creativesoul wrote:
Are you voluntarily entering into a moral obligation to offer me something "good"? I mean, can I hold you to that? On my view the term "good" is usually not worth using, as it creates unnecessary ambiguity.
I recognize no obligation whatsoever except to myself and my own.
creativesoul wrote:Define "good".
You are preaching to the choir, dear boy.
"Good" like many human concepts, has no meaning outside the human mind....and it is only common because human minds communicate ideas and so they transmit perspectives.
creativesoul wrote:The description of "the current environment" is grossly inadequate.
I did not offer a complete description, as you may have noticed.
But you didn't, despite the fact that I began with the term "hint".
In my vocabulary when one hints one alludes to something without clarifying it.
creativesoul wrote:There is no reason to believe that "the modern morals and religious dogmas are a result" of that description. The qualitative assessment regarding religious dogma seems true from my own experience. Whether or not the "modern morals" claim bears any weight would need parsed out. There is no reason to believe that all of them(morals) are a "necessary attitude". The last statement is - quite simply - unpredictable, there are too many unknown variables in play.
There is no reason to believe that they are not, dear boy.
I offer a hypothesis based no my assessment of what is more probable, what you believe or do not or how you "reason" is your problem and it determines your particular evaluation.
Necessity is the mother of all invention, dear boy, unless you wish to provide me, us, with one example of a creative act, an invention, which is not the product of a need.
This should be interesting.
Even God's hypothetical boredom is a need which contradicts His perfection.
Now, dear boy, I remind you that an organism is an interactive emergent unity. I say emergent because it is never completed...it never becomes a thing, a Being....it remains a process, a Becoming.
You should ask yourself why these morals took hold, or became popular where they did and when they did, unless you ascribe to the God delusion or you think these morals owe their success to their own intrinsic value, in which case you would have to define what intrinsic value is and how it comes about.
Now, I'm jumping around a bit, because I've debated this shit a million times and I can sort of foresee the arguments coming. They are mostly grounded on the same principles, even if some modes of expressing them are more sophisticated than others.
It's like the qualitative difference between a christian narrative with its God and angels and its demon, making it childish, as compared to the Buddhist doctrine which pretty much prescribes the same antidotes to living but it does so with more class and maturity or even the liberal narrative with its good versus evil and its
clean slates and its human nature without nature and its presumed free-will which is nothing more than a dedication to its principles. .
creativesoul wrote:The first claim is stated as though it is fait accompli. I find that "modern western liberalism, progressiveness" is a meaningless string of symbols... Orwellian-style. Seeing how this portion of your rejoinder hinges upon "these morals", what are those morals? Enumerate them.
Of course they are Orwellian as the entire system depends on selling a myth.
The God myth is losing ground in an information age or, more importantly, a global age where different cultures, different faiths have to be integrated into a harmonious whole.
Secular humanism, progressiveness, and the liberal/conservative dichotomy is the
New Age adaptation of the same Judeo-Christian crap, to the post-modern environment.
There is no
fait accompli my pretentious boy, as the process is ongoing and control has to be reinforced constantly.
These morals, are the ones that achieve the best results in integrating and managing populations. They are part or a more sophisticated form of human husbandry.
The docile, tolerant, undiscriminating dolt, who confuses knowledge for intelligence, is made harmless with peer pressures and my indoctrinating him, from birth, into a mode of thinking which makes certain thoughts and actions shameful.
Same as in the east, the western man is now told ego is bad, greed is evil, ironically as the system depends on a controlled application of both, or he is reborn into the systemic salvation by teaching him what he most wishes to believe: that he is just as good as anyone else; that he is born with the same potentials and that he deserves the same as anyone else.
This mirrors the Christian doctrine, itself a more inclusive form of Judaism, to make Judaism more universal and cosmopolitan, which teaches its followers that they too deserve eternal life, paradise - replaced by utopia in your secular
New Age - if only they accept Jesus into their heart.
In other words these common, "transcendental" morals, offer their wares only to the ones that accept them as self-evident.
Try to convince a Christian of the opposite. You will have the same response as trying to convince a New age liberal nitwit that race and sex are relevant and that appearances
do matter.
creativesoul wrote:While the traditional 'eastern' moral/ethical codes are significantly different from 'western' codes, there is no reason to believe that that difference is/was due to the time period at which "this same necessity occurred". The notion of whether or not they are "morally superior" offers potential. In short, I find that the main difference is that between holding the individual and/or the whole with primary importance.
And the main similarity is that they both propose an "ideal man" who can be best integrated and directed and will not cause too much internal disruption.
They experiences population pressures way before the Europeans did.
