MORALITY: Morality consists in resolving always to be receptive to improve the state of affairs with which one is led to identify, insofar as one has means to apprehend and progress it. Morality has to do with subjective apprehensions of improvement and progress in respect of one’s relations with the Field of consciousness. It does not pertain to purely empirical progress, but to a kind of subjective, Pilgrim’s Progress. Morality does not consist trivially in considering all that one may choose as being moral. Rather, it entails reasoned receptivity to guidance, and progress in relation thereto.
CONTINGENT MORALITY: In respect of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, morality may become like ballast, to toss over once the fight is seen to be one of survival. Among a generation that will be left holding the bag after economic depredations of its predecessor, there may at first be less time and energy for concerns about social niceties and moral traditions. However, when flourishing begins to require assimilations among like minded individuals, values may again harden among separate groups. Once the melting pot and salad bowl no longer work, confederacies of loyalists may again arise. Politics in such groups will become far less tolerant of diversity just for the sake of diversity. There will arise more concern for facilitating systems that avail practical results and decent jobs than for systems that promise a kind of cradle to grave entitlement-arianism that they have no power to bestow. Benefits for louts and incompetents will fade fast.
INVISIBLE HAND OF MARKET BASED MORALITY: When one’s notion of morality consists in believing that everyone should do that which benefits him only, I don’t quite grasp how such an ethos can very well sustain a group or a country, much less a civilization or a world. I fail to apprehend how some people write of morality while denying the existence of any connection or basis for empathy or mutual concern among respective perspectives of consciousness.
CONFLATING EMPIRICAL CONCEITS: When atheists claim they are ‘as objectively moral as” anyone else, I don’t quite grasp how they “objectively” measure any such a thing. Are they also able objectively to measure the subjectivity of being “as happy as” anyone else? Insofar as intersections among reality, science, morality, and religion often meet in ways that are appreciable yet beyond measure, it hardly satisfies my subjective or intuitive apprehension of truth merely to assert that atheists are as moral or happy as anyone else. Rather, my intuition tells me they tend not to be as moral as, nor as happy as, many people who do have decent faiths concerning a higher basis for morality. Simply put, I do not see that pure objectivity, or any purely objective testing, has much to do with morality.
RATIONAL RELIGION: I apprehend doubters’ disgust with what they perceive to be ridiculous or even evil practices of religion. What I do not apprehend is their expectation that religion can or should be done away with. Consider the concepts they would replace religion with, i.e., some kind of environmental or earth science, sprinkled perhaps with notions about genetics and psychology. Insofar as such concepts led to social and political urges about which many people could easily doubt, how then do proponents mean to justify enforcing or cajoling obedience or respect for their “science backed” rulings, except by claiming somehow that they have a closer relation to higher truth, justice, morality, or goodness – especially with regard to concerns that simply defy empirically precise quantification or measure? Yet, choices must be made, both by individuals and by bodies politic. To what, then, is the appeal ultimately made, when an advocate says such and such is best, if not to metaphysical truths (i.e., religion)?
COUPLING OF MASS AND WILL: Information is created, stored, and communicated in respect of the interaction of copasetic organizations of mass with organizations of particles of conscious will. Mass plus perspectives of consciousness avails the experience of a crude sense of touch, which eventually translates to the most basic of tactile sensation, then to translations of impingements that lead to experiences of balance, direction, taste, smell, hearing, and, eventually, sight. One remains faithfully cognizant of one’s connection to morality as one remains cognizant of one’s continuing connection to the field of consciousness (which is NOT entirely accounted for in the merely seen). In respect of the Field of consciousness, it may be that every perspective is morally responsible for its own empathy, is audited accordingly in respect of feedback with the field, and continues to preserve, weigh, and re-mix perspectives of consciousness in the hereafter in respect of such feedback. That is, our perspectives may be subsidiary to archetypes, the forms of which are forever expressible by the Field. In that way, our morality is grounded in archetypes of consciousness that are connected in meta-empathy within a Field.
4 comments:
Is mankind amenable of any saving disposition that could ever lead us to apportion wealth and goods on a basis of higher merit than the leveraging of self interested power? Must might in body, numbers, and technology always be our main basis for distributing right? May right directed oratory ever inspire society to promote allocations differently? Or must we always be hirelings for the crass and the greedy? Does there abide a higher calling, in respect of which people of vision and wisdom can rally ordinary citizens to volunteer to fashion balances, institutions, and values that can lead us to a more decent and refined society, one that can reasonably avail liberty and dignity to all who strive? In that, among our political parties, is there much principled difference, or do they both simply seek to force feed the other, based on might (Cheney: “It’s our due”)?
