Hello there Blick and Edouard!
I think we may have strayed from the original subject a bit. Wasn't this about the 13 question test? And then there was some concern that everyone should have gotten all or almost all the questions correct, because they were so easy. But they didn't.
And now, like a snowball rolling down Capital Hill, we're discussing the decline of humanity due to modern liberal influences of religious freedom and the carnage of spirituality in being forced to adapt to a homogenous society where monotheism, and polytheism exist side by side.
Edouard, you're the OP. If this is where you want to go, then so be it.
? ?You can say the same for capitalism,? my friend continued. ?It works because Americans have been taught in their churches that they should keep their promises and not tell lies. An advanced economy cannot function if people cannot expect that when they sign contracts, the other people will voluntarily uphold their obligations. Capitalism works because most people voluntarily keep their promises.? . . . ?
I've heard this same sentiment uttered many times. The premise is that religion is the source of morality, while the state of man in the natural order, without religion, is ignorance of morality, opportunism and survival of the fittest at the expense of the weakest. I disagree with this basic polarization. In my most humble opinion morality arises from empathy which arises from family structure, social structure and human interaction at its most fundamental level for all ages of men and women. There are those who lack empathy through mental defect, and there are those who are empathetic toward people they know, but not others. Then there are the ones we might refer to as bleeding hearts who empathize with every living thing, including animals and even insects. This is an attribute of man that is wholly independent of religion. Then there is the socialization of children within the family unit, where a moral code of behavior is enforced from parental authority to progeny for the purpose of order and survival. This also is totally independent of religion.
The other side of that issue is the amoral propensity for religious zealotry through attacks on people of opposing faiths and metering out severe punishments for failure to conform to strongly held ideologies.
The monotheistic Protestant and Catholic religions eschew amoral behaviors and provide many social constructs that benefit the moralization of communities, but they are not wholly responsible for moral teaching. They merely capitalize on man's affinity for moral behavior for the benefit of evangelizing. This has benefits for both the church and the community, but even so, people still do bad things.
? If we cannot find an objective basis for humans as transcending the animal world, then we are nothing more than hairless apes. Looking out upon the world - it is looking more and more like that each day. ?
Measure for measure, scientific principals define the physical world for our collective understanding by transcribing the analog world into digital approximations of real observations. It is a beautiful way of learning. Simply put, the two simplest integers, a one and a zero, can be used to communicate anything, no matter how complex, and with enough decimal places any error can be pushed into obscurity, but never eliminated entirely.
In my own very humble opinion, in light of our acquired knowledge of the vast and awe inspiring Universe and the numbers necessary to communicate our observations concerning it, and in light of the numbers employed to define our knowledge of man, both in current population statistics and historical population dynamics, it would be arrogant of man to believe in a spiritual after life. The ultimate realization and the only realization that conforms to observation is one which includes personal nonexistence. I didn't exist before. Now I exist. I will not exist again. I am a temporary vessel of life and knowledge, and a complex but insignificant nudge to a fraction of what matters. And, I'm OK with that.
