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gee, I'm not sure this deserves its own thread.  but I'll answer your question.

I respect your personal experience, and I think we actually agree on this.  You mention the cycle of violence, and that's easy to find in such communities.  What I'm trying to take into account is the criminal tendency to pick weaker people to prey on.  Weaker physically, but also weaker in the sense of naive.

My point was that morals ensure physically weak individuals are not prematurely eliminated from our midst and also make them a little naive.  Children raised with morals observe the golden rule.  That's great, and the direction we need to go - obviously.  But if you placed a person with high morals in the same room with a person with no morals, the immoral one will take advantage of the moral one.  If you carry it to the extreme, you get generations and generations of highly moral individuals who know nothing of violence, deceit, or evil, right?  They take care of each other and make up for each others weaknesses.  It all works great until an immoral person walks into the group and rapes, pilages and burns the whole thing down - with ease.  Hence, my statement that it takes less and less physical threat to overcome highly moral (weak) individuals.  I'm not sure where the balance is, if there even is one for our species this go round.  Part of our nature ensures a certain percentage of nasty people will be around to take advantage of peaceful ones.  Part of me wants to believe we can change the nature of humans, but another part really believes this species is what it is, and we'd have to start over with a new genetic program altogether.   I look forward to your comments on this and how it may affect our afterlife pursuits and repeated return through reincarnation or other feedback means. 
bud

gee, I'm not sure this deserves its own thread.  but I'll answer your question.

I respect your personal experience, and I think we actually agree on this.  You mention the cycle of violence, and that's easy to find in such communities.  What I'm trying to take into account is the criminal tendency to pick weaker people to prey on.  Weaker physically, but also weaker in the sense of naive.

My point was that morals ensure physically weak individuals are not prematurely eliminated from our midst and also make them a little naive.  Children raised with morals observe the golden rule.  That's great, and the direction we need to go - obviously.  But if you placed a person with high morals in the same room with a person with no morals, the immoral one will take advantage of the moral one.  If you carry it to the extreme, you get generations and generations of highly moral individuals who know nothing of violence, deceit, or evil, right?  They take care of each other and make up for each others weaknesses.  It all works great until an immoral person walks into the group and rapes, pilages and burns the whole thing down - with ease.  Hence, my statement that it takes less and less physical threat to overcome highly moral (weak) individuals.  I'm not sure where the balance is, if there even is one for our species this go round.  Part of our nature ensures a certain percentage of nasty people will be around to take advantage of peaceful ones.  Part of me wants to believe we can change the nature of humans, but another part really believes this species is what it is, and we'd have to start over with a new genetic program altogether.   I look forward to your comments on this and how it may affect our afterlife pursuits and repeated return through reincarnation or other feedback means. 
bud
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Of course, the question arises: How do you define
"moral"?
I'd say it is moral to take a physically weaker/smaller person and instruct them in martial arts, or the use of weapons. (Or in the case of non-physical oppression such as theft, swindling and so on - how to spot a scammer, con artist, thief, ect.) On the other hand, I would say that cultivating naivete in such individuals is profoundly IMMORAL behavior, serving only to create more "rabbits" for society's "coyotes" to prey upon. (Unfortunately, cultivation of such naivete seems to be what most people consider "moral instruction" these days.)
The MORAL solution then? Take "rabbits", and teach them how to be PORCUPINES. (Predators tend to avoid accosting individuals who can strike back, or are too savvy to be conned easily.) The "coyotes" will have slimmer pickings that way... and maybe fewer will decide to prey on their fellow men.

B-man

Having morals simply helps us to define who we are.  We can always question our morals...and should.  As we live and learn our values do change.  People say that certain values are timeless, and that is true.  But we live in time, and we are often faced with perplexing circumstances which we don't fully understand. 

We can have what we consider very "upright" morals and still not live by them all the time because we are human. 

However, if we can awaken to each moment we can find the way to live in peace.  It will take all of us, together, to decide that there is a better way to live. 

Have you been abused by your society?  Abused people often abuse others in some way, as we all know.  If we are all victims of human cultures which accept violence as a "way of life" it can seem like a never ending spiral.

Peace is always the answer.  Love is always the answer.  We do not always ask the right questions.

love, blink

Bud S--
I had my answer ready to your first question, but in the meantime, blink--and you--have raised the level a few notches.
My personal response to your last question now is that the best way I've seen to help the bottom 10% is my grandmother's way (no big social movement, 'no' governmental involvement)--she fostered kids, after raising her own. I've tried thru community programs and working thru the classroom but that doesn't erase their experience of the bottom and they slip back.

So this does relate to reincarnation after all. If I return and am to have a family I'll add a foster kid to my brood and when they are spreading their wings I'll add a couple more, like Grandma did. ('Coincidentally' just did some genealogy work andfound that fostering is the only way my ancestors made it thru a few generations.)
So thanks for turning this, blink, and thanks for the last sarcasm-free comments, Bud S. I for one just learned an important lesson.

Looking at evolution itself, it seems that aggression yields little anymore.

The aim of aggression, in my opinion is to consume or destroy. Well, life mastered that a millennia ago. The Komodo dragon is a modern day example of this aggression. They have mastered how to kill the prey and do so purely from an ego based stand point of consuming it.

A species that relies on aggression and the ego alone seems to evolve very little.

The morals of a person are based on many factors; the most seem to come from the society in which he/she lives. So by looking at a purely physical/observational reality we can see that a group consciousness is clearly involved in the moral choices made by a person. The phrase "group mentality" veers towards this idea. 

Whether there are sensory implicit factors would answer the question of a telepathic consciousness.

Morals can obviously make you weak. A creature that has no morals will kill you with the innocence of its own ego. A person without morals is like an animal, which is not an insult but must logically be pure fact. The main difference is that a person has the benefit of the human mind. A stupid person does not mean an amoral person and an intelligent person does not mean a moral person.

But without morals can you clearly observe a society with the same capacity as a moral person?

You would be trapped within your own ego and therefore just be a predator animal with a human brain.

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Morals are not an advantage against any form of aggression.

If two men of equal strength are placed in a room with a loaf of bread and they represent this thread, the immoral person will consume the bread but the moral person would share it.

Morals are one method to build society. Not the only one, but clearly it seems the most effective to date as our race revolves around this paradigm.

Self respect and morals are not related are they?

Lucy,
I took the liberty of copying your post on another thread to put here too. I think it's important.

Lucy says:
"...I think instilling a moral sense in us by organized religion (particularly the Roman Catholic Church, which ruled Europe for centiries) has been a means to make us weak.
Sure turn the other cheek, but give me a knowledge of how to project PUL so strong that I don't get squashed in turning that cheek. But the Church wanted people to be weak. So it instilled morals in them. And it did it  to the benefit of our old equation   
wealth= power and ability to control."

Bruce Moen is the first spiritual leader I've heard who tells how to project PUL thus letting us know it was an important process. Not that it's hard,
it just wasn't ever mentionned before--that is incredible when you think of it, isn't it ?! "Love your neighbor" comes closest to it but that became so abstract when the world shrunk and everyone became your neighbor. Bruce's spiritual processes do more than revive that old rule--they energize it.
bets