Circa the mid to late 1980s, I would’ve been just around or just over the age of twenty, and by that time I’d already taken up the position of being a secular man; but was I really? Around these same years the world was introduced to ‘the new atheism’ via the work of the Four Horsemen: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett all of whom put forward the idea that a person can be one of the good people without needing the double edged promises of God.
A lot of things have changed in the last twenty-five or so years, both publically and for me personally; the most obvious public change being that the Internet went public. The Public Internet was heralded as the provider of freedom, a platform to advance science, and a means by which the world will come together; these lauded promises have of course been perverted. In recalling that the Internet is based on work funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is a branch of the United States Department of Defense; I’m left to wonder how anyone ever thought that the general public was ready for, or would even be capable of unfettered access to everyone else without conflicts arising or the anticipation of the need of some to control others.
In my youth I attended the churches of both sides of my familial tree, this didn’t work well for me at a very young age as I just wanted to climb trees, jump in puddles, and do other fun stuff. As I got older, still nowhere near puberty, the God/Gaia archetype was pretty simple: father set the rules and handed out the punishments, while mother provided the love, empathy and bounty. As I continued to age, the God/Gaia archetype was still well entrenched seeing as I was starting to realize that a relationship had been formed resulting in the creation of and the benefit for my older brother and I. Admittedly, I am probably romanticizing my childhood experiences seeing as I am the product of my parents actions, literally.
Going further back, way before my own day of birth, there was this thing we now call the Enlightenment. The rise of the Enlightenment came about 130 years after the invention of the Gutenberg press and it lasted for about 150 years. A number of hypotheses have been put forth as to the causal rise of the Enlightenment including though not limited to: the Gutenberg press, crop abundance due to the rise in regional/global temperature, and of course Christianity is also mentioned seeing as it was the regional religion of that time.
Personally, of the three potential reasons highlighted above for the Enlightenment, I can not and will not put the entire load onto just one. Typically nothing happens for just one single reason or act, seeing as every moment in history has been preceded by some other moment of history, potentially including but not limited to that moment of Creation or the Big Bang.
Author’s Note: The Big Bang v. Creationism narratives are for me effectively a distinction without a difference because my parents taught me how NOT to be a thief, a murderer, a rapist, or a child molester; all the while not relying on God as the crutch in their teaching of good moral and civic values; my parents passed on that some things are just right and some things are just wrong, and yes it is that simple.
As I’m now going for the meat on the bone I’m going head off some of my critics, be they friend or foe, in admitting that I’m not an expert on the Bible, nor have I read the majority of the Bible. What I have done, as a secularist, is be to witness the impact and outcome of a lot fewer people reading the Bible.
Admittedly, the Christians got it spot on with their claim that everyone is born flawed, though in a society under God those flaws are limited to one’s character rather than one’s immutable physical characteristics. Medical and pharmaceutical advances now allow people to wear a gender based skin suite with seemingly little to no regard towards sorting out why such solutions are being sought.
Another thing that the Christians got right for many years was the idea of the family, where the family includes a father and mother joined in marriage, and a child or more. This probably sounds pretty ripe coming from a divorced and childless man, or does it? Up to and beyond the day of my wedding, my plan was to mimic my father as best as I could, unfortunately for me, my mother being one in a million coupled with me not having the patience to search the globe for one of the approximately 5,300 women who would have been perfect for me mathematically; and once my plans started to unravel my only solace was then, and still is now, is that no innocents ran afoul of the mistake I had made.
Nudge theory, is the current name for a principle that has been around for years; that previous term being ‘baby stepping’. If you wish to test ‘baby stepping’ try this, start a conversation with a friend while the two of you are standing, then take a half step forward, a few moments and then shuffle forward again; most people will, out of politeness, shuffle backwards until they bump into something that used to be somewhat behind them until the distance becomes no longer somewhat.
‘If you're not growing, you're dying’, and while typically this saying is attributed to the world of business, in a way, many organized religions do come across as some sort of business. ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’ is another common saying, though this saying has a broader cross discipline reach. These two axioms were selected to provide an overly simplistic explanation on how our society got to where it is today.
The equation “f=L÷ (4×π×d²)” explains what we all know to be true, the further one gets from a light the dimmer things get, until it become so dark that reading ones moral compass becomes nigh if not impossible. And, so here we are with way too many people now wandering around with ‘A Heart of Darkness’; by the way, everyone is encouraged to read that book.
Most people want an easier life, which is made evident by the inventive tendencies found throughout human history. Most people want a secure life, which is made evident by the inventions built for both defense and offence found throughout human history. Most people want a social life, which is made evident by the numerous villages, towns, cities, and this list can continue all the way up to the county state. And, most religions have for many years supported this trinity of the basic wants for many people, what is being talked about here are layers the second and third layers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Recalling that nature abhors a vacuum, something had to come in and fulfill the wants, or needs if one agrees with Maslow, mentioned earlier; for me what stepped in to fill the void was Political Correctness, circa mid 1980s, or as it is commonly abbreviated - PC. Being PC meant that one’s social behaviour had a new rule-book, this new rule-book came with two big problems in my opinion: the first problem being that the rules lacked maturity and the second problem being that the rules were never properly codified. It seems that the Torah, after being an oral tradition for generations was first written down approximately 2,500 years ago or so Google has informed me.
