with or without moral teachings?

I think there's a certain natural sympathy that even babies and dogs feel for each other. If something bad happens to someone or something like you, you feel bad because you worry about it happening to you. Is that conscience? I don't know.

It's not conscience if you're only worried about it happening to you. If you can put yourself in the hurt person's position and feel sad for them, so it teaches you to stand against the hurtful behavior, then it is conscience.

morals and ethics are products of our evolution as a tribal species. 'conscience' is just a version of ourselves examining our own morality

+1

The fact that sociopaths exist (i.e. people with little to no conscience) would seem to support the theory that conscience and empathy are at least partially a product of nurture and not entirely nature. Unless all people with sociopath mental disorders have some form of genetic mutation or brain injury that causes it.

Humans are the only animals on earth with two learning systems; genetically programmed instincts (conscience) and nerve based learning system. Before about 2 million years ago hominids lived by instinct (conscience), and the instinctive orientation of humans is to be good and cooperative as a survival strategy.

About 2 million years ago we developed the nerve based learning system. Two learning systems in each head lead to the "human condition." Our instinct tells us to be good, but the nerve based system wants to know why. This leads to frustration and a tendency to want to prove you are good and be egotistical.

As an example, consider a migrating bird. The bird is genetically programmed to instinctively migrate. It does not know why or want to know why it migrates, it just follows its instinct. If you put a nerve based system with the birds genetic/instinctive system, it would start asking why it migrates and would go off course. As it goes off course from the instinct (conscience) the instinct (conscience) starts to criticize it and it become angry etc,,

If you want more info go to this webpage.

I personally like this idea a lot. It makes sense in terms of science and intuitively.

Humans invented religion as a way to deal with the "voices in your head" and the human condition. We validate our "goodness" by redemption. With this explanation there is no need for religion. Humans are instinctive good, we just have this problem related to 2 learning systems in each head.
Look around, people are always trying to prove they are good!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2014 10:56AM by perky.

Biology isn't right or wrong, it just is. I wouldn't say that humanity is instinctively good, I would say that humanity is instinctive. If we are to interject the nebulous words good and bad than there are plenty of times that we would have to admit that our instincts aren't all that good.

One of the main reasons for the bad is the lack of understanding about the cause of the human condition.

Now that we know that the search for understanding causes the anger, upset and ego it is easier to return to the "good."

As mentioned it also explains why people need religion. It is way to prove you are good and get redemption from your "bad" acts.

Platos cave is also a great illustration of this. Once you understand the reason for the upset you get out the cave.

I think I get what you are saying except for one part. What is good and what is bad?

I have a long familiarity with the theories of Jeremy Griffith. I read his first book in about 1989. I was a believer. I spent some time with him. I transcribed tapes for him. I donated books to his library. It was me who introduced him to the ideas of R. D. Laing and Soren Kierkegaard.

From near the beginning, things struck me as wrong about his theory, especially his idea that sex is always an attack on innocence, and that men are not sexually attracted to women if they know they are not innocent.

For a long time I desperately wanted to believe he had the answers, and his writing can be very convincing. We had a falling out. I had a mental breakdown. After that I was on my own as, understandably, the organisation doesn't encourage involvement from people who have a mental illness.

Over the years though I was able to work out what was wrong with his theories. At the heart of it is a misunderstanding of what the conscience is and a misunderstanding of what love is.

He claims that our conscience is encoded in our genetics. There is no evidence that I can see for this. A far more accountable view is that our conscience is a part of our ego. It is that part of our ego where we store our expectations about ourselves. It is learned. This is why what makes people feel guilty varies from person to person and culture to culture. Also, if we had an inbuilt instinctive conscience which orientated us towards selflessness then we would expect young children to be less selfish than older children, something Griffith claims in the birthday party story that appears near the beginning of his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition. And yet a recent scientific study has found that 3-4 year olds are significantly more selfish than 7-8 year olds : http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v454/n7208/abs/nature07155.html To my mind this supports the idea that our conscience is learned.

And Griffith defines love as "unconditional selflessness" and talks about it becoming instinctive through the process of "love indoctrination" amongst our proto-human ancestors. The idea is that their selfish genes made them look after their own offspring as if they were being selfless and so the offspring learned that this was the meaningful way to behave, but this genetic orientation to selflessness was unforgiving of our need to experiment with consciousness driven behaviour. One problem with this is that it presupposes that love can be dictatorial and inflexible rather than improvisatory. Watch a mother caring for her child. She isn't following a dictatorial flight path like a bird, she is spontaneously interacting with her child. And this is a forgiving process. She doesn't expect the child to behave in a specific way beyond not doing anything dangerous to itself. So how can this improvisatory and forgiving process lead to an unforgiving and oppressive instinct against which we need to rebel?

