A friend of mine who went to Caltech (studying Physics and Economics) is an Atheist. No Surprize there. He thinks my ideas about a UMC are absurd and ridiculous. I recommended that he read "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. I knew it would reinforce his opinion that I am an irrational idiot, but I also knew he would like it. Here is his response to me after reading it. In addition, he has a link there to his Blog where he pulls out the best quotes from the book. I would highly recommend reading them. They are classic. I should warn you that if you have deep religious convictions you will find this stuff pretty offensive.
Spanky:
Harris disucsses the idea of moral being realistically right/wrong (not moral relativism). This doens't imply that someone designed such morals. I quote Harris:
The fact that our ethical intuitions have their roots in biology reveals that our efforts to ground ethics in religious conceptions of 'moral duty' are misguided… We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives. Once we begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that our religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally. P172
Robert Wright in the Moral Animal describes in detail how smart social creatures like ourselves would gravitate to certain behaviors because they are optimal for our species over time. Many economic behaviors follow from these moral or ethical behaviors - some that would not be technically rational when you only focus on economic utility of the particular item in question. Dean Kahneman, the Nobel lauerate in Economics, pursues these further to demonstrate humans are not in fact 'rational economic players' in all cicumstances, because we were built to operate in different envrionment from today's global marketplace. We were actually village people. YMCA.
http://bensbookblog.blogspot.com/200...am-harris.html
