Maybe my morals are few and far between. I really don't see the need for anyone else to set the rules; most of them are fairly logical. I see the idea behind having a standard set of rules because it is easier to treat everyone the same even though we all have different opinions on what is wrong and what is right, but that for me that need not be a spiritual authority but a social one.

I think you have a point about the self-respect; I used to waste an awful lot of time being angry or jealous, and it's still something I struggle with; it's all ultimately pointless because they're things which just eat you up from the inside – for the lack of a better word, they're corrosive to the soul. You have to try and make amends and become better or you'll go mad.

Personally, I did wonder if I never got involved in taking drugs or having casual sex or the like because I was morally against them (which I kinda felt like I was, at the time) or because I was just too scared to ever really try to. In all honesty it was probably the latter. I'm not sure if I regret that or not.

I think there's a compelling argument for group selection. Animals of the same species or group aer more related to each other than they are related to another species or out of their group, so they will act to preserve some fraction of their own genome if they act to preserve the group. Obviously it's a much weaker effect than would be achieved by self-preservation, for instance.

Thing is, you've got to ask why we have compassion or respect for other people. Why do we feel guilt when we feel that we have morally transgressed? The very nature of feeling that makes me think that there must be at least some biological basis to it. Human beings cluster into social groupings very much like other animals; their behaviour is biologically defined, it follows that ours is not entirely conciously constructed.

Maybe Sartre had it the wrong way round when he talked of “bad faith” – he thought that we found ways to deny our essential freedom. Maybe we're slaves, and we find ways to pretend we're free.

Then I suppose the do-as-you-would-be-done by rule had a few things to say about self-respect which perhaps I should have listened to.

As a Christian I don't do mad or immoral things because doing so will get me sent straight to hell; I try not to do them because they hurt others or myself and as a Christian I am meant to love everyone – which includes myself, and thus the moral stricture I feel against getting wasted and pulling random guys.

Forgiveness and redemption comes in feeling guilty – I didn't feel guilty or regretful until very recently for some of the things I had done in the past and that in a way was a gradual act of self-forgiveness – or rather, it was that alongside and secondary to the feeling of being forgiven by god. It also comes in making amends – by trying to be a better person, by saying sorry as and where necessary, all of that; and that hopefully will lead to being able to forgive yourself and be forgiven.

I thought about all of this quite a lot as an atheist; I have to say it does feel like it all makes more sense now that I see a God in the picture.

And yes we probably do have less free will than we think.

In evolutionary terms for example vampire bats share blood meals in a tit for tat system and that is proven the most stable evolutionary strategy so there may be some origins of morals in that sort of thing but those are not conscious morals, if bats could cheat I'm sure they would. This is also incidentally why I don’t believe in group selection, we only do things that increase our genes' frequency not everybody else’s if that happens to be what is best for the group then fine but ‘for the good of the group’ is not (in my opinion) ever the underlying reason.

I think morals are a conscious phenomenon to do with compassion/respect for other people rather than something evolved as such. The development of religion was typical of bigger societies and was a way of organising and more importantly controlling the masses using God as some sort of justification. There is something appealing about religious rules such as some of those from the 10 commandments for example, possibly partly because of empathy, I don’t want to murder anyone’s siblings because I know how sad I would be if mine were killed. Maybe religious rules set the premise for social rues and conventions such as the ones we have now although with the advances of science we feel the need for a figure such as God less and less.