In the previous post I have set out that old holy scriptures are not a good source for ethics in our modern society. No doubt my religious readers see this as a proof that atheists are an immoral bunch of heathens. This surely is true insofar as that we are immoral in a biblical sense and don't accept scriptures as a moral guide.
If God were really as wise some claim he is, he would have sent another prophet down here somewhere in the 20th century to give us a new moral guideline that works in our modern society. But he didn't, and the increase of the number of Atheists can partially, but not completely, be attributed to the fact that existing scriptures are far from contemporary. If it would say in some modern holy scripture 'thy shalt not download from the Internet pictures of undressed minors and lust after them' then it would make a whole lot more sense. But it doesn't, and child abuse is not a feature we find only in Atheists (cough).
Some people do not accept any man-made laws but only divine ones, which is why some countries are stuck in a ethical framework that is as old as the scriptures they subscribe to. This goes so far that certain immigrants in western Europe accept the hospitality of the country they reside in (including social benefits) but not their laws because these are man-made. Are these people to be considered morally right because they abide to divine law? I think not.
In our modern civilized world we have a complex system of laws that keep us from doing harm to other people or the state, and punish infringement of these laws. Yet these laws still leave room for acts that are perfectly legal but may infringe with the desires, wishes and entitlements of people around us: there is no law without a loophole. Additionally we should not want to have laws for absolutely everything because it would create a state that is oppressive and belittling. Think of the European parliament which sometimes passes laws about trivial things like the degree of bending of banana's.
Laws, divine or not, can nor should ever be a comprehensive guideline to what is right or wrong, neither are the 'unwritten laws' of society. Rather than relying on a set of rules that tell us what to do and what not to do, there should be a set of ethic principles that we can use to make decisions about right and wrong when existing laws of state and society fall short. A kind of 'moral compass' so to say. Bear in mind that the old testament says we should not develop such a moral compass of our own, because it reserves for itself the ultimate truth. But as said book doesn't provide satisfactory answers we have no other choice than to think about ethics 'out of the book'.
When thinking about ethics it is important to make these simple realizations:
- Everyone is equal.
- Every life can be lived only once.
- Everything you do has a consequence.
- Everyone has desires, opinions, wishes and entitlements.
- Everyone has ownership of their own lives and achievements.
When you think closer about these simple and straightforward ideas, and what it leads to, you have a pretty comprehensive guide for interaction with other people. And that is all what ethics is about: interaction with other people and societies, even those that you don't see or know about. If there would be only one person in the world he wouldn't need a moral framework because nobody could take offense from his actions except he himself. But there are more than 6 billion people stuck on this planet and we somehow have to get along with each other. So far, the known scriptures have largely failed in guiding us to a state of harmonious co-habitation and, looking at how much evil and immoral behaviour can be found in these scriptures, this doesn't come as a surprise. Consent and compassion are the cornerstones of moral behaviour, but not of holy scriptures, even though religious people like to believe so.
Anyway, let's elaborate on the points stated above
Everyone is equal.
It is important to realize that you as a person have no more 'value' than others or you are better than somebody else. Maybe there are some things you can do better than others, or you have more money, or you are more intelligent, but this makes you only more valuable in an economic sense, not in a humans sense. This equality of all human beings is not an opinion the bible or clergy share, and many religious people think they are 'better people' than those who don't believe in the same religious doctrine, for which they even find 'proof' in the bible. Moreover, the bible endorses and even regulates slavery, which is not only contrary to human equality, but also to other principles set forth in this post.
Every life can be lived only once
Until proven otherwise, we must assume that we live only once. We cannot take ideas, memories, experience or other 'things' with us to a next life. This makes life a limited resource: you can spend it only once. Therefore, life itself becomes the most valuable thing we have in life.
What we do with this one life is our own business, but taking into account the limited nature of life we should at all times consider what (negative) effect our acts can have on the lives of others.
Everything you do has a consequence.
Everything you do has a consequence, intended or unintended, on the world around you and possibly also on other people's lives. Therefore, with everything you do, you should take care not to do harm to others or the world around you, for damaging the world around us also harms the people who live in it.
Everyone has desires, opinions and entitlements.
I wrote about desires earlier, what important influence they have in our lives, and that critical thinking influences our moral. I will also mention freedom of speech and that having an opinion of their own is a right but not mandatory. Furthermore, everyone has entitlements to something. In other words, everyone has some kind of possession, most important of which is life. We are to respect other peoples desires, opinions and entitlements as long as they don't conflict with other peoples well-being.
Everyone has ownership of their own lives and achievements.
This is probably the most important principle here: self-ownership. The principle of self-ownership not only implies freedom of man, but also implies freedom from infringement of life from others. The principle of self-ownership means that the time of my life is owned by me and I have the freedom to do with it whatever I wish, and that anything I create is also mine. Without self-ownership, capitalism wouldn't work because if my time and what I create in this time is not mine, I couldn't sell it to make a living. It's as a simple and straight-forward principle but often its importance is underestimated.
It is one reason why communism never got off the ground very well: because peoples lives were not their own but the states property, and everything around them too. An individual didn't count, only the community as a whole counted. In strictly religious states like we see in the middle east this is also applicable, except that peoples lives don't belong to the state but to their deity. An individuals life has no value in totalitarian states (religious or communist) which is why such states can be considered (as a whole) to conflict with the principle of life ownership.
During our life we constantly make decisions on how to spend our time. It's our time, our 80 years or so that we have on this planet, and it's entirely up to us what to make of it. We could see it as an entitlement: once you are born you have the right to live. It may be true that society and our duties within it make claims on our time but generally we can choose how we live through our days. We can choose how much of our time we trade in for money by paid labour, how much time we trade in to amuse ourselves with television or games and so on.
we can consider life, or the entitlement of life, from two sides: quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative aspect is how long you live, and the qualitative aspect is how well you live ie to what extent you can fulfill your desires, opinions and entitlements as set out before.
There is one important aspect about self-ownership: because everyone is equal, everyone has it . It's an entitlement that is valid for everybody in equal measures, and thus it is wrong to interfere negatively with that entitlement, either qualitative or quantitative.
This covers a great range of moral behaviour.
For example, if I kill somebody, I take away the entitlement on the rest of his life. He would have lived longer if I had not killed him and therefore I rob him from his quantitative entitlement. It may very well be that this person voluntarily gives up his entitlement on the rest of his life because the quality of his life has been reduced to such a level that his wish to live has turned to a will to die. In that case the person has an entitlement to end the entitlement on life. I still don't endorse that any appointed individual would take this entitlement, after all the entitlement on life cannot be given back once taken. But I do feel very strongly that if a person wishes to do so, he should be able to give up the entitlement on life in a respectful way. This has everything to do with consent. We can only interfere with other people's lives if it is with their consent. If they give us their consent to influence their lives negatively this can be considered to be ethical behaviour, providing that person is in a mental state to take such decisions etc. Look at the sexual practice of SM for example: everyone would agree that beating your wife is immoral behaviour. But if she clearly states the pain and the submission sexually arouse her, the situation is completely different.
Another example: if I steal something from another person it is not so much that I remove a certain object out of his control, but I negatively influence both his qualitative and quantitative entitlement on life. Say I steal this persons' I-pod. Assuming he didn't get it as a gift but performed paid labour for that I-pod, I am not only removing the quality of life this person derives from the stolen object, I also take away the time (ie quantitative entitlement) he spent working to acquire the object in addition to the qualitative entitlement during the time of paid labour. After all, instead of working to acquire this I-pod he could have gone to the pub with his friends or do some other activity he enjoys.
It is not always so straightforward. Take lying for example. In principle, lying is wrong because by deliberately giving somebody a wrong piece of information you can harm him, and even others if that person acts on the information given to him. But imagine your 6-year-old daughter is terminally ill from cancer, she lies in her bed and whithers away, and at some point she asks you if it's really true what the nurse said, that after death you go to heaven. Would you really tell her that we don't know? It's probably not in her interest to hear this truth, but to be consoled by the idea that there is some kind of life after her short life here on earth. In that sense, it could be considered morally correct to tell her that life after death exists because it benefits the person who is being lied to. (whether life after death corresponds with the truth is another matter altogether)
As you can see, the principle of life ownership and the preceding principles provide a concise but powerful system of ethics, based on logic and compassion. The system in itself is morally right because it evolves around the respect for other peoples life, opinions, desires and entitlements. It is in itself a proof that holy scriptures are not only redundant as a guide to ethics but also that there is a viable alternative.
