Psioncy
- Posts : 8275
Join date : 2010-05-02
Psioncy Sun Nov 26, 2023 5:40 am
The imaginary sky-daddy didn't create vicious animals, nature did.
Nature is not moral. It is wondrous and nourishing, an endless cycle of birth of death, beautiful and mysterious beyond words.
But entirely amoral.
Morality arises from a combination of compassion and brainpower.
Wolves are born to kill. There's no choice for them in the matter. They will not survive and reproduce if they do not.
The Golden Rule is codified moral reasoning that arises from empathy. Reason can only be utilized by a brain that has evolved to the point where it is capable of abstraction. Lower animals do not have this, act purely on instinct, and thus cannot be moral or immoral.
Higher animals begin to grasp it and may choose to follow or go against their inherent empathy.
Therefore humans, having the most abstract brains, can cultivate themselves higher (or lower) than any other animal. Because we can imagine acting beyond our instincts, we have more CHOICE in the matter of whether to follow the worst aspects of our nature or not. Wolves have less of a choice but some. Plants and bugs and such have none.
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One could travel the Old West from Wyoming to Texas and all the way to Californy, hanging out in the seediest saloons, shooting a man for scratching his balls and another for laughin' bout it, associating with criminal skunk of every ilk, from Chattanooga to Chihuahua, every kind of shitbag yellow-bellied piece of no-good filth in tarnation.