Colligion's Answer to Religious Morality
Does it Hurt?—then, stop doing it!

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

All kinds of religions claim a god exists, and the most feisty of them also claim the lack of that to be a weakness in atheistic secularity.

Colligion relies on factual information for its colligation process to work, and secular people are only too aware that human beings spread misinformation with as much ease and glee as they do the truth; maybe, because it is fun, even moreso. Religions may have a god, we say, but they deny their followers any rights to testing of their information to ascertain that it is, indeed, factual. They have gods, we have testing, we can show when we are correct, they have faith in the power of faith but say we have to experience it for ourselves.

Not necessarily so, we say: Show us an example of how you have faith, and let us test it.

The nature of faith is one of the big arguments between colligion and religion. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," their scriptures teach the Xians, who use the word to taunt those who rely on science by claiming we exhibit faith in scientism (when they are not claiming we have nothing to rely on). What is it they worry so much about us? Is it that we suffer the same impulses as they, and answer to the same driving forces? What do they use as evidence that anybody beyond each of their individual selves suffer those defects?

Faith? About those particular claims they make about humanity, in what do they stake their faith? Things hoped for but not seen? That describes wishful thinking, about something that has never shown up, that maybe they have heard about and read about but never found. The faith is, itself, the substance. That is not something to be found in reality, but something as seeds planted in their minds that they, never through all of their generations, have ever observed to grow except to preoccupy the minds of others if they can get them, too, to hope for it. As the evidence of things not seen, faith is an end in and of itself, a self-defeating end that, by its own religious description, disappears when or if the hoped for item becomes attained.

If the objective of faith becomes real, faith disappears as something no longer required.

If the god of a particular faith could be real, faith is unneeded, for reality would provide the evidence. The proclamation of faith all religious people issue contains in itself the acknowledgment that everything the religion requires faith in must not be real. The god of it has to be not real. The goal of it has to be not real. The history of it has to be not real. The reasons for it have to be not real. Only then can faith be an element of it.

Colligion requires that only when something is clearly present and accountable can it be considered as a matter of fact. Religion requires that only if it is documented by a trusted religious authority is it a fact. The two processes are not compatible.

Compare how that applies to the subject of morality as proclaimed by a major religion versus as proclaimed by colligion.

Let us now visit an expanded version of responses to those claims, and demonstrate how colligion plays a role in secular thinking. From that, we can safely infer that role plays a part in the thousands of differences in the nature of religious versus colligious claims. By realizing that, perhaps it will become plain how we had to invent our own terminology to deal with this kind of matter because the religious words we had we too subject to wrong perceptions. When secular minds can develop and share their own vocabulary and keep it out of harm's way by establishing consequential definitions that highlight a rational natural perception and allow no room for the irrational, much of the argument over words' meanings will fade into silence.

1: "Morality comes from God's Laws." As it is defined in your dictionary, morality is a secular concern that resulted from wise people's observations about cause and effect within human interactions. It has been wrongly twisted from that purpose and adapted as a control mechanism by some aggressive cults that used it to far outgrow their original boundaries by instilling fear and horror into people about innocent occurrences and imaginary villains.

A colligious version of high morality as it is defined in a secular dictionary exists to promote nurturant interactions between people and their groups. Nurturance works where handouts will not, and promotes good where tight controls act to actually prevent it, as facts gathered from all over the world will show you.

2: "The Bible condemns homosexuality as evil." This goes back to what we said earlier about faith. You have faith in your Bible because it cannot possible be true, and so you have to believe in it, and in what your leaders make of it, rather than going by what can be shown to be reality in any situation.

If homosexuality is even questionably a natural condition shared by many animals, then it is wrong to condemn it until you can definitely prove otherwise. If you believe in a God who created everything including ourselves, which means all of nature, and said it was good, then you have to believe homosexuality is in some way good that maybe (I'll just go along with your here) you don't understand, it being one of God's mysteries. If some other part of your scriptures condemn homosexuality, then that is just another example of disparities and conflicts within its text.