Friday 23 January 2009
Tuesday 20 January 2009
The ten suggestions
There is a running joke among atheists, saying that if Moses had been more liberal he would have called the ten commandments the 'ten suggestions'.
Although a religious person probably can't produce any more than a wry grin about this, for an Atheist it is quite to the point. After all, if one doesn't accept the bible as a leading guide to moral issues, which atheists generally don't do with good reason, then these commandments are not binding. That is not to say that it is immoral to follow them, on the contrary. Some of the ten commandments fit very well within our view of norms and values: our society and economy would not work if it were legitimate to kill, steal and lie and such acts would consequently be practiced in abundance. That is not to say that we should look anywhere in the direction of holy scriptures for moral guidance, as the scriptures of the abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are hundreds years old and not compatible with our society today.
The commandments to not steal, kill, lie or commit adultery are among the few rules in the old testament that make sense. It might have made sense at the time but there are a lot of rules in the old testament which we would consider barbaric nowadays.
let's have a look at a few of these here.
If anyone in the circle of your family or friends entices you to worship another God you must, according to Deuteronomy 13:6-10, surely put them to death by stoning.
If your son or daughter doesn't obey you, even after punishment, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says you must bring them to the gates of the city and the kid must be stoned to death.
Homosexuals and transvestites are (surprise, surprise!) also to be stoned to death according to Leviticus 18:22-20:13 and Deuteronomy 22:5 respectively. Leviticus 20:27 prescribes the same fate to Magicians.
In Leviticus 20:15 we read that anyone who has sex with an animal shall be put to death, which is gruesome on it's own. The poor animal however is, after being raped, also to be put to death! Now where's the justice in that? In Deuteronomy 22:22-24 it says something similar about women: when a woman who is engaged to marry is raped in town, they are both to be stoned to death: the man for the rape and the woman for not crying for help! If the same happens on the countryside, we read in ongoing paragraphs, only the man is stoned because the woman's cries for help could have remained unheard. It's surely a logic unheard of in our times.
In Deuteronomy 22:13-20 we read that if you marry a woman and it appears she is not a virgin, you can ask a proof of virginity from the parents of the bride. If the proof is provided, you will be punished. Fair enough, you have made a fool of your in-laws, not very nice. But if the proof can not be provided that the woman is a virgin, she should be taken to her parents' house and be stoned to death. (This insistence on virginity is still strong among Muslims and some Christians although the punishment is not as severe among Christians.)
In Deuteronomy 23:10 it says that if you make male prisoners of war, you can put all of them to death. If there is a female POW, you can make her your wife and after a month of bereavement have sex with her. If she doesn't please you, you can send her away. (But because she is not a virgin anymore, she will be in trouble - see above.)
here are a few more absurd rules:
In Deuteronomy 23:1 it says that if a man has crushed testicles or his penis is cut off, he is not welcome to congregation.
If a man suspects his wife is cheating on him he can, whether this suspicion is true or not, take her to a priest who, according to numbers 5:13-28, mixes holy water with dust from the floor in a bowl. The wife will drink this mixture and if she had sex with another man her belly will swell and her sex organs will shrivel. Shrivel, for crying out loud!
And exodus 23:19 forbids us to boil a kid in it's mothers milk.. who does that kind of stuff anyway?
This list is by no means comprehensive but I think after reading the above you got the picture.
I do not wish to doubt the usefulness of the commandments at the time they were written, and whoever was at their source is beyond the scope of this subject so I will not attempt to a philosophy about that either. At the time, the society was ordered in a completely different way and a moral code was highly desirable. The fact that we frown upon laws as mentioned above doesn't mean people back then would find it as unacceptable as we do now: for would we accept such a code of moral in these days? Of course we should not. Although in Deuteronomy 29:19-20 it says that anyone who feels inclined to act on his own moral views shall meet the wrath of god, even today's Christians say they do not embrace this kind of conduct. What a relief.
The citations above are taken from the old testament that contains the ten commandments, which is mainly a foundation of the Jews but also relevant to the Christians. To what extent old testament scripture is relevant to Christians is open for debate, but surely they accept the ten commandments. But accepting one part of a scripture and not another leaves room for confusion and erroneous implementation of the scripture. I often hear from religious people that scriptures are 'open for interpretation' and 'one must read between the lines'. Again, this leads to confusion and erroneous implementation, the resulting misery of which we can see in Northern Ireland, the middle east, former Yugoslavia and all over history.
That's why any Atheist will reject these scriptures as a whole and seek refuge to another sort of moral framework. In spite of what it says in Deuteronomy 29:19-20 we must have our own moral compass, independent of scriptures.
In our time, the secular part of the ten commandments has been covered by national law and any country to my knowledge forbids theft and murder. But in a way, other parts of the ten commandments have actually been disabled by law:
I am the Lord your God
You shall have no other gods before me
You shall not make for yourself an idol
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
These four commandments are in conflict with the right to freedom of religion we know today as a basic human right in the civilised world. The old testament on the contrary, punishes the infringement of these commandments with death: everybody must get stoned. It also punishes or condemns other things which are accepted and/or legal in our world like homosexuality, sex before marriage etc. Slavery on the other hand is accepted in old scriptures while we have abolished it because it's considered immoral. Clearly the discrepancy between moral set out in scriptures and our current moral is bigger than the similarities.
Despite what religious people sometimes claim, we wouldn't live in a brave new world if we all would stick to holy scriptures and canonical law, or even the ten commandments. The middle east is a living proof of that. The fact that the Quran is many centuries younger than the old testament doesn't make it any more contemporary.
Contemporary or not, there is another aspect to scripture that prevents an objectively thinking person to base his moral on such scriptures. If one accepts moral from scriptures one accepts these morals because they are handed down from their God, and what he says is true and good beyond the shadow of a doubt. So killing somebody or stealing from them is not wrong because harm is done to that person, but because it is written in the holy book. If it says in that book that we can kill somebody in certain exceptional situations (and in the bible there are many of such situations described, see above) then all of a sudden it's perfectly OK to kill even your mother or other loved ones. Or to blow yourself up in a crowded bus, or fly an aeroplane into the twin towers. Of course the latter isn't mentioned in the bible or the Quran, but aren't we told to read between the lines?
The conclusion can only be that old scriptures, holy or not, are inadequate as a moral guideline in our times. We cannot rely on it in managing and designing our lives and that of our children. It may well be that some part of these scriptures include ideas that are still valid in our time, but deliberating about which are and which aren't may take more time than abolishing them all together and build a new moral framework from the ground up. And this moral framework should not come from above but from among us. It should be based on a mutual respect for all living creatures including their opinions, desires and entitlements.
Although a religious person probably can't produce any more than a wry grin about this, for an Atheist it is quite to the point. After all, if one doesn't accept the bible as a leading guide to moral issues, which atheists generally don't do with good reason, then these commandments are not binding. That is not to say that it is immoral to follow them, on the contrary. Some of the ten commandments fit very well within our view of norms and values: our society and economy would not work if it were legitimate to kill, steal and lie and such acts would consequently be practiced in abundance. That is not to say that we should look anywhere in the direction of holy scriptures for moral guidance, as the scriptures of the abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are hundreds years old and not compatible with our society today.
The commandments to not steal, kill, lie or commit adultery are among the few rules in the old testament that make sense. It might have made sense at the time but there are a lot of rules in the old testament which we would consider barbaric nowadays.
let's have a look at a few of these here.
If anyone in the circle of your family or friends entices you to worship another God you must, according to Deuteronomy 13:6-10, surely put them to death by stoning.
If your son or daughter doesn't obey you, even after punishment, Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says you must bring them to the gates of the city and the kid must be stoned to death.
Homosexuals and transvestites are (surprise, surprise!) also to be stoned to death according to Leviticus 18:22-20:13 and Deuteronomy 22:5 respectively. Leviticus 20:27 prescribes the same fate to Magicians.
In Leviticus 20:15 we read that anyone who has sex with an animal shall be put to death, which is gruesome on it's own. The poor animal however is, after being raped, also to be put to death! Now where's the justice in that? In Deuteronomy 22:22-24 it says something similar about women: when a woman who is engaged to marry is raped in town, they are both to be stoned to death: the man for the rape and the woman for not crying for help! If the same happens on the countryside, we read in ongoing paragraphs, only the man is stoned because the woman's cries for help could have remained unheard. It's surely a logic unheard of in our times.
