten the message wrong because they charged interest, and the Christians had gotten it wrong because Jesus was a mere prophet and Allah himself has no associates and is not three (father son and holy ghost) but one...An organized system of beliefs that gave his people an order of existence. No different is the secret of the Vedas and the eminations from this and that sub god of the one. An organized system of belief. And the tracking of ones soul from stone souls to metal souls to vegatable souls to fish souls to bird souls to animal souls and through men and women and Germans and english and americans and indians and persians and mohammedian and hindus and christians and harbers in aevloution process and then a realization process that unwinds all the sankaras that built up over the evolution process that allows one to tie together the mental world and the subtle world and the gross world and obtain a god state where you are aware of and connected to the master's soul, at which point your journey is complete...An organized system of beliefs that gave people and order of existence. People used to sacrifice their enemies to ensure the rains. They used to hold slaves. Women where chattle. There was no Geneva convention, there was no U.N. or Olympics or Red Cross BEFORE religion. Moral values require an organized system of beliefs that tie a human to the thing that was before their birth and will be after they are gone. Otherwise its a hedonistic, dog eat dog, anarchistic crap shoot. Religion needs no impossible god or group of gods. Just needs an organised system of beliefs that ties a human to the greater existence that we are all obviously a part of. Just can not get to morals, without first establishing an organized system of beliefs against which to judge good and evil behavior. Regards, TAR

Mike, You may be right. We are pushing at frontiers of every area of human endeavor at a pace not possible before SQL data bases, and processors, and hand held iPhones and the internet. Good ideas can spread fast. Well they always could, at least since radio and telephone, and before that there was telegraph and pony express and the railroad. And before that, the building of roads and smoke signals. We have yet to see what being able access the knowledge and capability of millions in a moment can spawn. Yet to see what 65 billion dollars a month in unowned computer money will do to the world economy and the balance of power between the indivual and his/her world. People are still going to be concerned with what they are going to have for dinner. And peanut butter cups are still going to be a really nice thing to pop in your mouth. Perhaps we have always had some representatives on the shore, and sailing the seas. Making something out of the chaos seems to be one of our skills as a species. We have always had paridigm shifts. Just have not before had so many, on so many different fronts within a single human's lifetime. Like anytime else, I think human judgement will be applied, and we will figure it out, as we figure it out. Some great good will be accomplished and some great evil will be attempted. But as before, good will probably win out, as it has done before. Regards, TAR2 As long as I have good food, good sex, comfortable shoes and a warm place to go to the bathroom, I'll be a happy guy.

dimreepr, Proceeded religion, but by how far? When Moses brought the tablets down from the mountain, there was morality written on them. Let's assume, for the sake of reality, that he chiseled them himself, and he knew these lessons from his own experience of the world, his own muses, and from the stories and ledgends he had been told about the origin of the world and the origin of man. Let's say the Jewish Religion was started that day. The situation was already ripe for it, the people already accepted it on some level. They already knew these things were right and workable and sensible, or it would not have "taken off", and made sense to everybody. So you can have morality or the building blocks of it, but to get everybody on the same page on the topic, some good ideas, and the writing of them down, does not hinder the process. In fact, when looked at as a history of ideas that has flowed through the human story, the idea holders, the Moses's and the Mohammeds and the Sidharthas and the Martin Luthers play a rather large role in the flow. One can, because I do, ignore the impossible parts, and the false parts, and the ignorant parts, and still "get" what religions are saying about the world and our responsibilities to it. I do not take God literally, I take him figuratively. And in the imaginary world of Easter Bunnies and Santa Claus, and the Lion in Narnia, God as an idea, makes perfect sense. Everybody "gets it" in their own manner. Everybody has access to the world and has internalized it. Otherwise we all could not be holding a model of it. But as a history of ideas, as passed down workable rules of behavior, religion is central to our moral values. And we would not have the ones we have, if it was not for religion. And I am talking about this here example of human life as is extant on this Earth. I would not expect the morals of some other lifeform on some other planet to be that much like ours, anyway. They did not have Moses and Mohammed and Jesus and Sidhartha to blaze the trail. Regards, TAR And they most probably are not human, with our set of senses, strengths and frailities, needs and desires. They would most probably NOT have our moral values, whether built in the genes or discovered, or thought up. "Universal" values I am afraid are basically applicable to caring about what happens to Earth and the life upon it. At least up to now. I don't have much experience or even any stories about what is "proper behavior" outside the asteroid belt. We don't consider going by the morals of a fish or a worm or a bat. Well maybe a bat, being a mammal, we could find some common ground. But a Hezitrope on Planet M3 circling a nearby star? I doubt they would go by the same rules as us. They could come to our Earth while on a jaunt, fuel up off one of our power lines in the country, and not even stop to chat or leave payment, or even give us and our rules of behaviour a thought.

