Lots of bashing for the belief of God....

[trestres]

Final-Fan said:

1.  I don't understand why oyu refuse to give me sources for that information you claim to have. 

2.  I don't understand what any of what you talked about has to do with American entry into WW2.  AFAIK, we did not enter the war because of the concentration camps, at all.  You have not answered my question about what sort of false pretenses you are talking about.  Do you think Pearl Harbor was deliberately made vulnerable or something? 

Moving on to the authority figures point, you're saying a lot of people follow authority figures even when they tell them to do bad things, because they are used to the stuff they are told to do being good even when it doesn't seem so?  That's an interesting point, and a good one, but I don't think it fully explains the Milgram Experiment. 

I mean, I got this from WIkipedia:  "The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.

"At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner." 

There's not really any way to spin that as being an acceptable part of a study on memory.  The fact that they were fooled and people weren't really being killed is immaterial to the study.  Some people did manage to resist authority like your electrician, but he was the exception to the rule, probably because of his personal experience with electrical shocks (in his particular case). 

It seems that you agree that morals change over time, so you are not really absolutist.  I think vagabond would agree with me when I say that most people have internalized a basic set of strong morals that are important to our society, but that doesn't mean that the "social good" model of morals isn't being followed just because they are deeply ingrained. 

1. Because it's not "well seen" to be revising history, much less on an English based website. I mean, I'd do it privately but not publicly. Even if what I say might be true, I would be offending many people.

2. Of course they didn't attack Germany because they had concentrattion camps, the motives are much more deep than those. In fact Pearl Harbour was USA's excuse to fight a war that wasn't even beneficial for the USA per se. Much like what happened during WW1, with the difference that WW2 was filled with ideological motives behind every decision.


I don't agree with morals changing over time, but rather humanity evolving and understanding better the true laws of morality. Accepting past mistakes and not making them again. Much like our understanding of physics evolved through the years. We humans have been developing intelectually, culturally and spiritually since we began to exist (which btw is another interesting topic to go through, where do we come from?) and so as we mature as a civilisation, we do so in every area of reality. It's difficult for someone believing the opposite to see it, as it is difficult for me to think about how can everything be subjective. Moral relativism nullifies the term morality, because there are no more rights or wrongs, as everything is relative, and then that subjectivity is also nullified as there is nothing good or bad a person can have relative views about.