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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Unless there is Someone, a Lawgiver, who transcends any human society.
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No.  I don't need a mythical being in the sky to teach me the difference between right and wrong.  To tell me that shooting people is wrong is unnecessary.  I know this intuitively.  I have empathy for others.  I don't do things to people that I wouldn't want done to me.  Just like I don't need someone to tell me to beat my heart or breathe in and out.  I have love in me, that's the only higher power I need to guide my actions.

I think there is something wrong with people who need a &quot;transcendent someone&quot; to tell them what to do.  Really, you have to open up the Bible and look up the chapter and verse that says cruelty or selfishness or slaughter is wrong???[/quote]

Google "argument from conscience."[/quote]

Well, it's nice that philosophers think that my intuition proves the existence of God.  I don't  - necessarily - agree.

I think human intelligence gives us a capacity to observe the pain in others, and to feel it ourselves by proxy, and to abhor that pain and the idea of causing it to others.  Watching others in pain causes a physical response in me, as I'm sure it does in others - an ability to feel, in some small measure, what the other person is feeling, and to want to make that pain go away.  I suppose it COULD be "God" who gave us our empathy.  Or it could be a simple consequence of our intelligence.

[b]Being empathic allows humans to cooperate and work together as a society.[/b] Natural selection would have encouraged this trait throughout our history.  [/quote]

Unless you are an unbalanced, homicidal loner.

Or a clever egomaniac.

Or a powerful dictator.

Or a sadist.

But then, it doesn't matter who their victims are, because it's just the circle of life, the coming together and falling apart of chaotic cosmic dust.  Some people are lucky enough to randomly be conceived in a group of humans who cooperate.  Others, not so lucky.  But there is no meaning to it all.  Just circumstance.[/quote]  Yes.  If  you do research on the prevalence of sociopathy in humans - about 1 in four people are sociopaths - there are interesting evolutionary ideas about how this trait is favored for selection.  Basically there are two effective survival strategies.  cooperation vs. selfish, winner-take-all.  [/quote]

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