what are three moral rules you will never break?
how did you get your moral compass?
do you experience shame, guilt, embarrassment?
why do you think there are people who do not experience the above?
are those emotions useful?
how good are you about forgiving yourself if you feel you have behaved immorally?
© 2026 – SoulSequel
17 responses to “morality”
Never take anything that isn’t mine.
Do everything I can to keep a promise.
I won’t lump my judgements on ethnic groups
I think for the most part my morality has come from the experience associated with those kinds of things being done to me and not liking it.
Yes.
Sociopaths. They truly believe they are perfect and unfortunately nobody is. Those broken emotional emotions are a conscious effort to camouflage what is probably a greater than normal sense of all three.
Very useful. They keep us balanced to the opposite extremes like pride, which could arguably be the opposite of all three those.
Not sure I would ever totally forgive myself, but I think my efforts would be associated with tipping the pendulum in the opposite direction, to try to balance the scale.
@spitfire3dc you wrote, “I think for the most part my morality has come from the experience associated with those kinds of things being done to me and not liking it.”
I can understand this. I have had the same thing happen, and I think once we have it happen to us, our empathy quotient is increased and we are less likely to repeat a behavior that hurt us.
on the guilt, shame, embarrassment , how do these manifest in you? do you think they manifest in different ways and different degrees in different people? for examples. polyamorous person who is the other half of an affair may not feel the same emotions because to them loving many is the norm.
@Scarlett I don’t think there is a true manifestation associated with those emotions. I think for the most part those emotions are internalized and quite possibly buried. I’m sure there are repercussions to these internal graveyards and one just might very well be the inability to laugh or even smile??
As I think about it now, and perhaps I am romanticizing my own intent, I think I just try to aggressively offset a shortfall. Might be the only way I can answer that question.
The whole loving many thing is a complicated issue. Some people see making physical love as an expression of love while others can see it as a personal victory of conquest. The range is broad. Some see it as the ultimate in terms of reach a communication pinnacle and others are trying to prove something only to themselves.
When you take two “differents” there is a calculable diversity of potential answers. When you get three “differents” the range becomes a lot more incalcuable. Not sure if you get what I mean by that but think an exponential explosion of diverse expectations…and that in a nutshell just may be what makes humanity human.
@Scarlett
Do you think the various victimhood groups may short-circuit on the empathy quotient concept?
They do seem uniquely blind to the oppressions they visit upon those they fancy their former oppressors. Especially once they gain political power in voice.
We used to have more accurate and less flattering terms for “polyamorous”!
(Having much to do with our confusing love for sex, and sex for love)
@griz I don’t see them as victim hood groups. I see some social justice warriors that you call victimhood groups.
If there is an individual who has a victimhood mentality then that is for them to work through and realize it’s not productive. I don’t judge them tho. I see it all as process.
I think polys are real. Personally, I am not polyanourous.
@Scarlett
We may differ on this point. The “misbehavers” I see as just an inevitable symptom of “the oppressed vs. the oppressor” mindset.
For every one obnoxious SJW there are hundreds or perhaps thousands of others supporting them with their silence.
Most people don’t have articulate reasons why they follow such movements and ideologies, beyond “it makes me feel good”. The misbehavers are empowered by such crowds.
I try not to discount anyone’s reality ie, Polys). But I do measure it against the greater shared reality, stretching back through time.
1. God is God, and I am not.
2. Serving God’s honor and glory is more important than serving my foolish ego’s honor and glory.
3. My freedom to play and explore in point 2 remains only so long as I willingly take correction, and this as a sign that I am loved. (Oh, my joy peace and purpose greater than self leave as well).
I got my moral compass from my father, who apparently got it from The Father.
My old self tries to feel shame guilt and embarrassment. Point 3 above takes care of it.
Those feelings are important signs that I may have violated point 1 or 2, and need to apply point 3 to avoid an entrapment.
I’ve never been particularly good at forgiving myself, fundamentally for disappointing my Father. I have two thoughts on this:
1. If God himself has said, “Apply this correction then don’t anguish it” . . . Wouldn’t I be proclaiming myself as something greater than God, to continue anguishing it??
2. If I do continue anguishing it, I sacrifice my freedom; as well as my joy, peace and purpose greater than self.
It’s an archetypal model of Divine parenting.
