Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Moonhead
Myself, I've always found the notion that Religion is the only possible basis for morality incredibly offensive.
Rats eat their young, if they think the amount of food available won't cover all of them. It makes perfect empirical sense, given the a priori assumption (i.e. article of conscience; what some, like me, would call an article of faith or belief, in that it is a given, not an observable) that every life is valuable and that this value is equal between individuals, in which case it comes down to math.
I'm going to hazard a guess that rats don't have religion.
Would you find it somewhat offensive if I get two kids, rack up some debt and then eat one of the kids (recycle the protein, fat and nutrients) so as to make sure that the other one can get by on what I have left?
How about if I say we should institute a prognom in Africa to take the population down to what level their current model of agriculture could support indefinitely, and make sure it stays there by killing off any surplus offspring?
Is it going to change the answer if I suggest the killing happen before birth?
If so, why?
No religious answers, please, so as to- by your argument- avoid anything morally incredibly offensive. And since K raised the issue: let's go one step further and say your answer must be scientifically founded, not founded in the humanities, belief systems or other a priori givens, as those are characteristic of religions (which are collections of same, along with metaphors, laws and history).
Science is a nice tool. I prefer to decide what task I put my tools to for myself, though, rather than letting the tools handle themselves. I alone decide what is moral by my own metric, and a society effects densification and cooperative gain by introducing laws that require moralities to have a certain level of compatibility.
That's higher level structure formation, a process that one can trace from the hypothetical subplanckian scale and up: the human mind, at its most coherent, is essentially a 350feV excitation, corresponding to a temperature of 8K or so, which is "some" orders of magnitude below say the electroweak transition at about a dozen octillion degrees, but presumably hotter than 'god' if 'he' obeys relativistic speed limits. Pun intended, of course.
From a human perspective, a question might be: should I be dealing with you, or yetanothernon, a particle that will likely disintegrate and reform in the local vacuum of your mind over the next few hours, as a quasiperiodic event that repeats until that system has reached equilibrium with its environment in an inglorious approximation of nirvana?
While I can acquire the math to do the latter, I prefer the former.
And religion does not have a monopoly of the incredibly offensive, or even the incredibly stupid. We do (humans). Religion just has a tendency to accumulate it because there are no checks or balances in the vast majority of religious groups. Which may be why Christianity, much as Judaism before it, proposed such checks and balances. Of course, those aren't too compatible with being a church/state union striving for dominance, so out they went and have yet to return. An oft criticized fact, that, and not without reason.
But a very human fact, derived from a very human process; cf. my tagline.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Abortion and Religion - 
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