B.U.I.L.D. Resetting Your World View
Hi! Happy Monday!
B.U.I.L.D. stands for "B.U.I.L.D. Up Innovation & Love Daily". B.U.I.L.D. is an infinitely recursive definition in that the definition contains the word itself. This reflects the task at hand: indefinite innovation.
Irreni is about solutions and not opinion. Today's solution is entitled, "Resetting Your World View."
Supernatural is out for all politics. Moral relativity is in. The Muslims aren't going to kill all the Christians, the Christians aren't going to kill all the Muslims. Therefore, moral relativity is in.
So what does this mean for your world view? and resetting it? What it means is we need to set natural limits on morality, natural limits on good and evil.
The journey of beginning to embrace Irreni World Scale is to reset your world view to relative morality informed by collective natural empathy and not by personal supernatural experience.
As an anti-theist atheist I know what your thinking. You are thinking I'm saying this because I'm not religious. Not at all. I'm saying this because the supernatural has only one known instrument of measurement: personal experience. Whatever you think you know about anything supernatural is personal because that supernatural experience has no natural measurement.
So, since the religious folks are not going to exterminate each other and since measuring supernatural experience is non-transferable between people then our only choice is set natural boundaries on morality, even if supernatural ones exist in your mind.
Let us put religion as the source of morality to the test shall we? Let us do so with a couple of images.
There are two pictures here on top of each other. The first picture is of the pilot of the Enola Gay who dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and thus killing hundreds-of-thousands of civilians. The second picture is of an I.S.I.S. beheading.
Which of these pictures represent faces of evil? In other words, if a scientific experiment were conducted of all Christians about the evil seen in these pictures then the answer should be the same for all Christians if religion is the source of morality . Further the answer of evil should differentiate Christian and non-Christian groups. Look into your heart and ask yourself honestly these questions:
Test 2: Tamir Rice
The video is of the police shooting and killing of a twelve-year old Tamir Rice.
If Christianity or any religion is a source of morality then the answers to all the questions below should be crystal morally clear:
The question isn't whether you are clear but on whether the Christian community as a whole is clear on the moral answers to the above questions. If not then this challenges the claim that religion is the source of morality.
Morality fails at large scale
The Enola Gay example was chosen to demonstrate we just cannot empathize scale. Even though we know the pilot of the Enola Gay was directly responsible for killing hundreds-of-thousands of people, many people would have a hard time thinking of the pilot as evil and further thinking of him as more evil than vicious killers doing beheadings.
As Stalin said, kill one person it is murder, kill one million people and it is statistic. Empathy doesn't scale and neither does our morality. Religion makes no difference in that regard.
If religion really was the source of morality, more importantly if the supernatural were the source of morality, then this morality would insulate people from doing evil. The source of morality would inoculate good people from doing bad things.
Hitler didn't kill millions of people, Christians soldiers did. Stalin didn't kill millions of people, Christian soldiers did. Neither the government of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany were founded with non-religious citizens. Instead, the majority of their country populations were very religious, just as they were the day before these governments came to power. It takes generations for a culture to change, not overnight. Germany and the Soviet Union may have been anti-religious in their government policy but not in their citizenry culture.
And today? Whenever we think of religion and politics in this country we first think of the religious right, and never of the religious left. Why? Where is the religious left? One would think their source of morality, religion, would compel the religious left to be speak out against the religious right? The religious left in this country is no more standing up to the religious right then the Christian soldiers and citizens stood up to Stalin or Hitler in their respective countries.The Christian left in America represents millions of Americans and yet they are silent with respect to the religious right.
Time-and-time again with endless examples throughout history it can be shown that religion as the source of morality fails utterly and completely. The African American and Native American experiences in this country are just two further examples.
Today there thousands of new moral dilemmas in which followers of Christianity can be found morally ambiguous and confused. Further, religion oft times has no answers at all:
Okay, at this point you may be thinking that I'm just espousing anti-theist rhetoric and not building up to any solution. But that's not the case.
I already stated the solution: the supernatural cannot inform relative morality.
I think Christopher Hitchens was a morally good man...when it comes to anti-theism. If you search Youtube for "Christopher Hitchens" then you will find all kinds of videos where Hitchens tears down religion with great success.
And yet I think Christopher Hitchens was a morally evil man...when it comes to war and specifically the war on terrorism. Why? Because Hitchens believed in the supernatural. Yes, that's right, an atheist can believe in the supernatural even if they do not believe in god.
What am I referring too? I'm referring to what Hitchens would see in the picture above of the beheading. When one looks at that photo one can easily feel one is starring into the eyes of evil. Pure evil.
But what does that mean? Evil as some supernatural force doesn't exist in people. Yet Christopher Hitchens claimed he saw evil inside people, or people under the influence of the supernatural.
