It is just amazing how different the universes can be where people spend their whole lives; how my nearest and dearest absolute certainties can be totally foreign to a person living in the next block.
We do not of course live in different universes, but we can have wildly different perceptions of it and it is in practice nearly the same thing.
My neighbor can look at my carefully built universe and see nothing and I can well do the same thing for him, of course.

There is in the end so despairingly few universal and unchallenged facts in this whole universe that every human can agree on.
However, I do think that we must learn to live with this fact, as it just might be one of the basic tenets of modern human social life in open societies, where everybody is not indoctrinated to see the world in a exactly similar way.

The situation is of course largely a result of the fact that we humans have the ability to create so powerful memes of the mind that they have the ability stop other memes from entering the mind that is already a host to a very strong meme.

I do think that all minds are not as susceptible to succumbing to memes and the same meme can have quite different effects on different people.
Also no human is a carrier of a single meme, but there is always a large collection of them. I would say that no two people have the same collection of memes and this incredible variety is a major causes of the versatility in the real world effects the same memes do really have.

I would even suggest that the more different memes a person really learns, the less space a single meme can have to grow in the mind of a person.
This process if of course behind the quite universal fact that with age there often develops a ability to consider a wider range of differing views.
This does not always happen of course, as a person can also wrap him- or herself tighter and tighter to a meme.

However, memes are not created equal. There are memes that are carefully designed to take over the whole mind of the recipient.
These memes are all too often also carefully designed to makes them extremely difficult to get rid of or even alter, after they have been accepted into the mind of the recipient.

Even if chancing memes is very hard, I do believe that it is not impossible. I say this even if tens of millions of people have been killed because their killers have seen them as carriers of incurable memes.

My own mind is of course also filled to the brim with memes I have collected during the bit over 50 years I have spent on this blue little dot in a lonely corner of our universe.
However, I do believe that we are all humans, even if we have different sets of memes and all humans can have even meaningful dialog if we just remember the vast differences in how we basically can perceive our world.

This all is of course a very easy thing to say, I do know and I will quite probably hate your facts too in the next discussion, if they just do not fit into my very own version of the universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetic_engineering

Comments

I am here making (again) a rather bold claim, I know, but I will clarify my stand in due time. But first things first; I do think that market economy is the only way to create such amount of continuous wealth that a society can really properly support also the weak and sick ones.
At the same time I do think that the stock markets are the main reason why modern capitalism has become so volatile and unpredictable.
I do also claim that there are other and even better ways than stock markets to finance the investments that are needed to keep our market economy going.

The very basic problem with stock markets is that they loan the money of the people who buy their stock without any direct promise of interest attached to the stock itself.
The investors are just motivated by the promise of a future growth of the market value of the enterprise.
This situation could just be even the main reason why the ability to grow has become for very many the only yardstick that the success of enterprises is evaluated on.
In this situation the only important thing for the management becomes gaining growth and the quality, sustainability or any kind of humanistic value simply cannot come into the picture, unless of course they serve the ultimate goal of continuous growth.

I do not deny the undeniable fact that a certain amount of growth is always necessary for the economy to be able to provide the wealth that is needed to keep a modern society going.
However, the universal mental hegemony of stock markets means that growth has become the sole target, the only value and even in many cases the only thing that people leading the enterprises have in their minds.

This demand for continuous and aggressive growth is also the main thing that necessitates the concentration of enterprises to fewer and fewer units.
In very many cases the growth demanded by stock markets is not simply achievable by any other ways but by buying off of competitors and this tendency leads to concentration that is in very many cases not at all good for the overall health of the market economy.

Contrary to a popular belief the real value of the enterprises is not created at stock market at all. A enterprise can only create real new value only by producing, marketing or selling something that somebody somewhere wants to buy. Stock markets do create imaginary value that is not necessarily based on reality at all.
Of course the valuation of a enterprise in stock market is ideally based on the real expected earning potential of said enterprise.
However, the sorry fact of life is that the stock market is not driven by rational calculations only, but as much by herd mentality, pure greed and most of all the very human tendency to be over-optimistic in good times and over-pessimistic in bad times.

In fact the stock market value of a enterprise needs not to have any connection to its real value, but the it can be wholly dependent on the often unrealistic expectations of the individuals making investments in the market.

The bubble-economy is the inevitable consequence of this basic human nature of the stock market, as the next bubble starts forming the moment the disaster created by the preceding one has been somehow cleared.
From the South Sea Bubble and Tulip Mania in the 17th and 18th centuries on, there has been a series of disasters that are a direct result of the speculative nature of the stock market.
Basically a stock market is nothing more than a big lottery, where players try to guess the best future earners. The worst thing is that the money pouring in the good times is all too often there just for the short-term speculative gains that are very often created by the herd-mentality of the market to start with.

In rising markets the "good stocks" or the ones who's value is rising more rapidly than the others get a boost that has no connection the their real earning capabilities. This quite unavoidable tendency creates the bubbles and also the inevitable disasters as the bubble inevitably blows.
However, this tendency is always presented as a inevitable fact of life, as so many wily operators do make big fortunes out of the whole process.
In the end only the poor suckers who do not know how this thing works do usually get really burned. The real big players just surf along on bubble-bursts to make a new fortune out of the rise of the next bubble.

A speculative market is born always when a longer upturn in share prices causes enough new money to pour in the market.
When enough money pours in, there simply is not left enough reasonable investments and the share prises start to rise without direct connection to the real capabilities of the enterprises. The most popular shares will inevitably rise more than others and their value will inevitably be warped, often beyond recognition.
The wily long-time players of course do understand this, but they universally keep mum, as they are the ones who are selling the over-prized stocks to the blue-eyed new investors.

