When will the BBC be held accountable for their lack of patriotism

They are less normal. Being so outside of the norm allows us to isolate them and join to exclude them as pert of a society.. most criminals justify their crime, I was poor, she asked for it, he provoked me. They thereforel appeal to a sense of "good", reasoning, and acceptability within society. They acknowledge that social sense and the moral imperative, even if they break it.

And claig, sadly, just because you repeat a thing over and over, it doesn't get to be true.

AppleTrees, you are right. I don't need to, it detracts from the argument.

Could you explain what God wanted? I have always found there to be quite contradictory interpretations. Which do you hold to be true and why?

Hully, yes, a mother's live is biological, ot is hard-wired, in the genes i.e. it is natural, it is as nature intended, and lions and tigers and birds have the same instinct. It is universal, because it comes from God.

Yes, there are pickpockets and thieves and vultures, but they are in the minority, just like Mao. The natural majority tendency is good, the minority is evil.

Appletrees - But those bad things I mention above are as natural as the positive things we can do. Culture and civilisation are ways of reducing those negative behaviours.

We can see what happens in places where civilisation and civil society have broken down.

Society that benefit the WHOLE of society are not a particularly natural human behaviour - many societies benefit only small parts of that society.

Craig: you rely too much on your Christianity as a cogent force of argument when you don't need to, and when non Christians will always dismiss your premise and therefore your reasoning.

Nature is amoral though.. you have defined love as "good" which assumes there is an outside absolute "good". That's a human or divine creation. Love for offspring is practical and of survival.

exactly, AppleTrees, we naturally create our societies. Our human spirit creates societies that allow humanity and the human spirit to flourish. We are naturally repelled by evil and we create laws to lock up evil criminals and to punish their evil acts. We naturally crave justice, because the human spirit is good and just, and because God is good and just.

Or had they perhaps all read the Thoughts of Chairman Mao?

A mother's love for her child is natural and instinctive

It's biological.

Claig, I hate to rain on your humans are love parade, but pickpocketing, looting and thieving is one of the biggest headaches for emergency staff at disaster incidents like the tube bombings, Madrid train bomb etc etc ad infinitum

Nature is not amoral. A mother's love for her child is natural and instinctive and is not amoral. People naturally help those in need, they don't go around stabbing everyone in the back, unless they are Stalin.

Society does not enable us to transcend nature. Or society would be an unnatural thing. To create a society maximizing benefit to society is natural, or it wouldn't happen. Society didn't happen by magic, or by an outside force. We create them. It is in our nature.

Do you believe in evidence-based research, like the evidence-based research on "climate science", carried out at the University of East Anglia. Sometimes evidence-based research is just politically-based research.

I am sure that Mao had a lot of evidence-based researchers supporting his evil system.

There is good and evil in nature, and it is a battle, but eventually good defeats evil and Mao's system crumbles.

An example of the natural tendency to goodness is :

if a man is run over by a bus in the street, people rush to help him and save him. It is a natural instinct, there is no time for thought. People don't rush to rob his pockets, except, possibly, Maoists.

claig - are you quite mad?

against nature and against God

Nature is amoral.

And

Could you explain what God wanted? I have always found there to be quite contradictory interpretations. Which do you hold to be true and why?

Because otherwise you seem to be saying, "It's nice to be nice. Aren't people nice? Yes they are. Lovely."

You're basically using the contents of your head as evidence again.

Claig - plesase can you reference some research showing the humans races natural tendancy to goodness in the absence of cultural or societal restraint.

'So stealing, infidelity, rape and murder are all good? All these things are natural.'

They are not natural. They are like Mao, they are evil and they happen less than love, respect, help and friendship, except in a society like Mao's.

Mao was horrid to people because he believed in a horrid philosophy which was against nature and against God. He thought he was superior to the people he ruled over. He killed millions to create his vision of what was worthwhile.

So stealing, infidelity, rape and murder are all good? All these things are natural.

why oh why?

Mao's failure might also have had something to do with the fact that he was a bit horrid to an awful lot of people.

and Chairman Mao's society of course was Godless, since communists like him outlaw religion. Mao was a representation of the transcendence of man over God and nature. His system was unnatural and bad, and that is why it had to fail and eventually China will be free, because that is what the human spirit works towards. That is natural, that is good.

Because nature was created by God, and God is good. Chairman Mao's society transcended human nature and it was bad.

Claig - why does something being natural make it good? The whole point of the culture and society thing is to allow us to transcend our natures.

Do you think that the patriotic words in the Scottish National Anthem, 'Flower of Scotland', are propaganda lines. Don't you understand the feeling behind those words? Do those words leave you cold? Don't you understand the sentiment of the person who wrote those words? The sentiment is patriotism and it is human and it is feeling.
The feeling is love and it is what separates living beings from stones.