In a recent discussion with a religious relative, I was struck by my inability to find a satisfactory answer to this question: “how do you have selflessness without religion?”.
My belief is that we evolved from early humans who were communal beings and who learned early on that one had to protect the clan, sometimes at one’s own risk. People who did not do so were cast out of the clan, thus giving rise to the term “outcast”. I don’t think getting cast out happened much but that was mainly because the THREAT of it happening was real. Thus, over time, humans evolved with some sense of community and protecting and helping each other. I MAY be overly optimistic on this, but it is my belief.
SO … my point of view is that we just naturally evolved a sense of selflessness. I do not at all mean that we spend most, or even very much, of our time thinking of the well being of others before ourselves. We’re not THAT selfless. We DO, however, sometimes do selfless things with no thought of reward. A simple example would be snow blowing an elderly neighbors sidewalk.
My relative points out, however that we do this because it makes us feel good. Well, yeah. I agree, but she argues that that means I am not being selfless because there is a payoff for me but that religious people are sometimes selfless without a payoff.
I did not press her on what she thinks would be a selfless act by a religious person because I want to think more about my own sense of selflessness as discussed above.
@CyberLN While I agree in general with your point of view, I find your post unnecessarily aggressive. I’m trying to have a decent conversation about this, not a pissing match.
Simply put: Homo sapiens is a social species. We live in groups. And an efficient group dynamics that helps the group as a whole (and hence also benefits the members) is fueled by collaboration within the group. Hence, behaviour that promotes helping your group peers will indirectly help yourself, and hence also help your genes survive through your offspring. Thus, a good combination of empathy and selfless behaviour in a group promotes the survival of your offspring. Therefore, the genes responsible for this behaviour will tend to spread through your offspring.
@Get_off_my_lawn that is an excellent restating of what I believe I was saying in my original post. This is my point. I don’t think we need religion to have selflessness but I do agree w/ my relative that we get positive feedback/reward, if only a good feeling about ourselves for being societal and helping others. BECAUSE of our evolution, that is enough.
I think I’m going to have to press my relative on what she thinks is a selfless act that has no positive feedback.
You can also challenge her to give an example of a selfless act that a religious person can do that a nonbeliever can not do(*). Note that I’ve seen som religious people trying to answer this by suggesting that no nonbeliever could do the most selfless or most moral act of all, namely worship god and/or give their life to him. This is, however, beside the point. Worshipping their god - at least in the abrahamic religions - is a religious command they are obliged to follow, and is in the end motivated by their desire to save themselves from damnation. Thus, very little moral value or selflessness in it. Besides, moral is entirely subjective, as there is no such thing as absolute moral.
(*) A version of Hitchen’s challenge - “Name a moral action performed - or a moral statement made - by a believer, that could not have been made by an atheist.”
When reading a post, where voice inflection is not available, it can be easy to make assumptions about a person’s attitude and purpose. You don’t know me and haven’t been here very long so it’s understandable that you don’t know my communication style. Some folks here are blunt, some aren’t. Some folks are succinct, others are wordy. Some folks speak plainly, others use flowery speech.
As a heads up, if I were being aggressive, I probably would have cussed you out. I reread my post, in the tone that was in my head as I wrote it, and there was no aggression. There’s no aggression in this either: if you’re hearing some sort of emotion in a post, you can always check with the writer to verify it’s actually there. Cuz, this time, you erred by inferring I was intending aggression or attempting to engage in a pissing match with you.
A jellyfish is very primitive, and its relatives have been around perhaps even before the Cambrian Explosion some 550 million years ago.
The Portuguese Man-O-War jellyfish is actually a colony of animals that work and live together collectively, and they are quite selfless toward each other.
They share food, participate in the common defense, and assist each other with reproduction.
They don’t even have a central nervous system, yet they have been selfless for many millions of years, and they don’t seem to have religion.
Neither do ants, bees, wasps, termites, corals, wolves, etc… Even a bacteria called Staph aureus (an important disease-causing organism in hospitals) forms colonies that look like clusters of grapes, so even bacteria may practice a form of selflessness (depending upon your criteria), and bacteria don’t even have a nervous system.
If there are so many other living things that can be selfless without religion, why do you require humans to have religion to be selfless?
We DO, however, sometimes do selfless things with no thought of reward. A simple example would be snow blowing an elderly neighbors sidewalk.
I reread my post, in the tone that was in my head as I wrote it, and there was no aggression. There’s no aggression in this either: if you’re hearing some sort of emotion in a post, you can always check with the writer to verify it’s actually there. Cuz, this time, you erred by inferring I was intending aggression or attempting to engage in a pissing match with you.