In Deuteronomy 22:13-20 we read that if you marry a woman and it appears she is not a virgin, you can ask a proof of virginity from the parents of the bride. If the proof is provided, you will be punished. Fair enough, you have made a fool of your in-laws, not very nice. But if the proof can not be provided that the woman is a virgin, she should be taken to her parents' house and be stoned to death. (This insistence on virginity is still strong among Muslims and some Christians although the punishment is not as severe among Christians.)
In Deuteronomy 23:10 it says that if you make male prisoners of war, you can put all of them to death. If there is a female POW, you can make her your wife and after a month of bereavement have sex with her. If she doesn't please you, you can send her away. (But because she is not a virgin anymore, she will be in trouble - see above.)
here are a few more absurd rules:
In Deuteronomy 23:1 it says that if a man has crushed testicles or his penis is cut off, he is not welcome to congregation.
If a man suspects his wife is cheating on him he can, whether this suspicion is true or not, take her to a priest who, according to numbers 5:13-28, mixes holy water with dust from the floor in a bowl. The wife will drink this mixture and if she had sex with another man her belly will swell and her sex organs will shrivel. Shrivel, for crying out loud!
And exodus 23:19 forbids us to boil a kid in it's mothers milk.. who does that kind of stuff anyway?
This list is by no means comprehensive but I think after reading the above you got the picture.
I do not wish to doubt the usefulness of the commandments at the time they were written, and whoever was at their source is beyond the scope of this subject so I will not attempt to a philosophy about that either. At the time, the society was ordered in a completely different way and a moral code was highly desirable. The fact that we frown upon laws as mentioned above doesn't mean people back then would find it as unacceptable as we do now: for would we accept such a code of moral in these days? Of course we should not. Although in Deuteronomy 29:19-20 it says that anyone who feels inclined to act on his own moral views shall meet the wrath of god, even today's Christians say they do not embrace this kind of conduct. What a relief.
The citations above are taken from the old testament that contains the ten commandments, which is mainly a foundation of the Jews but also relevant to the Christians. To what extent old testament scripture is relevant to Christians is open for debate, but surely they accept the ten commandments. But accepting one part of a scripture and not another leaves room for confusion and erroneous implementation of the scripture. I often hear from religious people that scriptures are 'open for interpretation' and 'one must read between the lines'. Again, this leads to confusion and erroneous implementation, the resulting misery of which we can see in Northern Ireland, the middle east, former Yugoslavia and all over history.
That's why any Atheist will reject these scriptures as a whole and seek refuge to another sort of moral framework. In spite of what it says in Deuteronomy 29:19-20 we must have our own moral compass, independent of scriptures.
In our time, the secular part of the ten commandments has been covered by national law and any country to my knowledge forbids theft and murder. But in a way, other parts of the ten commandments have actually been disabled by law:
I am the Lord your God
You shall have no other gods before me
You shall not make for yourself an idol
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
These four commandments are in conflict with the right to freedom of religion we know today as a basic human right in the civilised world. The old testament on the contrary, punishes the infringement of these commandments with death: everybody must get stoned. It also punishes or condemns other things which are accepted and/or legal in our world like homosexuality, sex before marriage etc. Slavery on the other hand is accepted in old scriptures while we have abolished it because it's considered immoral. Clearly the discrepancy between moral set out in scriptures and our current moral is bigger than the similarities.
Despite what religious people sometimes claim, we wouldn't live in a brave new world if we all would stick to holy scriptures and canonical law, or even the ten commandments. The middle east is a living proof of that. The fact that the Quran is many centuries younger than the old testament doesn't make it any more contemporary.
Contemporary or not, there is another aspect to scripture that prevents an objectively thinking person to base his moral on such scriptures. If one accepts moral from scriptures one accepts these morals because they are handed down from their God, and what he says is true and good beyond the shadow of a doubt. So killing somebody or stealing from them is not wrong because harm is done to that person, but because it is written in the holy book. If it says in that book that we can kill somebody in certain exceptional situations (and in the bible there are many of such situations described, see above) then all of a sudden it's perfectly OK to kill even your mother or other loved ones. Or to blow yourself up in a crowded bus, or fly an aeroplane into the twin towers. Of course the latter isn't mentioned in the bible or the Quran, but aren't we told to read between the lines?
The conclusion can only be that old scriptures, holy or not, are inadequate as a moral guideline in our times. We cannot rely on it in managing and designing our lives and that of our children. It may well be that some part of these scriptures include ideas that are still valid in our time, but deliberating about which are and which aren't may take more time than abolishing them all together and build a new moral framework from the ground up. And this moral framework should not come from above but from among us. It should be based on a mutual respect for all living creatures including their opinions, desires and entitlements.
Wednesday 14 January 2009
Freedom of religion for children
The freedom of religion we all hold so dear, and which is implemented in many constitutions additional to being a universal human right, unfortunately does not apply to children.
The fact that in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there are laws for 'minors' and religion doesn't change much in this matter. In Germany children under 12 years old cannot be forced to change to another belief, which implies that until 12 they can, and only kids over 14 years have the freedom to choose whatever religion they want to be in, which implies that up to 14 the parents have a legal right to indoctrinate their kids with religious dogma. This is clearly a joke, and should in reality be 14 months or something in this order of magnitude.
Now I hear you thinking that a child of 14 months cannot make any decisions or deliberations on which religion is the right one for him or her. That is of course true, but neither can a child of 13 or 14. And at this age, it's clearly too late anyhow. A child is "designed" (by evolution, not a designer) to be very open-minded and accept what his/her parents say, because it doesn't have the abilities to make certain decisions on it's own. It is inclined to accept what the parents say and teach and, for its own benefit, not to question too much until it has gained experience and knowledge about the world it lives in. For example if children won't listen to their parents when they tell them to stay away from the pool, the child will fall in and die. Children are of course impulsive and can run straight into the pool when chasing a ball, but would generally listen to their parents and respect their opinions. A small child generally can not form its own opinion about religious or philosophical issues. Taking in mind the mystic, fairy-tale character of many scriptures it is not difficult to see how children are susceptible to religious dogma brought down from their parents.
Consider the most common situation where a child is raised by his two parents: it is normal and expected that the parents teach values and morals to their children. Whether these fall into a religious realm will depend on how religious the parents are. When both parents have the same religion it is unrealistic to expect they will not raise their kids according to their religious beliefs. The only way to balance this is by schooling or another strong anti-theistic influence. Without it, a child raised by two religious parents is 'doomed' to be religious itself.
To raise a child with a solid moral framework does not require religious dogma any more than living a religious life needs religious dogma: it is certainly possible to live ethically without attributing to a religion, and raise your children the same way. Moreover, neither we nor our children are dependant on holy scriptures for the conduct of ethical behaviour, but I will get back on this independence in a later post.
One of the most important things that a child learns in the first decade in it's life is what is good and bad, and how to interact with others: apart from moral standards he gets from his parents, a child learns the basic rules of human interaction in kindergarten. If a child hits another child on the playground, takes away its toys or lies, it is wrong regardless of which religion either child is brought up in. For such basic social rules there is no need for religion, specially not for kids. There is also no need for an all-knowing, all-powerful God that punishes with hell fire. Properly inflicted, such ideas can cause trauma in children that border on mental abuse.
Essentially we are all born as Atheists because theism is not innate, we are not born with it. An uninformed child is godless, it has no notion of religion and will stay that way until it learns to speak and listen and form opinions on religious matters. So the act of baptizing is committed far earlier than when the child can form it's own opinion on religious matters. Baptizing an infant is therefore strictly speaking a breach of a basic human right for children, namely the right to freely choose a religion. When baptized, the parents of a child decide on its behalf that it will enter into church, and thus saved for salvation. Strictly speaking, once baptized a child is a christian (by whichever church variant it is baptized) until it's death. But without the child's consent, what validity does this baptism have? It can only have validity if a child is grown up and can decide for itself it it wants to be part of church.
All influence of parents and family aside, there is another important factor in a young person's life that has influence on its view on life and religious matters: education.
