Comments on: Radio Interviews Today

By: Black Adder

Black Adder — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:02:40 +0000

Blasphemy is a victimless crime

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:48:18 +0000

About rats – they also have a sense of humour. They can laugh, but it is outside of the human range of hearing.

See “Studies Show Rats Enjoy Tickling – Understanding What Makes Rats Laugh Is Shedding Light on the Evolution of ‘Ha-Ha’” – http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=626264&page=1

The last common ancestor that humans share with rats lived about 75 million years ago. So laughter runs deep!

And that, boys and girls, is why we like to laugh at religion! It is innate.

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:37:41 +0000

Other studies that show the foundation of another moral sense, namely fairness, is innate in dogs and chimps.

See “Dogs Understand Fairness, Get Jealous, Study Finds” – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97944783

By: Hugh7

Hugh7 — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:08:43 +0000

I found a review in New Scientist, 9 May 2009, p44, of a book called Wild Justice: the Moral Lives of Animals by Mark Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, U of Chicago Press:

“…the authors propose that other animal species possess empathy, compassion and sense of justice – in other words, a moral code not unlike our own.”

“In one lab stody of Diana monkeys, for instance, the animals had to put tokens into a slot ot receive their food. Whenan elderly female couldn’t manage hers, a neighbouring male inserted the tokens for her. In a different kind of experiment, rats refused to push a lever for food when they realised their action meant another animal got an electric shock.”

The first example convinces me: if “lower” animals have it, then it’s innate to humans. But rats? I’d look for a simpler explanation, like, the distress-cries of the shocked rats put the lever-pushers off their food.

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:55:26 +0000

@Hugh7

“Lord of the Flies” is fiction, as you know, so not a good source of factual information.

By the way:

Beelzebub, Beelzebul
ba`al zebub (Hebrew) (from ba`al lord + zebub fly)

By: Hugh7

Hugh7 — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:36:20 +0000

Thanks, Cyberguy. Both good points. I guess if a behaviour is present in chimps, we can call it innate in humans. I was thinking of “Lord of the Flies” (assuming it is true to life) as a counter-example, but you could counter that they had already been corrupted (or primed for corruption) by “civilization”.

By: Cyberguy

Cyberguy — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:51:04 +0000

@Hugh7 – “In the instructions, by “set it to flip on the short edge” do you mean “print as landscape”? ”

Both of those. Landscape for obvious reasons. Flip on short edge, so the reverse page is not upside-down compared to the front.

On the subjecy of morality being innate, I could not fit any more text into the document without it going to three pages. But studies show that both chimps and pre-verbal human toddlers show spontaneous altruistic behaviour for no reward, proving altruism (the foundation of morality) is innate.

For a non-technical description of the study see: Altruism ‘in-built’ in humans http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4766490.stm
or google “altruism human infants Warneken Tomasello”

By: Hugh7

Hugh7 — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 02:09:23 +0000

“Provo to the group”?

I know “props” but what is/are “provo”? Goggling it reveals only a city in Utah and a Dutch resistance group.

By: Russ

Russ — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:31:49 +0000

This is all good stuff, but one point that isn’t being pushed is this: Religion plays such a large role in politics and in the establishment of rules set for our society. Religious groups have huge influence in determining policies on such major matters as abortion and same sex marriage just to name a two. Yet these beliefs are in the minority in society. There needs to be a bigger voice pushing the interests of the majority….. Why should we feel embarrassed by not believing in god?

I would also like to say to those religious folk that are “offended” by this initiative, that these phrases are no more offensive than the many hundreds of church slogans in our faces every day.

Provo to the group for going ahead with this & good luck!

By: Jon Pawson

Jon Pawson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:02:28 +0000

I would agree to a point with Cyberguy but I’d exchange the term “morality” with “ethical behaviour”.

“The divine command theory (DCT) of ethics holds that an act is either moral or immoral solely because God either commands us to do it or prohibits us from doing it, respectively.” (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/divine.html)

The above quoted passage and the link, if you should wish to visit it, has a good overview of the problem inherent when we try to say that thigns are good merely because God says so.

When a religionist says that without God, how can humans behave good towards one another, I always whip out the ol’ DCT argument