• SeanRenaud said on Sep 02, 2009....

  Obviously it is a very complicated issue and question your asking here.  But to boil it down to it's simplest form right is anything that promotes life and happiness.  Wrong is anything that promotes the opposite.  Independence is superior to slavery (accept when it interferes with the previous rule) 

  Stealing is wrong for several reasons.  One is that you are dependent on another, you have offered nothing and earned nothing.  It is also wrong because it promotes (and often uses outright) violence ergo destruction.

  If it feels good (and hurts no one or no one but yourself) do it.  The thing here is that we must always consider how it effects those around us.  Again I use theft.  Sure it feels good to have stuff but we have taken from another.  As far as drugs go, what you do in your house is your business.  Micheal Jackson is emerging as (not that we didn't already suspect) a drug addict (and some serious shit too) but I never once heard about an incident.  On the other hand Britney, or Lindsey Lohan or Paris Hilton (one of them dumb broads) has been seen driving the wrong way on the freeway. 

  I obviously can't deny that I take many of my morals from the society I live in.  I think that a lot of the rules that you mention specifically were either written by idiots or in another time.  I find incest weird and gross (and I'm skeptical that outside of royal families it was ever accepted, simply because biology generally prevents this in animals) but slap on a condom, get on the pill and go to town.  It doesn't bother me cus it doesn't effect me.  I'm completely sexist and I can't really say that I think we are better off without slavery, it certainly hasn't been a universal truth.  Half the reason we have unions and labor laws and shit is that we found out that when "masters" are no longer required to pay for the upkeep of their "slaves" they simply don't.

• Hegemone said on Sep 02, 2009....

  Well, in that case, for me, probably a lot of my morals, ethics, what have you come from my peers throughout my life.  I say throughout my life because as I move along, they change.  At one point in my life I might have believed one thing, and then I spoke to a different group of peers and what they said might have made sense, and appealed to me, so I changed the way I thought.  So I can't necessarily say that 'society' determines what I believe, because I'm not going to follow complete strangers.  Maybe you could go as far as to say that if you consider that maybe my peers actually will follow a complete stranger's opinion, but for the point of this, we're not saying that.  Beyond that though, my peers and/or society only propose various things for me to choose to believe in ... I'm the one actually deciding to go along with it or not, for whatever reasons, which could range from 'Well, they'll think poorly of me if I do/don't' to 'I just don't like that, even if they all do' (or the other way around).  So maybe it's more a mixture, maybe not ... getting late and if I go really deep I might self destruct, lol.

• seer said on Sep 03, 2009....

  Hehe, that's kinda what I was after, all I wanted was to make you question yourself.
   
  You see I don't believe in right OR wrong in a definative sense, I believe that the human race are one big family, and doing things that benefit the family as a whole is right. So things like sending water to Africa is good, war is bad (full stop). Humans evolved as a herd animal, in packs of 30 or so, and now technology has made these packs one, one big six-billion person herd, so as a herd animal we should benefit the herd.
   
  Yes, I do have long hair and like hanging round in forests and random natural places like that.....

• SeanRenaud said on Sep 03, 2009....

  I'm not sure I would go as far as to say that war is bad full stop.  Personally I think that while Bush's reasons (WMD's, terrorist ties) were erroneous that anybody who knows (or strongly believes) that a country is performing ethnic clensing has both the moral right and the moral obligation to do something if they can.  We should have killed Saddam in the 90's.  I see it as no different than seeing a woman being raped and walking by.  I can justify it if you are also a woman and smaller and unarmed by comparison to the man.  If you interupt you'll just get raped too.  But if you're a big strapping man with a shotgun and you do nothing you're a peice of shit and only slightly better than the rapist.

• peilthetraveler said on Sep 03, 2009....

  What is right & wrong is what hurts others.  For instance.  Stealing hurts the one that is stolen from.  It also hurts the person stealing in the sense that this person now has a weaker work ethic because its easier to steal than to earn something fairly.   Now lets look at slavery.  There are different forms of slavery.  The one for that americans seem to only know about is the kind that took place in the 1800s with blacks that were taken for no just reason and made slaves.  In the bible though, the slaves were the people that agreed to be slaves so that their family would be taken care of, or they had a debt that they couldnt pay that made them a slave.  The ones that had the debts were most likely the ones that had to be disciplined (or beaten)  Despite what visual ideas people have of this, it was not the kind of beating that we imagine. It was the type to correct a person who otherwise was rebelious to his master.  The Masters would always first try to talk to the slaves (unless they were bad masters that just enjoyed inflicting pain which of course is wrong)  If talking to the slaves didnt work, a beating would happen.  Slavery was right or "just" because both parties got something out of it.  Sure the debt slave didnt want to be a slave, but he owed money that had to be paid off.  Its the same thing today...If a criminal does something wrong, he doesnt want to go to jail, because its hurts him, but its not wrong because justice is being served and he has to pay his debt to society.

