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How many times have you read this lamentation?—
[: ----- Original Message -----
[: The
propensity to be religious might be in our genes,
[: and it is
religion that decides morality.
[: However,
most all religions call upon supernatural beings
[: and powers
which are outside the realm of nature and
[: thus
outside that with which science deals, so science
[: cannot
decide anything about morality.
Notice the word 'lamentation' begins with 'lame'. I think
that's a copout. Science is all about data, testing, discovery… Religion is
all about control, mental and physical dominance, expediency. Morality is
about the acquisition of wisdom and the practices stemming from that. Where
do you find morality in religion? You don't!
It's about finding answers. The answers don't appear unannounced, they
come after the right questions get asked. How do you know when the right
questions get asked? You test, experiment… but, with what?
Well, to begin with, you have to figure out what you want to know, right?
So, what do we want to know about religion? Ahah!
We want to know if religions can more effectively establish moral
practices and rules than science. We don't know that, because no moral
practices and rules have ever been set by science, and science has never
really tackled this question. Science, very wisely, simply practices the
gathering of wisdom unannounced.
SO: We have the grounds upon which we can design an experiment.
First off, we have to know *exactly* what we mean by 'morality' and
'moral'. We look in our dictionaries and encyclopedias, and search online,
and everybody seems to agree it's about good versus bad personal behavior.
We then have to find out what 'good' and 'bad' mean, since secular people
don't have priests and preachers to explain that to us. We study the various
philosophies, discuss it with various people, look in our dictionaries,
encyclopedias, and search for the words online. After deleting all the stuff
about gods and other untestable premises, we have a good idea and set down
parameters for that. Morality, it turns out, is nothing different from what
is known in other circumstances as "wisdom". Morality is the practice of
wisdom.
So far, no testing, no experiments, we gathered data we hope to find
useful. We study that data and try to develop testable concepts out of it.
During all of that process, we start wondering about things.
Are we wondering about the right things?
Now, I am not all that well tutored, but I once ran a quality research
lab. The one commonality was that we had to find out what we wanted to know
before we could try to know it. Does that not apply here, too? After a while
we could make predictions, and then try to see how close we could get to
forecasting various results.
|
The
Power Behind Religion
Its secret source. Are
all religions evil? Are any evil? The nature of evil. How to tell the
evil from the good. Is science evil, or only a tool for human knowledge?
A tool of evil? Where does evil hide?
The Complete Universe of Memes
by Lloyd H. Whitling.
Check it out. Click here. |
So, now that we have done all of that, we can begin to
predict that morality is different from ethics. Ethics is about fair play,
business and professional practices, dealing with the public and maintaining
the public trust, stuff like that. Morality operates at the private,
personal, emotional level. Morality has a lot to do with how people feel
about things and respond to things. It is about personal wisdom in the
ongoing circumstances of our personal existences. It is not about choices
others foist upon us, too often to all our detriments. It is about the faces
we present to the world, when there may be no world that's looking.
Some of our responses are trained into us, others are common across the
board. By eliminating that which is culture-specific, we can posit that
which is left over must be natural responses, the way healthy,
unindoctrinated human beings will respond to various stimuli as a matter of
course.
At this point in the game, we find we have to develop new terminology.
'Good' and 'evil' and 'bad' get tossed out and replaced by words related to
pleasure and pain. Testing shows that certain stimuli elicit chemicals to
become present in subjects' bloodstreams that indicate not all of them are
responding with honest answers. Are they crazy? Not necessarily, maybe just
feeling guilty so they will answer "Pain" when their serums show the
opposite. Maybe they think little of their God, that it's too dumb to catch
them. Or, maybe they intend fooling the testers and enjoy thinking they'll
screw up the results. Bunches of possibilities. I observed people will give
a negative response to products for reasons that had nothing at all to do
with the tests being run. Forget that. Stop asking. Look at the numbers.
Prediction: Pleasure versus pain holds the key to good and evil.
Immediate pleasure versus long-range pleasure holds the key to wise human
morality. Now:
Don't argue. Just ask the right questions, go look for their answers, and
try to prove my prediction is wrong. Don't ask a goddam preacher. Don't
voice an opinion. Go do it in a lab, and then go test it in public places
and see if it works. If I have gone about this in a wrong way, then write
down the right way and do that. Just don't say it can't be done. That's a
copout.
_____
Lloyd
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