I was walking back from the bathroom in my home at like 3am one night. It was pitch black. I kicked a small container of toothpicks that had been sitting on the floor and stumbled. One of the toothpicks flipped out of the container and landed straight up just as my foot, and full weight, came down right on top of it. I ended up with the wooden pick sticking straight out of the bottom of my bare foot. They were standard ~2 inch picks, and it was probably buried about 3/4ths the way in. It looked exactly like what this guy had, but it went straight into the tissue of my foot, rather than glancing along side.
My partner drove me to the emergency room right away, and to this day I still feel the elation at learning it hadn't splintered or snapped off in the foot, and they were able to extract it pretty much in the same way he did. I got bonus tetanus shots for being such a good patient.

hej, kp
the people in the town where Melania was born (Sevnica) were elated Trump won, it's a small shithole on the croatian border, so people think now that Trump won tourism will boom:) otherwise, no - we're not happy he won

Tags for this video have been changed from 'hortelano, emotion, silver, gold, medal, disqualification, elation' to 'hortelano, emotion, silver, gold, medal, disqualification, elation, lucky, win, won, medal' - edited by ant

Also, this was a story in a mainstream UK paper today (the Sun). Reproducing it here because I wouldn't give the pricks another click:

WHERE THE BREX WAS WON Streets full of Polish shops, kids not speaking English… but Union Jacks now flying high again
People from Portsmouth, Plymouth and Boston revel in their relief at EU exit
BY BEN GRIFFITHS AND RYAN SABEY 26th June 2016, 2:11 am

VOTERS in Britain’s most Eurosceptic towns spoke of their relief at Brexit saying: “We’re elated.”

The anti-Brussels fervour was greatest in Boston where 75.6 per cent opted for Leave.

Single market too far … a corner shop in Boston, Lincolnshire
One in six of the Lincolnshire town’s 65,000 population are Eastern Europeans — the highest percentage in the UK.

Yesterday a buzz was back in its medieval centre where High Street stores are flanked by Polish and Lithuanian shops. Crosses of St George and Union Jack flags were adorning pubs and homes.

Caterer and mum-of-five Sally Shuttleworth, 58, said: “I’ve never been so elated as when I saw the Brexit result come in.

“Boston is an example of how Britain has lost its identity with all the Polish shops.

“We need tighter border controls. Immigrants are hard workers but there is too much pressure on the system, on schools, and hospitals.

“You could tell by the number of people streaming out of polling stations that the vote meant a lot to the town.”

In January the Boston area was named the most murderous place in England and Wales, with 15 cases per 100,000 people.

It also has the unwanted title of least integrated town in the UK.

Elation … Retired agricultural mechanic Ron Holmes, revealed: “I’m delighted. The whole town is.”
Translators are employed at Park Academy primary school where half the children speak Eastern European languages.

Retired agricultural mechanic Ron Holmes, 69, added: “I’m delighted. The whole town is.

“Whether you think the EU or immigration is right or wrong things have to stop in Boston.

“It is crippling the UK and we had to deal with it once and for all and vote out.

“The EU wasted money on so many things. They should have put the money in places like Latvia and Estonia to build them up so those people would not want to come here. We should never have joined the Common Market in 1975. I remember it well. Now we have finally put it right.”

Variety … the town of Boston has many shops and eateries catering for Polish tastes
Locals yesterday talked of celebratory parties, extra busy pubs and cheering in the streets.

There are around 1,200 people, mostly Brits, out of work in the town and many hope the result might see a change in fortunes.

Jobless Paul Cook, 53, said: “I don’t think people in the South realised how important this vote was to us.

“It is brilliant that we have voted out. We have had enough of the EU telling us what we can and cannot do. Not being able to control who comes in the country is a big problem. Now we can hopefully get a points system that will allow skilled people in.

“I’m hoping it will free up more roles for British-born people.”


There ya go. Racism is now acceptable in public discourse.

I just translated the lyrics. Damn, I forgot how difficult translating poetry can be. It took me quite some time. I tried to translate it as closely to the German meaning as possible, while still upholding or at least emulating some aspects of the poetic style of the original.

"Spring Greeting

1. (intro)
One beautiful spring day
A spring greeting – a little flower
Lay dying by the wayside

The poor thing had been plucked
Its existence doomed – Thrown away
To feed Death alone

2.
As I bowed down
To eye this misery
That bespoke brutal workings
Suggesting no remorse
A word escaped my throat
– Murder!

