I'd add that what we do 'discover' through experience is what sort of rules might just tend to create a society in which we and our descendants have a decent chance of surviving long enough to reproduce and feel important and party a bit without being offed by a surly neighbor. Just which facilitating rules we want to try out is what we 'decide,' I'd say.
If enough people who live proximate to each other, like in neighboring caves or valleys, make the same discoveries and follow them with decisions to implement their insights, voila, a culture. Laws. Civilization of one ilk or another.
The capacity for conscience, and guilt, obviously exists in the human animal. It evolved to have that advantageous (to survival) capacity. It seems to me that what those who think they need a God in place of a conscience, or as an enforcer, don't seem to grasp, is that the capacity for conscience is there whether or not there is an external 'divine authority.' It need merely be developed and molded in each human being by family and community according to their culture's, and its subcultures', 'decisions.'
(That's not really a 'merely,' clearly, as there are so many sociopaths around-- as many of them in cathedrals and mosques as at meetings of the Secular Humanist Society, i'll wager.)
Belief that without an external authority human beings don't have the capacity or will to live humanely does encourage intellectual creativity though, what with the exercise it gives in constructing rationales and institutions that benefit the affiliated believer-groups.
That last isn't fair of me, since one of the ironies of human conscience is that it requires of all groups, and individuals, theists and non-theists alike, that they construct 'moral' rationales before taking advantage of others, or perpetrating monstrous atrocities against them. Killing and torturing and raping and stealing their land or possessions and the like.
People are diabolically clever in rationale-construction!
Aren't you getting a deja-vu sort of feeling, Steven? I am. I shall resist answering the predictable replies, since i've done it so often following my predictable replies to predictable replies....
You are quite wonderful, btw. |