Of course many different kinds players are profiting from a game of chance going on, there are many different kinds of institutionalized investors who do benefit immensely from the flow of the speculative private money pouring into the rising markets and also many pension funds have also made big bucks out of this irrational phenomena.
However, inevitably there will be a new crash in the stock market in the future and some stock prices will inevitably be inflated out of proportion before that happens.

Above are basically my thoughts on the economy side, but I want to delve a bit deeper on the moral side of the thing also. I know that very many people will not like the following passages, but this is simply the way I do see this thing after following the economy as a professional writer for two decades and I just can?t help myself anymore.
Many people (and most of all institutions) will get rich at stock markets without really doing nothing themselves to create any kind of real new value or wealth that would really benefit the society at large.

If one looks at the thing in a starkest of lights, it soon becomes clear that people investing in stock markets are basically freeloaders who are just betting on the results of the work of others.
Of course they also benefit the economy by providing some of the capital that the enterprises do need to invest, but there would be other ways to provide that capital also.
However, what would be a nicer occupation for any human than living off the achievements of others.
We humans do constantly seek the easiest way to earn a living and it is only rational to use a tool like a stock market, if you have somehow gotten the capital to invest in the game in the first place, of course.

I am all the time more surprised by the fact how few people are aware of this process, as there is still a amazing amount of people who think that a stock market is based on rational decision making process.
I would go as far as to say that this belief on the rationality of a irrational market is the main force keeping up the bubble-economy.
The often in purpose inflated expectations of the common men who have spare money to invest do lead to catastrophes, as the influx of enough new money does inevitably push the market over realistic valuations and these unrealistic valuations of enterprises just must come down some day.

I would venture to say that many people simply do not want to understand the true nature of the game, as admitting the truth would hurt too much.
I do think that without understanding the history you cannot really understand the present and the history of stock markets of the world is a nasty collection of rude awakenings for the small investors.
But as people wanting to get rich fast will never want to learn nothing from history, the greed will feed the new surges of unwarranted market-optimism again and again.

Summa summarum; I do think that we need market economy to sustain the way of life we have accommodated ourselves, but I do think that stock market -way of financing the economy is badly flawed.
I do think that it needs ultimately to be replaced with a better model if we are ever to build a sustainable economy that does not depend on growth as the only yardstick.

One needs to remember that stock markets as we know them are a quite recent phenomena in human history.
It is all too easy to forget that there are still extremely successful and even very large enterprises that are owned by families. I do also think that creating systems that would encourage ownership by the workforce of the enterprises would be feasible, even if this model is not without its problems.
They could however be ironed out with time and experience, if this model of ownership would be taken seriously and a real legal framework for it would be in place.

I do think that getting rid of the ultimate power of volatile ands quite unpredictable stock markets would eventually create stable long-term ownership for the enterprises. Long-term owners could really be interested in the well-being of the enterprise they own in a long-term basis and would not be interested in just stuffing their pockets in short-term windfalls.

The capital needs of the enterprises can be fulfilled with a variety of ways that the banking system does basically already provide, even if the requirements for the own capital need to be lessened of course, if the financing of enterprises turn increasingly to banking system for the capital they need to sustain their operations.
Also the risk taking potential of banking system and the use of collateral would need to be thought anew in the banking world, as the collateral value of business ideas and the true ability of management of a company as a collateral would need to be assessed in a different way.

Well regulated banking system could be the repository of the same capital that is accumulated in the stock markets at the moment.
When markedly more stable and long-term ways of financing would be used to finance the growth of the economy, the unpredictability of the system will decrease markedly.
I see that the people now investing in stock market could instead buy themselves into the long-term financing deals that would be made through financing institutions in this new model of mine. The success of the enterprise that is financed would be a part of the overall financing deal.

In my model the financier would get its cut of success also and majority of this money would be passed to the smaller investors that have put in the money that has made the deal possible.
In my model the investors would get their cut of the dividends from successful enterprises, but on much more predictable and stable basis than in the modern stock market.
As the financial base of the enterprises would be much more predictable, the possibility of really planning for the future would be greatly enhanced in enterprises.

I predict that in this system there would be growth also, but not in the forced and aggressive way that is now all too often the norm.
We need not to forget how growth now often the only goal and it is all too often achieved without any considerations for the human and most of all ecological cost of it all.

I know of course that this all is just a pipe dream, as so unbelievably strong group interests are in play in this field and it is not easy to foresee how this kind of system could be started or even really considered in earnest.
However, a extremely heavy burst of a future stock market bubble could just create a social atmosphere, where the willingness to search for alternatives for the current system could be greatly enhanced. In any case, if nobody would ever bring new ideas to the field, nothing will ever change.

It is so easy to forget that the stock market -model is not the only possible option for financing the needs of corporations, even if it has achieved a extremely strong position where there seems to be no alternatives.
However, I do think that those who benefit from the current system do systematically deny even the slightest possibility of any alternatives.

I do not claim that I have found any kind of final truth in this matter. This little essay just tells how a person who has followed the goings on in the economy for a couple of decades with a growing sense of worry sees the current situation and how he sees that it could be remedied; nothing more, nothing less.
I have been pondering these issue for the last 15 years at least and even if this piece is a result of only three days of intensive thought and writing, it is really based on decades spent on getting to know and understand the subject matter of this piece. Now just was the time to get it out of my system.

Comments

In some forms of Stoicism there is also a belief in a Pantheistic life force or Nature, but this life force does not dictate big books for humans to follow to the letter or tell them what they should eat.
In Epicureanism there are not even these Pantheistic connections, as the questions of existence or non-existence of “gods” are simply brushed away as irrelevant to real life of humans. Epicureanism is in the end only interested in making real life of real humans better.

I would even dare to say that it is a quite different thing to think that something is a inerrant word of a omnipotent "god" or to think that something is a extremely wise piece of advice for certain group of humans.

