Quote:
Originally Posted by cardboard adolescent
That's not my argument at all though. My argument has nothing to do with how we obtain a "moral sense," but rather how we justify that moral sense. My argument is that without a principle higher than oneself, such as God, there is no way to ground moral principles. I don't think it's valid to take the higher principle as being societal values because an idea does not become more valid just because two people believe it instead of one. The validity of an idea has to come from within itself, and this is impossible if we simply create ideas for the sake of convenience.
Because of the society we live in, most people aren't driven to commit murder or other "evil" acts. Thus, saying that something is evil because most people aren't inclined to do it isn't enough. The problem is what can stop a person from murder once they find themselves in a situation that pushes them towards it? Because we find ourselves in a culture of moral relativism it becomes much easier to abandon morality once we find it's not the simplest way of dealing with a situation.
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I did know what you meant, but the problem with your argument is that it assumes that a god (or a higher power) is the reason we think of certain things as being "wrong" rather than just not doing them to watch out for ourselves. As I said before, much of the morality taught in the Bible was taught long before Jesus' time, when gods that are now considered "mythology" were believed in. If those gods were completely man made, the moral sense was as well. Whether we had a moral sense and then decided to explain it with the idea of a god or gods is irrelevant to the argument. Of course we explained what we did not know with what we
imagined to be the case, but it doesn't change anything here on Earth. Living happily ever after is plenty enough justification for human beings to be good.
You may not realize it, but your argument does lead to the idea that without a belief in god, people wouldn't have any conception of what's right and what's wrong. Unfortunately that is incorrect, and I'm living proof of that. The fact that my parents or their parents were brought up Christian or not doesn't matter - I don't have a belief in any higher power to help ground my moral principles, and I have as good or better a moral sense than your average theist.
People will always choose what's right and what's wrong based on the situation. The Bible says we shouldn't kill, but that rule seems to be pretty flexible. As I've probably posted before, this quote pretty accurately summarizes my idea of religion's role in society:
“With or without [religion] you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”
I think you're making the idea of human morality much too complicated. Don't assume that we
need a higher power to justify being good - there's plenty of evidence to show that's not the case.