As I wrote before, children are likely to accept their parents beliefs. It is also generally considered to be 'not done' for a kid, specially in primary school, to dispute what a schoolteacher teaches but instead to accept what he says to be true. So if the schoolteacher tells the story of the Arch of Noah as being a true story, they will believe him just as much as when he teaches the earth is round and circulates around the sun. They will also believe him that eve was created from Adam's rib or that the earth and universe were designed by a designer.
If you tell the story of the Arch of Noah to a well-thinking adult, he will counter that it is impossible for an old man to gather a male and a female example of each of the thousand species on a boat. On his own. A child will find it a fantastic story while every reasonable adult will find it humbug.
The educational system could act as a counter-weight to whatever religious dogma children get fed at home. Even a "neutral" education where all religions are briefly touched upon and explained in rough lines would be beneficial to kids as it will expand their horizon. Unfortunately this is not the case even in the most civilised countries. There are of course neutral schools, but there are also Catholic schools, Protestant schools, Islamic schools etc. In this way, the kids that need it most (those that are raised in a religious fashion) are not taught about other religions and irreligious ideas like evolution theory and thus expand their horizon beyond what their religious parents teach them.
In a recent study among British schoolteachers, 29% of them said that they want creationism to be taught in science classes. Creationism! In science classes! Since when is creationism a science? It isn't, it is a malign fable.
So why is this taught in schools? The school system can be a good instrument to counter-balance the religious upbringing children get from their parents. They can learn about creationism at home and get taught Darwin's evolution at school. However, all over Europe there are schools and other educational institutions which label themselves as religious, and where religion is taught. It wouldn't be all that bad if kids would learn about all religions in religion classes, so they would get equal knowledge about Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and what some of the more obscure schools of thought like Scientology. If I had kids, even I as an atheist would gladly send them to such classes. Unfortunately, on roman catholic schools kids just learn about the roman catholic religion, on protestant schools they learn about protestant religion. And immigrants from the middle east send their kids to Islam-schools where they just get taught about Islam - if we are lucky they don't get told that the Christian and Jewish religions are bad and its followers should have their heads chopped off. But I wouldn't hold my breath for it. To add insult to injury, the state pays for such religious "education" and therefore it is you and I who fund religious education through taxes.
Apart from what children are taught at home or in school, they act very much on example, they learn on repetition. Children are born without speech and without belief, so they just mimic what they see around them. The best thing we can do for our kids, in other words for the coming generation, is to show them to be honest, compassionate people (thanks to or despite their religion) and with a bit of luck they will take over the good things we show them.
The fact that in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there are laws for 'minors' and religion doesn't change much in this matter. In Germany children under 12 years old cannot be forced to change to another belief, which implies that until 12 they can, and only kids over 14 years have the freedom to choose whatever religion they want to be in, which implies that up to 14 the parents have a legal right to indoctrinate their kids with religious dogma. This is clearly a joke, and should in reality be 14 months or something in this order of magnitude.
Now I hear you thinking that a child of 14 months cannot make any decisions or deliberations on which religion is the right one for him or her. That is of course true, but neither can a child of 13 or 14. And at this age, it's clearly too late anyhow. A child is "designed" (by evolution, not a designer) to be very open-minded and accept what his/her parents say, because it doesn't have the abilities to make certain decisions on it's own. It is inclined to accept what the parents say and teach and, for its own benefit, not to question too much until it has gained experience and knowledge about the world it lives in. For example if children won't listen to their parents when they tell them to stay away from the pool, the child will fall in and die. Children are of course impulsive and can run straight into the pool when chasing a ball, but would generally listen to their parents and respect their opinions. A small child generally can not form its own opinion about religious or philosophical issues. Taking in mind the mystic, fairy-tale character of many scriptures it is not difficult to see how children are susceptible to religious dogma brought down from their parents.
Consider the most common situation where a child is raised by his two parents: it is normal and expected that the parents teach values and morals to their children. Whether these fall into a religious realm will depend on how religious the parents are. When both parents have the same religion it is unrealistic to expect they will not raise their kids according to their religious beliefs. The only way to balance this is by schooling or another strong anti-theistic influence. Without it, a child raised by two religious parents is 'doomed' to be religious itself.
To raise a child with a solid moral framework does not require religious dogma any more than living a religious life needs religious dogma: it is certainly possible to live ethically without attributing to a religion, and raise your children the same way. Moreover, neither we nor our children are dependant on holy scriptures for the conduct of ethical behaviour, but I will get back on this independence in a later post.
One of the most important things that a child learns in the first decade in it's life is what is good and bad, and how to interact with others: apart from moral standards he gets from his parents, a child learns the basic rules of human interaction in kindergarten. If a child hits another child on the playground, takes away its toys or lies, it is wrong regardless of which religion either child is brought up in. For such basic social rules there is no need for religion, specially not for kids. There is also no need for an all-knowing, all-powerful God that punishes with hell fire. Properly inflicted, such ideas can cause trauma in children that border on mental abuse.
Essentially we are all born as Atheists because theism is not innate, we are not born with it. An uninformed child is godless, it has no notion of religion and will stay that way until it learns to speak and listen and form opinions on religious matters. So the act of baptizing is committed far earlier than when the child can form it's own opinion on religious matters. Baptizing an infant is therefore strictly speaking a breach of a basic human right for children, namely the right to freely choose a religion. When baptized, the parents of a child decide on its behalf that it will enter into church, and thus saved for salvation. Strictly speaking, once baptized a child is a christian (by whichever church variant it is baptized) until it's death. But without the child's consent, what validity does this baptism have? It can only have validity if a child is grown up and can decide for itself it it wants to be part of church.
All influence of parents and family aside, there is another important factor in a young person's life that has influence on its view on life and religious matters: education.
As I wrote before, children are likely to accept their parents beliefs. It is also generally considered to be 'not done' for a kid, specially in primary school, to dispute what a schoolteacher teaches but instead to accept what he says to be true. So if the schoolteacher tells the story of the Arch of Noah as being a true story, they will believe him just as much as when he teaches the earth is round and circulates around the sun. They will also believe him that eve was created from Adam's rib or that the earth and universe were designed by a designer.
If you tell the story of the Arch of Noah to a well-thinking adult, he will counter that it is impossible for an old man to gather a male and a female example of each of the thousand species on a boat. On his own. A child will find it a fantastic story while every reasonable adult will find it humbug.
The educational system could act as a counter-weight to whatever religious dogma children get fed at home. Even a "neutral" education where all religions are briefly touched upon and explained in rough lines would be beneficial to kids as it will expand their horizon. Unfortunately this is not the case even in the most civilised countries. There are of course neutral schools, but there are also Catholic schools, Protestant schools, Islamic schools etc. In this way, the kids that need it most (those that are raised in a religious fashion) are not taught about other religions and irreligious ideas like evolution theory and thus expand their horizon beyond what their religious parents teach them.
In a recent study among British schoolteachers, 29% of them said that they want creationism to be taught in science classes. Creationism! In science classes! Since when is creationism a science? It isn't, it is a malign fable.
So why is this taught in schools? The school system can be a good instrument to counter-balance the religious upbringing children get from their parents. They can learn about creationism at home and get taught Darwin's evolution at school. However, all over Europe there are schools and other educational institutions which label themselves as religious, and where religion is taught. It wouldn't be all that bad if kids would learn about all religions in religion classes, so they would get equal knowledge about Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and what some of the more obscure schools of thought like Scientology. If I had kids, even I as an atheist would gladly send them to such classes. Unfortunately, on roman catholic schools kids just learn about the roman catholic religion, on protestant schools they learn about protestant religion. And immigrants from the middle east send their kids to Islam-schools where they just get taught about Islam - if we are lucky they don't get told that the Christian and Jewish religions are bad and its followers should have their heads chopped off. But I wouldn't hold my breath for it. To add insult to injury, the state pays for such religious "education" and therefore it is you and I who fund religious education through taxes.
Apart from what children are taught at home or in school, they act very much on example, they learn on repetition. Children are born without speech and without belief, so they just mimic what they see around them. The best thing we can do for our kids, in other words for the coming generation, is to show them to be honest, compassionate people (thanks to or despite their religion) and with a bit of luck they will take over the good things we show them.
Sunday 11 January 2009
The journey
please view this video of the poem 'Ithaca' by C. Kavafis, recited by Sean Connery, before you read the rest of the post..
It may be a terrible cliche, but I must agree with it: life is a journey. But it is a journey through time and space to a destination we don't know, and don't even know if it exists. Maybe upon reaching the destination we are immediately sent on the next journey, nobody knows. The opinions, which can be believed but not acknowledged with certainty, diverge widely.