Of course also religions do contain many wise things, but thing is that the main selling point by which these pieces of wisdom’s are sold is that they are the "only possible truth".
Of course also a philosopher very naturally thinks that he has got the right answer, as he would not be peddling it to others if he would not think it to be the right answer.
However, a philosopher is normally not suggesting that there cannot be other wisdom than his, given that we forget Aristotle for a moment, who did think that he had got it all absolutely right, even if he way off the mark in very many things.

I do think that there is also a very practical difference in believing that you must follow the inerrant words of a angry and demanding "god" to the last letter as it is revealed in a "holy book” or in believing that a sage whose wisdom you personally have come to trust has found a way of making your life a little more bearable if you follow his advice.

I am of course comparing schools of philosophy mainly to Christianity here. I do think that bad old Christianity still is THE religion for us for a very long time for all of us all that live in the lands that happened to fall under the iron rule of the Christianity through historical and political coincidences.
Christianity was also btw. the very religion that did destroy the Stoics and Epicureans so thoroughly that ultimately not a single one remained anywhere in the Christianized Roman empire.

Of course also Judaism and Islam (and even Mormonism) are built on the very same basic principles as Christianity.
Quite another thing of course is how people act on the basic rules presented by religions, as all of these religions have diversified into a veritable tangle of different belief-systems and people have different levels of attachment to them.
Most of all many modern people do pick and choose individual things from them to create their private religions.

All of the Abrahamic religions or Judaism, Christianity and Islam are however based on the same basic assumptions of there being an unmoving "absolute truth" that is revealed by the "holy book" of that religion and only by it.
In modern times there are of course increasing number of people in all religions who disregard these basic ancient demands for uniformity and who can even respect wisdom present in other religions or secular philosophy

However in all of the Abrahamic religions there still exists a basic requirement of accepting the existence of a single absolute truth represented by that religion and everyone straying from this requirement is corrupting the very core message of that religion.

In philosophy such requirements do not exist, and this basic fact will always differentiate philosophy from religions.
However, if any philosophy claims to be the carrier of a absolute and final truth, it is not merely a philosophical system any more, but a religion; basically it is as simple as that.

The other way around, I think that one goal could just be to make people realize that religions are just opinions of how things ought to be and they are in fact free to choose a religion that suits their personal needs.
One should bear in mind that philosophical systems like Epicureanism and Stoicism were often chosen according to a personal adult decision in their time even if undoubtedly of course there was also the force of tradition at play playing its part later on even among their followers.

Admitting that also all religions are just human ideas like philosophy would of course be a unbelievable revolution in the world of religions.
Of course it is not realistic to expect such a miracle to happen, as at least Christianity, Islam and Judaism would lose their main selling point; the comforting claims of full certainty in a world so full of uncertainty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Epicurus/79493658728?ref=ts
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Marcus-Aurelius/123395559393?ref=ts

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They have in fact in practice accepted the basic supremacy of science and knowledge over faith in our societies.
These churches are quite content if they are allowed to collect their dues and mind their daily business in peace. Very seldom do their leaders venture to the public eye to oppose goings on in the society or in politics anymore.

Much bigger problem for humanity are various fanatical fringe churches, sects and secret societies, whose popularity has risen as the official churches have became more reasonable and well-behaved.
One of those movements that are benefiting from the petrifying of the Western state churches has been Islam, that has gained converts in ever-growing pace in the Western Europe also.

The coolheaded and quite reasonable teachings of Western state churches are not enough for many zealots and these more extreme religious movements like Islam serve this existing demand.
When speaking in tongues and overall religious fervor goes out of fashion in the official state churches, there will inevitably be other places where they can be found.
There will always be people who need to have extremely deep personal experiences in their worship, which the sterile western state religions of today cannot provide anymore.

I do fear that there is a size-able portion of people in also our western societies that see freedom of choice as a real burden for themselves. There is a group of people that feel a great sense of liberation when they are not required making any real decisions on their own anymore.
The job of assembling your own view of the world just is a too daunting task for many people. The ready-made packets offered by religions, sects or religious-like ideologies as communism can be gift from heaven for this kind of people.
After you accept a ready-made package offered by a extremist version of religion you don’t have to think anymore yourself what to think of new things. There is a reverend, a pastor or cell-leader telling you what to think and how to respond to new things.

On this background it becomes much easier to comprehend that also some very well educated women in Western Europe have been converting to Islam.
The oppression of women inbuilt in this religion is so obvious to anybody that is almost beyond comprehension that this kind of things can happen. But the promise of liberation from our own free will can be so tempting, that people are willing to accept almost anything that comes with it, if only they can give up their freedom.

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However, I do think that the creators of the Jewish faith did not invent these things themselves, but they inherited these ideas from the first belief-systems of the new agriculturalists that have their roots in societies that were born maybe even 10 000 - 15 000 years ago.
The name of child's father was not important at all in for example original Polynesian societies, where important resources were commonly owned and used.

Overall the idea of ownership is in hunter-gatherer-societies pointedly a communal thing, as the local tribal formations are the units that can "own" certain hunting-grounds or good places for gathering food.
Rearing children in pre-agricultural societies is also often a communal enterprise and such was in fact situation also in many Polynesian communities on the Pacific Ocean when the white men did finally arrive on the scene.

When important food resources were shared commonly and also children were reared together on communal basis, the name of the actual father of any child was not seen as important at all. In fact sex was quite free and most of all quilt-free in many of those Polynesian societies.
Only after the birth of settled agricultural societies was born the novel idea that a single person could 'own' a piece of land personally and also 'own' other humans like wives, children or even slaves.

A common modern idea among researchers of the subject is that that only after the parceling of agricultural land to individual owners was it seen as necessary to really know who was the real father of a child was, as it was also decided that these individualized parcels of productive land and important resources could pass on through inheritance only to the members of the same family.
This new situation brought about the need to create a new set of morals for harnessing the strong forces of sexuality, that inevitably did still exist, as this new need to curb open sexuality was not the natural state of humans, but a unnatural one, that needed constant forceful enforcement to be followed.