Mike Smith Cosmos, To explain a little more. I am assuming that the human developed quite in concert with the environment around him/her. To each of us, the whole world, even the whole universe is present. The shapes and changes are happening "out there", but we get all our knowledge of it, through our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. (Well most of it, I suppose the inner ear senses the gravity of the Earth and there are probably some other senses not fully acknowledged our ranked as a sense.) But why are we so intimate with something so "outside" and far away? How do we take a God's eye view, or a snapshot (reference to your other thread) and build a "complete" model of the thing that is on the outside, on the inside of our skull? In my lake surface thought, the whole of scene above the shore is apparent on the surface of the lake below the shore. This "view" would be available to someone standing next to you, as it is available to you. So the "information" coming from the surface of the lake (the light rays of a certain frequency, from a certian direction) must have existed at every point on the surface, much as a broken holographic plate contains a complete image in each of its shards. The whole of the sky and every tree and rock cloud and bird is contained on the surface. If we were standing on opposite sides of the lake, you would see me directly and you would see me in the surface, and I would see you reflected off the same small area of the lake that you are seeing me reflected off. Two examples of completely different scenes, both existing, along with the scene from any other direction on that one small surface area. So, I take information as the form being internalized into the brain, and take that small surface of the lake that contains "information" from all spherical compass points, as something like an eye. The eye focuses the rays on the back of the eye and and cells at the back of the eye, release chemicals and pulses according to the frequency in a matching way to the direction(position) and frequency(time) of the thing on the outside, and delivers it to the brain, which has facility to make of this, the whole scene, out of this information. As if projected onto a screen. The surface of the screen much larger than the skull, in fact a surface that must be as large as the world around us appears. So I considered the "folds" of the brain as a way to fit all that surface into a small space. Somewhat like the surface of a lake being folded up, into a skull. Regards, TAR2

Unless you think that no man should judge another, and that mercy and forgivness should be entertained. In which case I would have to say that that is oddly reminiscent of a book I once read, written by Mohammed and his scribes. Sorry Cladking, that was for John Cuthber, I had not seen that you posted.

John Cuthber, Well, you said yourself that people get it wrong and have to be put right by others in their society. If you are naturally moral, and they are as well, then a shunning works. Your disapproval is felt by the Prime Minister and he adjusts his behaviour accordingly. If he refuses to adjust his behavior you will have to stone him. Regards, TAR by whatever manner of stoning you find morally acceptable. Maybe with stones under 3 and 1/2 cm.

John Cuthber, You are not religious. That does not mean religion had nothing to do with your upbringing. If the question is whether you can know the difference between right and wrong, without going to church or believing in an anthropomorphic god, then I have the same answer as you do, that yes you can, because I know evil when I see it, and I attempt to be good, and I do not go to church or believe in the God of the Bible and the Koran (as therein depicted). But, I took the question as whether or not you can have morals without religion. Not as whether you can have morals without being religious. And in this, my upbringing, and that of my parents, and that of the majority of the people I speak to and read and interact with, is repleat with religious underpinnings, and I assume that any moral judgements I have come to, have not been come to without the aid of religion. So regardless of the fact that you are good and not evil, how is it that you know the difference between? Who is the judge of it? Does it not take a certain other or two, to assist in the judgement? Can you be moral if religion is taken completely out of the equation, in the historical, and societal sense? Assuming that God is a community ideal, only, and not the fellow the Bible was talking about. Regards, TAR As to the tooth fairy, it was rather a nice thing to find the quarter under my pillow, to reduce the pain and feeling of loss caused by the missing tooth. The tooth was gone from under the pillow, but I still had something in its stead. I knew at an early age that my Mom or Dad had made the exchange. I still put the teeth I lost under my pillow, and each one continued to magically change into coinage in my sleep. I continued the tradition, with my children. The Easter Bunny also visited our house in the early Morning hours of Easter. And I once was rather moved by a Easter Morning sunrise service on a beach on the L.I. sound in CT. At the time I was solidly atheist, but it was still a beautiful and meaningful moment. If you recieve a gift on Christmas morning, and it has no tag...it is from Santa. If you recieve a gift in life, and nobody in particular gave it, to whom do you ascribe the gift. Lady Luck, Mother Nature, a good soul, the Easter Bunny, fairies, Angels. What's the difference?

Except you discount religious ideas as being constituents of your own ideas of what moral behavior is. While the stories and ledgends are in many cases "untrue", by your own admission, they must have been based on the truth. The truth that both ape and man are aware of, because its true. It remains a fact that moral behavior is not automatic and needs to be judged. Inow, Cross posted. the unaddressed post was in response to John Cuthber. iNow, Well, a proper nitpick. My mistake. But both the U.S. and England have Protestant roots. Regards, TAR2 Martin Luther doesn't have nothing to do with this discussion.

