Why do right?

So doing 'right' is just pure dumb luck? That is interesting! Just let us say, that all gods aside, if you think anything is MEANT to be, you might as well just say 'godditit'. Maybe not the Xian God, maybe not Jesus, etc., but you ARE acknowledging a higher power. If it is all evolution, and genetics/survival is as high of a power as you get, then fine. I would be bored with that. I am not afraid, kuresu. I do right because it is right, because it makes sense (sometimes) because I love people. I call these things 'God'. If you read what Phat siad, you will see. People who are not able to grow up loving themselves and being loved, are not able to love others. The saying is 'do to others what you would do to yourself'.

you're conflating some things here.I do the "right" thing because it is the right thing to do.that has no bearing on what "right" is.I help people (the "right" thing) because it is the right thing to do.
see what I mean?also, "it just is" is a reason. it's just a hell of a lot more abstract than "because my mother told me so". the latter is the easy way out, in my opinion. it's attached to something concrete, something "real". "it just is" is not attached to something "real". you can't define what "right" is in the second part of the phrase. just like you can't really define "political science". you can, but noone agrees. one addition: . . ., if he does exist.

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doing right is not pure dumb luck. luck is what happens when I can sink two balls at the pool table at once. luck is what happens when Civ4 gives me a good start.very little is "meant to be". doing right is not "meant to be", at least, in how I understand the phrase. It's just something you should do, and its something you have control over. hence, luck doesn't play in, neither does "meant to be" (which in itself is sometimes luck--like meeting the right woman).and luck/fate/evolution aren't higher powers.

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I am not sure you can think in concepts. At least your posts have not shown me that. Why do you do what the right thing to do is? You can't keep going in circles like this. Do you do it to fit in? Do you do it to avoid jail? Think about this; if I am late picking up my kids from the babysitter's, I can lie and say something big happened, or I can tell the truth and say I was having fun. Which would you do, and why? Is it right to make everything fine by lying and saying I had a flat tire? Or is it right to tell the truth and lose my sitter? Where is the evolution, the dumb luck, the law, the mother? Where is my peer review to tell me what is right? Where is the survival instinct? You mean, the popular thing? I don't see at all. You are telling me what is right but not why it is right. Well, then what does? Your opinion? Someone else's opinion? You need to make sense. This is your thread. If something 'just is' is it so abstract that you may want to call it God. None of you people have given me any reason or example of how you can know what is right by 'it just is'. I agree it is 'just is', because God made it so. What made it right for you?When your mother tells you not to do something, it is attached to something concrete. You most often will hurt yourself. If she tells you something stupid like 'don't eat eggs until 5 pm', you can decide to ignore it when you are old enough. Do you think all religious people are walking around with their common sense tucked in their back-pocket? Some might be, but I am sure even you follow the rules your mother gave you when you are in her house. Edited by anastasia, : No reason given.

If doing right is just something you should do, again, why?I aksed you if you ever feel something is 'meant to be'. You say little is meant to be. I invite you to tell your future husband or wife that meeting them was just dumb luck. It is not that romantic. Besides, if everything is just dumb luck, how do you know a woman is 'right'?

"Why" is irrelevant. The point is that we do.We feel hunger and thirst and we can make those feelings go away. Those feelings have a bearing on our survival.Empathy has a bearing on our survival too. Sometimes we can make the feeling go away by doing what's "right". Who says it has no meaning?(By the way, I like your avatar. That's exactly the way I pictured you. )

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I don't think Jesus ever "abandoned" religion. I think He was against religion from the start.Jesus' "My God, my God" speech demonstrates how human He was - human enough to question God.

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I can tell you why I do what I think it right: doing things that I feel to be wrong makes me feel bad.Granted, this is a self-centred system, but given that empathy and morality are (at least partly) innate, and so I don't need threat of punishment or a set of Ten Commandments to gain my all of morality, it works. That would be affirming the consequent. If that's not clear, let's have another example: I hope you can agree that this is unfalsifiable - No matter what occurs, fate rigged it - so makes a very bad theory.

