-=Dark_Angel=-, P.I.31 Aug 2004

I'm afraid I disagree awfully. I don't think religious people, on the whole, refrain from slaughtering people they dislike just because their religion says it's wrong. And I don't think non-religious people refrain from slaughtering people they dislike for purely practical reasons. In both cases, the majority of people feel guilt, partly through upbringing, but also because we have an innate sense of guilt at doing such things. If you did an experiment in which a human colony was left to develop on a desert island, totally isolated from the rest of humanity, and in particular from religion and people who told them killing was wrong, would they end up slaughtering each other? It is to the species's advantage that we feel guilt when performing certain lewds, since shame at lewding upon others promotes cooperation. Before we all evolved, humans who felt no shame at performing lewds upon others would have been shunned by the rest of the group, and left to wither and starve on their own. The main difference between religious people and normals is that religious people can end up believing in wallyish morals just because their religion says so. These are the morals for which the only justification is "God says so".