Changes

i think that if the bible was the one true moral authority (and God being omnipotent) then empathy would not exist, because it would be unnecessary and humans would just do as the bible instructed without having conflict. Since that is obviously not the case Christianity cannot have its cake and eat it too.  Ultimately i believe that this all goes back to the concept that Good isn't Good without Bad.  If bad things did not occur then good would just be the way things are.  I think that the argument that its a test from God has become recognized as ludicrous. [[User:superstudent|superstudent]]12:31, 9 October 2008

i think that if the bible was the one true moral authority (and God being omnipotent) then empathy would not exist, because it would be unnecessary and humans would just do as the bible instructed without having conflict. Since that is obviously not the case Christianity cannot have its cake and eat it too.  Ultimately i believe that this all goes back to the concept that Good isn't Good without Bad.  If bad things did not occur then good would just be the way things are.  I think that the argument that its a test from God has become recognized as ludicrous. [[User:superstudent|superstudent]]12:31, 9 October 2008

I'm a materialistic atheist and thought it might be interesting to point out how science can address all the issues on this page.  Yes, I believe morals are real and exist even if you claim God as a typical conservative might define him is not real.  They are created by natural materialistic mechanical properties of the universe we live in.  They exist, and are created on at least 3 different levels which are each important in their own way to us.  They all tie back to the all important question at the heart of this issue which is what is right, and where does it come from?  The simple conservative answer it that it comes from God. I think that answer is actually correct even though I'm a atheist because I translate the classic definition of God into one which is consistent with my scientific knowledge.  Which brings me to the top level source of all morality.  That's Evolution and survival.  To me, the universe is my God (not the first cause of the universe, but simply the entire universe as it exists and has it has always existed).  And that God created me by the process of evolution. And that God instilled in me, a desire to survive - a purpose of surviving.  I care, because I was built by a process (my God's work) that designed me to care about my survival.  I am around, because I am part of something that has manged to survive - which includes both the human race (all people), and the entire ecosystem of the earth that supports us, and the rest of life here.  We do what we are built to do, and we are built to survive as part of this ecosystem we exist in.  All forms of morality, and all questions of what is right, ultimately have grown out of this top level process that exists in the universe and which created us.  But, as is well documented in other parts of Conservapedia - creating a morality based on survival can lead to great evil.  So how can I justify that survival is the source of all morality?  The great evil emerges when the idea of survival is used to justify great selfishness.  That's where the mistake is made.  Humans can not survive by being selfish.  Hitler is the poster boy for failure to understand that his best odds of survival, was not created by his great selfishness (kill all jews just because he didn't like Jews).  He died, alone, in his bunker, with most the world hating him, for having made such a huge error.  The true powers of evolution killed him for his mistake.  I would say God killed him for his mistake.  But that is only the top level of morality.  Moving on, I have to introduce the next level.  That level is created by the way the human brain works.  Humans are reinforcement learning machines.  These types of machines have an internal generated reward signal that creates the machines personal motivations.  This hardware, which was built into us by the process of evolution, is what creates our personal needs, motivations, and drives.  It is what forces us to run from the things that cause us pain, and seek out the things that cause us pleasure.  It's what love is - the desire we all have to seek that which causes us pleasure and that which helps us avoid pain.  The very long and slow process of evolution, adjusts in humans, what our base motivations are - what we naturally love and hate.  What base motivations we have, in general, exist in us, because they have worked over the eons to keep the human species alive.  Not just to keep the individual alive, but to keep the human race as a whole alive, and to keep our selfish genes alive.  So though with our ability to reason, and do science, we have uncovered that our desires grow from the top level need of survival, what really motivates each of us individually, is not survival directly, but instead, the built-in drives that happen to have been created in us by our genetic heritage.  Most humans have very similar drives and motivations.  We hate to not have food, to not be able to sleep, to be too cold, to be too hot, to have our body damaged, we like sex, and many smells, and the taste of many foods - all because these desires are built into us at birth.  But we are not all the same.  Some people have a few innate likes, and dislikes, that are different - and even hard to understand - like homosexuality.  Is homosexuality bad for survival?  Clearly, if all humans had such a drive, the human race would die off in a few generations, and that would be counter to the need to survive.  But we don't fully understand why some people are born with this drive.  