GENIUS FORUMS

As the human mind has developed to the point of self-realisation, the natural tendency is to contemplate man's position in the cosmos. Death is difficult to contemplate for a mind which observes itself as an entity. There is less fatalism with increasing understanding. Men who no longer adhere to a religion but have not made the full transition to a conscious realism try to find relief in semi-religious cults. Relief is found through 'meditation', discussion, contemplations, etc., under the leadership of uneducated religious teachers, in some cases of Indian sects, even under the guidance of a schoolboy or a mentally retarded guru.

Religious freedom has opened the doors to all kings of empty beliefs. A state religion, as in England or France, has the one positive feature that a more developed religious system is preponderant and sectarianism less cultivated. In the United States, all religions are embraced and go tax-free. The greatest religious oddities, even the San Francisco Church of the Devil, automatically have state protection.

Guru adherents and Krishna pupils collect millions of dollars and sixteen-year-old boys bring pupils to India for meetings on "meditation". A country where human life is cheaper than the life of a cow and rats are considered holy cannot boast of presenting deep thought for human salvation. When Indian religion and philosophy cannot do better than ignore the human misery and desperation of millions of their people, there is no reason to seek depth and understanding in their primitive myths.

The rules of Hinduism show the absurdity of India's antiquated superstitions:

"When chewing do not look north or south or into a corner when your father is still alive."

"Do not eat while standing, walking, or lying down."

"When defacating do not look at either sun, moon, fire, water, on a cow or in a Brahman. During daytime, one should turn to the north; during the night, towards the south."

"Do not sleep with your wife on a day of full moon or new moon, and on the 8th or 14th day after these days."

"During intercourse, the man should breathe through the right side of his nose, the woman through the left side."

We have entered an era when the right of religious freedom has to be redefined. Moreover, a new situation arises with the erosion of nationalities. Many limitations of rights, and the very fact of defined privileges, originated through national boundaries. As all nations become more and more one great organisation of men, such national rights and restrictions will have to cede to international humanitarian laws.

In spite of the great number of followers of the classical religions, the conviction prevails that general human laws furthering our existence can no longer be based on these vague beliefs. A great humanitarian movement will set in to base international laws on our understanding of nature and our habitat. We need 'global ethics' to guide all nations through the next millenium without the danger of complete annihilation by genocide with atomic weapons. Global ethical laws will start with a gradual adoption of all efforts of population control. These standards will be based primarily on practical needs for genetic quality control. Initially, this will refer to physical health, but it will gradually be refined to include cognitive capacity and spiritual well-being as progress in genetic control and genetic engineering is made.

A superhuman effort will be necessary to find a quota system for the progeny of various races. As we are faced with the oldest human drive - the sirvival of one's kind - it will be very difficult for the global population to avoid confrontation and to form laws by conventions. It is to be hoped that these decisions can be made in an educated atmosphere of fact-finding and on the basis of the need for mankind to survive in dignity, instead of a holocaust brought about by religious wars in which both sides pray to their gods. In this process, humanity should not refrain from looking up and beyond its existence. It should not seek imaginary heavens and metaphysical nirvanas, but clearly look at the sky and learn about the distance of the stars, the extension of the Milky Way, and the miniature position of our globe in the universe and the infinitely small time scale of our own existence in view of cosmic events.

From this only one conclusion follows: that we are what we make of ourselves, that we enjoy what we understand of ourselves and the universe, and that we can make life rewarding by developing ourselves. Our civilisation should evolve on the basis of humanitarian conventions to which we freely bind ourselves in the conscience of beings whose minds have developed to the point of self-awareness. Man faces the greatest challenge of all time: to develop, not by accidental events, but by conscientious evolution.

AtheistNational wrote:A country where human life is cheaper than the life of a cow and rats are considered holy cannot boast of presenting deep thought for human salvation.

Out of two posts you have made so far, both have attacked India and mentioned rats.

These posts may have been inpired in part by the fact that there's just been a Hindu killing-spree against Christians.

AtheistNational wrote:A country where human life is cheaper than the life of a cow and rats are considered holy cannot boast of presenting deep thought for human salvation.

Ghandi used to irk his British masters with cheerful greetings like this: "Have you had a satisfactory bowel movement this morning?"

Jess

It's hard to take social Darwinism seriously, since it's one of the many strawmen of natural selection that creationists like to burn. It really doesn't help when some people who believe in natural selection also use it, completely unnecessarily, as a surrogate ethical system. Mixing "should" with "evolution" is kind of silly, when evolution will occur, no matter what people want.

It's hard to take social Darwinism

I do not advocate social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is an egoistic and libertarian social philosophy.

Mixing "should" with "evolution" is kind of silly, when evolution will occur, no matter what people want.

There is already a consensus about what fundamental traits we value. This consensus is evident in governmental expenditures on education (intelligence is preferable to stupidity), hospitals (health is preferable to sickness), criminal law enforcement (order is preferable to chaos), etc.

We are already using social engineering in an ineffective attempt to make people smart, law-abiding, and healthy. Man has already 'decided' what traits are to be valued, and the government enforces these values. But why not do something that would actually work?

Pre-scientific ethics should be replaced by research results from the social sciences tracing what social consequences follow from varieties of individual behaviour. The social substitution of revealed religious values by evolutionary ethics will be a gradual one, with the slow progress of a difficult science. It may well be that it will take sociobiology, social psychology, behavioural genetics, economics, cultural anthropology, evolutionary biology, and other brances of social science longer to reach the requisite methodological sophistication than one likes to think. But the principle is clear that group ethical values can and ought to be a branch of evolutionary science.