3: "The Bible condemns atheism as evil. Atheists who refuse to believe will all go to Hell." Your Bible does not mention atheism per se, but does mention unbelievers and hypocrites. Now, if you are one of those who says the Bible means what it says, but you avoid certain passages in it, and certain doctrines as it presents them, then you are as much an unbeliever as any atheist. That Bible you keep quoting says nothing about its words being metaphors for something other than what it expressed, nor does it tell you its stories are simply examples to make a point and you can pick and choose from among them to decide how you want to live. It does say that makes you a hypocrite.

What I suggest you to do is to colligate all the literary facts you can glean from that book, and set them all down pro and con for all the things you hear being claimed about it. After that you will know good and well why the early church forbade its members to read it, and why so many intelligent people who do end up as apostates.

4: "The Bible says that things of this world are temporary will keep me from going to Heaven when I die."

Some cults, and many sects within those cults, apparently regard the Xian Bible, or some version of it, as a reliable source of information.

It does not pass muster, however. Most of its contents cannot be verified as actual historical events. Some of it contradicts some other parts of it, and require specific apologia to have been created in its defense. Much of that apologia does not pass muster.

Some of it requires belief in magic and Hallowe'en creatures that cannot be verified to have ever existed. Some of it describes people and events that it claims to have occurred in historical times that left absolutely no evidence of any kind, even though they would have been notable and talked about among the people of the era, at least in that region of the world.

Spend the next five minutes colligating the biblical facts you can find outside your scriptures. Sure, some things may be real, such as place names, but so little information exists about the events said to have occurred there, that more than five minutes should not be needed.

5: "The supernatural exists outside of nature and cannot be subjected to the measurements of man." If the supernatural exists outside of nature, it exists nowhere, for that is all that gets left. It then becomes a category of science fiction or fantasy and is no longer an aspect of reality the way it used to be before apologia came along.

For something to exist outside of nature, makes in unnatural. The unnatural has been defined by some past church leaders as a form of perversity. While they cannot have their cake and also eat it, their apologia only makes Xianity less credible in the long run.

But, then, that's what people telling lies generally will accomplish.

6: "Our leaders have written thousands of pages about how it takes more faith to be an atheist than to believe in God." I wonder why they're so worried. That seems to be a lot of effort to deal with a subject that is actually outside of your religion.

Do you suppose it could be so, unless they steer you clear of us, we'll teach you useful ways to understand reality, and right versus wrong, that will show them up? By learning how to recognize actually factual information and using that knowledge to colligate an entirely better system of knowledge such as is found in science, you might show that to be true.

A true and testable understanding of reality than the religions give you will hand you a leg up on your ability to make your way through life, and be a better and more dependable person as a result. Facts are available for you to colligate in your own way that show atheistic people to be the lowest per capita of any group to occupy prison cells and mental wards in every nation that has been polled. Using democracy as a criterion, highly secular nations showed far lower rates of crime and illness in comparison to highly religious nations such as the United States. You can find the latest sources for this information on my website.

7: "Atheism is obviously a religion. Colligion is just a feeble attempt to deny that." Colligion is a name offered for the compiled results of factual colligation, wherein a system of practices results from that ongoing process. It differs from religion in almost every aspect, as does atheism.

Pick a subject of interest, any one (or more) of your choice, and colligate whatever information you can find about it. Under your headings, mark whether religious (scriptural or doctrinal) sources originated a piece of information, or whether it agrees with a general perception of reality (is it testable). You will surely discover that, wherever religion and science agree on a subject, the elements of it about which they agree will be mainly secular in their origins.

Beware, though, that doing such tests as that will tend to initiate doubt about the veracity of your religious credos, and will make you vastly more aware of why atheism is an increasing worldview throughout the democratic world. Colligion deserves your honest review before you condemn it. Honesty needs for you to have experienced it and fully understand it before you talk about it. Your apostasy awaits you, if you are honest enough to deserve it.

8: "There has to be an absolute moral truth to keep us from evil thoughts and deeds, and so from their consequences." Why not try colligating all the factual information you can gather about that, mark as religious that which is religious, and colligious that which is verifiable in reality? You will find one source of laws that directly affects our daily lives, and that those laws and rules are universal throughout nature so far as we can determine, and at least so far as they are relevant to us.

