I guess I just see it differently than you do. I see that statement (as well as the others that Oski cited) as a "karmic concept" and truly believe that you do "reap as you sow" if not in this life, in subsequent ones.
Sure I was going to try to explain it but then I googled a few sources that probably put it better Here's some material from the academic/economist side http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-ethics/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...3/104-3170859-0380737?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance and from the religion side http://objective.jesussave.us/gametheory.html Now I have barely read these and don't endorse the content, but its along the lines..
so there was no morality before the church?? or is this just today's entry in your 2004 Witty Statements Calendar (Desk Edition)?? Sam -- ok...i get what you're saying now. not really sure how it applies to loving your neighbor, though. but i'm not sure i care, either!
It's not hard, "love thy neighbor" is a florid way of tellling decisiomakers to consider the external cost as well as the internal cost of your choices - it's the subtext to all social activity, really - and leads to better more efficient outcomes in terms of social welfare. So it's not surprising that it pops up in the tenets of religions fom disparate eras and backgrounds - it probably even exists in instinctive practice, if not as a cognitive idea, in social animals as well.
So a lot of you are saying that morality doesn't exist outside of a social frame work. That leads to the question, is man a social animal? Is it in our nature (if we have one) to be social, or is life nasty brutish and short without society? Oski, I guess I'm asking what are the sources of authority. Why did we pick love your nieghbor as you would yourself. The Ancients certainly didn't think that a very noble or virtuous idea. Nietzsche wasn't down with that. So what, for those who think that morality comes from social structures, are the sources that helped give rise to morality in social structures. I'm not really buying the whole Bible as ultimate source of morality for Church going Christians argument. I guess what I'm getting at is, what is the role of love in this enterprise of morality? Why should I love my neighbor, why shouldn't I axe his head off. What does it matter if in the grand karmaic scheme of things I'm going to get my head chopped off later. Why does it matter? Is there something outside of life that I should be concerned about. Is there something outside of me to be concerned with, some truth. Or is truth relative? If so, why can't I just hold it as a truth that I'm going to chop people's heads off and agree to risk the chance that I'm going to get my head chopped off or face some sort of unbearable suffereing in return. Why do people break codes of morality. Doesn't seem very logical to commit a crime of passion. Very random post, I apologize, but I think the topic is of high concern.
Do you know what historicism is? I don't think you'd like it terms of your gun toting posts, and I could very well use it to say you shouldn't have a gun anymore.
A social framework can be anything with more than one person involved. It exists, but it exists in a marginal manner. It is void of anything but self-serving judgement. In this essence, morality has no agreed constituency. Therefore, morality outside of a social framework is a mere individualized choice based on many factors...of course.
I don't know what historicm is, but I do know what affirms or negates social morality as viewed through others is dependent on where I am, when I'm there and the year of when I'm therel...You can say what you want, but right now I'm sitting pretty with what I own compared to say...1995.
And who is to say that the circumstances won't change towards gun laws that negatively effect you. Is there something true outside of the social framework that can be seen in the 2nd Amendment, or was it merely a circumstance of the Revolutionary war that is no longer pertinent in present day time, and if we as a collective group of people decide to cahnge that amendment, we would be fully justified in doing so and commit no harm to any truth about gun laws that exists outside of the Bill of Rights because there is no truth about gun laws, there is only the here and now. Historicism is the saying that man is only a creature of his own times, and as such, can do nothing or represent nothing besides the spirit of his own times.
I had to take a"morality" class at the Catholic High School I attended. I had a morality textbook and everything. All morality really is a decision process. You have to decide what actions will bring about the the most positive outcome. It is a deduction process, not a set of rules. Your suffering will not occur later, It occurs NOW and later. Your happiness also occurs now, in the present moment. Which do you prefer? The Buddha said that the past is gone and the future is not yet here. Let us not regret the past. Let us not worry about the future. Go back to the present moment and live deeply the present moment. Because the present moment is the only moment where you can touch life. Life is available only in the present moment. Equality means is that all living beings are equal in their essential attitudes. In other words, all living beings want to be happy. They fear pain, death and suffering. All want to live, to enjoy happiness and security. And this is also true to all living beings just as it is true to ourselves. We can call this equality the great universality of the Buddhist vision in which all living beings are equal. On the basis of this equality, we are encouraged to act with the awareness of reciprocity. Reciprocity means that just as we would not like to be killed, robbed, abused and so forth, so would all other living beings not like to have these things happen to them. One can put this principle of reciprocity quite simply by saying "do not act towards others in a way which you would not want them to act towards you". Given these principles of equality and reciprocity, it is not hard to see how they stand behind, how they create the foundation for the rules of good conduct. The Buddha said "If you wish to do a certain action, first reflect whether the action is likely to harm yourself or others or both. If the action is likely to cause suffering, refrain from doing it. If the action is likely to cause happiness and no harm can arise from such a deed, do it again and again." Some think without believing in a god, or without a god, you have no reason to be moral. This idea is completely false. The Buddha gave the world the The Pancha Shila, or five moral precepts, hundreds of years before the time of Jesus. The Pancha Shila, or five moral precepts: 1. Avoid killing, or harming any living thing. 2. Avoid stealing -- taking what is not yours to take. 3. Avoid sexual irresponsibility, which for monks and nuns means celibacy. (homosexuality is treated the same as heterosexuality) 4. Avoid lying, or any hurtful speech. 