For this flower, so fragile
Was appallingly, purposely plucked
By the wayside, I assume
In a rush of ecstasy, absent-mindedly,
Someone bowed down
And bemused, elated, blushed,
In spring rapture, deeply delighted,
Discovered, clutched and killed it

Chorus:
And I asked myself, who seeks,
Against all grace and goodness,
To take such beauty's life
Executed, slaughtered
So disempowered, off-handedly
This peaceful blossom
So discarded and despised
Oh forbid

3.
The fool, he was so moved
That he had no doubt
His mind was captivated
By its splendor, which he abducted
And unscrupulously corrupted
As he took it – gave himself to it
Only then he became aware - it was dying

And suddenly the realization
Flashed through his mind and all too honestly
Comprehension became confession
Into his heart, painfully,
His misdeed crept, all too gravely

Chorus:
And he asked himself, who seeks,
Against all grace and goodness,
To take such beauty's life
Executed, slaughtered
So disempowered, off-handedly
This peaceful blossom
So discarded and despised
Oh forbid

4. (Bridge)
Shocked by his fallibility
He threw the beauty into the sand
Irritated by his misdeed
He retreated from his disgrace
‘Though he had desired the little flower,
Loved, adored, admired it,
He had not respected it
And this splendor by the wayside
Is now concluded and passed

Chorus:
And he asked himself, who seeks,
Against all grace and goodness,
To take such beauty's life
Executed, slaughtered
So disempowered, off-handedly
This peaceful blossom
So discarded and despised
Oh forbid

And he asked himself, who seeks,
Against all grace and goodness,
To take such beauty's life
Executed, slaughtered
So disempowered, off-handedly
This peaceful blossom
So discarded and despised
Man forbid

5. (outro)
One beautiful spring day
A spring greeting – a little flower
Lay dying by the wayside

Bereaved of the beautiful springtime
Of existence – doomed – of lust itself
A victim of vain humanity

It was me. It was me. I'm sorry.
It was me. It was me. Now I'm sorry."

Yeah, it's a bitch. I didn't know I was an alcoholic until I was running away from hard times. Then even after I had gained a marginal amount of success, the alcohol remained. Fucking alcohol. It really does make you a different person. Sometimes a very very excellent, if not womanizing person. But sometimes a monster. Best I avoid the stuff beyond what I think I need or can handle, one drink at parties. Parties can be bad if I violate this. Or good -- it's a gamble lol.

You know what though, it's addiction period. I stopped drinking, my life improved; but, I replace it with something else. I am addicted to video games. I do 80+ hour, no sleep binges playing a game I'm seeking to master. Addiction.

Pretty soon I will have to go cold turkey even on things like marijuana, which make me mellow, happy, heightened senses, and artistic/creative focus/drive, and which my peers claim is not addicting. Nah, everything in my life is an addiction. Even creative endeavors or day to day work -- it commands my utter and impenetrable existence, allowing my world to fall to shambles, meanwhile I create art or engineer new false existence. A system of dice I throw forever for no real reason other than I am addicted forever to throwing dice. Boom. Boom. Cards. Mmm, yeah, gambling is fun and bad too, and consume entire weekends. Sex. Typing things. It's ALL addiction to me.

The only thing I get from typing my mind is the rush and addiction to the finality of saying the truth, regardless of the consequences. It just comes out and the fists raise my adrenaline and I'm fighting now. Haahhahahahahaha!!! Addiction! Adrenaline. Energy. I'll run for 4 hours straight to achieve a moment of elation and existence outside of the day to day shuffle. Addicted to life? I sit at my desk addicted to death? No, life. I am addicted to EVERYTHING.

I mean... yeah, it's pretty cool when you make a shot like that, but to equate it with your wedding day and the birth of your child? And to be elated with yourself for the next 10 days?

Really?


Wow.

Imagine your elation were you lose your inhibitions in favor of unbridled experience.

That's pretty cool. I know it's the type of thing where most people don't really feel your elation satisfactorily, but I can totally appreciate the sentiment.

I can never get enough Whose Line. I'm so elated it's coming back.

I found these to be presumptuous. They do happen to some people, maybe even most people, but they don’t happen to all. Many people of no religion, and despite immense tragedies, live happy and fulfilling lives, and feel happy and fulfilled on their death beds. I’d further argue that people with religious faith also get depressed. I suspect you’d counter that anyone who is depressed has insincere faith. That seems tautological to me, but either way, it’s moot, for now.

