You REALLY need a refresher course in human evolution if that's where you think morality came from. We are social animals. We observe everything around us, searching for patterns. We evolved this way. For example, let's say you're a hominid on the plains of Africa 3.4 million years ago. You hear a rustling in the grass. Is it the wind or is it a predator. If you think it's a predator and it's only the wind, no harm, no foul. That's a type 1 error, or false positive. If you think it's the grass and it actually turns out to be a predator, you're toast. That's a type 2 error, or false negative. And by doing that, you've removed yourself from the evolutionary chain. Over millions of years, we have learned to make type 1 errors more and to take every pattern as the real thing, just to be safe.
Back to us being social animals. I don't go steal, rape, murder, etc., because ultimately I want to be treated well by other members of society. Over our evolution, we have observed this behavior and it's what made us moral.
Your highlighted portion is Pascal's Wager. We've already discussed this and how it's bullshit. You're presupposing that you've chosen the correct god. There have been thousands of gods. What if the one you've chosen turns out to be wrong? Then you're no better of than I am.
No, I don't believe in aliens.
Originally Posted by WombRaider
Is that so- what about the lion/elephant/tiger who hears a sound- they have no natural predators???
Also, are you aware of the little white lie that still exist today regarding man and our closes relative the chimpanzee? Humans and Chimpanzees are actually quite different and not nearly as close as you may think :
The chimpanzee genome was sequenced for the first time in 2005.
It was found to differ from the human genome with which it was compared, nucleotide-for-nucleotide, by about 1.23 percent. This amounts to about 40 million differences in our DNA, half of which likely resulted from mutations in the human ancestral line and half in the chimp line since the two species diverged
Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
That's the longest string of words that Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who scientists raised as a human and taught sign language in the 1970s, ever signed. He was the subject of Project Nim, an experiment conducted by cognitive scientists at Columbia University to investigate whether chimps can learn language.
After years of exposing Nim to all things human, the researchers concluded that although he did learn to express demands — the desire for an orange, for instance — and knew 125 words, he couldn't fully grasp language, at least as they defined it. Language requires not just vocabulary but also syntax, they argued. "Give orange me," for example, means something different than "give me orange." From a very young age, humans understand that; we have an innate ability to create new meanings by combining and ordering words in diverse ways. Nim had no such capacity, which is presumably true for all chimps.
Strength
According to Hunt, if you shave a chimp and take a photo of its body from the neck to the waist, "at first glance you wouldn't really notice that it isn't human." The two species' musculature is extremely similar, but somehow, pound-for-pound, chimps are between two and three times stronger than humans. "Even if we worked out for 12 hours a day like they do, we wouldn't be nearly as strong," Hunt said.
Once, in an African forest, Hunt watched an 85-pound female chimp snap branches off an aptly-named ironwood tree with her fingertips. It took Hunt two hands and all the strength he could muster to snap an equally thick branch.
No one knows where chimps get all that extra power. "Some of their muscle arrangement is different — the attachment points of their muscles are arranged for power rather than speed," Hunt said. "It may be that that's all there is to it, but those who study chimp anatomy are shocked that they can get that much more power out of subtle changes in muscle attachment points