Call something 'hedonist', 'hedonism' or 'hedonic' and even the staunchest atheists will jump. They will argue against you or support you, but never offer hedonism their support— at least, not in public. Have we fallen for religious propaganda to take this stance?

The title, hedonist, and hedonism, the philosophy, give rise to mental images of naked and dirty old men in shaggy robes groping after robust, healthy women they then leave dripping with foul disease. What's worse, some, whatever their cult or sect, can tell you where to go to find such people. "Don't go near there," they'll advise with wholehearted wholesome intentions. "You'll come back contaminated, just from breathing the air. You'll bring those diseases back with you. You'll give them to us!" Those places should thank such people for the free promotion.

Well, okay, I won't go there, and what disease I have is from living to a ripe age after a life of exposure to all kinds of industrial settings. What they have in mind is the oblivious hedonism preached about in the churches where people go to learn about such things, and more; alternatives to religion the preacher has warned them about. Any philosophy, any religious belief, can be misconstrued by anyone with the intentions to do so, whether it be the preachers hawking against it, or the practitioners looking for an excuse to justify their excesses.

As a philosophy, hedonism poses pleasure against pain. Since most of us live rather ragged and mundane lives, our picture of pleasure remains rather simplistic and involves material acquisitions or sex (while sometimes we are so dumb we can't tell the one from the other), the stuff the preachers tell us is bad for us while they beg for our dollars in their plates and our taxes in their coffers. If that becomes the focus of someone's life, I must agree with them. Of themselves, I must repeat myself to argue for their good side. Someone should thank them for the free advertising, and maybe slip a few bucks their way to inspire a greater effort. Natural wisdom needs better promotion.

Religion is for masochists: What most of us overlook is what the preachers don't talk about, that much of religion is derived from a hedonic philosophy. Pleasures are promised by the religions, such as "the religious experience" of ecstasy; Heaven and all those virgins; angels and other beatific images; the social setting in company of like-minded others; the edificial prominence of association with powerful groups; and more. Pain as punishment is threatened by the religions: Hell is most noteworthy; the absence of those virgins; punishment while on earth (supposed from God but meted out by peers); the pain of death and Purgatory; aimless wandering through a life of immorality and suffering; and more. Religions, in fact, promote hedonism in a very perverted form where pain represents pleasure, only if the pain, like the pleasure, is of an approved type.

I think that, compared to atheism, religion is so successful among human populations because it is fun. What does atheism have to offer in comparison to the thrilling ideas religion presents to the average person leading a life of drudgery? Even though aware that most of it is only BS, most religionists would defend their belief systems to the death rather than give up the pleasures they offer to face the empty pain they see as the only alternative. That's the picture of pleasure versus pain they practice, with denial as the added ingredient. To them, to admit to hedonism, would be an inconceivable acknowledgement that they practice, in their lives, what they see to be an endless chasing after happiness or pleasure as an end in itself (which is what makes it endless).

With no other objective in mind, striving to attain happiness in itself is to aim for a bobbling straw. Demanding happiness of life, while offering no material input upon which to build it, and depending upon artificial means to generate it, is a lazy person’s scheme. Happiness arrives in accordance with the material effort from which it gets elicited. Aim for what you love, dedicate yourself to that, learn the ropes so you can strengthen your accomplishments, and happiness will result. As will failure, which will strengthen and educate you.

How does that work? Much has been discovered by modern science about the workings of our nervous system and the variety of chemical substances, related to what amounts to a hedonic system of maintenance we somewhat share with all forms of animated life, dedicated to homeostasis.

We share homeostasis with all organisms, wherein they seek to maintain internal and external equilibrium. Some, who are called ‘wise’, have long taught that life and nature seeks balance, and that balance is the source of all morality. Those who would teach that, by their actions, acknowledge the truths behind the science, while science gives some support to their own teachings.

The tendency of humans to turn to drugs seems also to be a statement to that effect, that we will apply artificial means to gain what our lives prevent from us. The stress of modern living, of lives outside of nature, wherein Nature gets no acknowledgment except in the form of curses and demonization, drives people to seek relief from their unbalanced lives. Turning to religion or drugs further increases the unbalance and, so, the misery of living. The best one can gain is oblivion about it along with a perverse sense of what constitutes pleasure. It is that sense that makes religion seem like 'fun' to the religious, who will then turn against anyone who would offer to eliminate their misery.

