Morals

roar_ie

I wanted to post this in society forum put there doesn't really seem to be an appropriate forum, so i am going to post it here instead.

I was thinking about the question of our moral standards recently. Do people think that as a people/society our moral standard has gone up/down/stayed the same. I have included a poll for you poll junkies out there .

I [bold]Believe[/bold] that our standards have gone down, with more liberal ideas, the lack of a strong religious moral structure and such, we have come to accept some things to be more acceptable, underage drinking for example. I think societies impression of what is right or wrong has changed but for the worse. I am not against change, far from it, but not in such a way where it is for the worse.

Even writing this i know i am being vague, as i am having difficulty putting into words exactly what i want to say.

Mainly the purpose of this post was to get a feel for what other people think and even have an intelligent debate on it.

Powers that be, feel free to move this thread anywhere more appropriate.

Thanks
John

Doc

Over how long the last 5 years? 20 Years?

Personally I dont think our morels have drooped but what has changed is what we perceive to be bad or taboo. I think we now rely more on what we personally fell to be wrong then what we are told to be. So to older generations we may seem immoral as we do not go to church every Sunday or have sex before marriage but this is our time and we should not be judged on the morels of the past.

Meh

Originally posted by Doc
So to older generations we may seem immoral as we do not go to church every Sunday or have sex before marriage

Note that this supposedly superior older generation saw it as perfectly moral to lock up unmarried mothers, allow paedophile priests free access to children, and kick out Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.

Doc

In the same we should not be judged on the morels of the past the morels of the past should not be judged by us.

The Gopher

Well said Meh.The older generation may complain that society wasnt as violent,there was more morality and it all went to hell in the late 60s etc etc.Thats sh1te.There was probably more sex crimes then than today.Its just that 99% of them happened behind the walls of industrial schools and orphanages.There were probably more children killed by violence and neglect in these holes between the 40s and the 70s than from,lets say,the early 70s to the present.We are talking about a country where unmarried mothers were sent away to slavery until only a few years ago.Literally,Im fairly sure they got no pay in those launderies.
Honestly what is worse?More violence and sex available on tv,films and the internet?Or a hypocritical society where the most respected are those who secretly run slave camps,keep the economy behind with nonsensical interferences with government,put peoples lives at risk by opposing free health programmes,openly chastise promiscious sex despite the fact they are protecting grown men preying on young boys?
This country was sick to the core until the early 70s.It is amazing the amount of bishops involved in covering up the actions of their priests(and I would suspect a high number of these bishops took part in abuse)who are somehow still in office.
The fact that the church goers in this country tolerate these hypocritates(sp?) turning up at every confirmation and mass rock blessing and preach morality to the gullible masses is amazing.I can remember at my confirmation some bishop or deputy bishop or whoever preaching about the evils of drinking.A while later it was in the paper that while not on the same scale of some of those bishops down around munster that he had been involved in one or 2 shady movements of suspect priests.
How the hell does this country still partly revere these people?

Mossy Monk

i think its getting better. what were taboo subjects 10 years ago are the norm now. all taboos should be destroyed really if that's possible

DadaKopf

The feeling that our moral integrity has degraded is due to the process of history we're all caught up in. Over recent centuries, it's become fundamentally characteristic of our world to question all existing moralities because, simply, we've realised that a lot of them are hokum. Added to that is mass transportation, telecommunications and globalisation which has forced us into a position where we have no option but to accept that there are different ways to see the world, depending who you are and where you are.

The practical way around this is to all mutually agree on basic ethical guidelines to which we can all happily agree to live by. This is what instruments like the UN try to achieve. What inevitably happens under these processes is a certain destabilisation of the foundations of every culture's moral codes, but to say things are currently in flux (we're still very much in a position of adjustment) isn't to say a more dominant morality won't supercede our present state of moral uncertainty.

So long as some political and economic structures change for the better (being fed by a genuine desire for a fairer world), I remain optimistic.

DeadBankClerk

Originally posted by Amp
Abstaining due to lack of atari jaguar option