Setanta wrote: You can play any stupid game you want, it doesn't change the undeniable fact that Okie's global statement about concepts of right and wrong deriving from religion is unsupportable.
I think you are defining religion too narrowly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion
"A religion is a set of beliefs and practices often organized around supernatural and moral claims, and often codified as prayer, ritual, and religious law. Religion also encompasses ancestral or cultural traditions, writings, history, and mythology, as well as personal faith and mystic experience. The term "religion" refers to both the personal practices related to communal faith and to group rituals and communication stemming from shared conviction."
Religion does not require a temple or church structure or even an organization, and religion includes ancestral and cultural traditions that influence moral practices in a culture. All of this should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer.
Actually, i was laying off you quite a bit in this discussion, Okie. What evidence do you have that Amerindians derived their concepts of good and evil from a belief in a "Great Spirit?" You used the example of horse-stealing. Do you assert that the "Great Spirit" told the Amerindians that horse-stealing was OK? Do you assert simply that they believed they had been told so?
Unless you define religion so broadly as to be meaningless, you can hardly claim that the Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese and so many others in east Asia who were followers of Confucianism got their notions of right and wrong from religion. Shintoism, deriving from animistic shamanism, hardly qualifies as divinely ordained rules of living, and Bushido ("the Way of the Warrior") even less so--and those two influences were so powerful in Japanese society that they deeply affect Japanese society to this day.
Do you assert that the polytheism of the Hindus also entailed a set of moral strictures handed down to them by their gods, even simply to the effect that they believed as much? Do you assert that the animism common in Africa in recent historical times included religiously inspired rules of conduct?
I think you are on very shaky ground with your thesis, not the least of the reasons being that the statement is so global--for example, you seem to imply that aboriginal Amerindians were some sort of social monolith, when in fact they represented hundreds of languages or dialects, and thousands of tribes or bands. Do you assert that the nearly naked, ignorant and savage Montagnais of Labrador were culturally identical with the city-building and city-dwelling Toltecs of the central Mexican plateau?
I suggest that you have grossly oversimplified, and that you are projecting your favored Judeo-Christian values onto all of world history, and onto all of mankind.
Loyalty oaths have never stopped. The Pledge to Alliegence is one. Most of them mean so little, some mean you die if you step across a line. I stay away from the 2nd kind me own self!
I forgot.
I have been meaning to express my deepest thanks to ebrown-p for bringing us this thread because it made me remember the first time I ever read the words "Loyalty Oath". It must have been very early in the the 1960's, I was about twelve years old. I was a paper boy then for the Manchester (CT) Herald and every day when I finished my route I would sit down and read the paper from front page to back.
This one day there was an article which said that a fella by the name of Pete Seeger had had his conviction of something called Contempt of Congress overturned. Seems he'd been asked to take a Loyalty Oath and he had said something to effect that he didn't think he'd need to do that in a free country. That he hadn't done anything conspiratorial and that he was entitled, much as the committee chairman was, to his own opinions.
He didn't take the Fifth and refuse to testify, he said he figured he was within his right under the First Amendment to say what he wanted to say and (we always forget this part) associate with his fellow citizens.
Well, they slapped him with a conviction thinking he was that free, but, like I said, it was overturned.
Anyway, thanks, ebrown-p, for reminding me of the very day I started thinking like a free person.
Joe(about a month later I bought my first guitar)Nation
