| kazadoom said: If all we do is die and that is it, then why were we born with a conscience? Why is there something in us that gives us the ability to determine right from wrong? How does something like that just appear? Don't bother with saying it was just taught to us, because if that is the case, then who taught those who taught us, and so on. The ability to know right and wrong sets us apart from all other creatures, so why do we have it? |
If we can determine right from wrong then why are there religions and philosophical systems to tell us what is right and what is wrong?
We don't _know_ what is right and what is wrong, what differentiate us from other creatures that we can be sure of (unlike a soul which cannot be proved or disproved) is our intelligence and thus our ability to think about abstract concepts like right and wrong and subsequently try to categorise things according to them.
In other word, we do not have an innate ability to know the rightness or wrongness of things but we have an innate ability to think that something is right or that something is wrong.
Would you say that knowing that drinking alcohol is wrong is innate in you? Probably not as most Christian believe drinking it in moderation is a good thing (and wine is also a part of some Christian rites for Catholics); yet a muslim might say yes, knowing that drinking alcohol is wrong is innate in him because his religion says so (I think I am oversimplifying things here as if I understand correctly the coran says that you should not drink alcohol not because it is wrong in itself but because it leads to doing wrong things. A muslim reader is more than welcome to correct me if I misrepresent his religion as I am far from an expert on it).
Some of it is taught to us (would you be Christian if you had not been taught to be by somebody else, be it your parents, a preacher or Christ himself? Would you be Christian if you parent were muslim?) , some of it is thought by us (and then taught to others).
Some of what we are taught we accept and some we reject (I was raised Christian but am agnostic, some are raised atheist but find God...).
One question. If the knowledge of right and wrong is innate in us and Christianity is the one true religion, how come there were no Christians before Jesus's first coming? As our knowledge of right and wrong is innate in us according to this theory we should have found out about it without needing Jesus to tell us about it, no? (oh, and if somebody else believe in an innate right and wrong but happens to be of another religion, replace Chritianity by its name and Jesus by whatever proeminent religious figure revealed the tenets of your religion to the world).
"I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it"