The decision to make land a heritable property had of course also other dire consequences, as it was the 'original sin' that brought about the growth of the social inequality and the birth of unjust social structures, that were developed to protect the growing privileges of the original lucky ones who got to be in the land owning class.
In these new settled farmer communities there was born a new idea of patriarchy, that was based also on strong demands for curbing the sexual freedom of the members of the society.

Of course the practical arrangements did play their part in the process. In a wandering bands of hunter and gatherers it is simply impossible to control the behavior and actions of the members, but in a settled environment the possibilities to create really working systems of control were greatly enhanced.
A similar evolution of harnessing most of all female sexuality took place in many different areas where the transformation to the agricultural societies was accomplished. The Middle East was not the only place where the feminine sexuality was seen as a enemy.

In Judaism and also in Islam and Christianity that were later developed from it, the need for curbing all forms of sexuality soon reached a heightened status, that was in the end unrivaled anywhere else.

Comments

There is a persisting idea in some quarters that a person can really create new reality by just imagining it. This is of course seems to be true in art at least at first glance.

In arts a creative person basically often imagines new things and creates things that try to represent his or her imagination in reality.
These spoken, written, sung, painted or sculpted works of art are of course in itself real, even when they represent only imagined things that do exist only in the mind of the artist.
However, I do think that only the act of creation of an act or object in the real world makes imagined ideas part of other peoples reality.
If this act of real world creation does not occur, these imagined ideas are do not become real to anybody else and they are of no consequence .

This act of creation can of course be just the act of telling somebody other about your idea or just really acting in the real world according to the ideas you have created.
These acts do affect reality, but it is important to notice that even then it is always the acts caused by the ideas and not the imagined ideas themselves that do affect reality, even if also purely imagines ideas can and often are used as motives for real world actions.

Similarly if one imagines a thing like “god”, the representations of that idea can be very real for people who believe in them. This belief in itself can have very grave real world consequences, even if the original idea that caused this real world action can still be a totally imagined thing with no base in reality.
The real world effect that imagined things have by making people acting according to them does not however make the original ideas any more real in any sense, as the original imagined ideas are even then just works of imagination.

In fact purely Imagined things can form the basis for very actions and even complex real world systems, as also things like nations and states are also basically just imagined things.
They exist on the basis of them having some commonly agreed properties, that are in the end imagined at first.
These imagined ideas affect and change also the reality. The reality can in fact be changed to such a extent by the originally purely imagined ideas that the reality may soon seem to be the source of the original idea, even if the real impact has been the other way around.

Of course the changes in reality can also effect the original purely imagined ideas so that they can become more real.
This dual process has been going on in the life of nation states for so long that it is impossible for very many people to see the purely ideological and imagined base of the idea of nation state.

The idea of a state does of course produce many kinds of physical manifestations, as religions do also have very visible physical organizations, even if their basic guiding principles are just imagined things that just enough people have agreed to accept. A failed state is born when enough people lose their trust in the basic idea of state.

So, the line between real and imagined things is not so clear-cut as one would think, but I do think that it is there, even if finding it can take some work sometimes.
However, the my main point is that you can imagine new things that will ultimately also affect reality, but they can have any effect on real world only after these ideas are turned into real world actions or objects, but this is a quite different thing than creating new reality by just imagining it, which was the original idea that I wanted to counter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_Anderson

Comments

” Too much of any good thing just might be bad."

I believe that in very many languages there are corresponding sayings, as this is one of the very basic truths of human life. It is of course the very core idea in the Epicurean thinking from 2400 years ago.

This thought originally came to me when I was thinking about the role of modern radical feminism.
I do honestly think that feminism has been one of the most important forces that have changed western societies for the better during the last decades. However, I do see that people who see the whole world through one single idea like feminism can also become even dangerous.

I do think that same rule applies in the end to any human idea. The development of a society can be even seriously hampered if it is governed to a too great degree by any single idea, be it as good and recommendable as it may originally have been.

My second principle is admittedly only derivation of the first, but with a bit Hegelian thinking added:

“The story of open societies is a story of ideas, their counter-ideas and their fusions. This cycle never ends, as the ideas that emerge victorious from the fusion will inevitably produce counter-ideas that will lead to new fusions and inevitably also to creation of new counter-ideas for the new ideas emerging from the fusions of the old ideas.”

Here is of course basically the old Hegelian idea of thesis, antithesis and synthesis with a new twist.
Hegel namely thought that this process will have an end, as it would lead to a perfect society. In my model the process never ends and does not even necessitate a improvement, even if that is often the case.
I do think that the genius of Hegel was to see that emerging and most of all victorious ideas always do produce a opposition that will challenge it and most important of all that this very opposition will change also the original idea.

This process is very easy to discern in the emergence of the green movement in the Western Europe. It was a counter-idea to the idea of ideology of economical growth.
Its emergence however did bring dramatic changes most of all in the ideologies governing the economical growth and how it was implemented.
This massive ideological change was far more important than the the real political importance of the green political movements themselves.

However when the green ideas did slowly become parts of the mainstream ruling ideology in a fusion of ideas, the new emerging ideas soon had even a prominent status that did produce counter-ideas that challenged to status quo.
Nobody yet knows what kind of fusion will emerge from this new clash of ideas.

This chain of endless clash of ideas works of course best in open societies. If a strong idea can get control of all of the repressive mechanisms of state, it can slow down or even stop for the emerging of counter-ideas for even a very long time.
Rome of Antiquity was a quite open marketplace for ideas for centuries, until rising Christianity wiped out and destroyed all differing ideas with effectiveness that has not been seen again before the rise of the Soviet Union.
In the end Christian Church controlled totally all forms of education, all forms of media, all forms of entertainment and was dominant also in all levels of local and state machinery.

