Most cultures have a belief in some sort of diety or dieties, but the morality that goes with that varies to a certain degree. However, murder is generally not tolerated, even though it is defined differently (broadly or narrowly) in different cultures.

Cultures where it’s completely dog-eat-dog tend not to survive too long. (Even the Ik—if you’re familiar with the work of Colin Turnbull—were a transitional culture in a state of flux, who said he made them out to be worse than they actually were.)

Which comes first, the religion or the prohibitions and rules? Or do they come together and are linked?

Please also see this for a discussion of related topics.

Because you were brought up in a culture whose rules were based on the Bible and you absorbed them. I could take you a few miles from my house to neighborhoods where they grow up under Thucydides’ rules. You would be very hard pressed to find rules for the protection of the weak there — “Lord of the Flies” country.

“om & Saunders: How much violence would you allow for humanity, before you would grant humanity’s goodness (with or without a judgmental God)?

“My impression is you would require perfection, though perhaps I am mistaken.”

Ani ma’amin: (Traditional)

I believe with perfect certainty that the Messiah will come,
And though he tarries, I will wait for him every day.

What? What’s he teaching?

How about this: Democracy stinks as a regime? It’s hubristic and fickle, so gets what’s coming to it.

Hmmm, could be James Madison even learned a thing or two from the great historian.

“On the other hand both Hobbes and his teacher Thucydides are themselves personally aghast at the injustices they see and recount, nor do either of them live by these precepts imputed to them.”

You’ve obviously read Thucydides. Were you ever, ever, able to muster the slightest sympathy, or pity for those dead Athenians?

I’m not sure what moral we are supposed to derive from a war between red and black ants.

Huxley — then why is mankind’s most widespread and persistent — even to today — governing principle, “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must?”

Richard Saunders: That’s not mankind. That’s largely the way biological organisms have functioned since life emerged on the planet four billion plus years ago.

The wonder is that protections have been put in place for the weak long before your judgmental God emerged.”

Re. that last. I think that that is a very dubious proposition Hux.

You’re pretty well read. Can you think of a datable ancient legal code which mandates protection for the weak based on pure sentiment, or a contractual system, or a claim of common identity, or some combination of these, which either predates or does not implicitly or explicitly reference a divine lawgiver as well?

You were taken aback and scandalized that progress and human goodness did not prevent the slaughter of the millions not that long ago. So yes I do not expect perfection or goodness in human nature; empathy, altruism, kindness, love of thy neighbor are not default conditions of human behavior. Sometimes humans are good, but none are perfect, and some human societies are better than others, but generally that is the exception.

“We’ve all experienced pain and loss, and that seems to me to be all you need to know in order to realize that it’s wrong to inflict these things on others.”

How do you “know”, and I assume that by “know” you mean possessed of an intellectual conviction, that it is wrong to inflict pain on others because you have experienced it yourself? Perhaps they have inflicted it on those who are important to you, and are disinclined to stop or listen to reason.

Retaliation is one of the oldest laws “on the books”; and it is the threat of it, which probably gives any completely secular system of law its ultimate force.

Perhaps one day, we will be able to stop malefactors by dropping them to the ground, unharmed but in a state of paralysis, and then expel them to some remote from human society place, with a few creature comforts, forever.

But I am willing to bet that some people would think that that is a kind of unjustifiable infliction of “pain” … i.e., throwing the obnoxious back on their own company; forever.

On the other hand both Hobbes and his teacher Thucydides are themselves personally aghast at the injustices they see and recount, nor do either of them live by these precepts imputed to them.

But then where on the green earth did these ideas they each share — of loathing of barbarism and love of justice — come from? What is it, are Thucydides and Hobbes some sort of anomalous human beings?

My impression is you would require perfection, though perhaps I am mistaken.

To answer your earlier point: I’ve been agnostic most of my life. Yet somehow I’ve never had the remotest impulse to kill someone for their sneakers. How to explain?