   

  Another thing that people love to say is not wrong is sex before marriage.  Many will say it dosent hurt anyone if its between two consenting adults, but if you are a father, do you want your daughter having lots of one night stands with strange men?  It hurts the parents when they do this.  There are some parents that have boys and they are ok with the boy having one night stands, but these parents could be equated to a parent that teaches his child to steal and is proud of him when he does.

   

  Then we have homosexuality.  This is wrong because it spreads disease and acceptance of it, can cause young children to "experiment" with it just because they might look up to a homosexual because he/she might be witty, or funny in some way and the child wants to be like him.  We see this with other celebrities when they do drugs or things like that.  The kids want to be like them so they try what their favorite celebrity is doing.   Homosexuality is also not good for humanity as a whole.  It does not benefit us one single way.  It only makes our population dwindle as homosexuals do not produce children, nor can they raise children in a balance way.  Children are more likely to be homosexual if they have two homosexual parents.

   

  The bible is a great book to learn whats right and wrong because God knows what would give humans the least suffering.  If we all followed Gods rules, there would be no suffering in the world.

• ALIENated said on Sep 03, 2009....

  Thiest and Athiest are wrong. Theist and Atheist are right. I do know that much.

  Theists get most of their direction from the Bible. Atheists get most of their direction from society, what is popular and politically correct, as you said. However, there is some overlap of the two, as you also know. I figure it is all a matter of conscious. I have trouble doing things some people would not think twice about. Maybe I am just paranoid about being put in jail.

• seer said on Sep 03, 2009....

  Sorry can I just interject, Peil, I don't think homosexuality is wrong in the slightest. War in Iraq was not over oil, but to destabalise the middle east and to stop it prospering thus stopping the muslim world for becoming a threat to the Christian West. This is wrong.
   
  I wouldn't say drug use is wrong. You've been dogmatised into thinking it because of the media and government. Responcible drug use - IE my friends and I smoking a little bit of weed, some of my friends dabble with Amphetamines and MDMA, that doesn't hurt ANYBODY. They're addicts, stealing to feed a habit, they're not pushing it onto children.
   
  Christianity is wrong too, because God telling people how to live stops people from philosophising and coming up with real useful ideas and ethical solutions. The book of revelations is responcible for more serial killers than anything else EVER, and the Crusades, the Iraq war (twice), WW2, WW1, and how many serial killers say 'God told me to do it?'. 'If we all followed God's rules there would be no suffering', well except for the Homosexuals of this world, and all the happy Athiests. I'd point blank refuse to conform, as I did all through my Christian school life (yeah I got in trouble a LOT, but three generations of proud athiests were behind me). If we all didn't follow any made-up Gods or their fictional rules the world would be a much better place.
   
  But I'm not here to torment ignorant bigoted Christians, I was trying to make you question the origins of you're ethics, and I didn't want to know what you think is right and wrong.
   
  Sean, this is interesting. I don't think war is the answer, but you are right, we should have killed Sadddam. Maybe an assain or something. But yeah, war to stop worse stuff from happening, IE allied forces stopping Hitler during WW2 was probably a good thing.
   
  Alienated, good comment, lots of laws are Christian orientated.

• momofkandn said on Sep 04, 2009....

  Seer,
  I am not a follower of organized religion and have not read the Bible enough to claim being self taught. I am in a religion class right now through college and maybe you could be of use to me if I could kind of run somethings past you when I get stuck some day. What do ya say are you game?
  
  

• seer said on Sep 05, 2009....

  Lol if I could help I'd be more than happy, but as an Athiest with no qualification or formal teaching in religion, I'm probably not very useful - Wikipedia probably knows more!

• curmudgeon said on Sep 19, 2009....

  Right and wrong are largely determined by the concept one holds of oneself and the place that person holds within society.
  
  Do we emphasize individual liberty over the needs of the community? Do we emphasize communal harmony over individual need or desire? Whatever of these two factors we prioritize - our lives as individuals, and our life within our community - will guide our sense of what is right and what is wrong in particular instances, or with regard to particular issues.
  
  Of course there is a great deal of variety between these two poles.
  
  We may also hold community over individual in one situation - the good of the People vs. executive pay, for example, or the individual over the community - an individual right to abortion, regardless of the impact on family, community and nation.
  
  Where I come down on this right now is that I need to hold these two in tension with each other. More and more I see myself as an individual within a social context - the things I do have an impact on others, and I need to be very cognizant of that in whatever I say and do.
  
  It gets even more complex. I may do what I see is "right" only to find it has a negative impact on others, or result in negative consequences for myself. Am I wrong?
  
  Then lets bring religion in, shall we. We think that there are clear cut right and wrongs in the Bible, for instance. But what do we make of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in light of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? What do we make of "Judge not lest ye yourself be judged" in light of Jesus calling the Scribes and Pharisees hypocrites, over and over? How do we reconcile this image many of us have of Jesus as this birkenstock wearing, love and peacenik, tie-dye wearing anti-war hippie with the Jesus who forms a whip of cords and uses violence to drive the money-lenders out of the Temple?
  
  While right and wrong are not simply relative, they are relational. Right and wrong need to be discerned by all the individual(s) involved.
  

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