Well, the central argument of the video is that life without God is meaningless. You've already agreed with that point, so the argument now seems to be is whether someone can be happy and fulfilled with a meaningless life. I'm sure there are plenty of people who weren't believers who died happily in ignorance of the truth, but the question is, did they understand that their life was meaningless? I doubt it. It is not something that many people are able to face, and even if they could, they certainly don't live that way. In some way or another, they are deluding themselves and living as if their life does have meaning.

Some people do, at least in part. It’s a lot more complex than just a lack of hope though. For some people it’s due to a tragedy, or overwhelming cognitive dissonance, or it’s simply chemical, and has no correlation with anything in their lives at all. Maybe I’m nitpicking. I just want to make clear that depression is a mental disorder and is not a synonym for, "lack of hope because I don’t have God in my life."

Hope is what keeps people going. Without hope, you are just going through the motions. When you have hope and lose it, it is emotionally devastating. A person without any hope is a person most likely clinically depressed.

You can call depression a kind of mental disorder, and some people may be born without the right chemical receptors for instance, but most people are depressed because of a lack of hope. A person, for instance, who worked their whole life and lost their retirement in an afternoon, or a mom whose kids abandoned her to live in a nursing home. They are not mentally ill, they are simply facing the cold, stark reality of their situation.

Here you slipped into metaphysical talk that means nothing to me, full of judgemental words ("sick and depraved") and terms that I had just told you I don’t accept as objective concepts ("evil"). You also know that I don’t think there’s any hope in your Yahweh God since he’s a mythological character, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

The point being, that if there is no God then no one is in the drivers seat here on planet Earth. I would be surprised if the extreme fragility of our civilization escaped you. If you look at history, and you contrast it to what is going on today, you will find that the new is simply the old in different packaging. We're watching the exact same game show, simply on a grander and more dangerous scale. Humanity has never been closer to utterly destroying itself anytime in its history than it is today. I'm sure, like everything else in creation, you will attribute that to dumb luck. However, if you think everything is a numbers game, then sooner or later the odds say that cooler heads will not prevail and there will be a civilization annihilating calamity. The truth is, it is only the sovereign hand of God that is restraining this from happening.

The reason I made that comment about God is because of your comment about your depression. The reason you have that feeling that if you believed in God you wouldn't be depressed is because you know there is hope in God.

(Also, not that it’s critical to the discussion, but I’d like a reference for your poll about young people not knowing who Hitler was.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/06/29/half-german-teens-dont-know-hitler-dictator_n_163659 3.html

Now, about "bliss". I didn’t define what I meant by that, so you didn’t understand it. I’ll make up for that now. By “bliss”, I don’t mean immediate pleasure, or instant gratification, or fulfillment of a goal, or basically anything you mentioned. I do mean a great powerful feeling of being centred, being in tune, achieving self-fulfillment, overflowing joy, love, inner peace, elation, connection, lightness, "harmony", "rapture" or a feeling that many describe as "doing what I was born to do/meant to be doing" or "transcendent". It’s the kind of happy that boosts your immune system and makes people around you feel good about themselves as well. (The words in quotes aren’t words I tend to use myself—I’m employing them to help clarify the concept I’m talking about.)

If you understand now what I mean by "bliss" (as opposed to instant gratification, etc.), you’ll understand that people don’t follow their bliss and rape people, nor find inner peace by beating their wives, and so there’s no need to append any rules about not hurting. I can’t imagine how anybody’s bliss could ever include causing harm to other people, but I’ll even address that hypothetical, towards the end of this comment.

Thanks for the elaboration. I am familiar with the philosophy of Sam Harris, and I figured you were borrowing from him, but it is good to know where you stand. My original point, however, still stands. You say you can't imagine someone finding bliss in hurting people. Well, have you ever heard of psychopaths? They do indeed find their bliss in acquiring power and control and making other people miserable, and they feel absolutely no remorse for doing so.

You also say that you feel the best state of a human being is to be blissfully happy. I'm sure everyone will agree with you that feeling blissfully happy is good. However, why should we believe this is actually what good is?. Yes, it feels good to feel good, but this doesn't tell us why we *ought* to do anything. Maybe this is just incredibly selfish and the opposite of good, or somewhere in the middle is true, or maybe none of it. You give no actual reason (beyond arbitrary statements like that which makes the world better or worse) to equate feeling good with moral goodness. In a meaningless Universe, neither is there any basis for thinking that you have any moral duties. This leads me to some questions that you didn't actually address in the last post. Let me ask them again because they are central to this discussion:

In a meaningless Universe there is no actual right and wrong, so why shouldn't you just do whatever you want? Why waste your time trying to navigate some moral landscape that you don't even believe really exists? Why not just take what you can, when you can, before you lose the opportunity?

