Morals are to me, a personal code...they vary from person to person...thanks to my Christian bringng up i learned to NEVER lie...one of the few morals i kept...though it didnt help my social life much.

 

Be good, do good.

 

Simple.

In the begining Canada and the USA were modelled around the ten commandments. Do not lie, ceat, murder etc. Newcomers of other faiths usually agreed with these principles. I don't see anything wrong with them either.

 

Now we have some suggesting everyone is a victim. If you choose to do drugs it is because you are a victim. You rob a bank it is because you are a victim. Carla Homolka is a victim. Anyone who has ever done a bad deed in their life is a victim

 

Carla is sick, a prime example of why we need the death penalty.

 

Anyway, theres a difference between someone who makes a mistake and a criminal, the law is set up to be less harsh to people who make mistakes, and help them get back into society as functioning human beings. and if that doesnt work...we have maximum time to

#8 it can also be said if there is a god why would he have let slavery happen? but anyway, morality is a tricky subject, it can be said that all morality started with religion, but even cavemen knew (somewhat) how to behave properly.

 

          [#5]: Sudbury. Morals indeed are a very personal code - each to their own, and hands off the rest. However you lose me if you say that a need for speaking truth can ever be considered MORAL in some absolute way. In my mind, telling the "truth" all the time is as reckless as it is stupid. People who say things as if they were TRUE at all costs, can yet still be wrong, did you know that? Why for instance are all your truths somehow more valuable and worthy of note, more then every other possible truth in the world? Isn't it possible that your truth is only true for you, and it's best just to leave it at that? Some truths are so selfrighteous that whenever a person feels obliged to make themselves into a fool by going around proclaiming their ridiculous honesty, weather it is based on anything factual or not, they always end up distorting the world for themselves, and even worse, confusing all of the impressionables around them. Some obvious truths are so harmful, so distasteful, so selfservingly rude, that a person literally becomes a jack-ass if they go around saying them. If I tell someone that they're fat, who is that helping, and why is it truth? If I tell a sick child that they are only going to live two more years after a one in twenty chance to survive that long at all, how can a truth like that help anyone? Abortion is murder? Who's telling the truth, and how dose that help? A belief in god is madness? Non believers are lost to eternal damnation? Idiots who think they are honest, because they blindly believe "truth" is some kind of a positive character trait, are about the stupidest set of morons I have ever met in my life, staunch nobility in the face of social repercussions and all. You'll have to forgive me, but people who claim honesty to themselves, are very suspect in my book of ignorant misinformation, for I have come to understand that true honesty would never stand up to make such a dim-witted claim. (By the way, "truth" can never be taught by one mind to another, it can only ever be learned by one's self, within one's own private heart.) Is any of this actually truth? That's not for me to say; that's for YOU to decide! Decide if you want to decide, and then you can change your mind again later at will, if you decide that you want that too. Be good, do good - I absolutely agree.

 

          [#6]: Dave: I don't believe in "victims" either, although occasionally I still feel like one sometimes, whenever I am beaten in the street for no reason I can tell, or whenever I am arbitrarily robbed for another's gain. But no matter, accountability is all that makes sense. All our choices are all our own, unless someone else is controlling our minds, or through fear of harm, controlling our very deeds. However, I feel that if you believe that you are not in control of yourself, then perhaps you might better serve yourself, your society, or whatever god you choose, by taking responsibility for that fact, and letting go of your own possibilities for ever making your own choices in the future. If you are in control, then you must face your own choices! Carla Homolka deserves every punishment she gets, but the would-be punishers will then have to face their own judgments after, when the moral reaper finally comes around collecting all its dues. By the way, the first four commandments are only about ONE thing, which hopefully no one actually ever modeled their version of a shared universe after. In principle the rest of the commandments are a great guideline for the way we should behave - if we have to be told that is. But in practice, you can actually suspend your own moral values, using your own moral logic, in order to teach better morals to another person of far less integrity then yourself. Right or wrong is not even in question when you do this, all that's left is a self preserving comfort for your own good skin in the fact that anything righteous can morally be done. We all have our own morals, but in reality, absolute morals just do not exist. They never have, and they never will.