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"Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will." (Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.) - Arthur Schopenhauer

(Easy one first The avatar is of course not me. I had wanted to do something original, but that entails more work. Since anastasia means resurrection in Greek, the butterfly is a propo, and the human half butterfly even more so.See, I like dealing with you, and you have given me insight to how to deal with others. Pick apart the argument anyway you can. The question is 'why do some need God to tell them what is right?' I am saying I do not need a God Manual in my back-pocket to refer to. I do however blame 'right' ultimately on God, and the inability to determine 'why' I call 'God'. Think about it. If there was an answer to the question, 'why do what is right', other than kuresu's 'because', we wouldn't really be having this discussion. This topic keeps resurfacing because NO ONE KNOWS. If you tell me 'why' is irrelevent, that is fine, but you are not helping me to replace God. You are leaving room for God, rather than filling in the space. Simply satiating a need does not show that it is a survival mechanism. You can't say 'we eat, and when we finish, we are full' in the same breath as 'we open doors for others, and when we finish, we are full'. One bears directly on our survival, the other doesn't. There are many things that we do that bear upon the survival of somthing more than our bodies. Poetry, for example. Or music. They satisfy parts of us that go way beyond survival. Well, what IS the meaning? What is the point of right and wrong, sin and righteousness? If you keep evading the question with another question, you are leaving room for my God. I will not make the mistake of others in assuming that you have not filled that void.Edited by anastasia, : No reason given.

Good, then you should have no problem understanding the idea of a complete human being a complete God.

Why? WHY does it make you feel bad? You are not answering the question. Why does 'right' feel 'right', why does 'wrong' feel 'wrong'? Switch 'em as you like, but answer the question. If you are not afraid of God, why oh why be afraid of yourself?As to 'fate', 'luck', etc. I don't know what it means to find the 'right' person. I have thought about that in my adolescent years. If the right person dies, is there another? Why is the right person always within reach, and not buried on the other side of the world? The point is, we believe that true love is meant to be. If we don't, it is a product of our environment, our limited choices, our 'neediness' and our personal state in life where we just 'want' to believe. I have good reasons to believe my love was 'planned', not perfect of course, but just looking at my children I can say they were 'meant to be'. We need that in our lives. We NEED the feeling of magic, no matter how we define it. I would not like a life without it.

You're just about the only one around here who thinks I'm trying to be helpful. Actually, it's more like I'm asking, "Are you sure there's a space there?"I'm susceptible to night blindness (which is why I haunt the streets at High Noon ). Sometimes when I'm out in the dark, I have the distinct feeling that there's a deep hole right in front of me. I know it isn't there, but it's still (dare I say it?) "tangible".I suspect that the "space" you sense could similarly be filled in by a good dose of light. I think you can (though it's a different kind of "fullness"). That's why I drew the parallel between the two. Directly. Indirectly. What's the difference? I was thinking more in terms of "survival of the species". The meaning is whatever we make it to be. We don't need a Celestial Spook to tell us what our meaning is. In a sense, that's the antithesis of meaning - a "meaning" that we can't understand. I have a feeling there will always be room for your God.You seem unwilling to turn on the light.

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Could not empathy and compassion be useful for survival? There are the obvious ways, such as if you cooperate with someone you (usually) have a better chance of survival than if you hurt them. So, we open a door for someone in the hope that they will do something good for us when they have the chance, and to form a bond to ensure cooperation. While it may inhibit our survival at this minute to make the effort to help another, in another minute we could reap the benefits. Thus, we feel good when helping people, because those who felt bad or indifferent when helping people didn't reap aforementioned benefits of cooperation. Just because a behaviour isn't of any survival value, or inhibits survival, doesn't mean it can't evolve. The favourite example of this is moths flying into flames. It is a by-product of something that does have survival value: keeping a light source at a fixed acute angle.I could say the same sort of thing about music and poetry. Music and poetry may be a by-product of our innate 'wiring' for the spoken and written word respectively.

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"Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will." (Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.) - Arthur Schopenhauer

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.

Hello, iceage! I have a quick question for you. Can you speculate how far brain evolution will go? In other words, is evolution in a species ever complete? Is it ever finished?Am I still evolving? Will there ever be a time when I am finished evolving?