You will find, as your colligation of verifiably factual materials increases, that whatever in religion that shows itself as truth originated in this body of facts you have gathered together for the purpose of determining a useful and testable hypothesis. You will also find that, over the millenniums of human existence, that mankind has already done this work that you have duplicated, that much of it has gotten screwed up and twisted into perverted forms to serve the interests of vested interests of any sort you can think up.

So, yes, there is a source of moral truth; but, yes, the interest of religion has been to disavow it for the most part.

9: "Sin is any act in violation of God's Law, including the thoughts in one's head." Again, something that cannot demonstrate its own existence cannot impose meaningful laws. To call sin that and have it mean anything, you must first demonstrate that your particular god, out of all the particular gods mankind has worshipped since the beginning of acknowledged time, exists in some form capable to impose its will upon us. For so long as that stays true, the onus is yours to demonstrate it otherwise. Yours, or the god's.

If you should ever bother to colligate all the information available about your particular god in any honest fashion, and separate the religious from the secular, you will not have much of a colligious case. You will have religious statements to work with, and anecdotal statements absent of verifiability, but no verifiable facts to be found in nature.

What we started out with bears repeating at this point: All that supports your belief in any of the gods is faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. That you proclaim faith demonstrates that you do not want a god– your God –to actually exist. You have too much to lose should you somehow manage to demonstrate that as true. You would lose the power to influence authority: It would be the authority. You would lose your reasons for proselytizing: Everybody would then know the nature of God and whether your pronouncements were true. Your secrets would no longer be yours alone, your sins yours to hide from the world so that no one could know about them: Your God would obviously know, and it would know also all about your lying, cheating, and those dirty secret dreams that make you, a human being, a hypocrite because you deny them while accusing and persecuting others in your acts of self-aggrandizement.

Those who openly proclaim faith are no more believers and no less doubters than the gnarliest of atheists. They are hopers at best, it is written in the scriptures. Such a dishonest approach to living goes to their reasons for being over-representative in the prison populations.

10: "Hedonism is an immoral philosophy that flouts God's Law and sends people to an early grave after long bouts of illness." First, learn about hedonism before you declare it immoral.

Hedonism may be immoral by religious standards, but that also is true of all life's processes. Hedonism can also be understood to be a way of testing all kinds of possible social interactions and taking note of the results. In other words, as a philosophy, it represents the best approaches of science: We experiment, we learn, we develop a hypothesis and experiment some more. All that is absent, for the most part, is the taking of notes and the tabulating of data.

In the nurturant society that could develop under a very carefully developed hedonistic rule, mankind stands a chance to advance beyond our wildest imaginings. Hedonism described as a philosophy of abandonment stands no chance of that, and most probably develops out of small groups of individuals who've found ways to take advantage of some others. We have seen that all throughout history, even when such hedonism was promoted by religious groups.

Your condemnation of hedonism results not from factual materials, but from the offense you feel regarding your imaginings about sexual activities and body shame about yourself that you project onto others. You are imposing your personal problems onto the rest of the world in a successful move against the religious freedom the United States espouses while hiding its own true absence of it. Your condemnation is emotional, not studied and not honest.

An honest assessment of nurturant hedonism cannot be performed in the social atmosphere that prevails in most parts of today's world, but inferences can result from a colligation of whatever facts we can gather. Nurturant hedonism will arise as a philosophy from that colligation. Let me describe what is meant by nurturant hedonism, and then compile a short list of facts that show how badly we need to find a way to test the inferences that result.

Nurturant hedonism derives from a philosophy that states that true good arises from the experiences of pleasure as opposed to pain. Actions describable as 'good' get rewarded by the experience of pleasure; actions describable as 'bad' receive the aversive reward through the experience of pain. Nature provides each of us with the senses that guide us in the development of wisdom. In modern and historical times, religion has opposed nature by finding ways to discount the messages we get from our senses. What gets misconstrued as hedonism is a search for ways to experience unearned pleasure as an end in itself. That, as your religious statement in condemnation of hedonism declared, earns the practitioners the aversive rewards that result.

Religion also earns its practitioners its own kind of aversive (punishing) rewards. If we are to gain wisdom from this, perhaps we should compile a list of observable religious rewards and then colligate them into a hypothesis that we could test at some future time when we could trust the results.

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality, soon to be released