I'll also address some of your comments:

In all cases, whatever they did, it was because they were feeling bad about something, weren’t centred, and reacted from "lizard brain" instincts of individual survival rather than from human compassion

People do evil because they get carried away by their lusts and become enticed. You view this as some sort of ignorance, or automatic function. Not so. When a person is doing wrong, they are almost always entirely aware of this, but simply override their moral restraints with their desire to fulfill their lusts. People are responsible for the evil that they do, not society, environmental factors, their parents, or anything else.

Divine morality isn’t necessary. Having any collective understanding of what is good and what is bad is enough. For most of humanity’s existence, even up to now, there hasn’t been a clear standard. In patches of geography where there was one, it only applied well to that time and culture. Just as ordinary people supplanted kings and emperors as absolute leaders without society collapsing, and just as ordinary people supplanted religions are sole arbiters of the law without society collapsing, ordinary people can supplant religion as arbiter of what is good and what is bad as well, and society will continue not to collapse.

I've already agreed with you that we all have a God given conscience that tells us right from wrong. Therefore, we don't need to read the bible to know that it is wrong to murder or steal. However, what God has commanded is that we all repent and believe in the gospel. This is something you aren't going to intuitively understand without being told.

And better than a list of what’s good and what’s bad is a system that determines for us what’s good and what’s bad. I’ve seen one model that I like, delivered by Sam Harris. The most salient bit starts at about 10:00 and runs to around 27:30. If you don’t want to watch it now, I’ll summarise the most important ideas: For a moral code to have meaning, it has to apply to some form of consciousness – it cannot apply to rocks and dust. Then there’s the central point which requires you to imagine "the worst possible misery for everyone", and assume that this situation is "bad". "Good" is then defined in terms of moving people away from this "worst possible misery for everyone". That’s it. I recommend hearing it from Harris himself.

I am familiar with his system, to which I reiterate the point; what is the ground for associating moral evil with misery and moral good with "moving people away from misery". Where do you get moral duties in a meaningless Universe?

The three advantages that occur to me of this system over Yahweh’s morality are that it’s a simple system rather than a long intricate list, so it’s quick to teach, easy to absorb, understand and reference, hard to corrupt, and all-inclusive; there’s absolutely nothing random about it, so odd details like not being allowed to wear garments made from two different thread types won’t make it in and there’s nothing objectionable about it from the standpoint of people who just want to do the right thing; and it’s truly universal in that it applies equally well now as it would have in 4000 BC China, in 30 AD Mesopotamia, or will in 12 000 AD Mars, so it’s broadly acceptable too.

The morality that God gives can be summed up in two commandments: Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul, and all thy mind and all thy strength, and love thy neighbor as thyself. As Jesus told us:

Matthew 22:40

All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments

That's a very simple system. When you love God and other people everything else follows naturally.

Every act that is good makes things better for people. If an act makes the world worse, then it’s bad. Simple. Lots of generalities can be derived from it, like killing people is bad, respecting other people’s property is good, and there’d be no arbitrary crap about touching pig skin being bad or extra-marital sex being bad.

On the contrary, it's all arbitrary, because "what makes things better for people" or what "makes the world worse" is something determined by consensus. If everyone in the world agreed that torturing babies for fun made things better for people, it would be good in your view. If your moral system allows for this possibility, I think that's a sign its time to throw it away.

Even more generally, we clearly don’t require any god to tell us what’s good and what isn’t. We already have a conscience inside us that tells us what’s good and what isn’t regardless of laws. I know you believe that Yahweh made our conscience for us. Even if that were so, it doesn’t change the fact that if properly relied upon, a conscience precludes the need for an external set of laws. Any law that echoes what everyone naturally feels already is superfluous. Any law that contributes to human misery is morally wrong and deserves to be disregarded.

If this were true, there would be no need for courts, judges, prisons, or police officers. There are also laws which may make some people miserable but are necessary for the greater good.