The Moral Hedonism inherent to each of us would steer us away from the pain, were it not prevented from doing so by misinformation handed to most of us as ‘authoritative’ at such early stages in each of our lives. Building upon such information steers us toward pain, and away from the natural guidance a knowledgeable self awareness would develop. Such a natural guidance would alert us to the destructive nature of all kinds of artifices vying for our adoption, and to the constructive living they mainly prevent or cause people to avoid. It is right here that we can discover the true causes driving the decline of much of today's world, including its 'morality'.

If morality equates with wisdom, then by its own principles, hedonistic practice with painful results must be considered immoral. The preacher has us on his side in that. When he preaches a practice that results in pain, however, what he advocates by that must be equally immoral by the same token. Statistically speaking, with that as a standard, much of religious doctrine does sponsor immoral practices and attitudes. The best that can be said for religion is that it often provides a easy forum wherein good people can do the good deeds they would otherwise do without it.

The problem is with the impractical, unstudied approach generally taken to the forms of hedonism people favor, whether they are the resort-bound hedonists or the self-justified religious types. Pain, pleasure and apathy are the tools nature has provided to living, sentient beings for self-guidance. On their own, such tools serve to keep most beasts out of harm's way; where the tools gave wrong warnings, evolution has removed them from the environment, whereas they have otherwise thrived. Is it possible that, by teaching us to become attuned to wrong signals in a way that perverts nature's established codes, religion is, all by itself, sponsoring our social decline?— or, causing us to eventually wipe out all life from our planet.

So, among human beings, such tools require us to be educated as to their proper usage if we are to survive in the world, let alone advance. We must learn how to avoid the parasitical doctrines that will eventually lead us into annihilation. A proper understanding and practice of practical, moral hedonism will aim us into the right direction.

Moral Hedonism requires freedom from overweening control and a willingness to take certain kinds of risks. Organized religions seek to impose rigid controls from outmoded tribal systems and the promise of security to be found in an invisible sugar teat they have never produced. Both derive their messages from pleasure versus pain, but only Moral Hedonism promises to deliver in the here and now to those willing to gamble on their own abilities versus those willing to gamble on religions' empty promises. Knowing full well the only demonstrated aim of religion is for its own increase at the expense of those who support it, which is the greater gamble?

Those who choose self-reliance and self-development can adjust accordingly when they see things are going wrong. Those who choose religion gamble that they chose (or had handed to them) the right cult and sect, and must wait for the results until after they have died and it has become too late to change their ways. No approach can be taken, not even apathy, without the necessity to gamble, so anything to be said against gambling on this must be moot. Believers will proclaim their faith but still remain oblivious that their faith is not in unseen gods, but in the men who claim to deliver their messages. Who has approved these glib-tongued messengers but others just like them? Who has given them each a different message than all the others, but others just like them, delivered from tongue-passed stories and scrolls created by still others just like themselves, but from ancient times.

That will not stop the faithful from decreeing Moral Hedonism to be the bigger gamble, but they are wrong. No way exists to justify the more than empty claims made by their form of hedonism; their destructive form proposes an eternity in Hell, whereas the self-obviously true and constructive aims of Moral Hedonism rise from the proposition that sees our existence to be a rare occurrence in the midst of two eternities, and that we ought not to waste that one-time chance for adventure, delight, and human advancement.

Even in the best possible circumstances, we live miserable lives under the superstitious influence of religious hedonism because we are forced to give up our self recognition and live at far less than our full potential—even when we are not at all associated with any of those religions. Moral Hedonism, by proposing that morality (wisdom) arises from our drive to make the most of ourselves in this life in directions of our own choosing, promises to enable growth and human advancement beyond our wildest dreams. We are likely at least a millennium or two behind in that possibility right now, thanks to the regressive stances organized religion takes against human advancement. Even the field of medicine was held back several hundred years because of unwise, ongoing churchly interference. How much more immoral pain and suffering will they cause humanity to endure?

