Quote:
Originally posted by Spanxxx
Therefore, your parents telling you "not to kill someone" is still based on a message that they learned through training from a life under the reign of a nation founded on the bible.
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Not so. Killing predates the bible and all religious texts and thus the bible cannot be interpreted as being the foundation of western law. Besides, even if, thousands of years ago, some angry caveman saw his mate have his face broken on a rock by another angry caveman, and decided that murder was a crime and that it should be written as such, they still would have had to come to that conclusion through basic instinct- an immediate reaction to what he had just seen.
I believe that the basic grasp of right and wrong is instilled in us in the same way as, say, the need to reproduce, and modern law enables us to develop this instinct into an acute understanding. Of course it's not quite as simple as that, as it's inevitable that there will be variation from extreme to extreme (pacifism to sadism, for example), but I doubt that if we all woke up one morning to find law no longer existed, the murder of as many people as possible would be the first thing on our agendas.
Religion is just an easy target in any argument.