Morals are instilled through parents, friends, surroundings you grow up around, the environment you grow up in, things you witness (like parents behavior). Those aren't the 'higher powers' I was referring to. I was talking about a God or something unearthly. I just still don't see how you are basically relating society and God. It makes no sense.

:love: love those things.

Fair enough, let me attack it in another way then.

I'm sitting here typing this to you right now. Consider all the things that had to happen for this situation to exist. My parents had to meet, fall in love and have me, same with yours, same with the people who created this site and the people who started this thread. Same with the people who designed and built everybody's computers. Same with all of their parents and on and on like that as far back as humanity goes. Plus, the thread starter had to decide to create this thread, both of us had to decide to create accounts here and respond to it. Etc, etc, etc. Not to mention all those meetings were facilitated by other situations (if my dad hadn't decided to transfer schools in 1970, he'd never have met my mom), each of which had thousands of factors that led to that situation. The number of pre-existing situations that created the conditions for me to be sitting here typing this sentence is mind-bogglingly huge and encompasses all of history--there's no point where you're forced to stop tracing back chains of events.

So this brings me to a fate vs coincidence argument--is there some purpose in me sitting here typing this sentence or is it just a random occurrence. I'm suggesting neither/both. On the one hand, I can't claim to know the ultimate purpose of why this is happening and to assume that I'll ever be able to see the end result might be hubristic, but on the other hand it's definitely not random, everything IS fundamentally interconnected.

Okay, so what shapes you as a person? Why do you (or I, or anyone) hold the ideas you have? Probably a combination of nature and nurture, right?

What I was just talking about plays into the nurture side of things--you've developed an identity by internalizing and reacting to situations you've been presented with in your lifetime. But everything that you've reacted to, everything you've been told and every decision you've made has been likewise informed by a cumulative history of every decision everyone's ever made. And likewise, the decisions you've made have affected others in a similar way.

But it's not just the nurture side of things it plays into--nature is affected as well. The makeup of physical reality plays a part in how we react to different stimuli (this seems fairly obvious), but it works the other way too--physical reality can also be subject to perception and observation (psychosomatic medicine, the observer effect, the Heisenberg principle, etc). So not only has the natural world--both in terms of your internal biology and external stimuli--also helped shape your thoughts, emotions and decisions as a person, but those same thoughts, emotions and decisions have potentially conversely affected the natural world in ways we're only beginning to understand.

What you end up, if you follow this line of thinking, is this idea that everything that exists is sort of mutually dependent, but also moving forward along the axis of time (actually there's a tangent I could get into about that but I won't).

So now that we have this complex system, let's introduce morality into the equation. How do you define good? Maybe there isn't a universal definition, but if you had to suggest one, what would it be?

What I'm suggesting here is that the idea of good is self-perpetuating. Like you cited a desire to help others, at the heart of which is treating others with respect, working to create equality. What's valuable about treating others with equality? There's the idea that everyone is important, everyone is necessary, noting is extraneous. That suggests an awareness and deference to this idea that everything is interconnected.

Likewise, evil. Take something generally agreed to be evil, like killing another person. Killing is a selfish act--it's saying that your will (whatever your motivations for killing are) is more important than any potential contribution this person could make to the universe around us. A killer might make an argument that the act of killing is inherently part of this system--that they're merely acting out their role, but that's fallacious. Killing requires action, action requires will--that's why I can't call what I'm talking about strictly determinism [it's bigger than that], because will plays an important role.

Acts of both good and evil affect not only the world around you but yourself as well (I'll address this when I answer Zaqarbal in a sec), again because of this idea of interconnectivity.

So you have this system of cause and effect in which everything--morality included--exists. What is it? Well, for one, it encompasses everything, there's nowhere one can escape it because existence itself is its makeup. So it's omnipresent. Likewise, it includes everything that could possibly occur, again because existence itself is its makeup, which is tantamount to saying there's nothing it can't do. So it's omnipotent. And if nothing exists outside of it, then there is no information it doesn't contain. So it's omniscient.

What do you call something that's omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent if not god?

I see what you're getting at and it's a legitimate criticism that had me stewing for a bit.