Some say they know the path to this destination.
Some say, any path except the one they propose leads to eternal damnation.
All they provide is hope and consolation, the rest is a pretentious delusion until somebody proves otherwise, as nobody returned from "Ithaca".
Some choose their own path, and for others the path is chosen. Some travel down a straight line to their destination, at the highest possible speed, only to realize they missed the sightseeing along the way to a boring or even painful end. Others go slowly, taking their time, making detours and enjoying the wayside.
Some tread only on treaded paths, over flat land, to minimize their effort and maximize their comfort. Others go the rough way, off the beaten path, to see things that are seen only by those who care to look further than others. They climb high peaks, from which they can look down on everything. Maybe not as high as Wittgenstein or Einstein, but still a peak from which one can have a view on the toils of humanity. They don't trust on reaching the peak at the end of our life, but try to climb as many peaks as they can during their journey, cross wild rivers and crawl through the underwood. They make the journey to be their goal, as a purpose of itself: the road to the final end becomes a final end itself.
All we know is that it's ours, and so are the decisions on how to experience it. It is what it is, but it's also there, forever, in a different dimension to which you can't return. You can't imagine the journey without you, from a point beyond the destination, but you can see it as being always with you. On your journey you can have everything you dare to reach out for, and what you grasp with your mind will always be there for you. Life can be cruel and take away everything, but not the memories of the past travels. It is etched into (your) history, and the traces you leave can be a guide to others. So make your journey well, it is your task and a duty to yourself to make the most of it, as for all you know it is your last journey. You don't know if Ithaca exists and whether it's a nice place or a terrible one, whether somebody will open a hospitable door or send you further. Maybe if you finally reach Ithaca, there will be someone waiting there to hear your story, but imagine you have nothing to tell them? And if it is merely a delusion, a Fatah Morgana, at least the journey towards it deserves to be an exciting one.
It may be a terrible cliche, but I must agree with it: life is a journey. But it is a journey through time and space to a destination we don't know, and don't even know if it exists. Maybe upon reaching the destination we are immediately sent on the next journey, nobody knows. The opinions, which can be believed but not acknowledged with certainty, diverge widely.
Some say they know the path to this destination.
Some say, any path except the one they propose leads to eternal damnation.
All they provide is hope and consolation, the rest is a pretentious delusion until somebody proves otherwise, as nobody returned from "Ithaca".
Some choose their own path, and for others the path is chosen. Some travel down a straight line to their destination, at the highest possible speed, only to realize they missed the sightseeing along the way to a boring or even painful end. Others go slowly, taking their time, making detours and enjoying the wayside.
Some tread only on treaded paths, over flat land, to minimize their effort and maximize their comfort. Others go the rough way, off the beaten path, to see things that are seen only by those who care to look further than others. They climb high peaks, from which they can look down on everything. Maybe not as high as Wittgenstein or Einstein, but still a peak from which one can have a view on the toils of humanity. They don't trust on reaching the peak at the end of our life, but try to climb as many peaks as they can during their journey, cross wild rivers and crawl through the underwood. They make the journey to be their goal, as a purpose of itself: the road to the final end becomes a final end itself.
All we know is that it's ours, and so are the decisions on how to experience it. It is what it is, but it's also there, forever, in a different dimension to which you can't return. You can't imagine the journey without you, from a point beyond the destination, but you can see it as being always with you. On your journey you can have everything you dare to reach out for, and what you grasp with your mind will always be there for you. Life can be cruel and take away everything, but not the memories of the past travels. It is etched into (your) history, and the traces you leave can be a guide to others. So make your journey well, it is your task and a duty to yourself to make the most of it, as for all you know it is your last journey. You don't know if Ithaca exists and whether it's a nice place or a terrible one, whether somebody will open a hospitable door or send you further. Maybe if you finally reach Ithaca, there will be someone waiting there to hear your story, but imagine you have nothing to tell them? And if it is merely a delusion, a Fatah Morgana, at least the journey towards it deserves to be an exciting one.
Saturday 10 January 2009
Desire vs Moral
In the previous post I wrote about 1st class and 2nd class desires, and how they move us into action. I want to briefly elaborate further on that.To recap, 1st class desires are those that are formed by our subconsciousness, like the desire to eat and fornicate. They are essentially the forces that drive us in an animistic way. In addition to this, we have desires that are subconsciously caused by our environment, for example when we see that a neighbour or friend has something desirable (new car, woman) this can also create a desire in us for such a thing.
One could say that the notion of free will is a delusion, and that we are just an instrument of our desires. In fact, when we feel hungry and start thinking about food, this is a thought imposed upon us by our subconsciousness. We merely have a free will about the way we satisfy this desire for food, not whether we eat or not. With sex this is a bit different, as we are theoretically able to live without it. It's another thing if resisting this desire on the long term is wise or not.
What sets us apart as humans from animals is the concept of the 2nd class desires, which we can form about the 1st class desires. Animals act on their desires impulsively, they don't reflect and aren't self-critical either. If a bear or a wolf is hungry he will hunt for a prey, kill it and eat it without reflecting on whether the prey agrees to this or maybe is somebody Else's property. The animal doesn't know about it and consequently isn't bothered about such issues. In contrast to this, humans have these 2nd class desires and not only do they characterize us as a species, but also form a great part of our personal, cultural and social behaviour.
The 2nd class desires characterize us in the way that, as I set out in the previous post, we can form these desires which thus become the embodiment of our free will. We can want to want or want to not want, based on ethics, given to us by society and religion. Let me explain.
There is no way or need to fight the primary desires, as they are created by our subconsciousness. We cannot fight what happens in our subconsciousness. But what we can do as human beings is consciously control these primary desires. One way to control them is to form 2nd class desires. Like I set out before, our 2nd class desires are desires that we consciously form about our (unavoidable) 1st class desires. By forming these desires and evaluating them, we achieve a sense of free will about which primary desires to satisfy (and in which way) but also which desires to suppress. Which desires we give in to and which we suppress depends on our ethics. Everyone has a complex framework of ethics which helps us decide which desires we can give in to and which to resist. But it would be wrong to say that we base our decisions only on ethics. Apart from what is morally wrong, which applies to the world around us, we must also deliberate about what is right or wrong for us personally . Spending money on buying new shoes for example can be perfectly right, but not if it's our last money and we cannot buy any food as a consequence. You could think about this as 'intimate ethics'. So in deciding which desires move us into action we must not only consider our own interest but also the interests of the society we live in, and often make a compromise between the two.
The complex way in which we do this gives character to us as a person and also to our society as a whole, because what we do or not do, and the reasons for this, shapes us as a person. And what we do as a people collectively also shapes society of course, which leads us in a circle, because isn't it mainly society that shapes what we do? Society is an important influence on how we shape our 2nd class desires, in other words, we decide to act on our primary desires.
A very important aspect of making decisions about these 2nd class desires is our conscience. Human beings are susceptible to conscience, which separates them from animals just like having 2nd class desires. But 2nd class desires and conscience are not the same. It is natural for us as human beings to have 2nd class desires, even if they are very primitive and not guided by moral, and doesn't have to concern itself with anything except ourselves. Second class desires come from within us like primary class desires, but unlike the latter, we can conduct critical thinking about the former.
Conscience, on the contrary, comes from outside and is not innate: it must be formed. This happens within the family and later in society. Conscience therefore always concerns itself with the wishes, desires, entitlements etc of the world around us and the people in it. The conscience can be seen as a mental institution (an institution within the mind that is) which enables an individual to live after the moral rules of the society that the individual lives in. It has a strong influence on our 2nd class desires
A strong influence on our 2nd class desires, by means of conscience, is religion. More specifically, religion mostly tries to create a 'bad conscience' to keep us under control, by damning things like anti-conception, masturbation, eating pork etc. In that sense, religion often suppresses what is natural or beneficial to us, most notably sexual desires: religion is good in that for some reason. The parts of conscience that religion correctly suppresses are things which people with a decent moral wouldn't do anyway.
As such, an atheist is not to be defined as an immoral person, but as a person who doesn't allow his conscience to be spoiled by religious dogma and therefore suppresses morally correct desires. An Atheist derives his moral from the society he lives in and in a certain extent from critical thinking. The extent to which he will form his moral by critical thinking depends on personality traits, like to which extent he is inclined to go against what society tells him to do or not do. If a person conducts his behaviour within the moral framework of his society (i.e. taking into account the wishes, desires and entitlements of others) this is enough morality. If a religious moral framework demands more than the societies' moral framework, the religion demands too much.