A answer that could be quite simple, is that it's genetically difficult to build into the sexual drives needed for survival, while never getting the "programming" wrong and misdirecting that drive to the same sex, instead of to the opposite sex.  In other words, as long as the drive is towards the opposite in the majority of people, the fact that our genetic system of reproduction produces a same-sex drive at times is mostly harmless.  The needs to have a sexual drive, and the need to have variation in reproduction, might be far more important to the survival of our species, than the need to not have some percentage of the population turn out to be homosexual.  But what we can speculate, is that since it's here in such numbers, it exists for some reason, which is beneficial for our survival as a species.  But all this is simply pointing out that though our high level purpose is survival, each of our brains are built with a far simpler purpose - which is to serve the innate desires and drives which are genetically built into us.  When those innate drives make us do things that work well at surviving, our innate drives tend to be passed on to future generations.  When our innate drives fail to keep us alive - which is what happens when someone eats themselves to death at an early age - the simple process of evolution works to prune those drives from our population.  As individuals, we are slaves to our innate drives, far more so than we are slaves to the our God and the process of survival that created us.  So what is "Right" for an individual, is really defined by what innate drives they have genetically built into them.  We say, people must follow their heart.  This really means that people must follow their own innate drives - if not, they will never be happy.  But if your individual drives are at odds with the views of the society you live in, life will always be difficult for you.  Finding personal happiness will be hard.  Which brings us to the third level of morality - and the one that's really the most important here in Conservapedia.  The human brain is not just limited to dealing, and serving it's innate drives.  The human brain is a learning machine that has very strong adaptive powers.  It adapts to the environment it is placed in.  That's the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate.  A very important part of that adaptation, is the way we learn secondary reinforcers.  We _learn_ what we need to love, and hate, in order to best serve our prime innate motivations.  This learning is not a choice we have - it's not part of our free will as we might say.  It happens automatically whether we like it or not.  It's a subconscious effect that exists in us.  We learn to love our family because of what they have done for us - such as feeding and protecting us for years as we grew up.  Our subconscious learns what we must do to protect the things we love. If we grow up in a family that rejects anyone that doesn't go to church, we too learn to love going to church - because the act protects our standing in our family - which is so important to our prime needs.  Though we might have such thoughts at the conscious level where we debate such things with ourselves using the logic and language - the real work happens subconsciously shaping our secondary motivations without our awareness of it happening.  It just does.  We absorb the beliefs of the people that have been (and which we believe will continue to be) important to us.  These beliefs become almost as important to us, as our innate prime motivations.  And they form the third and most important level of morals.  They are in fact, the best description of our morals - they are our prime beliefs that guide our decisions and actions in life.  These beliefs are not the beliefs that are genetically created in us by evolution, but instead, the beliefs we learn from our society.  A typical religion is filled with these sorts of learned beliefs about what is right and wrong and Conservapedia is filled with these beliefs - beliefs that are so important to a large set of people, that it motivated them to create Conservapedia.  The ultimate answer to what is a "good" belief, and what is a "bad" belief all ties back to what helps us as a person, as a race, and as an ecosystem, survive.  The answers are seldom easy.  But one simple way to find "good" answers, is the way evolution finds them - by the test of time.  The longer a belief  can survive, the better it must be for helping survival.  Our beliefs are subject to the same forces of evolution that our genes are.  Good beliefs help people survive - who then share them with their friends and family - who survive to pass them on.  We can roughly measure the power and value of a moral belief, by its age.  Religions beliefs tend to be very old.  And that age is the proof of their value.  They are beliefs that have helped many people survive - they are here today - because of their survival value.  There are many beliefs from the Bible however that haven't survived into our modern times.  Times change, and beliefs that once worked to help survival in the past, can stop working as society changes.  But religion in general is still going strong, and though some of that can be explained as momentum (good ideas from the past can take a long time to die out after their value fades) most of what survives has to be seen as "good" simply because it has survived - it's passed the ultimate test of time (so far).  Why a given belief is good, is often too complex for us to really fully understand (I could say God's ways our beyond our understanding and be consistent with my definition of God).  So to sum all this up.  Yes, morals are real whether or not you choose to believe in a first-cause God.  They are created by the process of evolution acting on three different levels.  The top level being the pure survival of the fittest.  The second level, is the innate drives built into us by our genetics - which themselves evolve by the forces of evolution.  And the third level, our learned behaviors - our beliefs - our memes - passed from human to human (our memes) which also live, and die, based on their powers of survival, and more important, their ability to help _us_ survive as individuals, as societies, as a race, and as an living ecosystem here on earth.  What we each chose for our own morals are not so important in the grand scale of things.  But if we choose the wrong ones, we will each have to answer to our own God. [[User:curtwelch|curtwelch]] 7 December 2009

