Dissident Heart,

Thank you for the welcome. I am happy to have found this community. When you point to shalom, or peace and well-being, are you speaking of a personal final goal, or a societal one?

Here's a book I would like to read: Truth: A Guide by Simon Blackburn. Some reviews: From Publishers Weekly Admirably sketching the battle lines currently staked out over the idea of objective truth, a Cambridge professor of philosophy makes his subject lively and accessible even as he parts some of...

MadArchitect said: "My resistence to taking those as evidence of any particular disposition towards looking for some "good" is that there seems to be an equally prominant set of instincts to the contrary: we have aggressive instincts, selfish instincts, anti-social tendencies, a desi...

I think the impulse to be "good," has both cultural and instinctual components. The instinctual part, I think, is composed of a protective instinct (which includes the maternal instinct), an altruistic instinct (we get good feelings from making someone else happy), a need for social approv...

One of the books on my must-read list is The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker. From Booklist Experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist Pinker is fascinated by the symbiosis between language and thought. In this stimulating volume, a continuation of the discussion found in The Language Insti...

MadArchitect, Thanks for the clarifications. My answer to your original question, "Is there a Good?" will have to be I don't think so. I think that, while the impulse to be "good" has evolutionary roots, the concepts of good and bad are products of the human mind, and their defin...

Dissident Heart, Is the force or call you refer to have a source external to the human mind or is it a product of the interdependent web you mentioned, of which the individual is a component? Also, would you consider the source to be an intelligent entity? Although I am not familiar with the discipl...

I agree. I'm tired of hearing the same arguments against religion over and over.

I also cast all my votes for The Lucifer Effect. I have already read The Moral Animal and would prefer to read something new.

MadArchitect wrote: seeker wrote: There are some pleasures that we feel guilty about even as we experience them. Are associated "bad" feelings the only reason to avoid them? For example, if a person could revenge some perceived mishandling without feeling a sense of guilt or repulsion, wo...