99Percent

Look at your dog after it pissed on your rug.

galiel

god has only been around for ten months?

Devilnaut

Dogs have only been around for ten months?

Stephen T-B

Perhaps I should have mentioned in my original post (I didn’t, because I didn’t want to limit the discussion. So I don’t feel guilty about it. Or not very) that the context in which these remarks were made was a programme about the British Empire, and whether it is something about which we Brits should feel guilty - the slave trade, the subjugation and exploitation of other nations and so on.

At the end of the Second World War, the British and American forces occupying Germany forced German citizens to see film shot inside the Nazi concentration and death camps after they had been overrun by the Allies.
I think part of the motive was to induce guilt, but whether it was or wasn’t, that’s been its effect and for several generations, many Germans have lived with a sense of national guilt.
Interestingly, after Japan surrendered, there was no comparable programme, with the result that Japanese war crimes have never been confronted by Japanese society as a whole, and the Japanese have escaped the “collective” guilt experienced by so many Germans. Has that been a good thing or a bad thing?
I have to say that it offends my own personal sense of justice, and I think that what I experience is not uncommon: I associate myself with the Japanese victims, and on their behalf I wish to see the perpetrators of the crimes committed against them made to feel guilty.
Or perhaps what I want is remorse.
Are remorse and guilt different?
Do I feel remorse when I’ve done something bad and been found out?
Do I feel guilt when I’ve done something bad and not been found out, but recognise that it was bad?
Remorse, I do believe, might induce amnesia.
Guilt, I think, cannot. I see it as coming from a deeply-embedded sense of having crossed a boundary which we judge - for one reason or another - to be significant. You cannot forget having crossed such a boundary; it lives with you, like it or not, until your mind goes in death or dementia.
The discomfort it brings might prevent you crossing the same boundary again. But I’m not sure of that. It depends, I think, on the reward expected from crossing that boundary.
When I was a teenager, I sometimes visited a mountainside in Switzerland, and if I came across a boulder I was likely to send it hurtling down through the trees. It was thrilling to see because of its wild, uncontrolled destructive power. But within moments of having released it, I was overcome with a terror that it might hit someone farther down the slope, or smash into the side of a house. I would continue my walk overwhelmed by apprehension and guilt - until I came across another huge, roundish boulder, just asking to be rolled down the mountainside.
This behaviour has puzzled me a lot in later years, and certainly suggests that guilt doesn’t necessarily induce reform.

Sarpedon

How can a religion create an emotion?
It can't, any more than it can create morality. Society existed long before any organized religion existed. Other primates have society, and a sense of morals, but no religion. Similarly, an emotion is the same thing as an instinct; an automatic reaction to certain stimuli as a result of selected behavioral tendencies. Your theory would have to make guilt some kind of conditioned response, quite different from other emotions. In other words, you are suggesting something contrary to the "common wisdom." Now, the common wisdom is not always correct, but the burden of proof is on the person who makes the new assertion. You would either have to prove 1. Guilt is a conditioned response, unrelated to instinctual emotions or 2. No emotions are instinctual, they are all conditioned responses. My view is that religion exploits the existing feeling of guilt to further itself, much like a tapeworm inhabits a person's intestine. Anyway, I stand by my absolute assertion: Emotions are not invented, they are as much a product of our evolution as our intestines.

XGuilt

Given my screen name, I couldn't pass this one up...

Whatever guilt "encourages" in the minds of some people, it can only be negative, and it can be experienced only in relation to other people - both of which raise the question of any 'value' to such an emotion, value presupposing a positive-only aspect and presupposing the fact that it can be only an internal acknowledgement and highly individualized experience. Whoever said that guilt "encourages improvement" obviously underestimates individual integrity and objective reasoning, and overestimates the value of the prevasively unsolicited opinions of other people. Never in my life has 'guilt' ever prompted words or actions with others, and I would have little respect for myself if it did. Doing anything out of 'guilt' certainly destroys sincere, genuine and honest interaction with people. What, if any, internal effect of "encouragement" it may have on any particular individual is his own self-imposed misery to deal with. If one has a well-developed, healthy and rational self-interest in life and does no harm to others in his exercise of that self-interest, he has no need whatever of any arguable 'benefits' of such a destructive and deceitful emotion as 'guilt'.

The entire concept of human 'guilt' should be relegated to the realm of religion where it was fabricated... and where it fully belongs. It has no place in the human experience outside the dusty halls of those vacuous institutions and it has no value to humanity at all. It is a slap in the face of human dignity and integrity, and not worth further comment...

southernhybrid

The above are two dictionary definitions for guilt. I think the first one is healthy and what most people feel when they have done something they feel is wrong. For example, if my husband and I argue and say hurtful things to each other, we later realize we were wrong and apologize, kiss and make up. That's the end of it.

The second one is the more pathological type of guilt which leads to self doubt, insecurity, etc. This is the type of guilt that I think some religions try to sell. At least when I was growing up, I heard a lot about what unworthy sinners we are whenever I attended church. I once knew a Xian woman who was constantly asking god to forgive her because she always felt so guilty about almost every little thing she did.

Longbow

Well, here is an atheist (a strong atheist) that basically agrees with him. Guilt does promote denial as another poster put it -- downplaying the significance of what was done, restructuring ones beliefs so that they are no longer "guilty", and son. Is it some sort of precise deterministic relationship? I don't think so and I don't think that is what the authors intention was.

galiel

My dog has.

galiel

Um, you didn't read my post carefully. The statement which I was challenging was the one I quoted in my post: