Atheism and Moral Values

[piercehawkeye45]

Originally Posted by Phage0070

This does not logically follow. Of course societies have a low level of violence; society was formed to prevent things such as violent interactions and would suppress such tendencies. You cannot look at a set of sorted data and conclude that sorting was not necessary because your data set is sorted already.

I strongly disagree that societies were created to prevent violent interactions. Societies were most likely created in the same nature as writing, agriculture, and religion, with no planning.

If you look at how writing started in ancient Egypt, Sumeria, and China, there is a trend in all three. These three did not copy or borrow a writing system from any other civilization and no one created it. In ancient Sumer, there was a lot of trade and with that trade came accounting. Traders would mark create symbols for what they traded. After thousands of years of making this system more complex, the product was a complete system of writing we now know as cuneiform.

Agriculture worked in a similar fashion. Since almost every crop we now use cannot be found in the wild means only one logical conclusion, they were genetically altered in the same way that we get house dogs from wolves. To do this, it takes thousands of years. All wild forms of wheat and corn could never sustain a human community and most do not even produce anything that provides any nutritional value so that means there could not be any planning involved. No one looked at ancient wild wheat and thought that they could create agriculture from it. It took thousands of years of chance, luck, and experimentation to find anything sustainable, and even then, hunting and gathering was still more efficient. So, having a society based on agriculture was something that had to have just happened and the switch was most likely very slow and gradual (over the course of thousands of years).

Societies, mostly came the same way with the use of agriculture. When humans were primary hunter gatherer societies, mobility was a must so a civilization in the sense that we have today could never have formed. But as agriculture came into play, people would have to start living in one place, and societies would slowly start to form. As with writing and agriculture, no one planned societies and it most likely just happened. So I do not see how violence would have any play into this. In fact, humans living 5000 years ago in agricultural societies had shorter lifespans and were on average shorter than hunter gatherers, which backs up the inefficiency of that early lifestyle.

To get to my point, I do not believe in any Daniel Quinn hunter gatherer utopia but I not see how we so easily believe that the hunter gatherer living was so brutal. Which is my original point of comparing morals with religion and morals with government and law. Everyone of us have been raised to believe that government, law, and religion (besides a select few) keep us civilized, but like our debunking of religion, I am starting to question government and law as well.

Note- This is not some anarchist rant but I mean in the same manner as the atheists have done in the defense of morals and religion.

Originally Posted by Pico and ME

I don't see why small groups of people wouldn't raid another small group for their resources. It wasn't just "raping' and 'pillaging", it was a matter of the struggle for survival when competing with other groups. I'm sure it wasn't all violent either. Some groups probably joined together as another means for survival.

I'm wondering how it was any different than our society today in that respect? We still do raid other countries for their resources, but just on a much larger and discreet way. As I said earlier, I'm not suggesting that it was any better in that respect 8,000 years ago (proportional wise) but I certainly don't see it as any worst either.

Its about sustainability. The population density was much smaller back then and as long as their was not a drought, most groups could live in peace without going into each others areas. But, in case of droughts, it would be very likely raids happened and some violence did occur.

Originally Posted by Flint

Oh, I'm sure things used to be brutal. I'm not saying it isn't within our nature to rape and pillage; just that, for the most part, we've come to an agreement that we aren't really into that kind of thing anymore. Exactly how it is that we've all agreed to voluntarily curtail our raping and pillaging tendencies is what is up for debate here. I, for one, say that to attribute this change in behavior to a the noodley appendages of a cosmic vigilante is the less likely than the Mama's fryin' pan theory. I don't see the need to include supernatural forces in the equation. It works without that.

From my knowledge, it seems that most raping and pillaging either comes from necessity or expansion (nationalism). The Vikings, Goths, etc didn't start raping and pillaging until their food sources started to become low. Rome, the Colonial nations, etc just wanted to expand for resources and nationalistic reasons. Just like genocide, raping and pillaging is most likely a very strong social force that happens when a group feels like they are under a strong pressure to survive or way too big headed. That also means that I don't think the raping and pillaging part of humans are over, just like the genocide part isn't either. We may consider raping and pillaging bad but our nation as a whole has never been threatened with starvation or elimination. Also, I would not consider our economic policies towards other countries to be anything close to moral.