This totalitarian control prevented the rise of any counter-ideas for long over a half of millennium until Renaissance and most of all Reformation did produce the counter-ideas that fused with the medieval Christianity to produce the modern reformed Christianity.
During this process also the Catholic church itself was radically transformed by the counter-ideas to produce a fused new modern Catholic church.

Similarly Communists in Soviet Union could prevent in a totalitarian system the emergence of new competing ideas for half a century, but once the lid of oppression was lifted for a single moment, the counter-ideas emerged immediately and destroyed the system.
That is of course the reason why Iranian government is now cracking on all signs of dissident, as they fear that the slightest show of lack of firmness could result in similar fall of ruling ideology as happened in the Soviet Union.

What ideas do emerge victorious at given time is of course decided by a multitude of factors. However, new ideas do normally gain widespread support only if their emergence is a result in changes in the social structures and in the societies themselves.
The emergence of Socialism and Communism was a result of the rise of industrial production that changed the lives of most working men often to the worse.
This process did produce a inevitable counter-reaction, but that it was just the Socialism that became the symbol of resistance to the naked exploitation of industrial capitalism was not inevitable at all.

I must now return to my first maxim. Socialism in its western democratic form did became the necessary counter-force that helped to iron out the worst excesses of capitalism.
The Social Democratic movement was in the end the main driving force that created the modern welfare-states. In these the spoils of a capitalist production model are divided in a radically more equal way then has happened never before in human history.

A paradoxical thing is that the rise in the living standards brought about by the labor movement was one of the crucial things in producing the mass markets that were needed for the rise of the modern capitalism in the first place, but also of the welfare-states that are paid for with the spoils of that very same capitalism.
On the other hand on the basis of the same socialist tradition was born the Bolshevik Soviet extremism, which of course is a typical case of too much of good thing turning bad.

Similarly the French revolution of 1789 was a result of objective changes in society, when the rising new educated middle class felt that it had been left out and cheated by the old feudalism. The new ideas that emerged represented that objective changes in society.
However, the new victorious ideas of equality and freedom led also tho the horrors of The Terror. It happened when followers of a single idea took over the power and too much of good thing was again at play.

It is not difficult to many other cases where this rule of ideas, counter-ideas and their fusion is easy to see at work.
Human societies are of course extremely complex things and one rule cannot of course explain their development, but I do think that the more one looks at the bigger picture of human history, the more this pattern emerges.

Comments

After spending a wonderful week deep in the world of philosophy, I ended up marveling how clearly every single philosopher presented in this fine book represented his own personality type, his personal history, his social class, and most of all the temperament of the society he lived in.
Btw. I use the word "he" here without hesitation, as the history of western philosophy was in the year 1945, when Bertrand Russell published his fine book, simply was the history of male philosophers.

The very basic thing of course is that every single person in this planet has had and has a personal philosophy on issues of life and universe.
So there are billions of different philosophies out there, even if most of them differ from others only in minor details and much of it is derived from the same sources.

Most of the people are of course not really aware of their personal philosophy and many even think that they are just continuing the old traditional way of thinking as diligently as they can.
However, every major event in our lives and in the lives of our near and dear ones does ultimately mold our personal philosophy.
These personal events do slowly make it more and more different from anybody else's. In the end these changes can accumulate and change our views in surprisingly major issues.

Ludwig Wittgenstein has the metaphor of philosopher and the ladder. I see it as philosopher climbing up a ladder and creating something while up in the top, but kicking at the end of his work the ladder out from the view.
I think this leads to a situation where a later visitor to a philosophy is not aware of the ladder that was used to create the end result, but is forced to evaluate only the end result, which is can be only a small part of the whole story.

Let's pause here for a little joke: "A philosopher is a person who thinks about things that do not have definite answers, but who thinks that he can provide them."

But seriously, a philosopher differs from a regular street-walker firstly on the point that he knows much, much more about the earlier ideas for answers on unanswerable questions, but most of all he has the time and financial backing to really put his mind on these issues that do not necessarily have real world applications at all.
Of course a really successful philosopher needs also to be a brilliant writer, bit of a showman and most of all to have an unwavering trust in his personal abilities.

Another joke (admittedly of the dry sort): "A person who does know exactly what all earlier philosophers have said, and can quote them at length, but does not have any real personal philosophy built on these foundations is just a stamp-collector."

But let's move on a bit in my ramblings in the strange world of philosophy. I personally do see that there are two different and at times even quite unconnected fields of philosophy.
The first is logic, which is at its worst just filling in crossword puzzles. It can be interesting and intellectually extremely rewarding, but do not necessarily have any kind of real meaning in the world of real humans.

Is see this world is part of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called the world of "word-games", where changing the rules of what words do mean one can create fantastic new games, which do also puzzle immensely and also often impress everybody who is not aware of the new rules.
In this hard world of logic there is known to live those legendary beasts called 'absolute truths', even if we really have only the word of some philosophers on their absoluteness.

For me personally this is a old and stiff world, where things have points and hard edges. I see this as the world of old stiffs with names like Aristotle, Kant or Hegel or Marx.
However, or course at its best logic can provide an deep insight on how our mind and most of all how our different ideas of language do work and how they affect the way our mind operates.

The second part of philosophy as I see it, is more my own cup of tea. I see that it consist presenting new and often personal visions and vistas into the way how our thinking, mind, humans and our universe do work, instead of claiming to present universal and absolute truths about them.
Also in this world of what I would like to call 'soft philosophy' or 'philosophy with a human face' there are also certainties that are much more certain than others, but they are at best of times at least subject to change if new and better ideas do emerge.

For me this is the world of Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, John Stuart Mill or Thomas Paine. In my mind it is in the modern times inhabited by for example likes of Bertrand Russell Karl Popper or A.C. Grayling and Daniel Dennett, even if all of them have put their passion into developing and furthering the field of logic also.
However, I do see that a modern philosopher need to earn his honors in the field of logic before he is taken seriously in this field.

