Posts Tagged ‘ morality ’

Maybe the idea that people will lose their morality when they lose their religions says more about the religion?

The response to trauma is instinctual, even if our instinctual responses are wired individually. God evolved our species’ instincts to do something fast –flee, fight, or freeze — because the lethal nature of most of the dangers that killed humans throughout history is immediately perceptible and requires immediate response. Instincts don’t do as well when [...]

For me, as a conservative Mormon guy living in Washington state, the 2012 elections were rough in a number of ways, starting from the top down: Romney lost the election.  I had spent a year volunteering for his campaign and truly thought he had a good chance of winning.  He nearly pulled it off, but [...]

“There is but one Lord of the Ring, and he does not share power!” — Gandalf to Saruman. Hawkgrrrl recently summarized Jonathan Haidt’s thesis, expressed in The Righteous Mind, of how people develop pronounced liberal or conservative tendencies as a combination of both genetics and experience (see here). I also wrote about Haidt’s ideas about how [...]

How do people form their political views?  Many people assume it’s based on how you are raised (e.g. Democrats raise Democrats), your life experiences (e.g. a factory closed in your home town), or which party serves your interests (e.g. rich people are Republicans).   Would you be surprised to find that there is a genetic [...]

As an American living in Asia, I often encounter cultural disconnects.  A peer or friend will make a comment that is so obviously based on assumptions or values I don’t share that I realize that my own values and assumptions must sound equally foreign to them. A few months ago, one of my co-workers in [...]

“Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness. It’s not fairness as equality of outcome. It’s fairness as karma — the idea that good deeds lead to good outcomes, and bad [...]

The laws that govern normal behavior on earth (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill”) do not apply in heaven, because there they are unnecessary. The laws that govern normal behavior on earth also do not apply in hell, because there no one can hope to keep them. I am not the first to notice that “war [...]

Is morality subjective or objective?  Is there a universal morality?  Are all “current” moralities subject to later correction?  Morality is often confused with the “norm” or unquestioned cultural assumptions or personal beliefs and preferences.  This is apparent to us when someone else’s view of “morality” clashes with our own or when we view opinions from past [...]

As an insulin-dependent diabetic for more than 47 years, I’ve had to become far more familiar with numbers measuring my medical condition than I’d ever wanted. By my teenage years, I knew what glucose readings meant in regard to how soon and what I had to eat, or how much insulin I needed to inject, [...]

Today is another joint post by jmb275 and Hawkgrrrl.  Some of the comments in the post about decriminalizing pot also referenced the possible implications of decriminalizing prostitution, an even more divisive issue.  The underlying arguments seem similar:  these are “illegal” activities that inevitably crop up in society, it could be argued that consensual sex (involving an exchange [...]