> > This post was going somewhere, but I'm sort of tired and thinking about all this again is making me miserable, and I don't remember where that was. I guess I just wondered if anybody can come up with a good line of reasoning on why we should go around helping people who don't want to be helped. I don't really need a reason, but it would be nice to think there *was* one out there somewhere.
>
> Looking at Sam's and famous's replies, I suppose I ought to have been more clear about what I was asking. There was never any doubt in my mind that helping the woman, in whatever way, WAS the right thing to do, and I would have done it no matter what.
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> I've been sitting here trying to think of a better way of posing my question, but in the end I think it comes down to wanting a total explanation of the nature of good and evil, and why we *know* something is right or wrong, so I guess I'll just leave it there. I suppose the answer is in terminology. A sense of right and wrong isn't based on knowing, but on feeling. I just wish I could find a way to explain this better, and why I find it so frustrating.
>
> Call the original post a late-night rant after a bad week at work and it probably makes more sense than as a moral question. When I stay up too late, I spend too much time looking for the rational glue that holds the spiritual universe together, and invariably end up stuck to a messed-up half-finished project all over the bench.
>
> Brunnen-"glue fumes get to me sometimes"G

Of course, to people of religion, they "know" right and wrong if they study the Bible or the Talmud or the Koran or meditate intensively enough. The morals they have are the morals of the god they belive in (for lack of better wording). This only natural - after all, one of the main purposes of religion is to establish a line between right and wrong. A follower of a religion will attempt (most of the time) to remain on the "right" side of that line, wherever his or here religion may draw it.

Most atheists, on the other hand (and I speak from the second-hand; my friend who is an atheist explained this to me), will identify right and wrong basically by the Golden Rule, and the Golden Rule alone: Do unto others as you would have done unto you. Of course, that has a lot of room open for debate, but that is what it is, essentially. In your case, I can't say. If you are believe in God, then pray about it. If you don't, then I can only say...I don't know what to say.

knivetsil