Why do right?

It is late but I wanted to make a quick point.Humans are social animals - no escaping this fact.One often feels good about doing an altrustic deed because of our social constitution that has surprisingly been forged in hellish furnace of selfish interests. This is notable.One feels good about doing a good deed because it registers with our social or ethical makeup. Religion is not required to explain or accentuate this feeling or response - there are evolutionary explanations that explain the value of forming alliances within social constructs and even explain empathy and compassion. As complexity evolves the value of nonzero sum transactions increase. I don't have time or room here to expound on this right now and it is late.The ability to feel the experience of others in your own consciousness is one of the great accomplishments of brain evolution.That may sound horribly reductionist and depressing. However, I think the opposite is true, if not exciting and hopeful.I believe that empathy and compassion are products of intelligence and self-aware consciousness. Empathy is an emergent property of intelligent life just like complex molecules are an emergent property of chemistry. Ethics based on empathy are built into the system.If the game of life on earth was rerun it is unlikely that humans would result, but I believe the property of empathy for others and fellow creatures would emerge in a species that achieved our level of consciousness. I also think that if we encounter extraterrestrial life they would have this property - perhaps even more developed and uniformly distributed and they would view us like we look at other primates and see examples of inchoate altruism.Edited by iceage, : No reason given.

No idea. However, I have a hunch that the future course will be far more interesting than we can ever imagine.

You say this with a smiley so i am not sure what you believe.However I did find your comment that religion allows you to survive interesting if not alarming. Can you elaborate?

Oh good. My detector is out for repair. Keep in mind, you have to integrate into your theory that numerous "lower" animals have what we would call a moral compass in lesser and varying degrees.

Can you elaborate on this or did I miss it in a prior post? Birds can be quite intelligent - of course they can also be bird brains. Sounds like you focusing in on choice and guilt as the unique component of human morality that is missing in animals, is that it?As far as feeling guilty goes I know when my dog would do something "wrong" like peeing on the floor or getting into the cake left on the table she would exhibit mannerism that one can only attribute to guilt.

Interesting observation. Thanks for sharing it.I guess the whole point in this is that we see inchoate forms of morality, emapthy and compassion in "lower" animals. Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that these same behaviors that are exhibited in humans are only different by degree.I believe that these qualities are an emergent property of intelligence...In the same way, that life is an emergent property of chemistry and chemistry is an emergent property of atomic level behaviors....Extra-terrestrial life that is more intelligent and advanced than us, may look at us like you are now looking at animals - with a sense of moral superiority and sense of specialness.They may view our amoral (immoral?) carnivorous ways, scientific animal testing and industrial farming practices with horror and conclude that we are not spirit filled and outside of gods concern.

Precisely! Welcome to the agnostic way of thinking.The Bible, the sacraments, the traditions, the fallible male hierarchy, the sordid history, the misogynistic agenda, the inconsistent philosophy, the absurd myths don't even come close to a reasonable criteria to proving that the invisible blood thirsty angry guy in the sky of the bible is god.

Yes I noticed that.However your response to my message Message 138 was tangential and unclear so it was hard to follow exactly what you were trying to say, speaking for myself of course. (ps I am being biblical here in that I am alluding to the fact the male fallibility is ultimately due to female weakness , joke , joke ok?)Let me try again. You believe that our moral sense of right/wrong was given to us by this being call God and described specifically (and uniquely?) in the bible. That this moral sense is not something that can result from nature, red in tooth and claw.I say poppycock! The roots of human ethical propensities can be found in varying degrees in the animal world. This is becoming increasingly well documented in the past few decades.Furthermore an advanced form of extra-terrestrial life or even the forms of life that spring from the H. Sapiens will look back at our crude ethics with the same dismissal that we view ethics within the animal world. I am not talking about God, a being that I presume did not originate via a evolutionary path.I am saying that the course of evolution will eventually give emergence to a ethic that is not primarily centered around our species.I was responding to your statements that put humans on a pedestal as being special and that this is obviously due to some impartation from God.