From A.T. --
@blackelkspeaks, re: "... about the possibility of a return to civility. It seems to me that the American people of today, awash as they are in a culture of filth and degradation (that they support and advance), are not capable of such a thing. "
Well, I think the masses are "capable," in that they are so easily led by the nose and by base desires. If the NWO becomes corporatist, and corporatist powers deem it helpful to put brains of the easily led under controllable fixations, they will do it. The current swamp of sex, drugs and degradation has been useful to divide and decimate nations. Once nations are done in, the masses will be revived in religious zeal -- if that is in the interests of newly reigning corporatists. Actually, I think there is good basis for smart people to sense a higher spiritual connection. However, that is not the basis that will likely be found by the masses. More likely, they will be led to new fervor by powers that understand how to excite glands. When Bush asked, is our children learning, well, yes, they are learning -- if learning means to be conditioned to be led around by your glands. See "one toke over the line" Berkeley.
From A.T. --
@r0astytoasty said, "Man-made answers to questions such as those raised by the author can't ever be complete because mankind's perception of Life Itself has been truncated by the old knowledge of good and evil. No matter how much info we gather about any problem, it's never enough because it is never complete."
Yes. The only moral absolute we share is in one reconciling Consciousness, not in bivalent, moral truths provable to mortals in specific cases. All other moral truths are qualitative, not quantitative. Given meaningful free will as experienced through our varying perspectives, it may be doubted that even God "knows" the right answer to every moral issue. If God did, and God were morally perfect, how could God ever plan a change in His/Her mind? If God could never experience any unfolding thing that would trigger a reconsideration of moral priorities, how could that kind of existence be any more meaningful than that of an unfolding, brain dead, mindless, directional force?
The "rightness" of an answer to each moral issue may be less in the nature of absolutist, either-or reasoning than in the character of empathetic searching among perspectives within a reconciling field for that manner of organizing their communications which is most conducive to sustaining a civilization that avails each perspective of free will in its ongoing pursuit of communication of self. The moral absolute consists in a qualitative and innate need to be empathetic. Measurable specifics for how "best" to go about that in any particular case or quantitative analysis are not absolute.
Empathy is NOT the same as superficial love or immediate desire, but encompasses also tough love. What is the basis for reconciling tough love? An apprehension of what seems objectively necessary to sustain a civilization that avails each perspective a reasonable opportunity for freely pursuing its idea of meaningful fulfillment. That is not a true-false relationship. Do legal, cultural, religious, and moral traditons play a vital role to help us reconcile our purposes towards greater shared objectivity? You betcha.
In America, I sense qualitative truths in many of the ideas developed both by Jews and Christians. There seem to be some issues for which the Jewish approach is best, and some for which the Christian approach is best. So, it is important to apprehend that there are difference. Yet, much also binds us. Much of the Jewish sacred text is in the Old Testament with which Christians tend to be familiar. We both honor the Ten Commandments, as well as the Great Commandment. We both seek to live lives less laden in sin and immorality. Justice seems often to overlap with concerns about that which is moral. In that, Jews and Christians tend to see God as key to moral philosophy: that there is a God, none of us is that God, and we should "listen" to be receptive to what God may desire for us.
In that regard, doesn't morality, fundamentally, have something to do with free will (or freedom of choice), as well as something to do with some Source or reason for innate empathy, i.e., seeing oneself (or one's conscious will) in others?
Why is it that those who seem not to believe conscious free will is other than artifact (entirely derivative of physicalism), nevertheless tend to deem it necessary or proper for a civilization to act as if (i.e., pretend) free will were a real existent? If all of decent society is merely a matter of "proper" conditioning based on that which is, rather than that which ought to be, then why bow to any ointment of morality at all?
Problem: Is not the word "proper" a fly in such ointment? Is it not necessary somehow to choose that conditioning which is proper? Is it It not necessary to choose who should decide, as well as the principles under which they should decide?
This seems to beg a quesion: Having bowed to the need to pretend to believe in free will, why then do atheist moralists stiffen necks not to bow to a concept of a common or interconnecting Source for such free will? If morality consists in empathetic good will towards other perspectives of consciousness, why, absent some connection with such other perspectives, should I be empathetic?
If morality is taught to be only a front for (or artifact of) survival of the fittest, why should I not be devious and enslaving? If morality consists only in a genetic predisposition brought upon us by evolution of selfish or altrusitic genes (btw -- are these consciously selfish and altruistic genes?), and if evolution is morally blind, then, for my own most selfish and fittest advancement, why should I not seek to establish or design a superior order of sociopathic beings whose genes are mutated so that they have no qualms about reducing all other Americans (and the entire middle class) to mere serfs, to do as they are instructed or bribed? Why should I not seek to participate in directing my own superior evolution? Once that becomes what I enjoy, does it become my personal morality? Is that all morality is: an invention to justify what one wants to do anyway?
As we seek to build a decent civilization for our children, should we seek to raise our children to the heights of sociopathic packs of wolves, oligarchs, and international corporatist rulers, or should we inculcate our children to seek to establish decent society for as many as are willing to invest in it with independent work, good will, and good faith?
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