Recent thoughts

There are many arguments to be made... against those great dangers that are harmful to my delicate sensibilities. I am in a full swing assault on religion as a whole and am immersing myself in current texts to fill my arsenal. I have recently come to realize my evolution from semi-agnostic to full on atheism. Allowing for the freedom of moderate and liberal believers of any faith keeps the door open for the fanatics to practice their corrupt and downright harmful dogmas. It's easy to fight against extremism, but what of the moderates? You only need look at the current state of our union to know that the majority remains unwaveringly religious. Stem cell research, abortion, abstinence, gay marriage... these are all hot topics of our time and topics that the religious right is currently dominating and causing much suffering along the way. What good comes of denying a same sex couple the right to marriage? What good comes from denying science the ability to help alleviate suffering from disease and injury by making stem cell research illegal?

Are you prepared to tell me how a young girl dying of a potentially curable ailment is less significant than a 3 day old blastocyte? Will the religious right help me explain to a 16 year old girl that her life as she knows it is over because abstinence that was taught in school didn't teach her how to use a condom? Will you help me explain to those people suffering from environmental ailments that clean air and clean water don't matter because your Lord and Savior should be showing up anytime in the next 50 years to take care of everything? Let me ask you this... what problems do religious faith actually solve? The only potential one is to give the believer a false sense of hope that somehow they will live in bliss when they leave this world.. Not exactly relevant to the suffering currently going on in the world, and downright selfish when it comes down to it. Besides truly needing something to believe in that is out of this world, people turn to religious faith to feel like their lives have meaning, mission, or purpose. It's the oldest answer to an even older question. "What happens when you die... I go to Heaven... then why don't you just kill yourself?... because God has a plan for me... and how do you know his plan isn't for you to kill yourself?" You need a purpose in your life... you want a mission to go on... here you go! Make this world, the one you're living in right now as morally happy a place as you can. Don't know what moral happiness is?... coming right up...

Happiness

I quote John Galt... "Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy - a joy without penalty of guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction..." This is my definition of a moral happiness. It means that whims are thrown out the door, this is not a motto of "do whatever makes you happy" for in that case you may be into murdering, plundering, raping, drugs etc. as your means to happiness. It it worth noting here that "human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone." The values a rational person upholds are reason, purpose, and self-esteem and the virtues used to maintain these are rationality, productiveness and pride. We must learn to value ourselves before we can value anyone or anything else, this is because the achievement of our own happiness is our highest moral purpose.

An obvious altruistic response to these statements goes something like... "but selfishness will only lead to evil and mindless whims!" In reality selfishness merely means 'concern with ones own interests'. The evil connotation attached to it has been produced by those whose moral agenda requires human sacrifice to achieve greater good. What this idea of happiness suggests is to not make sacrifices, and a sacrifice is merely giving up something greater for something lesser, not the way we probably typically think of sacrifice. This does not imply that there will be no giving, for instance I would not normally give up a 5 dollar bill for a 1 dollar bill as it does not make any sense to do so, however, if someone asked for 5 dollars to buy dinner for himself and I valued this man's health more than that 5 dollars than it would not be considered a sacrifice. A father willing to risk his life to save his daughter would not be a sacrifice if he valued her life more than his own. On the news they would surely say that he sacrificed himself, but that would merely be a slap in the face as he was really only fulfilling his own moral purpose.

So what does this mean when it comes to religion? It means that we look to ourselves for our own moral code, a rational code that cannot contradict anyone else who holds the same rational code, for rational men do not hold contradictory values. It means that we do not look to a 2000 year old story or the eye in the sky for direction on how to treat our fellow humans. This moral code allows for change and flux in the world such as science and environment and doesn't insist that people be stoned for things such as heresy or adultery or not being a virgin on your wedding night (all things the bible calls for). It means that we can once again value ourselves fully and that we are given a purpose "the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose." This indeed sounds nothing like a Christian view of "purpose" but it will be this life that will be lived to the fullest and in doing so we shall make others lives better as well. I end with Galt again, "You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his reward for accepting ours."