If It Feels Good, Do It

I tend to agree with Uncle Ken about emotion being the primary source of our concepts of right and wrong.  Reason is good for planning an action but, to escalate from planning to doing, you need emotion.  Religion is mostly about emotion too. Although there are people who study it objectively, studying religion and practicing religion are two different things.

I never thought of it before, but Uncle Ken might be on to something when he says that a concept of right and wrong comes from raising children.  Family bonds are certainly emotional, especially the bond between mother and child.  I am reminded of a line from the TV show "Young Sheldon":  " I don't believe in God, but my mother does, and I believe in my mother."  By imparting a belief in some higher power, be it God, the tribe, or the state, a parent gives a kid something that he can use as a moral compass when the parent is no longer around.

There might have been a time when everybody, at least everybody who lived in the same village, carried the same moral compass, but that ship sailed a long time ago.  How then do we explain the diversity of moral standards that we observe today?  It seems obvious that every parent does not teach their kids the same moral standards, but how did that come about?  Maybe it's because kids eventually break free of their parent's influence and pick up ideas from other sources.  Then they raise their own kids differently than their parents raised them, which does not guarantee that those kids won't spin off on another tangent when they grow up.  I seem to remember that a number of kids from our generation became atheists or embraced some exotic cult, which gave their parents fits.  I wonder if the kids of those kids gave their parents fits by reverting to traditional religion.  Somebody should do a study about that.

We ate that frozen pizza from Home Run Inn this evening.  We liked it, but I don't know if we liked it better than Jack's.  It's certainly different than Jack's so maybe it's not a competition.  There is no law that says you have to only eat one brand of pizza to the exclusion of all others, at least not yet.