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Old 01-23-2009, 09:11 PM   #71
troutman
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ResAlien View Post
If there is nothing greater than us, what real incentive is there for morality?
It has been pointed out many times in these threads that we don't need god to be good. Our morals come from the natural world, not the super-natural.

My oft-cited quote:

Sam Harris in The End of Faith:

The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics. Anyone who does not harbor some rudiementary sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is by reading - and, indeed most scripture offers rather equivocal testimony to this fact in many cases. Our ethical intuitions must have their precursors in the natural world . . . concern for others was not the invention of any prophet. [Harris, p. 172]

Last edited by troutman; 01-23-2009 at 09:14 PM.
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