Valiya, apologies for my absence. I had business to impede a well thought out answer sooner.

I like the fact you clearly have a moral stand point on alchohol consumption. Given there is a lot of risks involved in alchohol, recognizing the risks and advising other to avoid them as unnescassary is not bad i tellectual adviceadvice. But as to your origin and reasoning I have to disagree. Simply put, I don't see a lot of evidence to suggest a Divine origin for the Q'uran. Quite simply, It was written by men. That alone easily disqualifies the vast majority, in my opinion, of the content as being more easily explained as being fictional. However, I do realize that most moral codes are contained in two sources, religious scripture and law books.

Law tends to be bland and boring, with reasoning for doling out punishment based on intellectual grounds and sociological factors. In other words, you can't easily explain it to children and expect them to follow it. How do you explain to a child that being honest is the only way to expect honesty, or the the implacations dishonesty will have if discovered. Especially why people will dislike them, or even turn combative if swindled. Or even why we have laws. As adults we recognize how laws and morals work as sociological factors. Truelly intellectuals recognize both laws and moral codes as the rules that stop a society from degrading into anarchy. John Locke said it best in his pamphlet Common Sense.

Essentially, he points out that humans band together to make survival easier. They make laws to protect themselves, then enforce them. As an example, in a state of nature, or anarchy, the individual man is only entitled to what he can take, and law exists only so much as an individual can defend himself. So if a man claims a banana tree, it's his so much as he can defend it. Anyone taking his bananas is subject to whatever punishment the owner can inflict on him, whether it be a thrown rock, or death. People in society however can make willful exchanges using the superiority of numbers to ensure punishment. So for example, they decide that anything a man grows himself is his by the labor of his hands. And the penalty for such should be a imprisonment. A single person would have a hard time ensuring imprisonment of a theif, even if he kept him in his basement. But a million people in a society can pitch in an effort to insure punishment.

Anyway, as you can see, what I'm getting at, is that society and moral codes and laws are anything but divine. In fact, if you think about it, there could be nothing that is more the product of man's intellect, than the laws he enforces.

I think that while morals are subjective and relative, there are things that have held true since ancient civilizations. Take the Egyptians, for example, they believed murder was wrong and punishable by law. Ancient China also had rules and regulations to abide by. Both civilizations did not have moral laws decreed by God.

As a biologist, I approach it from a certain point of view. I think that humans, being social animals, generally band together to gain strength. We form social groups in which we mutually benefit, and establish rules by which we can live peacefully (generally, anyway). Like Confucius said, "do unto other what you want others to do unto you". As long as we have some level of empathy, we do not inflict pain on others because we can understand what pain would be like if inflicted on us.

There are always going to be grey areas though. Take alcohol for example. I cannot have a say in how a person treats his own body; it's his right to drink as much as he wants. But we have laws in place if a drunk person inflicts damage on anyone or anything besides himself. We advise pregnant women not to drink, or we see them as unfit parents, because of the dangers of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. We persecute drivers for driving under the influence of alcohol because they pose threats to others. I think that's how we establish laws in most countries (not the religious ones). We come to a consensus on where to draw the line. Usually the line is where a person's actions start inflicting harm on others.

Religious texts aren't the way to go. They are great as pieces of literature and history, but any rational person can see that there are unsavoury or "immoral" things inside them, like condemning apostates to death, or condoning slavery. No matter what context you argue it in, I can't see when and where those things are acceptable.

I would rather live in a society where we have rules and regulations thought out, reasoned and argued before coming to a consensus. I would rather focus on equality for people under the law, regardless of race, gender, sexuality or class. I would never ever want to live in a county or state ruled by religion, where it seems like just blindly following God's supposed decrees without being able to question them.