identity crisis
If I had been born in India, chances are I’d be a Hindu. If I had been born in Spain, I would likely be a Catholic. If I had been born in Iran, it is more than probable that I’d be a Muslim.
I was born to a middle class family in European country with a decent education system. This has been a huge contributory factor to the fact that I have never experienced violence, either giving or receiving, and that I can float around the world picking up and dropping means to make a living on a whim. I have choices and my experience of life is pleasant. It’s therefore more than easy for me to pleasant to other people.
If you believe you don’t deceive, steal or hurt other people because you have chosen to be a ‘moral’ person, you are wrong. If you believe that a god, or your own superior personality, enables you to avoid raping or murdering while other people do, you are wrong. We are all the product of our environment. If everyone around you is murdering and you have realised it is not a positive or useful action, your realisation is a result of the environmental factors you have been exposed to – not because a god is helping you control sinful urges, or because your powers of reasoning are superior to those around you.
When we look and despair at the atrocities committed around the world, we should be careful how we judge the individuals involved. Because but for flick of DNA, it could have been someone closely resembling us.
NO crisis there i can see.
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I thought I was being clever with the title but I can’t remember why …
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Don’t worry, i have no idea why “No” is in all capitals.
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This is a post I agree with. Our actions are dependent on our environment, training and temperament.
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I was born into a proletarian family in a very equal western democracy. I have had my share of violence, hard work, poor living and difficult choises. My family was an atheistic one, so I have no reason to be particularly proud of my moral standing, it is not a result of myself struggling whith, or braking from childhood indoctrination. The reasons why I do not decieve, or steal, nor whish to hurt other people are truly not the achievements of my own, but simply me adopting the values of my parents because they did not only tell me to do as they tell me to, but also explained why in general a person should behave in a moral fashion. As a result doing the good thing makes me feel good and choosing what I know is wrong makes me feel bad whith myself. I believe that is called the concience. Then again. I just might be guilty of such acts, at least unintentionally. I might decieve someone by telling something I myself believed to be true, but that was not. I might “steal” someones happiness by telling them the truth, when what I though I was doing was helping them. I would hurt someone physically to protect an innocent party, or myself.
There is a wonderfull book by Michael Moorcock called Elric of Melniboné, that tells of a person who becomes aware of natural ethics though he is part of a society, that has fascistic, ultra individualistic and imperialistic conservative values. A nother good book about this kind of subject is The Kid From Hell by Arkady and Boris Strugaski, that tells a story of a soldier from a culture of for ever war who is taken to a place where pacifists rule.
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I’m sure the vast majority of humans get their full range of moral type instincts from their parents. We tweak them a little and hand them on. Thanks for the book recommendations, I’ll have a look into them.
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Does anything ever feel like free will to you?
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Everything! Everything I do is my choice. I just don’t confuse that with the fact that given the knowledge and processing power I have, my choices on some level are obvious. I’m still trying to find a way of expressing this in a way that makes sense to others because the ‘free will’ standard argument clearly clouds all these issues. I definitely think we all have choices in our actions and we are all responsible for our actions.
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