I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:
Many of my moral values arose from my upbringing, as opposed to biology. This is evidenced by the fact that biologically similar people living in different places and epochs have different ideas of what's right.
Therefore many of my values originally came from the society that raised me.
Society's values were strongly influenced by Christian values, and many of our core moral prohibitions are inherited from Christian tradition.
The world is full of people who may want to edit my values ever-so-slightly while I'm not looking, in order to further their own agenda.
Also my values may drift, and most drift is harmful from the perspective of my current values.
A good recipe for countering this insidious deterioration of values is to consciously pull them back toward their original source, as long as it's something unchanging, like a book.
That means editing my values to more closely match Christianity. QED.
Not for rebellion's sake so much as for the sake of survival and power. As one who enjoys the benefits of modernity, I find it perplexing that modernity has become something that is, from any rational Darwinian perspective, a form of cultural suicide. What I'm looking for is a civilization whose prophets have more resemblance to Nietzsche than to Jesus or his secular disciple, Marx. I just don't see much future for non-Nietzschean modernity; it is a dying culture of empty cathedrals and hospital-tombs. If secular people continue to abort themselves into extinction, the future will belong to the fundamentalists. I see nothing particularly rational about this!
Which modern day community would you say comes closest to your hopeful vision of a future civilization?
Somalia seems to fit your criteria of polygamy, aggressiveness, unequality, etc
Admittedly, it's not atheistic or eugenic, but do the above listed elements contribute positively in your evaluation of Somalia as opposed to e.g. Sweden, which is less agressive and more egalitarian?
0Maurus
Following a syphilitic madman like prophet and divine being? Had been tried before :-P
I just had a long conversation with my brother, a devout Christian. With my help he has outlined the following argument why it might be good for me to follow Christian deontology:
What do you think?