I mentioned earlier that there is a sort of moral circle, in which we as a people influence the societies' moral framework, and the societies' moral framework influences us, including the framework passed by religion. By critical thinking, meaning critical thinking about religious moral, we can put question-marks to such morality which is in conflict to our well-being as a human species. In such a way we can evolve as a society to a better framework of moral. If people behave differently from 'normal' behaviour, and this behaviour is approved, others will start mimicking this behaviour and changes can be made, while society will reject or punish individual behaviour deemed as inappropriate. This is a slow but continuous process, a 'moral evolution', which moved great parts of the civilised world out of a moral from the middle ages. Some parts of the world, unfortunately, are stuck in the middle ages, because they don't think critically about the moral their religion gives them and instead just 'follow the leader' like a flock of sheep.
Not all religious moral is bad: the ideas to not steal, kill or fornicate your neighbours wife are good ideas, which should be embraced by any society. And this is exactly the point: they would be embraced by most societies anyway, with or without religion, because they can harm society as a whole. It has severe consequences to the economy and the people if everyone would kill and steal without inhibition. And because nobody wants to find their neighbour in bed with their wife, we as a society reject adultery. So the people in a society collectively agree that this is reject-able conduct, and no deity is needed. These morals were already in place before Christianity, Islam or other religions came into this world: religions just adopted moral and rewrote it as 'God's will'. This goes to prove that we do not need religion to have a moral framework. Moreover, religion can hold back the development of a moral framework like it did with science for many centuries. Thus, we need to abolish religion as a means to reach a moral framework. Our moral framework should depend on our will (that is, the will of us as a collection of people in a society) and not on God's will.
One could say that the notion of free will is a delusion, and that we are just an instrument of our desires. In fact, when we feel hungry and start thinking about food, this is a thought imposed upon us by our subconsciousness. We merely have a free will about the way we satisfy this desire for food, not whether we eat or not. With sex this is a bit different, as we are theoretically able to live without it. It's another thing if resisting this desire on the long term is wise or not.
What sets us apart as humans from animals is the concept of the 2nd class desires, which we can form about the 1st class desires. Animals act on their desires impulsively, they don't reflect and aren't self-critical either. If a bear or a wolf is hungry he will hunt for a prey, kill it and eat it without reflecting on whether the prey agrees to this or maybe is somebody Else's property. The animal doesn't know about it and consequently isn't bothered about such issues. In contrast to this, humans have these 2nd class desires and not only do they characterize us as a species, but also form a great part of our personal, cultural and social behaviour.
The 2nd class desires characterize us in the way that, as I set out in the previous post, we can form these desires which thus become the embodiment of our free will. We can want to want or want to not want, based on ethics, given to us by society and religion. Let me explain.
There is no way or need to fight the primary desires, as they are created by our subconsciousness. We cannot fight what happens in our subconsciousness. But what we can do as human beings is consciously control these primary desires. One way to control them is to form 2nd class desires. Like I set out before, our 2nd class desires are desires that we consciously form about our (unavoidable) 1st class desires. By forming these desires and evaluating them, we achieve a sense of free will about which primary desires to satisfy (and in which way) but also which desires to suppress. Which desires we give in to and which we suppress depends on our ethics. Everyone has a complex framework of ethics which helps us decide which desires we can give in to and which to resist. But it would be wrong to say that we base our decisions only on ethics. Apart from what is morally wrong, which applies to the world around us, we must also deliberate about what is right or wrong for us personally . Spending money on buying new shoes for example can be perfectly right, but not if it's our last money and we cannot buy any food as a consequence. You could think about this as 'intimate ethics'. So in deciding which desires move us into action we must not only consider our own interest but also the interests of the society we live in, and often make a compromise between the two.
The complex way in which we do this gives character to us as a person and also to our society as a whole, because what we do or not do, and the reasons for this, shapes us as a person. And what we do as a people collectively also shapes society of course, which leads us in a circle, because isn't it mainly society that shapes what we do? Society is an important influence on how we shape our 2nd class desires, in other words, we decide to act on our primary desires.
A very important aspect of making decisions about these 2nd class desires is our conscience. Human beings are susceptible to conscience, which separates them from animals just like having 2nd class desires. But 2nd class desires and conscience are not the same. It is natural for us as human beings to have 2nd class desires, even if they are very primitive and not guided by moral, and doesn't have to concern itself with anything except ourselves. Second class desires come from within us like primary class desires, but unlike the latter, we can conduct critical thinking about the former.
Conscience, on the contrary, comes from outside and is not innate: it must be formed. This happens within the family and later in society. Conscience therefore always concerns itself with the wishes, desires, entitlements etc of the world around us and the people in it. The conscience can be seen as a mental institution (an institution within the mind that is) which enables an individual to live after the moral rules of the society that the individual lives in. It has a strong influence on our 2nd class desires
A strong influence on our 2nd class desires, by means of conscience, is religion. More specifically, religion mostly tries to create a 'bad conscience' to keep us under control, by damning things like anti-conception, masturbation, eating pork etc. In that sense, religion often suppresses what is natural or beneficial to us, most notably sexual desires: religion is good in that for some reason. The parts of conscience that religion correctly suppresses are things which people with a decent moral wouldn't do anyway.
As such, an atheist is not to be defined as an immoral person, but as a person who doesn't allow his conscience to be spoiled by religious dogma and therefore suppresses morally correct desires. An Atheist derives his moral from the society he lives in and in a certain extent from critical thinking. The extent to which he will form his moral by critical thinking depends on personality traits, like to which extent he is inclined to go against what society tells him to do or not do. If a person conducts his behaviour within the moral framework of his society (i.e. taking into account the wishes, desires and entitlements of others) this is enough morality. If a religious moral framework demands more than the societies' moral framework, the religion demands too much.
I mentioned earlier that there is a sort of moral circle, in which we as a people influence the societies' moral framework, and the societies' moral framework influences us, including the framework passed by religion. By critical thinking, meaning critical thinking about religious moral, we can put question-marks to such morality which is in conflict to our well-being as a human species. In such a way we can evolve as a society to a better framework of moral. If people behave differently from 'normal' behaviour, and this behaviour is approved, others will start mimicking this behaviour and changes can be made, while society will reject or punish individual behaviour deemed as inappropriate. This is a slow but continuous process, a 'moral evolution', which moved great parts of the civilised world out of a moral from the middle ages. Some parts of the world, unfortunately, are stuck in the middle ages, because they don't think critically about the moral their religion gives them and instead just 'follow the leader' like a flock of sheep.
Not all religious moral is bad: the ideas to not steal, kill or fornicate your neighbours wife are good ideas, which should be embraced by any society. And this is exactly the point: they would be embraced by most societies anyway, with or without religion, because they can harm society as a whole. It has severe consequences to the economy and the people if everyone would kill and steal without inhibition. And because nobody wants to find their neighbour in bed with their wife, we as a society reject adultery. So the people in a society collectively agree that this is reject-able conduct, and no deity is needed. These morals were already in place before Christianity, Islam or other religions came into this world: religions just adopted moral and rewrote it as 'God's will'. This goes to prove that we do not need religion to have a moral framework. Moreover, religion can hold back the development of a moral framework like it did with science for many centuries. Thus, we need to abolish religion as a means to reach a moral framework. Our moral framework should depend on our will (that is, the will of us as a collection of people in a society) and not on God's will.
Wednesday 7 January 2009
Who cares for a meaning of life?
Not many people would disagree that it is at least to some degree important to live life well. After all, we have only one life to live (or at least we must assume we have) and it's generally considered to be too short. It's also often considered to be harsh and unfair (life's a bitch until you marry one) so while we are here we ought to make the best of it.
But how?
This is a question which is not always easy to answer, but has a direct effect on how we (intend to) live our lives. Most people, at some point in their life, are thinking about or looking for a meaning of life. We look for it to feel more at home with ourselves, to give us the idea that our toiling through the years is not futile. Some find a meaning of life through religion, and adhering to it's dogma. Needless to say, I will not concern myself here with how to give a meaning to life by following religious dogma as the title of this blog is 'Life without God' after all.