Love is not "unconditional selflessness". Love is a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. It is not some harsh dictator. It operates according to the pleasure principle. It feels good to have this kind of relationship with our fellows. When we are in loving communication with others we are, in a very profound sense, not alone.

The question is - what are the barriers to love and how do we remove them? The main barrier is fear. When we feel threatened by others or by what we have repressed inside ourselves we put up what the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich called "character armour". Our "character armour" is the barrier to love - it is our egotism and our alienation. But we can learn to do without it by developing the art of unconditional self-accepance. This is the foundation for mental health and a healing of society.

I used to suffer terribly from mental illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder. Since I freed myself from Jeremy Griffith's ideas and came to an understanding of unconditional self-acceptance, I have been free of any serious forms of psychological distress. I've also become very creative as a writer.

All of my writing is available in e-book form for free. I have benefited from these ideas so much that the only right thing to do is to share them freely :

http://www.howtobefree-theblog.blogspot.com.au/

I use the pseudonym Joe Blow because I want to de-emphasise myself and place attention only on the ideas, which are offered for what they may be worth. I don't claim anything I say is true. I leave it up to others to decide for themselves.


perky Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Humans are the only animals on earth with two
> learning systems; genetically programmed
> instincts (conscience) and nerve based learning
> system. Before about 2 million years ago hominids
> lived by instinct (conscience), and the
> instinctive orientation of humans is to be good
> and cooperative as a survival strategy.
>
> About 2 million years ago we developed the nerve
> based learning system. Two learning systems in
> each head lead to the "human condition." Our
> instinct tells us to be good, but the nerve based
> system wants to know why. This leads to
> frustration and a tendency to want to prove you
> are good and be egotistical.
>
> As an example, consider a migrating bird. The
> bird is genetically programmed to instinctively
> migrate. It does not know why or want to know why
> it migrates, it just follows its instinct. If you
> put a nerve based system with the birds
> genetic/instinctive system, it would start asking
> why it migrates and would go off course. As it
> goes off course from the instinct (conscience) the
> instinct (conscience) starts to criticize it and
> it become angry etc,,
>
> If you want more info go to this webpage.
>
> I personally like this idea a lot. It makes sense
> in terms of science and intuitively.
>
> Humans invented religion as a way to deal with the
> "voices in your head" and the human condition. We
> validate our "goodness" by redemption. With this
> explanation there is no need for religion. Humans
> are instinctive good, we just have this problem
> related to 2 learning systems in each head.
> Look around, people are always trying to prove
> they are good!

Thanks for the post. Real food for thought.

Conscience is a loaded word because it assumes a sort of duality. Not that I'm opposed to duality, I just think that as an explanation of gut feelings it is unnecessary. Essex Ex MO mentions evolution and winklebottom mentions nurture. Why can't our gut be explained by both?

We are a herd species, we prefer to congregate, we like to have structured society. That is part of our nature. However societies don't all agree with baseline definitions of right and wrong. This is part of our nurturing.

I suggest that our perception of things is influenced by two major factors, our worldview (nurture) and our experience. I know that is simplistic but simplicity might be the answer even if it isn't all of the answer.

Consider this example: A person brutally rapes a child, and everyone is justifiably outraged at this. This person is convicted of the crime and must now pay the price. Some cultures say that death is an appropriate punishment and others don't. I am not sure where I stand but the society that I live in has in the past been ok with executing people for crimes. Let's say this person is executed and I am present. I will without question get sick and feel a tremendous amount of angst. Does this mean that the execution was wrong?

In the end my gut feelings or my perception is an exceptionally unreliable indicator of reality. How I feel about things on a subconscious level is only an indicator of how I cope, it isn't an indicator of the rightness or wrongness of the thing that I am feeling. If there is one thing that I have learned on my way out of Mormonism it is that the easiest answers are sometimes the most destructive.

please tell me of one "moral teaching" that requires religion.

It's immoral to drink coffee. Now there's a moral teaching you'd never see without religion.

Written as the evil Cactus hunkers over his first cuppa of the morning.

The conscience exists because of millions of years of evolution. The brain evolves and adapts. Over millennia we have learned that working together rather than as individuals is powerful. These ideas form the basis of the conscience--learning that we as individuals benefit even more when everyone benefits. From this is born empathy. We understood that others feel what we feel. We as a species prefer to see a happy face and we learned to make others happy when we could.

Having "goodly" parents to teach you these principles can enhance the realization of their importance in our lives, but it all came from humanity--humans on a planet trying to survive.

I believe these principles are innate for the most part, but unfortunately there are some very vile people on the planet who are the exception that proves the rule. Many of these are extremely religious.