Lord Larehip

While I am a hardcore atheist, I grapple with the idea that this one life is all there is going to be. I can live to be 200 years old and what will I have learned about existence? Really nothing. This life we are living is just not long enough for us to really learn anything about that life.

If life was really whatever you wanted to make of it and it didn't matter what you did because when you're gone, you're gone, then why don't I just go and kill everybody I hate and just rape all the women I've always wanted to have sex with? Gee I have never burned down a house full of people or sexually molested a child so why don't I just go do these things for the hell of it? There's no payback so what does it matter?

And yet, it DOES matter, doesn't it? Many religious people think that if you don't believe in their god, their religion, that you WILL do those things. Of course, they must be brain-dead because most of the people that currently exist or have ever existed were not members of their religion and they did not go around killing and hurting people just because they wanted to. The truth is, they didn't want to. But the question is WHY? The answer doesn't really suffice: "Because it's wrong!" But why would someone with no religious convictions at all believe it is wrong? "Because society frowns on it!" But that's not the reason you don't do that stuff. You don't do it because YOU don't believe it's right--period. F-uck society. YOU don't believe in behaving that way. But the truth is, you really don't know why.

Serial killers, war criminals who murdered and tortured innocent people, rapists, thieves--they feel no remorse. They're not bothered by what they did. Why would you be bothered by doing the same thing if there is no real payback if you can get away with it?

We can talk about conscience, ethics, increasing the chances of survival by reinforcing certain beliefs and behaviors but all of these are empty if you really analyze them. To say I don't murder people because I have a conscience is saying what? What is a conscience? From Meriam-Webster:

Main Entry:con£science
Pronunciation:*k*n(t)-sh*n(t)s
Function:noun
Etymology:Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin conscientia, from conscient-, consciens, present participle of conscire to be conscious, be conscious of guilt, from com- + scire to know — more at SCIENCE
Date:13th century

1 a : the sense or consciousness of the moral goodness or blameworthiness of one's own conduct, intentions, or character together with a feeling of obligation to do right or be good b : a faculty, power, or principle enjoining good acts c : the part of the superego in psychoanalysis that transmits commands and admonitions to the ego
2 archaic : CONSCIOUSNESS
3 : conformity to the dictates of conscience : CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
4 : sensitive regard for fairness or justice : SCRUPLE
–con£science£less \-l*s\ adjective
–in all conscience or in conscience : in all fairness

(As an aside--ALWAYS keep a dictionary loaded into your computer, it's so very, very handy.)

Our definitions are tautologic--they go around in circles. To truly understand this definition, you'd have to define every word in it and then each of those definitions must also be defined until you finally end up back where you started none the wiser. The definition fails simply because it doesn't tell us WHY we have a conscience or why others don't.

I posit that the reason some of us have a conscience and some don't MAY be because those who do not have a conscience feel deep down that there is anything to regret after death. Those who do have a conscience, on the other hand, cannot escape the belief that SOMEHOW there WILL be a payback. Maybe it's not some bearded, wizened old man in a robe up in the clouds surrounded by angels that passes judgment. But somehow, some way, we must pay for what we do. Even if you're an atheist.

By examining the various philosophies and religions of the world, I found that the doctrines of karma and reincarnation to be the most palatable explanations. So began a long search for a philosophical argument to support it. After many years, I think I have one that is air-tight. It doesn't explain everything or even much of anything but it does lay out a case for reincarnation and that's enough for right now.

If you're interested, I'll lay it out for you (it's fairly complex).

Sansa Stark

there are no rewards, get over it. Don't be a pussy.

Freebase Dali

I don't agree with the statement that those who behave morally are doing so exclusively because of some sort of fear for retribution, in this life or the next.
I'm an atheist, and I truly don't believe there is any judgement in the "next life" or any karmic underpinning to our actions beyond cause and effect. However, I don't go around murdering and raping and being a monster out of fear of prison.
I don't know "why" I'm not a monster, but if we were to speculate, no matter what you take off the table, the simple fact of the matter is that we would not have survived as a species if we did not evolve some sort of base moral code. So in absence of any other evidence, you can say with certainty that there is a very high likelihood that it's just a part of us as a successful human race. Most of us just don't go around killing, raping and drowning kittens because we don't want to, not because we want to but don't want to end up in a prison cell or a fiery pit.
To have that sort of outlook is hugely cynical and flies in the face of all the evidence we see on a daily basis that the majority of us do actually care about others... and not because we think we'll get a medal at the end of the race.

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Paul Smeenus

This. Your premise doesn't hold water, at all.

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Lord Larehip

That's the fictional narrative that your conscious mind creates to explain the subconscious desires and inclinations that we all act on. You can test it by asking yourself if you've ever done anything for which you could be arrested and sent to prison. If the answer is yes, then you don't abstain from activities out of fear of going to prison.

