The naturalist understanding of morality asserts that we have evolved empathy as an impetus to cooperation. Combined with personal experience, empathy leads most of us to a "Golden Rule" sense of morality. From experience, I know what hurts me: with empathy, I know the same things likely hurt you too. Experience and empathy is all we need to decide most moral matters. "Do unto…

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hey guys, thanks as always for stopping in to see what i've found for you this week.

 

first, i've just confirmed our new contest! in the run up to the July 10th Dr. Stephen Law interview on the Think Atheist Radio Show we'll be having a contest to win one of 3 signed copies of his recently released book…

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last week i linked to the first news trickling out about a new paper by a NASA astrobiologist that purported to show that a meteorite contained fossilized bacteria. well, once people took a good look at the paper and its findings it became clear that the findings were absurd. lots of commentary on this one.

Matt, The Skeptical Teacher,…

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I wrote a blog post, a few months back, that wondered if nature's prime directive (survival) could be used as the basis for morality. Since then, I've realized that I missed the most important point of all: survival of our species depends on cooperation. Survival is the purpose of cooperation, so survival is still the basis of morality but the operative principle is cooperation. This is because we are intelligent social animals who can choose to cooperate instead of fight or kill. Nature may be… Continue