I'm a materialistic atheist and thought it might be interesting to point out how science can address all the issues on this page.  Yes, I believe morals are real and exist even if you claim God as a typical conservative might define him is not real.  They are created by natural materialistic mechanical properties of the universe we live in.  They exist, and are created on at least 3 different levels which are each important in their own way to us.  They all tie back to the all important question at the heart of this issue which is what is right, and where does it come from?  The simple conservative answer it that it comes from God. I think that answer is actually correct even though I'm a atheist because I translate the classic definition of God into one which is consistent with my scientific knowledge.  Which brings me to the top level source of all morality.  That's Evolution and survival.  To me, the universe is my God (not the first cause of the universe, but simply the entire universe as it exists and has it has always existed).  And that God created me by the process of evolution. And that God instilled in me, a desire to survive - a purpose of surviving.  I care, because I was built by a process (my God's work) that designed me to care about my survival.  I am around, because I am part of something that has manged to survive - which includes both the human race (all people), and the entire ecosystem of the earth that supports us, and the rest of life here.  We do what we are built to do, and we are built to survive as part of this ecosystem we exist in.  All forms of morality, and all questions of what is right, ultimately have grown out of this top level process that exists in the universe and which created us.  But, as is well documented in other parts of Conservapedia - creating a morality based on survival can lead to great evil.  So how can I justify that survival is the source of all morality?  The great evil emerges when the idea of survival is used to justify great selfishness.  That's where the mistake is made.  Humans can not survive by being selfish.  Hitler is the poster boy for failure to understand that his best odds of survival, was not created by his great selfishness (kill all jews just because he didn't like Jews).  He died, alone, in his bunker, with most the world hating him, for having made such a huge error.  The true powers of evolution killed him for his mistake.  I would say God killed him for his mistake.  But that is only the top level of morality.  Moving on, I have to introduce the next level.  That level is created by the way the human brain works.  Humans are reinforcement learning machines.  These types of machines have an internal generated reward signal that creates the machines personal motivations.  This hardware, which was built into us by the process of evolution, is what creates our personal needs, motivations, and drives.  It is what forces us to run from the things that cause us pain, and seek out the things that cause us pleasure.  It's what love is - the desire we all have to seek that which causes us pleasure and that which helps us avoid pain.  The very long and slow process of evolution, adjusts in humans, what our base motivations are - what we naturally love and hate.  What base motivations we have, in general, exist in us, because they have worked over the eons to keep the human species alive.  Not just to keep the individual alive, but to keep the human race as a whole alive, and to keep our selfish genes alive.  So though with our ability to reason, and do science, we have uncovered that our desires grow from the top level need of survival, what really motivates each of us individually, is not survival directly, but instead, the built-in drives that happen to have been created in us by our genetic heritage.  Most humans have very similar drives and motivations.  We hate to not have food, to not be able to sleep, to be too cold, to be too hot, to have our body damaged, we like sex, and many smells, and the taste of many foods - all because these desires are built into us at birth.  But we are not all the same.  Some people have a few innate likes, and dislikes, that are different - and even hard to understand - like homosexuality.  Is homosexuality bad for survival?  Clearly, if all humans had such a drive, the human race would die off in a few generations, and that would be counter to the need to survive.  But we don't fully understand why some people are born with this drive.  A answer that could be quite simple, is that it's genetically difficult to build into the sexual drives needed for survival, while never getting the "programming" wrong and misdirecting that drive to the same sex, instead of to the opposite sex.  In other words, as long as the drive is towards the opposite in the majority of people, the fact that our genetic system of reproduction produces a same-sex drive at times is mostly harmless.  The needs to have a sexual drive, and the need to have variation in reproduction, might be far more important to the survival of our species, than the need to not have some percentage of the population turn out to be homosexual.  