Once humans demonize other humans and make them into something not-human then we justify killing our "enemies". And that was Christopher Hitchens: a believer in the supernatural, the supernatural of evil being a force at work in people. He wanted to kill them.
You may not have heard of Christopher Hitchens but you most certainly have heard of George Washington.
George Washington was a morally good man.
George Washington was a morally evil man.
I can hold the above two statements about Washington easily in my mind. But how can I? The two statements are logically contradictory aren't they?
Yes and no. Yes if one believes in the supernatural. It is common to all religions that being possessed by either good or evil are mutually exclusive, you can't be both good and evil. For the record, this is just one of the myriad of reasons one can generalize about religions, because they all see good and evil as mutually exclusive.
That mutually exclusive state though is only a contradiction when the supernatural is involved.
I do not believe in the supernatural. I believe good and evil are based intuitively on empathy and can be managed intellectually. Therefore I see Washington had a good morality and good empathy when it came to founding this country. Washington had an evil morality and bad empathy when it came to owning slaves.
The Irreni World Scale solution to resetting your world view is eliminate the supernatural from morality and to also embrace relative morality for all the reasons stated above. Everyone is both good and evil, they are not mutually exclusive. The source of our common morality is our collective empathy. We need to find not only common ground but morally superior ground as we have done recently with gay rights and the gay community. We may not be gay, our empathy may be disgusted by the thought of homosexual sex, but we can rise to erect a superior common morality based on moral relativity: we are not all morally the same because we do not all have the same empathy.
The journey of beginning to embrace Irreni World Scale is to reset your world view to relative morality informed by collective natural empathy and not by personal supernatural experience.
What are these natural limits? Here is the easy part, we just redefine good and evil without any supernatural references. The solution is to reset your world view for good and evil as defined below:
Cheers!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
B.U.I.L.D. stands for "B.U.I.L.D. Up Innovation & Love Daily". B.U.I.L.D. is an infinitely recursive definition in that the definition contains the word itself. This reflects the task at hand: indefinite innovation.
Irreni is about solutions and not opinion. Today's solution is entitled, "Resetting Your World View."
Supernatural is out for all politics. Moral relativity is in. The Muslims aren't going to kill all the Christians, the Christians aren't going to kill all the Muslims. Therefore, moral relativity is in.
So what does this mean for your world view? and resetting it? What it means is we need to set natural limits on morality, natural limits on good and evil.
B.U.I.L.D. Resetting Your World View
The Irreni World Scale solution to resetting your world view is eliminate the supernatural from morality and to also embrace relative morality for all the reasons stated below. The source of our common morality is our collective empathy. We need to find not only common ground but morally superior ground as we have done recently with gay rights and the gay community. We may not be gay, our empathy may be disgusted by the thought of homosexual sex, but we can rise to erect a superior common morality based on moral relativity: we are not all morally the same because we do not all have the same empathy.The journey of beginning to embrace Irreni World Scale is to reset your world view to relative morality informed by collective natural empathy and not by personal supernatural experience.
As an anti-theist atheist I know what your thinking. You are thinking I'm saying this because I'm not religious. Not at all. I'm saying this because the supernatural has only one known instrument of measurement: personal experience. Whatever you think you know about anything supernatural is personal because that supernatural experience has no natural measurement.
So, since the religious folks are not going to exterminate each other and since measuring supernatural experience is non-transferable between people then our only choice is set natural boundaries on morality, even if supernatural ones exist in your mind.
What is the source of the morality?
Empathy is the source of morality, not religion. In fact, religion gets morality wrong on so many topics then all religion does is muddy the already murky waters of differing empathy capacities between people.Let us put religion as the source of morality to the test shall we? Let us do so with a couple of images.
Test 1: Enola Gay vs. ISIS
Which of these pictures represent faces of evil? In other words, if a scientific experiment were conducted of all Christians about the evil seen in these pictures then the answer should be the same for all Christians if religion is the source of morality . Further the answer of evil should differentiate Christian and non-Christian groups. Look into your heart and ask yourself honestly these questions:
Do Christians have a consistent morality for what is displayed in the above pictures? Do Christians have even the slightest moral consistency above and beyond non-Christians when presented with the above pictures? [EDITOR'S NOTE: No]
Test 2: Tamir Rice
The video is of the police shooting and killing of a twelve-year old Tamir Rice.
If Christianity or any religion is a source of morality then the answers to all the questions below should be crystal morally clear:
- Are the police officers evil?
- Did the police sin?
- Are the police morally wrong?
- If the police are not morally wrong, why not?
- If the police are morally wrong, why?
The question isn't whether you are clear but on whether the Christian community as a whole is clear on the moral answers to the above questions. If not then this challenges the claim that religion is the source of morality.