This division is not a universal truth in any sense. It is just a product of my personal philosophy, which is just one of the billions of possible personal philosophies that are out there at this very moment, even if there can of course be other people who share it.

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I think that Finland is what it now is because we have had this wonderful ability to work out compromises after compromises after compromises.
No single ideology or political group has been able to dominate the government (for any longer period of time, at least) and we have been able to create a society that is quite balanced and well-behaved for a basically very capitalist society.

I know that there are people who scream that there are a million poor people according to a recent study in Finland.
I would however say that this is largely just relative poverty, and just a small part of this number is real poverty that really keeps people hungry and deprived of all amenities.

A sad fact of life is that the relative poverty will never, ever go away and it will always be with us. It will not go away even if general living standards of people improves ten or hundred-fold and the current poor would be living like princes, as then the rich would live like emperors and the relative feeling of poverty remains the same.

One can of course fight to diminish the differences in income and I do think that this is a fight we need to maintain. I claim that the success of Finnish society lies besides the ability to compromise largely in successfully curbing the general differences in income in a society-wide level.
This has of course been achieved mainly through success of labor movement, the activity of political left and also because of the leveling effect of taxation.
However, the differences in income are a quite another thing altogether than the feeling of hurt among those who have smaller income than others.

In the end one of the cold realities of life is that differences of income have always existed and will always exist. They existed in communist countries also, even if a conscious effort was done to prevent them,
I'm an Epicurean myself, and the Epicurean solution is to diminish the want, as mostly the feeling of hurt in relative poverty is a result of wanting something some others have but one cannot get.
This hurt prevails even after one has the basic necessities of life fully covered if others just have it markedly better in a society.

It is much easier to mend and lessen the feeling of hurt caused by relative poverty than to remove all differences in income completely.
In the end I fear that people will always find things to be jealous and hurt over even if everybody would get the exactly same amount of money.
I would like to add that all I say above is applicable only the well-to-do societies, where nearly everybody has the basics covered. Real hunger and deprivation will not go away even if you not pay attention to the bigger car of your neighbor.
However in an affluent society one of the main causes of anxiety is the relative feeling of deprivation and poverty. The level of deprivation or even poverty one feels is in fact mostly not decided by the real living conditions one has, but by how a person sees that the people one chooses to compare oneself are faring.

I must clarify myself on one point; I do believe that to attain the maximum well-being for a maximum amount of people we need a two-pronged assault in a modern well-to-do society.
On the other hand we need a assault on the real life excessive differences of income that inevitably do poison a society, when they reach a critical point.

But on the hand ensuring the happiness of people would demand them to diminish envy and most of all diminish the want for larger and more expensive things, as this never fully fulfilled desire keeps people unhappy.
Of course the last point is contrary the very basic teachings of capitalism and is very hard to combine with rising of general standard of living though economical growth. Just this process in the end has brought us the standard of living be enjoy now.

I however do think that there just might come a point where just maintaining what we already have could just be the wisest goal. I think we just could set new goals that would make activity on your own time-table, social life and simple leisure as important goals in life as a bigger house and a expensive pair of shoes are now.

PS. Alain De Botton has many wonderful ideas on this field and I have commented them here: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2010/01/31/why-do-we-cry-in-the-front-seat-of-a-bmw-7913966/

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I see that this process of automatic simplification is one of the very basic things that make human reasoning and abstract thinking possible, but it is extremely easily also overdone.
And always when the simplification is overdone, it can lead to a baseless beliefs of absolutes existing also in places and things where they do not exist.

Simplification is a very basic process also in most of the scientific work, as one simply must discard all the data that is not seen as important for the process that is currently studied to be able to form hypothesis of complicated phenomena.

In the field of philosophy and most of all logic simplification is always a very basic tool. Without it building any kind of philosophical abstractions would be nigh impossible.

Most strikingly it is however observable in the field of religions, where the birth of our whole universe can be explained in a few terse sentences and the whole extremely complex field of human morality and behavior leading to it can be explained in a few simple commands.

So, simplification is a extremely important tool in nearly all fields of human thinking, as without it is quite impossible to build any kind of general rules that can be used to explain our reality.
However, as in any other field of human endeavor, also in this the danger of overdoing it lurks all the time. I would go as far as to say that the danger of overdoing it is present every time a mind is doing these basically extremely necessary and important simplifications.

I do claim that a human mind very easily learns that the mental load it has to handle is lessened the more simple things are made to appear.
I believe that the more often this easing of mental load happens, the more one’s mind is prone to also simplify things too far and use the same process on things that in real world do not allow simplification, as also such things do exist.
There is a learning process going in the mind in this respect also. I think that the human mind very easily learns patterns that are repeated also in the fields where they are not applicable.

The greatest danger is that this urge for simple things leads all too easily to a search for absolutes and most of all absolute truths in things that such truths simply do not exist.
I see that this tendency is a very basic property of the human mind, but the level and need for of it is very personal.
I would think that there are great variation between individuals in this tendency also, as well as there are great variations in the tendency to end up in things like alcoholism or workaholism.

So, the human love for absolute truths is so based on very basic properties of the human mind. However, I do think that being aware of this process and of the dangers inherent in it, one can at least lessen the effects of our very natural tendency to find one simple truth that would explain everything.

PS. This piece is of course a gross over-simplification of the process that leads to the love of absolutes in humans...
In the end also this thing boils down to my old maxim "Too much of any good thing just might sometimes be bad."

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I'm however quite sure that for example Sam Harris is against the political Islamist extremism for quite different reasons and on a quite different agenda than for example the horrible Muslim-baiter Ann Coulter.
After all it is all too easy to fall into the mental trap of seeing the enemies of your enemies as your friends, even if in real life you would have nothing in common with them.