Mike Smith Cosmos, I am having something similar to Ophiolite's reaction to this thread. I don't think it third or fourth rate anything though. I think its good. Second or possibly first rate something, but not readily accessible. In this, in regards to the island analogy, it's important to remember that different people, even in the same time, in the same moment, do not have their focus on the same thing. And some part of the chaos can occur, while some other part is occuring "differently". Important to remember that although the island analogy "works" on more than one level, there is more than one island going on, at a time. Regards, TAR2 Mike, A tie-in, for this thread and the ideas we have bantered about in "the lingual theory of everything" is morphology. The study of the structure of language must have analogies to our study of the structures of reality. I was thinking the other day (merging your ideas here, with your ideas in the aforementioned thread, with my own), that inorder to visualize a structure, one must freeze it in time, and have the whole thing, from one end to the other, happening at once. So when it comes to an island or a tube, there are portions that are actual and dynamic, and portions that are "frozen" in a somewhat arbitrary way, from a certain perspective, that while true, is only true temporarily from a certain perspective. When the structure persists or repeats, then we can count on it "being real" and actual. (even though it is NOT frozen into that shape.) Don't know what that says about the island analogy, but I think it says something. Regards, TAR In Physics, I understand that one cannot measure both the position and momentum of a particle, partially because the measurement is likely to disturb one or the other. In some way this indicates that one can see the structure if you freeze time, or see the motion if you freeze the structure, but you can't freeze both space and time. Doing so leaves you with nothing to say about it. Unless of course you agree on, and define the "system" or sentence you are considering, with a known subject, a known predicate and a known object. Speaking of shapes and being frozen, how about a snowflake. People have struggled to categorize them into 41 different types, each with incredible possible variations, enough so to consider that no two match exactly. The varying elements of pressure and humidity and temperature and motion during the formation of one, allow for, or cause a large range of occurances, cystal formation, melting, refreezing, branching and breakage, all to result in a snowflake, which we measure in the landscape it and its relatives create, and in inches and feet that we have to remove from the driveway.

John Cuthber, Well if the question is whether an atheist can have morals, then I went to deep with the question. I am, myself an atheist, have been for probably 40 years. It makes no sense to me that someone should deny life and desire and pleasure for the sake of a false reward or a false punishment. It is fully possible, to be "good" for the sake of real reasons, real people, real communities an real shared values, purposes and even transcendental ideas. My angle is not that religious people have it right, and non-religious people have it wrong, not that religious people have it wrong and non-religious people have it right, but that the morals we have have not "popped" in to us from our genes alone, but from a history of humans experiencing the world, and each other and coming up with some rather workable rules of behavior, that are consistent with natural needs and desires and natural behavior, but are also consistent with ever widening communal values. Not every human society has a bill of rights, and a constitution that protects the rights of the individual, while simultaneously pledges the individual to a greater goal of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The protection of the weak is a strong common thread in the U.S. and this "idea" came from the Bible. As did tithing, As did doing onto others, as you would have them do unto you. Private property rights and other "ideas" that stem from several of the ten commandments are also biblically based. These ideas are not present as the lion steals and kills the wildebeast baby. The mommy wildebeast starts to fight, but sees quickly the battle is already decided...and she moves along. Were the Bible and the Koran and whatever regilious texts other of our religions are questioned, is when they don't work, or the conclusions and way of being from the one, is contrary the tenants of another. In this we look for the commonalities and workable ideas that are consistent with ALL religions and call them the morals you can have, without having any one of the religions. But my argument would be that secular is not acheived by having no religion, but by having all of them at once. Regards, TAR2 If this is not analogous to operating under the judgement of "the one", then I'll be a monkey's uncle.