Morality fails at large scale
The Enola Gay example was chosen to demonstrate we just cannot empathize scale. Even though we know the pilot of the Enola Gay was directly responsible for killing hundreds-of-thousands of people, many people would have a hard time thinking of the pilot as evil and further thinking of him as more evil than vicious killers doing beheadings.
As Stalin said, kill one person it is murder, kill one million people and it is statistic. Empathy doesn't scale and neither does our morality. Religion makes no difference in that regard.
If religion really was the source of morality, more importantly if the supernatural were the source of morality, then this morality would insulate people from doing evil. The source of morality would inoculate good people from doing bad things.
Hitler didn't kill millions of people, Christians soldiers did. Stalin didn't kill millions of people, Christian soldiers did. Neither the government of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany were founded with non-religious citizens. Instead, the majority of their country populations were very religious, just as they were the day before these governments came to power. It takes generations for a culture to change, not overnight. Germany and the Soviet Union may have been anti-religious in their government policy but not in their citizenry culture.
And today? Whenever we think of religion and politics in this country we first think of the religious right, and never of the religious left. Why? Where is the religious left? One would think their source of morality, religion, would compel the religious left to be speak out against the religious right? The religious left in this country is no more standing up to the religious right then the Christian soldiers and citizens stood up to Stalin or Hitler in their respective countries.The Christian left in America represents millions of Americans and yet they are silent with respect to the religious right.
Time-and-time again with endless examples throughout history it can be shown that religion as the source of morality fails utterly and completely. The African American and Native American experiences in this country are just two further examples.
Today there thousands of new moral dilemmas in which followers of Christianity can be found morally ambiguous and confused. Further, religion oft times has no answers at all:
- Abortion
- Porn
- Violence in movies and entertainment.
- Sex in movies and entertainment.
- Capital punishment.
- Guns
- War in Iraq and Afghanistan
- Immigration
- Water boarding
The Case of Christopher Hitchens
Okay, at this point you may be thinking that I'm just espousing anti-theist rhetoric and not building up to any solution. But that's not the case.
I already stated the solution: the supernatural cannot inform relative morality.
I think Christopher Hitchens was a morally good man...when it comes to anti-theism. If you search Youtube for "Christopher Hitchens" then you will find all kinds of videos where Hitchens tears down religion with great success.
And yet I think Christopher Hitchens was a morally evil man...when it comes to war and specifically the war on terrorism. Why? Because Hitchens believed in the supernatural. Yes, that's right, an atheist can believe in the supernatural even if they do not believe in god.
What am I referring too? I'm referring to what Hitchens would see in the picture above of the beheading. When one looks at that photo one can easily feel one is starring into the eyes of evil. Pure evil.
But what does that mean? Evil as some supernatural force doesn't exist in people. Yet Christopher Hitchens claimed he saw evil inside people, or people under the influence of the supernatural.
Once humans demonize other humans and make them into something not-human then we justify killing our "enemies". And that was Christopher Hitchens: a believer in the supernatural, the supernatural of evil being a force at work in people. He wanted to kill them.
The Case of George Washington
You may not have heard of Christopher Hitchens but you most certainly have heard of George Washington.
George Washington was a morally good man.
George Washington was a morally evil man.
I can hold the above two statements about Washington easily in my mind. But how can I? The two statements are logically contradictory aren't they?
Yes and no. Yes if one believes in the supernatural. It is common to all religions that being possessed by either good or evil are mutually exclusive, you can't be both good and evil. For the record, this is just one of the myriad of reasons one can generalize about religions, because they all see good and evil as mutually exclusive.
That mutually exclusive state though is only a contradiction when the supernatural is involved.
I do not believe in the supernatural. I believe good and evil are based intuitively on empathy and can be managed intellectually. Therefore I see Washington had a good morality and good empathy when it came to founding this country. Washington had an evil morality and bad empathy when it came to owning slaves.
B.U.I.L.D. Resetting Your World View
The Irreni World Scale solution to resetting your world view is eliminate the supernatural from morality and to also embrace relative morality for all the reasons stated above. Everyone is both good and evil, they are not mutually exclusive. The source of our common morality is our collective empathy. We need to find not only common ground but morally superior ground as we have done recently with gay rights and the gay community. We may not be gay, our empathy may be disgusted by the thought of homosexual sex, but we can rise to erect a superior common morality based on moral relativity: we are not all morally the same because we do not all have the same empathy.
The journey of beginning to embrace Irreni World Scale is to reset your world view to relative morality informed by collective natural empathy and not by personal supernatural experience.
What are these natural limits? Here is the easy part, we just redefine good and evil without any supernatural references. The solution is to reset your world view for good and evil as defined below:
evil: 1. harmful, 2. the state of mind whereby thoughts of harming and killing others are acted upon.
good: 1. helpful, 2. the state of mind whereby actively helping others not only helps them but helps yourself.
Cheers!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
Comments
Post a Comment