zodiac1 Sep 2004

1) I was pretty sure you were making fun of Dovina for suggesting so in the first place.

2) Nurturing, even by a robot, is not morally neutral. There is a rather interesting and amusing note in the memoirs of Master Wellington-Beeves concering an Irish infant abandoned in a forgotten back courtyard at Cambridge and somehow allowed to grow to maturity more-or-less undisturbed, but that's hardly applicable to this discussion.

3) It's hard to say there's "very little correlation between high church-going levels and low murder rate", because the moral influence of religion extends to most nonbelievers, as Dovina has demonstrated.

You can't say a moral is innate simply because the practical reason for it has been forgotten or become irrelevant. I can't imagine what reason might have been for the refrigerator thing, but the condemnation of gayishness, especially gayish monogamy, was probably at some point pretty practicaly, involving political and species-minded motivations. At any rate, gayfear still has to be learned (and unlearned).