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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (77996)	4/13/2000 11:54:00 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

People who grow up in non-empathetic societies do not have to be taught to kill. Children are wonderful torturers- they come by it naturally. They have to be taught NOT to torture things. If you encouraged their innate desires you could raise quite a bloodthirsty race- and it's been done. I think the wiring to learn morality is inborn- but it does not follow that the wiring needs to be activated. And religion certainly doesn't have to have anything to do with it.

To: Ilaine who wrote (77996)	4/13/2000 12:59:00 PM
From: Edwarda	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Although I suspect that you have me on "Ignore" and will have to be told by someone else, I agree with you. At its best, an environment--be it formal education, religion, family and peer values and pressure--encourages the development of these "higher" beliefs and behaviors such as a revulsion toward unnecessary killing, arson, and the like. The other behaviors that you cite--eat cows, not eat cows, eat pigs, not eat pigs, not kill anything at all, eat fish on Friday, bow to Mecca, not work on Saturday, on and on and on--are more ritual than morality.

To: Ilaine who wrote (77996)	4/13/2000 6:02:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

What I believe is innate is our social drive, our need to live in contact with other humans. This need forces us to learn and adopt principles and specific rules to govern our relations with other human beings; we call the principles "morals" and the rules "laws". Both are our own creations; we created them because we need them to live together. We also create devices to compel people to comply with them: police and courts to deal with offenders, and Gods and religions to scare people into not offending. Morality and law are in a continuous state of evolution and refinement. Many principles that were once hailed as right and just a few hundred or a few dozen years ago (slavery, the subjugation of women, etc.) are no longer accepted, and the rules based on these principles have changed. Some things that were once not accepted now are.