Quote from: anon_giraffe on February 29, 2016, 02:32:11 AM

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Suggesting that intellectual mindsets are necessary to create behaviours relies on our intellect being our ruling aspect. This does not seem true.
The intellect is never a truly objective entity and will always interact with subjective reality.
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On reflection, it seems some arguments are based on the assumption that the intellect is the base cause for behaviour or morals.
This seems a weak point and has no necessary validity.
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Let's examine base human behavior and morals when you strip away all "intellectual mindsets"

In a base state each person would have a right, or license, to everything in the world. There is no centralized authority and no external recourse against violence, coercion, or defection. Thomas Hobbes envisioned this as, a "war of all against all"

Quote from: Thomas Hobbs Leviathan 1651

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Now it is likely that we do have a 'built in' primitive moral code that allows us without any preconceptions to escape Hobbs baseline. This code is one of tribalism.

Quote from: username18333 on August 20, 2015, 09:10:38 PM

Quote from: username18333 on February 19, 2015, 02:51:34 AM

Quote from: R. I. M. Dunbar. Co-Evolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size and Language In Humans

http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/1993/dunbar1993a.pdf
Primates are, above all, social animals. This has inevitably led to the suggestion that such intense sociality is functionally related to the exceptional cognitive abilities of these animals, as reflected in their unusually large brains (Jolly 1969, Humphrey 1976, Kummer 1982, Byrne & Whiten 1988). This claim is supported by the finding that mean group size is directly related to relative neocortical volume in nonhuman primates (Sawaguchi & Kudo 1990, Dunbar 1992a). These analyses suggest that although the size of the group in which animals live in a given habitat is a function of habitat-specific ecologically-determined costs and benefits (see for example Dunbar 1988, 1992b), there is a species-specific upper limit to group size which is set by purely cognitive constraints: animals cannot maintain the cohesion and integrity of groups larger than a size set by the information- processing capacity of their neocortex.

(Red colorization mine.)

(Blue colorization mine.)

It is in maintaining social cohesion in groups larger then the information- processing capacity of our neocortex where "intellectual mindsets" are required. The role of these is to maximize individual freedom to build wealth, prosperity and happiness via cooperation while minimizing individual freedom to prosper from coercion, violence and defection.

Quote from: organofcorti on February 29, 2016, 04:37:50 AM

I think most people understand moral codes...

People who rely on their native or built-in moral code are more likely to have a positive affect on their local social group than people who rely on dogmatic moral strictures.

Our native built-in moral code may be helpful for daily decisions within local social groups but there is little reason to think it functional when dealing with those outside our local social groups.

Your error is your continued insistence to lay the limitations of humanity on the doorstep of religion when in actual fact religion is a critical and perhaps primary mechanism for overcoming these limitations.