Moral Hedonism proposes the pleasure/pain scenario as four-components: The various forms of pain; the pain resultant from pleasure; pleasure here and now (pleasure for its own sake); pain now to earn future pleasure.

(1) The various forms of pain: Think of morality as a synonym for wisdom. Pain, unbalanced by the experience of pleasure, is costly to us and thwarts our natural drives toward stasis. To induce such pain in other human beings has to be something we should consider to be immoral (read: "unwise") because it lessens the quality of any environment we share with them (as can be seen in the actions such immoral people take to insulate themselves from those whose lives their actions have degraded). That idea serves as the basis of Moral hedonism and, we have seen, the unwise (read: "immoral") form of hedonism practiced by religion as we know it.

Pain, for humans, involves much more than the physical. We ruin ourselves by enduring psychological pain when some enlightened guidance could steer us onto a constructive course. While physical pain is obvious to us when we must endure it, psychological pain too often goes unrecognized or arrives accompanied by other pain-inducing agents such as shame or guilt.

Psychological pain is, in fact, our most prevalent form of pain. We pamper ourselves in the physical, but stifle our awareness of internal anguish out of shame, or for fear of admitting our gods think so little of us that we have to feel so bad, or that we have somehow sinned and deserve our misery, or that we must torment ourselves to keep others from finding out we have been mistaken about some major belief we have adopted. This builds the stress that everybody talks about to blame it on everything but the actual causes. We seek help only after all other avenues we search to escape it have been worn down to the bedrock.

Our medical practitioners seem unwise about dealing with this, and dope us with drugs rather than deal with the omnipresent root causes. Whether from fear of tipping the boat or from profiteering is not all that obvious, very few doctors seem able to accomplish more for their patients than to put them into an oblivious daze.

(2) The pain resultant from pleasure: Masochism (the tendency to wring pleasure from being abused) is not the only way to find pleasure in pain. Masochism is an end in itself, whereas the moral form is to endure the pain of struggling toward a highly desired achievement (even if that accomplishment happens to be a life of absolute inertia). While masochism ultimately proves destructive, proper instruction about the philosophy behind Moral Hedonism will inform the practitioner how constructive pain benefits the world as a whole for each person who succeeds its endurance, balancing it with the pleasure of small accomplishments along the way, always experiencing the pleasure of anticipation, and sometimes the actual reaching of an intended goal. Moral Hedonism recognizes how each human advancement resulted from constructive, goal-oriented pain. Those who experience goal-less pain, if made aware of that, can work to discover their own errors and set themselves onto a better path toward happiness and joy.

(3) Pleasure here and now: Pleasure as an end in itself, like masochism, is the pleasure against which all the world's preachers work to turn their audiences. As a reward for doing right, pleasure has no peer, but unearned pleasure past the point of satiation is wasteful gluttony. There is no sense of balance inherent to it. The fat, overstuffed bodies prominent in western civilizations warns us that pain will be the reward for that. Where is the wisdom (morality) in our religious teachings about that?

(4) Pain to earn future pleasure: The basis for human advancement and all of modern living has risen from this hedonistic concept. Plagiarized and perverted by organized religion, misunderstood by philosophers, the proper form for this is as proposed by the United States' founding fathers by their attempts to avoid the entanglement of government with religion, to uphold natural (hedonistic) freedoms as our highest rights, especially the right to the pursuit of happiness which organized religions now seek to slurry away.

Our eroded freedoms, as a result of generations since not taking the founding fathers at their word, now stand to cost the United States of America its prominence in the world. We proclaim our country to be the harbinger of liberty, but only because we stand too close to the problem to be observant, and only because too few of us are aware of what has been lost that generations past had used to their advantage. So, then we are left to wonder why other countries' citizens scoff at our claims and scoff at our religionistic form of crotch moralism, our way of turning every form of pleasure into a sexual desire, and at our obliviousness to our own condition and our loss of inspiration.

Our eyes have turned toward the past. Only there do we find America's glory. When our eyes return to the future, we want the prize we saw, but not the method of its arrival. We have nowhere to go but down, and the pain of that, to my Moral Hedonistic mind, is immoral to an extreme when it could easily be avoided.

Copyright ©2005 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.