Opar [#4]: Quite right, and well put as always. But I hope you are not suggesting that I am somehow blind to the dangers of intolerant religions like those outlined in an extremists views on Islam. You don't actually have to study the damn Koran to understand the fundamentals of what is professed there as being the TRUTH. Any religion that proclaims its own members as the only true children of Allah, is as moronic as it is scary - why do I have to read it to understand that? To a lesser degree most religions do the very same thing, though grant it without the need to go to immediate war over themselves. For a fanatical Christian, if you're a heathen, then you are far less important then another good Cristian human being, and it's quite alright to treat you that way. This means, in a life and death situation, a true Christian would easily let ten heathens die, in favor of one righteously Christian person. There are many different levels of extreme disdain for your fellow man in this world, belief and religion allows all of them to exist, both morally, and according to the good greatness of some god. Islam is an obvious one, but pointing it out, yet failing to mention how others are also the same, is just another form of one-sided perspective. Though I'm sure, Opar, that you are not guilty of that. Are you?

[#8]: LOL!

From CS, #11;

 

But no matter, accountability is all that makes sense.

 

 

How can there be accountability in a world where each person's morality is equally valid?

A person who robs you or cheats you or does anything to you does so for his own reasons, reasons which are valid to him at that time and in that place.

 

Is the virtue of being 100% 'middle of the road', undecided, refusing to judge what is good and what is evil, a virtue?

Auda #15: Good questions, but I think the answers are obvious to you. I think it's more of a matter of how can there NOT be accountability in a world were we all run according to the way we see fit. Some would say that uprooting a large section of old-growth forest is equal to the harm you create when you destroy a hundred innocent minds with the idea that touching themselves is evil and wrong. Flicking a cigarette but into the ocean can have the same uncaring ignorant reverberations as the abortion of a one that would have been loved well...  Morals? You said it yourself, how can it be so...? Opar says it well also, and I do not disagree with either of you. I merely say that all all the gods and all human ideals of moral paradise fall under the same realm of "right if your on this side", and "wrong if your not". Allah and all of them, including the christian god, all party at the very same table of good wholesome morality with all the other morally wholesome nuts.

Accountability to ones self is a trust you have to give your fellow man if you want to also have it for yourself. But we won't be doing that anytime soon I think. A person living in the city might find it difficult perhaps to understand how all of ones actions can affect every part of our every day life in society, now, and even more so with the outward expanding ripples of future affect. In most smaller communities, your interaction and conflict resolution styles become your main concerns in life, while a bigger town might find you more concerned with keeping all the parasites off your back. In a truly moral person everything just seems plane and simple, but that dose not mean we do not judge our fellow wrongs, especially if it negatively affects us or those we love. It means we are accountable to our feelings of integrity in the SELF. But like I said, that is a trust we are unwilling to give up to each other. So we punish. And some things MUST be punished, I am the first to agree. But again we must teeter as we think to what lengths will we go to deliver such a punishment, and perhaps to yet another innocent victim who must be crushed in order to fulfill the Justice of thousands...  Well, I digress. I never said it was wrong either, the way we got it all set up now, (or even that I knew what right and wrong were), I just said that imposed morality pisses me off to no freaking end! lol. People get what they deserve anyway, I guess - mostly...  Some will be accused accidentally, or through "malicious goodness", and other will  sometimes be mistakenly revered for violence and hatred, but mostly everything works out well on an average basis for the standard citizens and normal personalities who follow the profile patterns well...

The loss of an odd-ball now and then to "moral outrage" is of little to no consequence to anyone who matters anyway. And the birth of a Bush or a Napoleon to extreme power is to be expected and calmly unfeared...

#16 & #17: I can not disagree with the thoughts here. Personally I judge everyone who crosses my path, and sometimes quite harshly, in every single way that their behavior affects ME, (directly, indirectly, or imagined - lol).