In general terms, we could say that we can give meaning to life by caring for things. How much we care about these things creates a framework of standards and goals by which we design and manage our lives. Everything we care about, and the order in which we care about some things more than other things, gives an answer to the question of how to live. Such concerns fall in the domain of practical reasoning: deliberating about what to do and to evaluate what has been done in the past. These deliberations often concern themselves with morality, which will not be discussed at this point as it is not always the most important thing in our lives to be morally just. It is for us as a person more important what we want and desire, although in a perfect world only the desires that are morally right will move us into action.
Most desires are created subconsciously, by our biology (desire to eat) or the media (desire to buy something) or by other people around us (desire to have the same as another person). But we can also consciously form desires ourselves which concern these primary desires. These 2nd class desires govern to which extent the primary desires move us into action, and are based on moral and motives. We can want to want or not want to want. If we feel a primary desire is not morally right we may choose to not be moved into action by that desire. For example we can have a sexual desire but our motives for that desire may be unmoral, or in conflict with other desires (e.g. religion), so we can want to not be moved into action by this desire. Sometimes this 2nd class desire is too strong and make us fulfill the initial desire. I may find my wife in bed with a lover and feel a desire to throw them out of the window from the 10th floor for example. This desire is motivated by jealousy and morally wrong, as it would kill them. If I give in to this jealousy I may be considered to act against my will and also against moral standards of society.
The opposite can also happen, e.g. we can have a desire to pray and actually want this desire to move us into action because we feel that fulfilling this desire is morally right. If somebody fulfils a desire that he wants to fulfil, he comes as close to freedom as he possibly can. To fulfill the desires we want to fulfil is also an important aspect in living our lives well.
Another important aspect, as mentioned previously, is to care about things. desire and caring about are connected, as caring about is in a way a complex mode of desire. but simply desiring something doesn't mean we care about it. Some desires are not important to us and we give up on a desire because it could be unworthy or harmful. Sometimes we do something not because we care about it, but because we care even less about other things. If we do something to kill time, we may not in the least care about it, but just do it to kill the time with it.
What we care about often has an intrinsic value. writing a book for example, or owning a sports-car, or courageous acts of warfare to serve our country. Such things may be regarded and desired for it's intrinsic value: as a final end not as a means to something else. but such objects of intrinsic value may fail to attract us, we may not care about it, cause it doesn't have enough intrinsic value to us personally to make us care about it. For example we may find the life of a monk or a nun intrinsically valuable but still wouldn't aspire such a lifestyle ourselves.
To care about something we need not only to desire it, we need to desire it over a longer time. And even that is not enough: we must be fully committed to the desire, and the desire shouldn't be in conflict with our will. In fact, we must be so committed to it, that should the desire weaken, we liven it up ourselves. we must want to sustain the desire, identify with it and accept it as addressing what we want.
Imagine we don't care about anything. Our lives would be empty and meaningless. Like I mentioned before, caring about things gives a meaning to our lives, and as a consequence it gives our live added quality. And to us as a person it often gives character, as what we care for often characterizes who we are.
Moreover, the fact that we care about some things and not about others gives us a certain structure and individuality.
This leads us to the next larger-than-life question: what justifies caring about one thing more than others? And therefore living in one way and not the other? This leads us into a circle. To evaluate a way of living, we must know by which criteria to evaluate the importance of things in our life. We need to know what counts in favor of living one way rather than the other, and what counts against. we must know how certain actions lead us towards our goals that we set ourselves. The set of actions that we take towards our goal constitutes how we live.
But to establish the way to live which leads most effectively towards the goal, we must first establish the goal. Simply said: if we manage and design our lives daily life, we should do so with a certain goal in mind. But the very goal we try to achieve may force us to manage our life in a different way. This symbolises the constant changing of our lifestyle throughout our life. We cannot afford to be stuck in this circle though, as we will never reach our goals. We must at some point find a balance in life that keeps us heading straight towards our goals instead of toiling in a circle.
So for the answering of the question of how we should live we must first answer what we already do care about. As everyone cares about something or the other in our lives, everyone has a starting point in the deliberation of how one should live. But just knowing the current state of our preferences and importance of the things that make up our lives is not enough. We also need a clarity of vision and a robust confidence to go after our goals in order to achieve them.
In designing and running our lives, we must thus ask ourselves:
- what we want
- what we want more than other things
- what we consider to be intrinsically valuable
- what we pursue as a final end
- what we care about
This concept is the same for believers and non-believers alike, except that the believers have a framework ready-built by their religion about what they should care about, which the non-believers lack. That is not to say the non-believers lack any framework, they just lack the religious framework. Which is not necessarily a bad thing as long as they have a replacing framework. The religious framework answers the question "how to live like a good christian" (or Muslim or Jew or whatever) but for Atheists there is not such a given framework. If there would be, Atheism might be considered a religion itself, but the term life-style would be more appropriate. Atheists might find themselves re-inventing the wheel over and over again, but if the existing wheel doesn't fit on the axle, it's the only way to go.
But how?
This is a question which is not always easy to answer, but has a direct effect on how we (intend to) live our lives. Most people, at some point in their life, are thinking about or looking for a meaning of life. We look for it to feel more at home with ourselves, to give us the idea that our toiling through the years is not futile. Some find a meaning of life through religion, and adhering to it's dogma. Needless to say, I will not concern myself here with how to give a meaning to life by following religious dogma as the title of this blog is 'Life without God' after all.
In general terms, we could say that we can give meaning to life by caring for things. How much we care about these things creates a framework of standards and goals by which we design and manage our lives. Everything we care about, and the order in which we care about some things more than other things, gives an answer to the question of how to live. Such concerns fall in the domain of practical reasoning: deliberating about what to do and to evaluate what has been done in the past. These deliberations often concern themselves with morality, which will not be discussed at this point as it is not always the most important thing in our lives to be morally just. It is for us as a person more important what we want and desire, although in a perfect world only the desires that are morally right will move us into action.
Most desires are created subconsciously, by our biology (desire to eat) or the media (desire to buy something) or by other people around us (desire to have the same as another person). But we can also consciously form desires ourselves which concern these primary desires. These 2nd class desires govern to which extent the primary desires move us into action, and are based on moral and motives. We can want to want or not want to want. If we feel a primary desire is not morally right we may choose to not be moved into action by that desire. For example we can have a sexual desire but our motives for that desire may be unmoral, or in conflict with other desires (e.g. religion), so we can want to not be moved into action by this desire. Sometimes this 2nd class desire is too strong and make us fulfill the initial desire. I may find my wife in bed with a lover and feel a desire to throw them out of the window from the 10th floor for example. This desire is motivated by jealousy and morally wrong, as it would kill them. If I give in to this jealousy I may be considered to act against my will and also against moral standards of society.
The opposite can also happen, e.g. we can have a desire to pray and actually want this desire to move us into action because we feel that fulfilling this desire is morally right. If somebody fulfils a desire that he wants to fulfil, he comes as close to freedom as he possibly can. To fulfill the desires we want to fulfil is also an important aspect in living our lives well.
Another important aspect, as mentioned previously, is to care about things. desire and caring about are connected, as caring about is in a way a complex mode of desire. but simply desiring something doesn't mean we care about it. Some desires are not important to us and we give up on a desire because it could be unworthy or harmful. Sometimes we do something not because we care about it, but because we care even less about other things. If we do something to kill time, we may not in the least care about it, but just do it to kill the time with it.
What we care about often has an intrinsic value. writing a book for example, or owning a sports-car, or courageous acts of warfare to serve our country. Such things may be regarded and desired for it's intrinsic value: as a final end not as a means to something else. but such objects of intrinsic value may fail to attract us, we may not care about it, cause it doesn't have enough intrinsic value to us personally to make us care about it. For example we may find the life of a monk or a nun intrinsically valuable but still wouldn't aspire such a lifestyle ourselves.
To care about something we need not only to desire it, we need to desire it over a longer time. And even that is not enough: we must be fully committed to the desire, and the desire shouldn't be in conflict with our will. In fact, we must be so committed to it, that should the desire weaken, we liven it up ourselves. we must want to sustain the desire, identify with it and accept it as addressing what we want.
Imagine we don't care about anything. Our lives would be empty and meaningless. Like I mentioned before, caring about things gives a meaning to our lives, and as a consequence it gives our live added quality. And to us as a person it often gives character, as what we care for often characterizes who we are.
