What are your views on where morals come from?
On going conversation at my local coffee shop. Are morals an innate or man-made? Do you think that morals are given to us by a higher power? If so, do you have to be a religious person to be a moral person?
Or, are do we as humans define our morals?
Being one of the few non-religious people that goes there regularly, naturally I argue for man-made. It came up when in another conversation I let it be known that I don't believe in God or the devil, heaven or hell, etc. One guy asked what keeps me from doing wrong. I told him that you dont have to be religious to have morals, he disagreed. Thus the conversation started.
I see morals as a culture based, man-made, collective agreement. They may not be a written code, and frequently they are (laws, rules), but regardless, not handed to us by God. A lot of these morals may be found in religion, but lets face it, those books were written by man.
If they were in fact innate or handed down by god, then would not every culture contain the same morals with no differences? and wouldnt morals have stayed completely unchanged since whatever belief you subscribe to was started? some of them argue that they have, but anybody that can look through history can see that there is a constant shift in what is moral and what is not. Imagine a woman in the 1700's dressed as women do now, would be considered indecent and immoral behavior.
some of the guys have decided to make their point by trying to put this in with the creation/evolution argument and asking if its not from god, then when and how did they come about? then since you cant answer that question definitively and cannot provide evidence of all species originating from one organism (not just humans from primates but all the way to the core beginning) that obviously they are from god.
any way, thats the jist of it, im sure im forgetting a lot that I can add later, but I figured it would be an interesting one to put here and see what else is brought up.
On going conversation at my local coffee shop. Are morals an innate or man-made? Do you think that morals are given to us by a higher power? If so, do you have to be a religious person to be a moral person?
Or, are do we as humans define our morals?
Being one of the few non-religious people that goes there regularly, naturally I argue for man-made. It came up when in another conversation I let it be known that I don't believe in God or the devil, heaven or hell, etc. One guy asked what keeps me from doing wrong. I told him that you dont have to be religious to have morals, he disagreed. Thus the conversation started.
I see morals as a culture based, man-made, collective agreement. They may not be a written code, and frequently they are (laws, rules), but regardless, not handed to us by God. A lot of these morals may be found in religion, but lets face it, those books were written by man.
If they were in fact innate or handed down by god, then would not every culture contain the same morals with no differences? and wouldnt morals have stayed completely unchanged since whatever belief you subscribe to was started? some of them argue that they have, but anybody that can look through history can see that there is a constant shift in what is moral and what is not. Imagine a woman in the 1700's dressed as women do now, would be considered indecent and immoral behavior.
some of the guys have decided to make their point by trying to put this in with the creation/evolution argument and asking if its not from god, then when and how did they come about? then since you cant answer that question definitively and cannot provide evidence of all species originating from one organism (not just humans from primates but all the way to the core beginning) that obviously they are from god.
any way, thats the jist of it, im sure im forgetting a lot that I can add later, but I figured it would be an interesting one to put here and see what else is brought up.