Comment by Unseen on September 16, 2012 at 6:34pm

If you had a hard time dealing with "I used to be a primate," consider that YOU did not used to be a primate. You are at the end of a progression from single-celled organisms, to chordates, to bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, primitive mammals much like shrews. Primates come along quite a bit later. So, if imagining some pre-human ape-like creature bothers you, what about a fish or amoeba?

Also, as to morals. Believers commit all the sins you mention. The only difference between us is that you think a magical sorcerer (God) will take care of busiiness in the afterlife. We believe it's better to deal with these things in this life.

Comment by Pope OoO (Out of Order) on September 16, 2012 at 10:10pm

Don't give up on science, until the ID/Creationist "scientists" declare science off limits. At least they're often trying to use science to explain things. Their gargantuan task, growing more difficult every day, is how to explain why God left so much scientific evidence to support non-Genesis explanations.

I think my morals come from inside me, from my family, and from society. Morals in the bible came from the minds of mere mortals, after all, and one can see that their sincere attempt at it had flaws. Primarily, for me, it's a libertarian form of the golden rule. That is, do unto others what you feel they would want, and don't force your ideas into/onto them unless they are causing harm. This is *not* a perfect analysis of morality, because I don't think one exists. However, I think it works even better than a lot of the morality prescribed in sacred dogmas that are immune from periodic re-evaluation.

It doesn't have to get much more complicated than that. Even most animals know how to respect each other, at least. We're just learning where empathetic behavior like that comes from, but it's evident in social animals as primitive as ants.

Consciousness is a whole other, huge topic. My personal feeling is that homo sapiens started out with a very limited, rudimentary form of consciousness, which was enhanced and added to in leaps and bounds by increasingly sophisticated language, and other cultural cultural memes (e.g. reading/writing) that took thousands of years to develop. Perhaps even our new ability to invent and describe various gods was simultaneous with our increasingly sophisticated ability to imagine what other people could feel and think about, and even the (huge!) empathetic leap forward to imagine what other beings (and gods, of course) might be feeling and thinking about each of us. (This is called "theory of mind", if you're interested in learning more about it.)

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