But what we can speculate, is that since it's here in such numbers, it exists for some reason, which is beneficial for our survival as a species.  But all this is simply pointing out that though our high level purpose is survival, each of our brains are built with a far simpler purpose - which is to serve the innate desires and drives which are genetically built into us.  When those innate drives make us do things that work well at surviving, our innate drives tend to be passed on to future generations.  When our innate drives fail to keep us alive - which is what happens when someone eats themselves to death at an early age - the simple process of evolution works to prune those drives from our population.  As individuals, we are slaves to our innate drives, far more so than we are slaves to the our God and the process of survival that created us.  So what is "Right" for an individual, is really defined by what innate drives they have genetically built into them.  We say, people must follow their heart.  This really means that people must follow their own innate drives - if not, they will never be happy.  But if your individual drives are at odds with the views of the society you live in, life will always be difficult for you.  Finding personal happiness will be hard.  Which brings us to the third level of morality - and the one that's really the most important here in Conservapedia.  The human brain is not just limited to dealing, and serving it's innate drives.  The human brain is a learning machine that has very strong adaptive powers.  It adapts to the environment it is placed in.  That's the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate.  A very important part of that adaptation, is the way we learn secondary reinforcers.  We _learn_ what we need to love, and hate, in order to best serve our prime innate motivations.  This learning is not a choice we have - it's not part of our free will as we might say.  It happens automatically whether we like it or not.  It's a subconscious effect that exists in us.  We learn to love our family because of what they have done for us - such as feeding and protecting us for years as we grew up.  Our subconscious learns what we must do to protect the things we love. If we grow up in a family that rejects anyone that doesn't go to church, we too learn to love going to church - because the act protects our standing in our family - which is so important to our prime needs.  Though we might have such thoughts at the conscious level where we debate such things with ourselves using the logic and language - the real work happens subconsciously shaping our secondary motivations without our awareness of it happening.  It just does.  We absorb the beliefs of the people that have been (and which we believe will continue to be) important to us.  These beliefs become almost as important to us, as our innate prime motivations.  And they form the third and most important level of morals.  They are in fact, the best description of our morals - they are our prime beliefs that guide our decisions and actions in life.  These beliefs are not the beliefs that are genetically created in us by evolution, but instead, the beliefs we learn from our society.  A typical religion is filled with these sorts of learned beliefs about what is right and wrong and Conservapedia is filled with these beliefs - beliefs that are so important to a large set of people, that it motivated them to create Conservapedia.  The ultimate answer to what is a "good" belief, and what is a "bad" belief all ties back to what helps us as a person, as a race, and as an ecosystem, survive.  The answers are seldom easy.  But one simple way to find "good" answers, is the way evolution finds them - by the test of time.  The longer a belief  can survive, the better it must be for helping survival.  Our beliefs are subject to the same forces of evolution that our genes are.  Good beliefs help people survive - who then share them with their friends and family - who survive to pass them on.  We can roughly measure the power and value of a moral belief, by its age.  Religions beliefs tend to be very old.  And that age is the proof of their value.  They are beliefs that have helped many people survive - they are here today - because of their survival value.  There are many beliefs from the Bible however that haven't survived into our modern times.  Times change, and beliefs that once worked to help survival in the past, can stop working as society changes.  But religion in general is still going strong, and though some of that can be explained as momentum (good ideas from the past can take a long time to die out after their value fades) most of what survives has to be seen as "good" simply because it has survived - it's passed the ultimate test of time (so far).  Why a given belief is good, is often too complex for us to really fully understand (I could say God's ways our beyond our understanding and be consistent with my definition of God).  So to sum all this up.  Yes, morals are real whether or not you choose to believe in a first-cause God.  They are created by the process of evolution acting on three different levels.  The top level being the pure survival of the fittest.  The second level, is the innate drives built into us by our genetics - which themselves evolve by the forces of evolution.  And the third level, our learned behaviors - our beliefs - our memes - passed from human to human (our memes) which also live, and die, based on their powers of survival, and more important, their ability to help _us_ survive as individuals, as societies, as a race, and as an living ecosystem here on earth.  What we each chose for our own morals are not so important in the grand scale of things.  But if we choose the wrong ones, we will each have to answer to our own God. [[User:CurtW|CurtW]] 7 December 2009