We could have evolved any type of moral code or none at all and the results wouldn't be appreciably different in terms of survival. Psychopaths have survived quite admirably.

It's not fear of hell either. It's a subconscious feeling that once the deed is done it has a price attached to it. It cannot be unwritten. Nothing more than that.

Cynical it is. The scientific finding that we don't have any idea why we do what we do and believe what we believe and must make up narratives to explain is about as cynical as it gets. But it has been proven. Do we actually care about others and why?

Freebase Dali

The answer is yes. I've broken many laws, some reasonably serious. However, those actions were not at odds with my general sense of morality. They were at odds with legal expectation. Furthermore, I've done things that I consider immoral that have no legal ramifications, and I've felt bad about them enough to go to great measures to prevent such actions from reoccurring, based on the effect they had on the parties involved, who I care about. I don't understand how you're willing to speculate that all of humanity acts out of fear of reprisal, and simultaneously are unwilling to entertain the likelihood that most of us genuinely care about the well being of others because it's just part of who we are (most of us), which is far more evident than your sweeping assumption, which can be quantified as unlikely if you walk into a prison and see people occupying it without being able to classify them all as psychopaths.

I hope you're aware that the majority of the human race is not psychotic... The human race as a majority is what drives the whole. To use a statistical minority to make assumptions about the majority is fallacious. In fact, had the majority not been successful at co-existing with its own species, the deviant minority would not have survived either, since it's still part of the species. So in all actuality, that minority owes its survival to the co-existence of the species as a whole, which evolutionary morality supports in the first place.

Since you have unrequited access to the collective subconscious of our entire species, please tell me why people still feel remorse for things that are commonly forgiven.

Cynicism isn't in the detached analysis of behavior. It's part of behavior.

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Lord Larehip

You seem to be contradicting yourself. You said earlier you wouldn't be murderer or what not because of the legal consequences. I said if you ever broke the law before then you don't abstain for that reason because you have no problem with breaking the law. Now you've switched gears and are saying murder, rape and such are at odds with your general sense of morality. Part of my point was you don't do certain things because YOU don't want to and now you seem to be confirming that. My point was further that you don't know why you don't want to you just don't. You can cover it up with saying it's at odds with your morality but that doesn't really explain anything. You're just saying you don't do that because you don't do that.

I'm not talking about those things. I'm talking about doing something that could land you in jail but it didn't stop you from doing it. Some things we will do and some things we will not do. Why? We don't know. Or we could say that we were raised that way but then that's doing things automatically without any real thought going into it which is doing it without really knowing why.

I'm not saying people behave a certain way out of fear of reprisal. It's cause and effect. We watch bad causes beget bad effects and that, in turn, affects what we do. I wouldn't call that reprisal. We know once things are set in motion--that's it. It will have to run its course and we can't change it. That has to nag like a b-itch at the root of our subconscious.

You mean psychopathic? Psychopaths are not psychotic necessarily. They are generally as sane as anyone perhaps even more so in some ways. They are simply devoid of a conscience.

That doesn't explain the presence of the psychopath or the proliferation of such. The truth is, no one is even sure how much of the human race is psychopathic. We only know they are found in every race, country, culture and both genders. Psychopaths are the premier solipsists. Solipsism is a philosophy that holds that you are the only real being and the others around you exist only for your benefit and can be used anyway you like. They don't really feel anything, they only appear to for your benefit. It's called a defunct philosophy but nothing could be further from the truth. EVERY ontological philosophy MUST have some degree of solipsism in it. This philosophy I am expounding relies on it a great deal.

And perhaps human beings are that way--we are all to some degree psychopathic. We have to be. If we were emotionally devastated by all the death and tragedy we read in the news everyday, we'd be complete wrecks in the space of a week, totally dysfunctional. Being able to detach ourselves emotionally from the tragedies of others and even joke about them also affords us some clarity, some sense, some way to learn from it without paying too high a price emotionally. And that's why, I believe, that psychopaths survive and in large numbers, because we share enough of their characteristics. But just as you can take solipsism too far, some people take psychopathic behavior too far.


You can figure that out on your own. You too have access. That's why it's called COLLECTIVE.



It's part of nature and nature is cynical. What do you call the food chain? No loving god would have come up with something so brutal and thoroughly absorbed in self-interest. It's a bloody outrage.

John Wilkes Booth

Though not quite as admirably as human morality, which they have to feed off like parasites in order to survive.

Lord Larehip

Not at all. Psychopaths have wrought tremendous changes to human history and consciousness. The Holocaust, the Stalin purges, Mao's Great Leap Forward, Pol Pot, the Inquisition, etc. The world will long reverberate to the impact of the psychopaths among us. I'll go so far as to say that human morality and ethics seem incapable of progressing without them. Nothing will make you appreciate compassion and empathy like running into someone who doesn't have any.

TheBig3

Sounds like

"I'm an atheist because Evangelicals are ****ty, right? But also, I'm not"

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