Moreover, the fact that we care about some things and not about others gives us a certain structure and individuality.
This leads us to the next larger-than-life question: what justifies caring about one thing more than others? And therefore living in one way and not the other? This leads us into a circle. To evaluate a way of living, we must know by which criteria to evaluate the importance of things in our life. We need to know what counts in favor of living one way rather than the other, and what counts against. we must know how certain actions lead us towards our goals that we set ourselves. The set of actions that we take towards our goal constitutes how we live.
But to establish the way to live which leads most effectively towards the goal, we must first establish the goal. Simply said: if we manage and design our lives daily life, we should do so with a certain goal in mind. But the very goal we try to achieve may force us to manage our life in a different way. This symbolises the constant changing of our lifestyle throughout our life. We cannot afford to be stuck in this circle though, as we will never reach our goals. We must at some point find a balance in life that keeps us heading straight towards our goals instead of toiling in a circle.
So for the answering of the question of how we should live we must first answer what we already do care about. As everyone cares about something or the other in our lives, everyone has a starting point in the deliberation of how one should live. But just knowing the current state of our preferences and importance of the things that make up our lives is not enough. We also need a clarity of vision and a robust confidence to go after our goals in order to achieve them.
In designing and running our lives, we must thus ask ourselves:
- what we want
- what we want more than other things
- what we consider to be intrinsically valuable
- what we pursue as a final end
- what we care about
This concept is the same for believers and non-believers alike, except that the believers have a framework ready-built by their religion about what they should care about, which the non-believers lack. That is not to say the non-believers lack any framework, they just lack the religious framework. Which is not necessarily a bad thing as long as they have a replacing framework. The religious framework answers the question "how to live like a good christian" (or Muslim or Jew or whatever) but for Atheists there is not such a given framework. If there would be, Atheism might be considered a religion itself, but the term life-style would be more appropriate. Atheists might find themselves re-inventing the wheel over and over again, but if the existing wheel doesn't fit on the axle, it's the only way to go.
Sunday 4 January 2009
On Importance
In the continuous attempt to run our lives in an efficient and satisfactory way, we make an ongoing evaluation of what is important in our lives and what is not, and thus the order of importance in which we arrange the various 'concepts' that form our lives greatly determines how our lives are shaped.
Something is important by measure of the difference it makes: if a certain thing makes no difference in our life (e.g. what color of socks I wear today) or just a small difference (e.g. what we eat tonight) then we consider it not to be important. For something to be important it must make a consequential difference, meaning that this important thing changes another aspect of our life, for example submission to a religious system. To determine what is important we must assess what makes a difference big enough to care for, ie if this importance is beneficial to us. We must also have criteria to make this assessment: why is one thing more important to us than another thing? Something is important because we care for it, and what we care for is subject to an ongoing evaluation. During a persons lifetime the criteria naturally change. This continuous process has a large influence on how we run our lives.
For almost everyone there will be sooner or later a thought about the design of our lives which concerns the importance of our (dis-)belief in the existence of one or more god-like creatures, and consequently the importance of following the rules that his ground-personnel imposes upon us. Those who believe in the God they have been conditioned to believe in, by family and society etc, tend to attribute great importance not only to this belief but also to the rules that come with it. For these people, their belief in God and submission to the religious system is often one of the most important, if not the most important, thing in life. There are of course numerous believers who don't attribute a lot of importance to their belief, and whose belief hardly has any influence or importance in their daily life. What you see in society today is an increasing amount of people who have faith, but kind of 'pick-and-mix' from the principles handed down to them by religion, varying from alcohol-drinking Muslims to believers who don't see the inside of a church in most years of their lives.
But this goes to show that the more important something is to us, the more difference it will make in life, and by virtue of the difference it makes, becomes more important. The reverse order of this process is also often seen, for example when people are loosing their faith and/or religion.
Those who lost their belief or never had it, generally don't attribute much importance to it. There are only few people, for example Christopher Hitchens or professor Dawkins, who seem to attribute a high importance to their Atheism. One reason is of course that there there are many more people who believe in some kind of God than there are atheists, and the other is that not believing in some thing or some concept usually also implies not to attribute much importance to it. Not believing in a God means that the possible existence of the same makes no difference in managing and designing our lives. The atheist doesn't add the burden of a religion to his life and thus not only lives without the burden of religious rules altogether, he is also free from the dilemma of how much importance to attribute to religion and to what degree he should follow it's rules: The Atheist only has to follow his conscience and the rules (written and unwritten) of his society.
A popular prejudice among believers about Atheists is that by not attributing importance to the value of a religion, the Atheists don't attribute importance to anything at all. This implies that Atheists wouldn't care at all, which is simply not true. Moreover, a lot of values and ideas of religious people are shared by Atheists, who in their turn share these values for their intrinsic value rather than for religious reason. An Atheist who does a charitable deed because he wants to contribute to society surely has higher standards than a religious person who does the same charitable deed in order to go to heaven after death? This is of course a polarising example, but the bottom line is that an atheist who does not rely on the traditional religious framework has more thinking to do in order to run his life in an efficient and satisfactory way.
To lead a life without attributing importance to anything more than for example what food comes to the table or who wins the football cup can be done easily with or without a religious framework. But if one wants to lead a life attributing importance to more than just the common banalities, one has a harder time doing this as an Atheist than as a religious person.
Something is important by measure of the difference it makes: if a certain thing makes no difference in our life (e.g. what color of socks I wear today) or just a small difference (e.g. what we eat tonight) then we consider it not to be important. For something to be important it must make a consequential difference, meaning that this important thing changes another aspect of our life, for example submission to a religious system. To determine what is important we must assess what makes a difference big enough to care for, ie if this importance is beneficial to us. We must also have criteria to make this assessment: why is one thing more important to us than another thing? Something is important because we care for it, and what we care for is subject to an ongoing evaluation. During a persons lifetime the criteria naturally change. This continuous process has a large influence on how we run our lives.
For almost everyone there will be sooner or later a thought about the design of our lives which concerns the importance of our (dis-)belief in the existence of one or more god-like creatures, and consequently the importance of following the rules that his ground-personnel imposes upon us. Those who believe in the God they have been conditioned to believe in, by family and society etc, tend to attribute great importance not only to this belief but also to the rules that come with it. For these people, their belief in God and submission to the religious system is often one of the most important, if not the most important, thing in life. There are of course numerous believers who don't attribute a lot of importance to their belief, and whose belief hardly has any influence or importance in their daily life. What you see in society today is an increasing amount of people who have faith, but kind of 'pick-and-mix' from the principles handed down to them by religion, varying from alcohol-drinking Muslims to believers who don't see the inside of a church in most years of their lives.
But this goes to show that the more important something is to us, the more difference it will make in life, and by virtue of the difference it makes, becomes more important. The reverse order of this process is also often seen, for example when people are loosing their faith and/or religion.
Those who lost their belief or never had it, generally don't attribute much importance to it. There are only few people, for example Christopher Hitchens or professor Dawkins, who seem to attribute a high importance to their Atheism. One reason is of course that there there are many more people who believe in some kind of God than there are atheists, and the other is that not believing in some thing or some concept usually also implies not to attribute much importance to it. Not believing in a God means that the possible existence of the same makes no difference in managing and designing our lives. The atheist doesn't add the burden of a religion to his life and thus not only lives without the burden of religious rules altogether, he is also free from the dilemma of how much importance to attribute to religion and to what degree he should follow it's rules: The Atheist only has to follow his conscience and the rules (written and unwritten) of his society.
A popular prejudice among believers about Atheists is that by not attributing importance to the value of a religion, the Atheists don't attribute importance to anything at all. This implies that Atheists wouldn't care at all, which is simply not true. Moreover, a lot of values and ideas of religious people are shared by Atheists, who in their turn share these values for their intrinsic value rather than for religious reason. An Atheist who does a charitable deed because he wants to contribute to society surely has higher standards than a religious person who does the same charitable deed in order to go to heaven after death? This is of course a polarising example, but the bottom line is that an atheist who does not rely on the traditional religious framework has more thinking to do in order to run his life in an efficient and satisfactory way.
To lead a life without attributing importance to anything more than for example what food comes to the table or who wins the football cup can be done easily with or without a religious framework. But if one wants to lead a life attributing importance to more than just the common banalities, one has a harder time doing this as an Atheist than as a religious person.
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