iNow, End of program? I am not in full agreement that morals must predate religion. Consider a individual. As learned in your "Religion hijacks" thread, the ability for a person to put themselves in someone elses shoes does not really develop until the age of three or four. There is some argument that our internal judge developes to some extent by having "conversations" with an unseen other, which would require at least some capacity to put oneself in someone elses shoes. If the brain area, responsible for these kinds of considerations is not yet developed in the toddlers studied for their inate moral compass, what then of the logical order? Can you have morals, prior obtaining the knowledge of good and evil? If they come hand in hand, then an inate sense of belonging, fairness, and whatever other attributes are found in babies, are building blocks of morality, that only come to fruition when a person is able to put themselves in the shoes of an unseen other. Whether that be another actual individual, or an imaginary one. In this religion comes after being a baby, but morals do as well, and most of history is made by adults, with already the capability to put themselves in the shoes of an unseen other. So, then the chicken and the egg question should be discarded if morals are both caused by religion, and religion caused by morals, and the development of each needs to be considered in the presence of the other, in the adult populations that have made history and cobbled together our societies, created our laws, and our institutions, and our transcendent values of good and evil, that exist prior to birth, during life, and continue to be entertained, after our deaths. Sam Harris provides a long list of human conflicts that religion has explicitly caused. A long list of conflicts caused by differing sets of trancendent rules of behavior. Each set, though, was a development created by and for and with large groups of inately "moral" adults. What of the "good" it took to create a unified, transcendent rule book? While I am personally the enemy of those who would blow up innocents for the non-existant seat on a Satin bench next to a river of honey, surrounded by virgins, I am also the friend of those who would kill such evil men and women, to stop them from taking innocent life. And as the history since Mohammed shows, the same rules that tend to provide moral grounds and unification, causing a strong "we" to emerge, also creates an out group of "non-believers" who become definite "thems". Based on what objective rules, could a humanist cobble together a transcendent religion, that explicitly places 80-90 percent of the "warring" populations of inately moral humans, in the "them" column? Without using the workable transcendent ideas and specific rules and laws and findings of religion. And if such a manifesto were to be described, would it be of any value if 10 percent went along and 90 percent had other ideas? Would it have to be "enforced" or would people just "naturally" agree? Regards, TAR

I don't even know how to cross myself. And I NEVER went to confession. I certainly fall way short of being morally sound in the eyes of a Catholic. I am Satan to Muslims, a WASP to everyone that isn't, a "landowner" to everyone that doesn't and so on. If I were to add up all the ways I fall short of being moral in all the eyes that see me lacking, I would be rather an immoral bastard. And I atheist to boot. Would be pretty hard to rationalize my life and behavior as being "universally" moral. John Cuthber, But if morality is set by Forum rules and UN conventions, how is that morality that can be had in some natural universal, human way, without religion? Either a person can come to morality by themselves, or they have to be led to it. Which do you figure? Regards, TAR Mohammed unified Arabs that were separated into idol worshipping, warring tribes, under the Alah banner. He had a whole host of proscriptions, that the Angel Gabriel forwarded. Why, if people are naturally moral, would he have to have told them the rules? Why did Moses have to tell the Jews, or Sidhartha have to tell his people the "right" way to be? Think carefully before you respond...just because.

John Cuthber, I worked for a company for 24 and they no longer required my services and laid me off, killed me, said I was done. I was an "at will" employee to them, but I was reliant on the salary to live. There is a slavery component in there somewhere. More than rhetorical. Much more than rhetorical. I interviewed and was hired back, by the same company 4 months later, in an other department, and am again "subject" to their whims and am required to "take care of" the paying customer. If I were to step out of line, I would be "killed" (rhetorically?). Gees, If initially its "alright" to treat non-tribe members in a sub-tribe manner, then racism is not without reason, and therefore no more immoral than slavery. Regards, TAR I went to mass with a girlfriend I had in the Army, I was not Catholic, did not know when to kneel or stand, or when to repeat what the priest said, or when to say lines that everybody else knew. I was not allowed to take communion (not that I wanted to). What was moral and proper was known to the congregation, but not to me, an outsider. I think to some extent, this is how people operate, and there are Americans, and aliens, or Ukranians and others, or people from a certain district of India and people that are not. Language, or religion, club membership or being part of a company or having a certain political affiliation, can cause insiders and outsiders. Therefore treating outsiders differently than insiders would more or less have to be expected of everybody, and therefore could not be an immoral act, on a universal morality scale. Regards, TAR

John Cuthber, But slavery is not a completely objective truth. I was thinking a few months ago about how most of us are actually willing slaves. Looking at the history of America, we had outright slaves on the plantations, then somewhat slaves in the coal mines and iron works, with the company stores that commanded the wages of the worker, and now most of us are still obligated to the bank, through our mortgages and credit cards. And even those of us, not in debt, need to work a forty hour week to pay the electric and fuel and insurance and food and cable bills. (and taxes). In this, the subjects of any intermidiate master, are somewhat willing subjects, and therefore not slaves. Depending on your subjective definition of such. There would be an argument, based on the homosexuality of the greeks, that the "giver" was the master, and the "taker" was the slave. Dominance and recessivity takes two parties, and the dynamics are complicated when you talk about groups where many are subject to one, or one is subject to many. Or where you can find examples, in any individual's situation, of where they are the master and where they are the slave, and where there is willingness, or unwillingness, agreement or revolt. In regards to religion, as a set of moral standards, it seems somewhat good to be subject to the standards themselves and not anybody in particular. That this can be metaphorically considered as having God as your judge, does not require that God is anybody in particular. Regards, TAR