The Balkan Yankee

Following up on my previous post, I have some more quotes and references:

We are the very privileged owners of a brief spark of consciousness…this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own, and feeling that are just as important as your own and this gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system.
–Ian McEwan; speaking to Richard Dawkins in The Root of all evil? Part 2

Isn’t this an eloquent way to describe it? To me this is much more powerful and beautiful to recognize ourselves as being inherently gifted with empathy, rather than saying we are motivated to do good out of fear of god’s reappraisal, or out of selfish anticipation of a reward.

Is it morals that come from god or moral corruption that comes from god? Think about the motivations for 9/11… clearly a group of individuals committing an evil and immoral act under the distorted pretense of religious, god given authority. I’ll this post with this quote:

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg, Physicist, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

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