5. Avoid alcohol and drugs which diminish clarity of consciousness. The Buddhist perspective of morality is well illustrated especially in the Sigalovada, Vyagghapajja, Parabhava, Vasala, Mangala, Metta and the Dhammika suttas and of course in the Dhammapada, to mention only a few sources. The morality reflected and explained in these is not founded on any divine revelation. It is a rational practical code based on verifiable facts and individual experience. The individual is to practise this teaching in everyday life with effort and diligence and depend on oneself, cultivating self discipline and self-control, self-reliance and self-purification. There are no dogmas to be believed and followed blindly, without reasoning and putting to the test. Praying to the Buddha or other beings, the performance of superstitious rites and ceremonies, meaningless sacrifices and penance’s are not helpful. Morality in Buddhism provides human beings with guide lines of conduct of what it is good to do and what it is not good to do for the sake of oneself and of others. It is an in-looking or looking into the behaviour of the mind type of morality with an outside glass and a rotten and defiled interior. It guides the layman to achieve and enjoy material progress in harmony with spiritual satisfaction and upliftment. It guides us to calm our senses, avoid conflict between the mind and the heart, enabling us to get on with our work, duties and responsibilities with peace of mind and joy. http://www.lankaweb.com/dhamma/view12.html You are not separate from the rest of the cosmos. The "outside" of you IS you. "We are people, but we are also more than just people. Are you only a person? Or at the same time are you also a tree and a rock? You only need to look deeply to discover that you are a person and at the same time you are a rock and a tree. In the Buddhist circle, people believe that in former lives they were human beings, animals, plants, and minerals. This is scientifically true. If we look deeply into the evolution of our species, we see that in former times we have been a rock, a tree, and an animal. Humans are very young creatures. We have evolved over many years to become what we are today. It is scientifically proven that we have been a rock, a cloud, a tree, a rabbit, a deer, a rose, and a single-cell being. If you continue to look deeply, you will see that in the present moment, you continue to be a rose, a rabbit, a tree, and a rock. This is the truth of interbeing. You are made of non-you elements. You can touch the cloud within you. You can touch the sunshine within you. You can touch the trees and the earth within you. You know that if these elements were not in you, you could not be here at this very moment. Not only in former lives were you a tree, but sitting here, right now, you are a tree. That is why I say that the trees are your home. Recognize your home, your home sweet home. This is hard to understand, because we normally think of our self as some essential core of personal being, some intangible essence or "true self." We think that our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. are stuck onto that core and can be pulled off and replaced by others without changing the core. Buddhist teachers challenge their students to strip away all the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and desires, to reveal the "true self." They are confident that the student will fail. The student will discover that we do not "have" perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and desires. Rather we are all those processes, and nothing else. When we look carefully, we discover that those processes are all interactions between what we call self and what we call not-self. From this perspective, too, we are nothing but a constantly changing pattern of relationships. So everything that we call "out there" is already inside us. There are two doors that open to us when we read the Lotus Sutra. The first door is that of history, the events we experience and what we can see and know in our own lifetimes. The second door is that of ultimate reality, which goes beyond time and space. Everything—all phenomena—participates in these two dimensions. When we look at a wave on the surface of the ocean, we can see the form of the wave and we locate the wave in space and time. Looking at a wave from the perspective of the historical dimension, it seems to have a beginning and an end, a birth and a death. We, too, are subject to these notions. When we look from the historical dimension we see that we are subject to being and nonbeing. We are born but later on we will die. We have a beginning and an end. We have come from somewhere and we will go somewhere-that is the historical dimension. At the same time, all beings and things also belong to the ultimate dimension, the dimension of reality that is not subject to notions of space and time, birth and death, coming and going. A wave is a wave, but at the same time it is water. The wave does not have to die in order to become water; it is already water right in the present moment. To talk about a wave, we need these notions: the wave arises and passes away; it comes from somewhere or has gone somewhere; the wave has a beginning and an end; it is high or low, more or less beautiful than other waves; the wave is subject to birth and death. But none of these distinctions can be applied to the wave in its ultimate dimension as water. In fact, you cannot separate the wave from its ultimate dimension. Even though we are used to seeing everything in terms of the historical dimension, we can touch the ultimate dimension. So our practice is to become like a wave—while living the life of a wave in the historical dimension, we realize that we are also water and live the life of water. That is the essence of the practice. Because if you know your true nature of no coming, no going, no being, no nonbeing, no birth, no death, then you will have no fear and can dwell in the ultimate dimension, nirvana, right here and now. When you dwell in your true nature, you are already dwelling in nirvana." ~ Thich Nhat Hanh http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/NonviolenceBook/ThichNhatHanh.htm http://www.iloveulove.com/spirituality/buddhist/dimensions.htm
Right and Wrong are never clear. They blur, and it never seems, that anything clearer ever surfaces. If you have to kill to feed your family then some people consider that moral. Others do not. Therefor Morality is unclear. It's somehwat relative to the situation. The Truth however has an irresistible nature. All it ever asks and all it ever wants is the liberty of appearing. The Truth is absolute. So that is what I lead my life with. I choose to always follow the truth.
Morality is defined by the one with the most power. Whether those with less power disagree, it makes no difference. They are powerless to redefine morality.
Morality is a social construct that is mutable and situation specific. Basically it ends up being what the majority wants it to be contrary to popular belief morality does not exist in a vacuum it is not. . ultimate truth Rocket River
For clarity, this should be preceded by: (In societies where every individual has an equal say in policy making) understood I don't think anyone believes in moral vacuums. Morals require a relationship to exist.