The counterpoint I've come up with has a couple different parts, but they're very interconnected (heh) so I'm going to try and put them in a way that makes sense but I'm not sure how clear it'll come out.

Basically, the parts are:
1. In the idea of total interconnectivity, you can't totally separate the whole from the self--what's good for one is good for the other
2. Any perspective we might have isn't a complete picture because we're fundamentally unable to be objective or contain all the relevant information

Consider the ill-fated good people you talk about and how many of them are self-defined as happy, despite their negative circumstances (see also: "Man's Search for Meaning" by Frankl or the biblical parable of Job) and, on a similar wavelength, the malaise prevalent in those we might consider socially fortunate (see: most American literature from the mid-20th century on for examples).

The kind of social hypocrisy that you're talking about is a fundamental to the necessity of evil to exist for there to be will. In cause-and-effect type terms, I think of it like... um. I can't remember the name for it, it's a calculus thing--the line that eternally approaches zero without ever reaching it. We're constantly evolving, trying to resolve the equation of our existence in a moral dimension, but it's a perfectly imperfect system (such is the nature of the infinite)--for us to have a moral choice, we must be able to choose evil sometimes and because we're imperfect we sometimes do. This falls in line very directly with the idea of a JudeoChristian God.

The idea in Judeochristian theology is that there is some kind of ultimate reward that allows for virtuous suffering in this life to be rewarded in another iteration of existence. Frankly, I don't know how to speak to that. I don't think there IS any way to speak to that outside "mythology" because we have no empirical evidence of what experience might or might not exist after death as we understand it. I could start talking about multidimensionality and the nonexistence of time as they could potentially relate to consciousness (there's that tangent again), but it'd be hypothesizing at best. As an aside, focusing solely on empiricism to understand the universe is fatally flawed, but that's a topic for another day.

I dunno if I really addressed what you were saying--I'm kind of thinking as I go here. I'm curious what your thoughts are. Thanks for engaging on my level. Also, Dead Can Dance? Nice.

"What is it?"

All these things you are talking about is called LIFE

I don't see how ANY of this has to do with a God. I do not believe in fate or anything like that. Yes, many things had to happen for us to both be here discussing this... So what? For any situation to exist, tons of things have to happen before. That is pretty obvious and relates to God in no way.

To just put it very simply... nothing you are saying even relates to god. You are just talking about how society works. How situations occur. How things got to be how they are. Again, nothing to do with religion at all.

Yes, exactly.

I don't think we're going to get anywhere with this, simply because I find "So what?" to be a vital question and you've made it clear you don't.

So I'm just going to flat out say maybe you don't know what god even is and leave it at that.

Who are you to say what I do and don't know. Perhaps you are the one who really doesn't know what God is.

Basically you define God as society. Or life in general. Apparently you don't believe in God as a person or something that overlooks the world.

I just have no reason to believe in any religion or any God. The idea of Heaven, Hell, etc are just ridiculous to me.

But I'm asking the question--that's what this whole thing started with; how do you even try to figure out what god is. You seem to be adhering to one strict view of god that you've decided you don't believe in and leaving it at that.

Not society. Life in general is closer but still sort of missing the point.
A "person or something that overlooks the world," no, but that doesn't preclude a kind of consciousness.
I would posit that god--no functioning definition of god--could possibly be that simple.

Well, how much do you know about "any religion or any God?" How can you say you have no reason to believe in it without trying to understand what it is you do or don't believe in? Why might some people find value in believing in it (whatever "it" might be)?

That's where I'm coming from. Like I said, "so what" is important to me here. You study things around you, find links and commonalities, try to mesh that with your own experience in an effort to come up with larger truths. I can't just stick a label on something and call it done.

God is different to everyone. Let's switch terminology here.

Do I believe there is a force that determines things like fate and karma? No I don't.

I know some about different religions. Pretty much everyone I know is religious. I just can't be bothered with ideas of a higher power that is overlooking us. Or things like praying. Or angels, or the afterlife.

Alright, let's do switch terminologies, but we still have to define our terms.

How does what you call fate/karma differ from what I described above?

And in response to your latter statement, why not?