The situation where the most aggressive critics of Islam are from the right does not however in any way mean that there would not be other very good reasons to oppose the influence of political Islamic extremism.
Islamic extremism simply happens to be in direct and vocal opposition with all the things most liberal and progressive people do stand for in nearly all fields of life.

Islamist fundamentalists do oppose all the major ideas that the progressive and liberal movements have fought for decades.
For example Islamist do expressly deny the any ideas of equality of sexes, they demand absolute and unwavering submission from their wives and children, are strongly against giving even hint of human rights to any kind of sexual minorities and are openly working for strong limitations in the freedom of speech.
The current situation is of course made all more difficult by the fact that a large proportion of the Islam-critique of the political right is in fact thinly veiled racism and has clear racist motives at its heart.

In this kind of situation it is all too easy to put all critiques of Islam into same basket without looking at real motives or goals at all, even if Sam Harris and Ann Coulter just could not be more different in their motives and also in their goals, even if both do criticize Islam.
It is of course a very common fallacy to think that also the liberal and progressive people who oppose Islamic political extremism would somehow be friends of racists or even somehow hate Islamic people, as in the political right this kind of thing is quite common.

One must however bear in mind that similarly opposing communism as a ideology did not mean at all that one would have hated Hungarians or Poles when they were under the power of that evil system of thought.
I'm an ardent critic of Islamist extremism myself, but I do think that people of Iran or Saudi-Arabia are as good or bad humans as everybody else.

They are just under a repressive theocracy and opposing that evil government does not mean that one should have a single bad word to say about Iranians or Saudi-Arabians as humans, even if one strongly opposes the ideology that does produce medieval cruelty.
The real genius of political Islam is to use the special privileges offered by the status of a religion to further purely political agenda.
This is made all easier by the fact that most people have been raised in a idea that a religion is something quite different than other ideologies.

It is all too easy to forget that religion is not a genetic property at all, but just a refined form of ideology which is taught to the young people when they grow up, as well as mathematics or a any language is taught to them.

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The most significant thing for me at least was however that this book is one of first examples of Big History, from the time when the idea of Big History was still to be invented.
Big History is about finding the big changes and developments behind the historical stories and daily action of men and in just this field Bertrand Russell really excels.

He wrote this book during the Second World War, but its has no feeling of being dated at all. On the other hand he was way ahead of his own times in most issues and on the other hand our perception of at least ancient philosophy has has changed very little during the last 50 years.
I do think that Bertrand Russell is one of the few people in this world who could really write a comprehensive book on philosophy like this with having a personal opinion and having really personally analyzed all ideas that are presented.

Bertrand Russell was one of the really big names of western Philosophy himself and was in fact THE philosopher for decades in many circles.
The big thing here is that he had a personal but very well reasoned vision of what is important in philosophy and what ideas are worth presenting to a modern reader and what could be left to mere mention.

Bertrand Russell has a very personal relationship with many of the big names of the history of philosophy, but this personal relationship is just the thing makes this book so fascinating.
He is not merely presenting the big ideas of the past, but evaluating their meaning and also commenting on their value with a true air of authority given by his immense personal knowledge on the subject.
For example Plato gets on quite thorough bashing for building pure castles of the mind on clouds and presenting them as universal truths.

I’m at loss at finding the right words in describing one aspect of the book, as even if Bertrand Russell is a philosopher of the first magnitude on his own right, he can write so that a person with normal cognitive abilities can easily follow his train of thought.
Of course the convoluted systems of thought of the ancient philosophers are at times very hard to grasp, even if presented in a language that is clear as a bell.
One gets however never a feeling that the writer would have written something just to parade his skills as a writer, but to convey an idea on the best of his abilities, which is for me hallmark of great writing.

There are many real gems in this magnificent book. One of the big revelations for me was the influence of Platonism and Stoicism had on early Christianity.
I have been acquainting myself with Stoic thinkers lately and Bertrand Russell confirms what I have been suspecting all along; the builders of Christianity took a lot of their newfangled teachings straight from the Stoics and early Platonists.

The biggest thing for me at least was however a general view of how the western thinking has developed overall and what are the social forces that have molded it.
Bertrand Russell does not tell the dates of big battles or the names of the kings, but he presents his personal view on how the core ideas molding our societies have evolved in the past and why they have produced the kind of thinking they really have.

Bertrand Russell presents also the Christian thinkers in a quite objective way, which of course would be impossible, if he would be a Christian.
When he is not a Christian or a follower of any other kind of a other religious persuasion, he can look at also their ideas quite objectively and analyze the impact they have had in a objective way.
His objectivity does not stop him from making a stand when he sees it fit and just this mixture of objectivity and personal touch makes this book so great.
I really mean it; if you think that you need a refreshing course of the central ideas of western thinking, grab this book immediately!

Bertrand Russell is in Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bertrand-Russell/86711477873?ref=ts

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Both these dangers are made more serious by the fact that we humans do have an urge for simple answers that would explain in best cases the whole of universe in the case of religions and the whole of the human history in the case of Marxism.
This kind of sweeping grand explanations do not, however, belong to the true science. They are in fact often a mark of emerging and newly evolving field, as the more we know of something the more complex the explanations tend to became.

However, in the field of philosophy this tendency to oversimplifications does linger on often even unchallenged. Of course philosophy is not science in the sense physics or mathematics is, as in philosophy there are just competing human ideas and not verifiable or falsifiable truths.
I see that the basic danger in philosophy lies in beliefs that pure theoretical logic can be applied to human life, even if pure logic is something that can be universally ‘true’ only in mental vacuum that is devoid of real humans and populated by some kind of theoretical purely logical entities.

As soon as you start applying the results of pure logic to the real world, you stumble into difficulties. Pure logic that concerns human behavior is mostly just a gross oversimplification, where the human component of humans if left out and only the inner rules of logic are left to bear.
A typical example of this tendency is the famous categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant. It is build on a impeccable sequence of logical reasoning and it is based on quite faultless premises.
However, trouble starts immediately if you start using this mother of all simplifications as a yardstick in real human life, which is one of the most complex things there is.

