Things to think about that blow your mind.

[NightmareExpress]

Everything is pointless and right/wrong doesn't really exist unless it gets yourself killed.
Your thoughts/feelings are just NA and K passing through a membrane and electric currents blasting chemicals around.
At one point, everything was apparently the same mass of nothing/space dust.
Look how much the world has changed in the last 100 or so years.

Oh, and biology.
You get a completely different outlook on the hows and whys organic things work the way they do.
Compare this to the basic understanding of it you had as a child.

 

[Hagi]

That's an interesting point. Human life, and life in general, is indeed wonderful simply because of just how incredibly unlikely - even miraculous - it is that it even exists. The thought of just how staggeringly implausible it seems to be that all of those particular atoms and particles came to together here, of all places, in the precise, perfect place to support such complex and magnificent life is just astounding. It's certainly something that people don't appreciate enough. To think that each on of us carries the same parts that made up stars and galaxies and the very first products of the beginning of time itself is almost beyond comprehension.

I still can't help but feel however, and please don't take this the wrong way, that seeing that kind of creation as only a sequence of natural events does take away from the ideas of morality and meaning somewhat. Mrblakemiller does raise a good point - if life is purely naturalistic, without any sort of guidance or implicit meaning to it, then killing another person would be no more immoral or worthy of punishment then waking up in the morning. It could be argued that the fact that it hurts another person is what makes it wrong, but that just raises the same question again - why would hurting someone else be wrong?

I don't know, it just seems as though regarding the natural world as the final point leaves too many things open. Sorry if anything I said seemed rude, I only wanted to state my own position on the debate you guys are having.

No rudeness I've no problem whatsoever at all with questions. Can't say I understand everything about how theists approach morality, especially seeing some of the rules laid down in some religious texts. There's a big difference in asking them how they deal with particular issues compared to telling them that they have a certain stance on those issues because I personally interpreted certain things a certain way.

As for why it's wrong to do harm unto others, from a purely naturalistic view pain and unhappiness are indeed nothing more than simple patterns in our nervous system. However from a purely naturalistic view there are also almost no differences between those nervous systems once you get down to it, you might find differences when comparing two people but when you compare to any other randomly chosen object it's quite obvious what's human and what isn't. Therefore any unhappiness or pain in any other person is, from a naturalistic point of view, really no different at all than pain or unhappiness inflected on yourself. Almost the exact same neural patterns will be happening anyway, merely in a slightly different location.

Thus hurting other people is pretty much equivalent to hurting yourself. And hurting yourself? Well, from a purely naturalistic point of view all that matters is what can be observed or in another word sensed. If you hurt yourself you'll immediately sense an undeniably negative sensation and you'll soon after observe at the very least the desire to avoid that in the future, most likely an action as well.

So morality-wise it's optimal to act in such a way that causes the least amount of pain and unhappiness in total, because from a naturalistic point of view it's impossible to differentiate between people because our nervous systems are, in the larger picture, pretty much identical (even in the case of someone mentally handicapped).