You state that without a divine moral standard that exists outside our consciousness, there is no objective justice. This is true by definition. Without a true objective moral code, you further argue that nobody can condemn any action as bad without being hypocritical, so in effect, everything is permissible. This is not the case, however. Although the moral code I advocate isn’t "objective" in the sense that it exists beyond our consciousness, it is universal among humans. And if we’re only attempting to determine moral behaviour for humans, then a universally accepted standard among humans suffices, regardless of where we think it came from.

It doesn't suffice, though. Yes, we can both agree there is a universal morality among human beings. How is that fact supposed to serve as grounds to invent an arbitrary system of good and evil based on people following their bliss and avoiding misery? I could just easily reverse the two and say the existence of universal morality justifies that too. I could say that the existence of a universal morality justifies that we should all love eggplants and hate rutabagas. There is no logical connection here between the system you've created and universal morality.

If there is no objective morality, then nothing is really wrong. Any system you create in the end is a human invention, based on human interpretation, and agreed upon by human consensus. You still cannot get an ought from an is. Good could be defined as a world of people who love each other, or a world of people who love to eat children. What is wrong then is simply based on your personal preferences.

The arguments I make here don’t describe a perfect system. That’s wasn’t my intention. I believe they do, however, answer your concerns about non-objective morality being insufficient to guide humans.

I understand that this wasn't meant to be perfect. It has, however, raised more concerns than it answered.

>> ^messenger

@shinyblurry

Of what you said above in the first two paragraphs about the consequences of accepting meaninglessness as reality, just about all of it I fully agree with. For clarity, I’ll mark the exceptions:

the closer you are to death the less happy and hopeful you will become
and
Eventually, when enough tragedy happens to you, you will break down and the future will become more and more like a millstone around your neck.

I found these to be presumptuous. They do happen to some people, maybe even most people, but they don’t happen to all. Many people of no religion, and despite immense tragedies, live happy and fulfilling lives, and feel happy and fulfilled on their death beds. I’d further argue that people with religious faith also get depressed. I suspect you’d counter that anyone who is depressed has insincere faith. That seems tautological to me, but either way, it’s moot, for now.

Further, you comment that, "people become depressed because of a lack of hope."

Some people do, at least in part. It’s a lot more complex than just a lack of hope though. For some people it’s due to a tragedy, or overwhelming cognitive dissonance, or it’s simply chemical, and has no correlation with anything in their lives at all. Maybe I’m nitpicking. I just want to make clear that depression is a mental disorder and is not a synonym for, "lack of hope because I don’t have God in my life."

For all of our so-called progress, humanity is just as sick and depraved as it always has been. Evil is increasing, not decreasing, and mankinds destructive appetites will never be satiated. There is no hope in man, but there is in God. I think you know that.

Here you slipped into metaphysical talk that means nothing to me, full of judgemental words ("sick and depraved") and terms that I had just told you I don’t accept as objective concepts ("evil"). You also know that I don’t think there’s any hope in your Yahweh God since he’s a mythological character, so I’m not sure where that’s coming from.

(Also, not that it’s critical to the discussion, but I’d like a reference for your poll about young people not knowing who Hitler was.)

All that is to say I pretty much agree with your view of what meaninglessness implies, and if there’s any bits that you want to explore more, I’m all for it.

Now, about "bliss". I didn’t define what I meant by that, so you didn’t understand it. I’ll make up for that now. By “bliss”, I don’t mean immediate pleasure, or instant gratification, or fulfillment of a goal, or basically anything you mentioned. I do mean a great powerful feeling of being centred, being in tune, achieving self-fulfillment, overflowing joy, love, inner peace, elation, connection, lightness, "harmony", "rapture" or a feeling that many describe as "doing what I was born to do/meant to be doing" or "transcendent". It’s the kind of happy that boosts your immune system and makes people around you feel good about themselves as well. (The words in quotes aren’t words I tend to use myself—I’m employing them to help clarify the concept I’m talking about.)

If you understand now what I mean by "bliss" (as opposed to instant gratification, etc.), you’ll understand that people don’t follow their bliss and rape people, nor find inner peace by beating their wives, and so there’s no need to append any rules about not hurting. I can’t imagine how anybody’s bliss could ever include causing harm to other people, but I’ll even address that hypothetical, towards the end of this comment.