The Greeks and the Romans were the true representations of European tradition: the pagan man, who held nothing to be insurmountably or worthy of his surrender.
An anti-monistic attitude, a masculine one that birthed science and philosophy to a degree unprecedented in human history.
creativesoul wrote:No real argument here, except possibly the role of the individual.
The role is determines by the individual's quality.
If i define the role of the individual pig to be in reference to the quality of the pork-chops it produces, then its individuality will be judged accordingly.
Now you may judge the "individual" to be the one who serves humanity, just as a Christian would say that a christian man's freedom is in his choice to serve God.
Here the choice is a lie, since any choice except the "good" or the common is judged to be evil or destructive or bad.
creativesoul wrote:This, in particular, is interesting. While I find very few of the nature vs. nurture argument(s) meaningful and/or compelling for what looks like perhaps the same reasons that you hold, it is the "vengeance" aspect that garnered my attention. 'Western' freedom/liberty can, and perhaps will, be the vehicle for it's own demise.
Look around you boy...markets filled with unblemished fruits, humans "correcting" nature, particularity how it has manifested in them...there is an anti-nature agenda....linked to Judeo-Christianity which overturns nature making the meek powerful or pretending to.
There is a vengeance against nature and natural selection and evolution, and it can be called
resentiment.
We see it in the selective application of empiricism. Sensual information matters everywhere except in some contexts where it is deemed inappropriate or superficial.
This is mind-control like Orwell could not have imagined it...perhaps Huxley did a better job.
In the east sensual information is dismissed altogether as an "illusion". it is degraded to the status of a dream, or some blanket covering the more "real" reality which is emptiness or nothingness or some ambiguous and self-contradicting state of conscious unconsciousness.
Self is an illusion, ego a chimera that can only lead to suffering....and so the ideal state is that of a meditative self-trance. The living dead.
Nirvana is posited as the ascent to a state where you are never reborn...can you think of a more self-annihilating, life hating proposition? Christian call it paradise, a limbo underneath the
all-mighty and to the side or underneath his boot to fry for eternity.
In secular humanism the individual is degraded to the state of mere cell in a "bigger body", a servant of the whole, an ant in the ant-hill. all who serve the Idea man, deserve...all who refuse to, are ill.
Discrimination, a quintessential act of consciousness, is demeaned and slandered, then applied selectively.
One can discriminate with wine, letting his more sensitive palate seek out a "higher" quality, but one cannot with humans, because here the senses are fooling us or the more sensitive eye should be blinded to retain the mediocre peaceful numbness...and those who can see must pretend to be as blind as the average.
This is not only dumbing-down, this is raising mediocrity to the level of a virtue.
creativesoul wrote:There is lot packed up in here. It seems to be about personal/loving relationship. That is the approach I'll take. We come automatically equipped with the potential for a whole range of emotion.
No boy, this is about self-esteem and pride.
In Christianity all deserve love, as love
is God. In secular humanism all deserve rights and respect and consideration.
Remember, discrimination when it comes to humans is not permitted or when it is it is reprimanded using social ostracizing and the costs that follow.
One cannot say the females, for instance, do not perform as well as men in all areas, including intellectual areas and particularly in the more creative disciplines.
One cannot say that a Negro does not perform as well as a European in some areas, and outperforms him ion others, because this too is unacceptable and the "official" doctrine does not permit such speculations nor using the past as a guide. The past is either erased on some justification is offered to retain the delusion of equal potentials.
You see the "correct" nurturing (eugenics given a politically-correct label) will heal the sum total of generations upon generations of naturally selected divergences.
creativesoul wrote:Emotion need not be 'turned on', as it were. It is autonomous. However, that which "feels good" is empty without also knowing that which does not. That is not to say that if one cares about another then s/he ought to only focus upon that which feels good. Nor is it to say that one ought not focus upon that. Rather it is to say that both are of utmost importance. There are a myriad of ways to focus upon that which is unsettling and choosing carefully can lend itself to a unique kind of bonding that cannot be reached any other way.
None of this applies to what I said.
But to be even more controversial, in my opinion fear is the primary emotion, out of which all others emerge in reaction to or as mutations which offer an advantage.
Emotions are not bad, none of them.
Love is worshiped in this
New Age world, for the reasons I indicated earlier, but hatred is just as useful and creative in that it sparks activity and leads to change.
What is dangerous is the uncontrollable emotion. In this love is just as self-destructive as anger.
But in this day and age love must be risen to the state of a sacred cow, no longer a God, perhaps, but some mysterious, mystical force that can heal the world of all its evil spontaneous occurring ways.
Ironically those proposing such drivel do so in this feigned aloofness which is supposed to imply that their opinions are rational and unemotional when that is all they are.
