Can a person have morals

I'm no atheist but my educated guess would be the human conscience.

 

Human conscience. Wonder how evolution would explain that?

 

It's all the environment yuo are brought up in. I was brought up in a very loving and caring family.....just that there ws not much religion. My grandfather was a fanatical Jehova's Witness, and he tried to get us to have bible studies, but I didn't believe it.

I think it's interesting that you say that you need the influence of the bible and the supposed god to make you do the right thing....why would you need some outside source to let you know what is wrong or right? To me, it's mostly common sense.

 

humans don't actually work so well as individuals -- it's when you have societies that humans do well. you can't have societies without people behaving. conscience is what facilitates that.

 

It seems to me that anyone who has "morals" that we typically think of such as "do unto to others as you would have them do unto you" or "respect and do not harm others" is simply partially accepting religion. The ideals they hold came to them from some religious source. It may not be direct but someone taught them right from wrong and if you trace that back far enough it came from religion.

If you were to drop some new borns on a deserted island and they somehow survived to adulthood I doubt they would develop a morality system that is anywhere close to our own. If you look at the tribes that did and prehaps still do exist in the remote jungles of our world they have a very different set of morals. They think it is ok to kill and eat other humans in some cases.

If you reject religion then if you are consistent then you must reject morality in the traditional sense. I think what is really happening is that people are cherry picking what they want from religion. For example "Do not steal, Do not murder" those are good I agree with them "Do not committ adultery, Do not committ fornication" I disagree with them so I will throw them out.

 

That goes for about 90% of Christians I know too.

 

ummm.... no.

i believe religion came about to re-enforce morality, not to invent it. if you don't need the robes, tales, group hugs, etc. to be moral, then great.

you make it sound as tho christianity has the market cornered on morality and if somebody does something moral, that is not a measure of their morality, but a measure of just how much christianity they've accepted. it's a very egocentric view.

 

Of course they can have morals. Just as people with strong Christian backgrounds can be taught immoral things by well intentioned people, like the openly Christian, openly bigoted people I grew up with.

The obvious point, of course, is to stop stereotyping one way or the other. If a guy from "up north" is an obnoxious prick, he's an obnoxious prick because he's an obnoxious prick. That should have no bearing on how you treat others with similar geographic backgrounds. Just as one minority who commits a crime is indicative of nothing of that minority as a whole, and so on. It should all go without saying, and yet it's apparently human nature to group negatively, and to judge without reason.


Religion can and should teach morals. Religion can and should teach openness, love, and compassion, rather than judging and disdain/condescension. I know plenty of people who look down on Christians, Christianity, and God for the actions of a small few misguided people, and the irony is that those people are willingly turning that same action back upon a greater number because of the initial action.

 

No idea. Empirical systems aren't equipped to tackle those kinds of questions.

 

So it is your claim that natural selection was somehow aware that societies would exist?