Ash Burton wrote:

RogueShenanigans wrote: @jackfrost - My argument in that post was that religion builds from morality rather than vise versa. (My overall point being that values and morality can exist very easily without religion) People imprint thier own values onto a diety and in turn these values must be correct because they are what thier God would have wanted. Westbro Baptist's do not hate gays because they are Christians, these kids do not need Christianity to make them decent. Read this: Very interesting look at were exactly morality comes from penned by one of the greatest minds of all time.

I've not read that book, so I can't make particular arguments against it.

As a pre-emptive argument based on the cover, I would like to note that morality also developed in other parts of the world without the presence of christianity and occasionally without the assumption of a deity proper, and that western morality developed as a work in progress, often in response to charitable humanistic demands and in certain cases even opposed to the key text.

And CS Lewis could hardly be called the greatest minds of anything. A intelligent and charming man who wrote a pretty good children's book series, but lets not elevate him too high.

Darwin's Ghost the rabbit and Syd and a few others are playing "Amateur Eugenicist" and its making me angry.

EVOLUTION DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT

The reason we don't practice people breeding is two-fold. The first is people are notoriously ill-equipped to decide whats a good goal and whats not due to self-preference and a lack of effective information.

Okay Syd this'll get you on my side in a hurry- imagine if you will that standard breeding produces people like a more or less free market. Imagine eugenics as a big government program trying to decide what makes a good person or not. When Russia set quotas for shoes, they picked what they thought would be a good benchmark quality and what wouldn't. They picked leather used, and ended up with the thickest soles in the world. Then they picked number of shoes, and ended up with a surplus of childrens and other small sizes. In all instances quality dipped a huge amount at the end of the month when the quotas were due. Imagine people produced like that. Hell, even imagine people produced like dogs, with their myriad of genetic deficiencies and health issues and general overspeciation.

The second is we have a innate sense of morality, that under good psychological health and free from malignant influences is repulsed by certain things like ingroup killing, incest, harming children, stealing, lying, and cheating on a partner. I'm pretty sure and its been demonstrated to an extent that morality comes from evolutionary lines (there are even more examples than tyop or rogue mentioned, like the forceful benevolence of certain species of birds). Its pretty universal though, so if your inclined you could attribute it to a soul of sorts. Religion itself doesn't seem like the cause, other than a mutual desire to develop a moral structure and explain the mysteries of the universe.

Crap, outta time, be back to finish up on this.