Lots of people do bad things to others and themselves, and later on, some may consider what they did was bad, or they might not. If they still think it was OK, it’s because they’ve used some kind of justification, like, "She did it to me first," "She was teasing me. What did she think would happen?" or, "He had it coming," or "I had no choice," And so forth. These are all rationalizations after the fact, justifications that allow them to still consider themselves as good people rather than change their behaviour or take responsibility for having done something wrong. These don’t address the real reason these people did these things. In all cases, whatever they did, it was because they were feeling bad about something, weren’t centred, and reacted from "lizard brain" instincts of individual survival rather than from human compassion.

I believe that the natural and best state for a human being to be is happy (and here again, I mean blissfully happy). Every bit of programming we have nudges us towards certain actions by rewarding us with feelings of happiness, or reduced misery. We only live once, so I would modify your description only slightly to, “taking what bliss you can when you can”.

Divine morality isn’t necessary. Having any collective understanding of what is good and what is bad is enough. For most of humanity’s existence, even up to now, there hasn’t been a clear standard. In patches of geography where there was one, it only applied well to that time and culture. Just as ordinary people supplanted kings and emperors as absolute leaders without society collapsing, and just as ordinary people supplanted religions are sole arbiters of the law without society collapsing, ordinary people can supplant religion as arbiter of what is good and what is bad as well, and society will continue not to collapse.

And better than a list of what’s good and what’s bad is a system that determines for us what’s good and what’s bad. I’ve seen one model that I like, delivered by Sam Harris. The most salient bit starts at about 10:00 and runs to around 27:30. If you don’t want to watch it now, I’ll summarise the most important ideas: For a moral code to have meaning, it has to apply to some form of consciousness – it cannot apply to rocks and dust. Then there’s the central point which requires you to imagine "the worst possible misery for everyone", and assume that this situation is "bad". "Good" is then defined in terms of moving people away from this "worst possible misery for everyone". That’s it. I recommend hearing it from Harris himself.

The three advantages that occur to me of this system over Yahweh’s morality are that it’s a simple system rather than a long intricate list, so it’s quick to teach, easy to absorb, understand and reference, hard to corrupt, and all-inclusive; there’s absolutely nothing random about it, so odd details like not being allowed to wear garments made from two different thread types won’t make it in and there’s nothing objectionable about it from the standpoint of people who just want to do the right thing; and it’s truly universal in that it applies equally well now as it would have in 4000 BC China, in 30 AD Mesopotamia, or will in 12 000 AD Mars, so it’s broadly acceptable too. Every act that is good makes things better for people. If an act makes the world worse, then it’s bad. Simple. Lots of generalities can be derived from it, like killing people is bad, respecting other people’s property is good, and there’d be no arbitrary crap about touching pig skin being bad or extra-marital sex being bad.

Even more generally, we clearly don’t require any god to tell us what’s good and what isn’t. We already have a conscience inside us that tells us what’s good and what isn’t regardless of laws. I know you believe that Yahweh made our conscience for us. Even if that were so, it doesn’t change the fact that if properly relied upon, a conscience precludes the need for an external set of laws. Any law that echoes what everyone naturally feels already is superfluous. Any law that contributes to human misery is morally wrong and deserves to be disregarded.

You state that without a divine moral standard that exists outside our consciousness, there is no objective justice. This is true by definition. Without a true objective moral code, you further argue that nobody can condemn any action as bad without being hypocritical, so in effect, everything is permissible. This is not the case, however. Although the moral code I advocate isn’t "objective" in the sense that it exists beyond our consciousness, it is universal among humans. And if we’re only attempting to determine moral behaviour for humans, then a universally accepted standard among humans suffices, regardless of where we think it came from.

The arguments I make here don’t describe a perfect system. That’s wasn’t my intention. I believe they do, however, answer your concerns about non-objective morality being insufficient to guide humans.

I was stunned also.

I reiterate my feelings from one of the videos of the event here...

MOTHERLOVING SKY CRANE ON ANOTHER MOTHERLOVING PLANET!

That's insane.

We sent a craft that lowered itself, autonomously, down onto another planet under power... I've always got the whole 'drop out of the sky, use a parachute and air bags' approaches, they all seem doable to my little brain. But for a craft to land like in a sci fi movie, by itself... that's just amazing to me.

Huge high fives to all involved. It was awesome watching it live here at work, and awesome to see the elation in those JPL people when it reported back it was fine.

Oh, wait... This is fake. Guess those were workers on the movie.

This is a clip from the comedy Kongsi(Lu Langsi Lu Mati). Here is a clip where you can see this scene at about 4:00:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTnG4p5_X-M&feature=r­elated