Being PC stumbled along for about a decade or perhaps a little longer and eventually it need to be re-branded, and so Social Justice came into being, which is what happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Social Justice was much like what Political Correctness was though with harsher words being deployed; the tone of the movement at this point took a turn for the worse in my mind. When the words correctness and justice are considered, the first implies how to treat others, while the latter implies what can be done to help those set upon. To paraphrase Yoda of Star Wars fame, ‘the victim wars begun they have’; and as such, any swim towards the social top required a preemptive claim to be drowning at the social bottom based on an immutable characteristic with a total disregard of an individual person’s fiscal reality.
Even Social Justice had no survivability and so another re-branding was in order, and as such what started out as being Politically Correct morphed into Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity (DIE) in just a few decades; any reference to the individual has at this point been summarily ripped out of the social narrative for the sake of pushing a convenient ‘truth’.
In 1971 John Lennon claimed to want everyone to ‘Imagine’ a world without the Divine, and I’m left to wonder what Mr. Lennon would say today about the Utopian dream now partially realized, for which he advocated for in that song some 55 years ago. I feel that the result of Lennon’s dream can best be described by Conan the Barbarian in his answer to the question ‘What is best in life?’ and Conan replied: ‘To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women’, though I will speculate that Conan could at least answer the question ‘what is a woman?’
Of the two, John Lennon or the barbarian Conan, which one seems to have their thumb on pulse of how mankind works my wager, is on Conan. Inspired by the Divine, artists and architects of years past made spectacular works, by comparison the works of the creative class today mostly fail to make me go WOW in quite the same fashion. The banknotes of the USA still carry the phrase ‘In God We Trust’, which I’d like to point out, now seemingly holds more value than the worth of the bill itself; and that should tell you something. For those who may have questions, my personal moral frame work is: be kind when you can afford it, treat others as you’d want to be treated, and oppose evil when and with whatever you are capable.
2 comments:
=="Author’s Note: The Big Bang v. Creationism narratives are for me effectively a distinction without a difference because my parents taught me how NOT to be a thief, a murderer, a rapist, or a child molester; all the while not relying on God as the crutch in their teaching of good moral and civic values; my parents passed on that some things are just right and some things are just wrong, and yes it is that simple."==
I won't argue against that at the moment. And in any event, you've surely already encountered essentially the argument I'd put forth. Though, I do have an post or two about the matter on my blog.
=="... of the three potential reasons highlighted above for the Enlightenment, I can not and will not put the entire load onto just one. Typically nothing happens for just one single reason or act, seeing as every moment in history has been preceded by some other moment of history ..."==
Here is another potential reason, and one I think vitally important -- the self-aggrandizing “Age of Reason / Enlightenment Age” was the inevitable out-working of the tentative atheism of the Humanism of the Renaissance.
What I mean by “tentative atheism” is this –
Long before there was any evidentiary reason to favor the heliocentric model over the older geocentric model, the Humanists had gravitated to, and were teaching as known knowledge, the heliocentric model. The reasons they did this were religious/metaphysical, rather than being scientific/experimental/evidential.
Most modern people misunderstand what it meant under the geocentric model to say that “The Earth is at the center of the universe”. A better way to phrase that so that moderns correctly understand what is meant would be, “The Earth is at the *bottom* of the universe”. Under the geocentric model, “the center” was not the privileged location, but rather was the absolute worst place to be; it was the sump of the universe (and there was no sump-pump).
So, the Humanists latched onto the heliocentric model because that model elevated the Earth to a “celestial body” … and thereby made themselves into “celestial beings”.
From a Christian point of view, the Humanists told themselves, and fell for, the First Lie: “You shall be as gods.”
[continued]
==”Admittedly, the Christians got it spot on with their claim that everyone is born flawed, though in a society under God those flaws are limited to one’s character rather than one’s immutable physical characteristics.”==
Another important point is that since we are social beings, growing up in a Christianized society will tend to improve the characters of most persons. For example, the “high-trust society” which we enjoyed until recently, which made possible the safe world in which I grew up (I’m 66, so 5-10 years older than you), and which made possible most of the cultural artifacts we modern Westerners think of as universal goods, is a rarely in history. Such a society can exist only when the vast majority of its members want to have objectively good/moral characters.
==”… in a way, many organized religions do come across as some sort of business.”==
Given human nature, that is inescapable. Any organized society will, and must, contain some degree of bureaucracy in order to continue to function. But, also as an inevitability, bureaucracy tends to take on a life of its own, not infrequently becoming a parasite upon or even destroying the organized society it was meant to serve.
==”Most people want an easier life, which is made evident by the inventive tendencies found throughout human history.”==
The most common “inventive tendency” that people have turned to over the millennia to make their own lives easier has been to try to so arrange things as to live off the labor of other persons. In past ages, we called this ‘slavery’, these days we call it ‘socialism’.
==”In 1971 John Lennon claimed to want everyone to ‘Imagine’ a world without the Divine …”==
For that matter, he asked us to imagine a world in which none of the normal means by which human beings have over the ages sought to meet that “Hierarchy of Needs” any longer exist … and yet the needs get met. Somehow.
==”… though I will speculate that Conan could at least answer the question ‘what is a woman?’”==
Certainly! That made me laugh, because had I written that paragraph, I probably wouldn’t have thought of the quip.
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