@griz
the very beiing that excludes itself from the do x, get y type of a thing. Another person can do the EXACT same thing as you… or even worse and suffer no consequences. Talk about a strange and unpredictable, unprovable system of parenting
@Jear77
Sort of a random shot across the bow but I’ll allow it!
True relationship is not a profiteering enterprise.
There is the possibility that our craving the entertainment of consequence visited upon others, is a desperate distraction from our own consequences that are past due and accruing interest.
The best distraction from our $500/month maintenance fees, is to gloat our superiority over someone with $5,000/month maintenance fees.
Do unto others as you’d like to be done…
Kill only in self defense or to save others…
& Don’t Give Up On Yourself
I got these morals from 70s Cartoons & Comics & Comics.
I’m not a psychopath,…. I’m NOT!!!
Everyone else IS!!!
Blushing is always useful.
I forgive me.
The gospels…
People who do not know shame, embarrassment, guilt tend to have had a bad upbringing.
Not feeling shame, when you have nothing to be ashamed for is one qualifier to your list.
I honestly don’t know. I experience those three things greatly. It is probably why I have a hard time answering the first question. Saying I will never break them is a promise, and I have regrettably broken a few before. I hate making promises I can’t keep or even if there is a slightest possibility I may fail to keep it.
I think something that I don’t think I would ever fail would be cheating on a significant other. There are different kinds of loyalty. I may not always back up the people I care about if I think they are wrong, but I would never just put a knife in their back like that. It is just one of those things that I could never understand how or why people do it.
If I behave immorally, I usually don’t forgive myself. I understand how forgiving yourself can be good and everything, but I just feel that if I remember the shame and guilt that it brought me, it may keep me from doing the same again later. Maybe one can forgive themselves while also remembering how it made them feel, but I just don’t see how.
@yin
I’ve had good results with turning it into a positive lesson: something with more intelligence to it than just “I’m never going to do/allow that to happen again!”
It takes some effort and thought to do this. I use the negative emotions as a “power source” for this: sort of burning them up in the process so they aren’t around to “haunt” me.
All of this effort helps to really instill the positive lesson in my subconscious.
And if I fail the same way again, I burn up the negative feelings correcting the positive lesson.
There’s shame in stagnating; and a kind of honor in growing. Which is a process.
There is no shame in being in process. In stagnation, more so.
@yin in my opinion people cheat because they aren’t in a emotionally healthy place. There is a book on it tho that goes into enormous detail about why ppl cheat. It is called State or Affairs by Esther Perel
I think there are some truly polyamourous ppl out there that haven’t owned up that their poly’s and they cheat rather than admitting to themselves and others that they are polys.
@Scarlett Even with all of my emotional issues, I just find it odd how you could drag someone else through hell by doing that. Though, there is a possibility that maybe I just don’t understand it from the other side of just not being desperate or really caring about engaging in sexual activities. Connecting emotionally and physically with someone like that just isn’t a common thing for me. Well, connecting emotionally could be pretty common, but the physical makes me a slightly uncomfortable and a bit of a hassle in some ways.
Fair enough on that second point. That actually makes a ton of sense. It’s just unfortunate that that is the case. There are a lot of things that society has told us was weird or wrong without ever truly explaining why, aside from some stories in some ancient books or shoddy science.
I think the basis of any morality system needs to be based onan understanding of the world in which you currently live. Basing one’s life, one’s morality on a world which no longer exists is foolish.
Having said this the basis of my moral system is communication. There is this thing called the languages of love. I will try to do what i say, and if i’m not able to do so, i let those around me know, according to their language of love.
That’s why it baffles me that my friend gets on my case for not doing x… when i told him from the get-go there would be consequences for having me get a job – among which is that my time to help him with his stuff would be severely limited AND I know that his language of love is service. At some point, If x task doesn’t get done when I’m available, you need to figure out how to do it yourself… or do without.
The next points are pleasure and pain – i will do what I can to minimize or eliminate hurt in my and others’ lives of those i care about. If i can’t, i rebert to point 1. At exact same time, i try to increase pleasure.
I get it from seeing that much of the world hurts through simple misunderstandings which can be solved by communicating properly.
There probably are, but they have issues. Sometimes such emotions are, sometimes not.
We all make mistakes, we all have conflicting views, we’re all hypocrites, it’s what makes us human.
@Jear77 that’s cool that you are deconstructing others love languages. Mine is words.