Thoughts about morality

We seem to have entered an age when every discussion of morality begins and ends with what goes on between a person's belt and his knees. It strikes me that people with this sense of morality have a very small sense of what it really means to be moral. Morality has more to do with how people treat each other in our continuing efforts to live together than it does with how we sleep together. I suggest that morals actually preceded any religious thought. It became evident very early in the human social order that rules were needed about such things as personal health, safety and property if we were to be able to live together and prosper. In small group society, those rules were needed just among the small group; all others could be cheated, raped and killed. As the groups got larger, the rules came to encompass more people. Today, we have a concept that maybe all humans belong to one group as far as social order is concerned; that our moral compass is the entire world.

I would suggest that gods developed as rulers attempted to provide their ruled with a type of all-seeing eye that would perch on each person's shoulder and ensure that he or she did what he or she was supposed to do and act toward all others as he or she was supposed to. We know that people developed rules, called morals, that enable them to live together. We also know that the concept of gods is basically only about 12,000 years old, if that.

Star Trek had its prime directive: Let a culture develop as it is supposed to. In other words, do not interfere with another person's right to exist as he or she wishes to exist extended to a culture (Native Americans take note). That's what the so-called "moralists" in today's world are forgetting. They want each of us to exist as they wish us to. I think that is the worst type of immorality.