A logical system applied to real world can of course produce even excellent results in some cases, but the problem is that if a theory is believed to explain all cases, the real world cases that do not fit the theory get a wrong explanation or remain unexplained.
The real problem arises if a thing like categorical imperative is presented as a natural ‘law’ like the ‘law of gravity’, even if it is applicable only to a certain ideal cases of human behavior.
Then it is not at all a tool in explaining the real world like the idea of gravity, but just a theoretical idea that works only in the world of pure logic.

A thing like categorical imperative may well even be totally ‘true’ when measured as a product of logic, but the trouble is that pure theoretical logic is all too often not applicable to the real world. So, a thing like categorical imperative can be a wonderful piece of logical engineering, but be at the same the quite useless in the real world.
However, the real danger here lies in the fact that a belief in the correctness of faultlessness of the logic that is used in a purely theoretical thing like categorical imperative can overflow to the real world.

This erroneous belief can create a false idea of there being simple and immutable logical ‘laws’ also in the field of human behavior, when in fact it is one of the most complex and most fast-chancing things there is.
The very basic components of it have changed immensely during the course of human evolution and most of all during the cultural evolution of the last 20 000 - 30 000 years.

The problem is that there is this tremendous urge to have simple explanations for things that are important to us. This lure of simplicity keeps of course the religions alive, as they offer the simplest and easy to accept explanations there is, but it lurks also in science, as having simple immutable laws governing things do make life so much easier.

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As I see it, he is not arguing for any kind of "absolute morality", but he is arguing that there can be a objective view to compare and even value the different effects that the different competing ideas of morality do produce in human societies.
I do think that there is a huge difference between a “absolute” morality and this kind of “best possible” morality.

An absolute idea never changes, but I do think that one can strive to achieve an objective view also of the effects the different visions of morality are producing in the real world.
It can be based on analyzing the moral ideas that produce the best results in furthering human flourishing at a given society in a given state of development. This kinds of ideas are not absolute and do develop and change with time.

There has been attempts to create a logical “objective morality”, of which Immanuel Kant and his categorical imperative is the best known example ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative ).
I do not however think that it would be in reality possible to build a faultless logical system to explain a wildly complex thing like morality. I do not even think that Sam Harris is after anything like this.
Kant was of course just a child of his ignorant times even if as a German he was fond of building as impressive systems of reasoning as possible out of his pet ideas. His categorical imperative can be a fine idea, but it just is a human idea among hundreds or thousands of human ideas.

The main problem with categorical imperative however is that it is a gross simplification of reality similarly as theoretical mathematics is always a gross simplification of reality.
It is all too easy to forget that even the best theoretical mathematical notions do not necessarily mean anything if translated to the real world.

Even 2 + 2 = 4 is absolutely true only if the things that are counted are imagined entities. In real world it is often even difficult to really define what could be included in a group of two and where its boundaries do go.
There are for example a wealth of cases where it is impossible to define the boundaries of one entity, so you could say with certainty what is the thing you are even counting.
It is for example often quite impossible to say where a hyphae of one fungus stops and another starts and even if there are one or several fungi at a given location. When counting something is impossible, the absolute theory of 2 + 2 = 4 is just practically useless in real world.

Other thing that is so easily forgotten when talking about moral issues is that most basic traits in human behavior are biological. It has been successfully argued that we have evolved also common moral and ethical qualities as a species.
Marc D. Hauser shows this quite convincingly in his fine book “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right & Wrong”. More of his ideas here: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2010/01/25/is-there-an-inherent-sense-of-morality-shared-by-all-humans-7873171/

I'm of course just stating here my personal view on the issue, nothing more, nothing less. I would however boldly state that the main thing here is that even if absolute truths can well exist in logic, but even the ultimate and valid logical claims do not necessarily have absolute and universal real world implementations.

However, I don’t see that Sam Harris would be advocating even such a Kantian version of objective morality. I see that Sam Harris is just saying that there can be objective and most of truly scientific ways to analyze what kind of ideas of morality do produce the best results in furthering human happiness.
I do not think that he is saying that we need to force all people to behave according to our own scientific view on morality. I do not believe that he is out to create a Utopia based on the best possible morality and I do think that would certainly see this kind of suggestions offending

Sam Harris is a scientist and I suspect that enforcing of some kind of universal "absolute morality" did not even cross his mind when he wrote his book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values", which is coming out on 5th of October.
I do suspect that he was just thinking and writing in response to people who say that we cannot judge at all even things we deem as very bad, if they just are done in the name of a different culture or religion.

The main thing here for me at least is the ability to say; “Hey, but this thing here is not furthering the best interests of humans or our planet”, even if the thing is done in the name of a tradition, ideology or even a religion.
This does not mean at all that I would be forcing people to live according to my ideas or for example advocating invading the countries that do implement a version of morality which is not producing good results in human flourishing.

However, being able to even to state aloud the obvious differences in different kinds of visions of morality is a big step forward.
I do believe that seeing and accepting these differences can have an impact in the long run most of all in the universal marketplace of ideas that the world of Internet, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia is fast building.

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I would go as far as to say that the love of absolute truths is the real enemy of mankind and not the ideologies that are offering these absolute truths. At least most of them can be tamed, if just the absurd longing for absolute truths is first extinguished.
The extremely crucial point is always arrived at when one starts suspecting that there is no single Unshakable Final Truth, but that even many parallel lesser truths are possible.

Of course this idea of the dangers inherent in all of the absolute truth is just a opinion too and not a absolute truth in itself.
However, I do not think that this kind of thinking will necessarily lead to absolute relativism either, if we just are able to see that there are values that we accept as universally worthwhile and worthy of forwarding and even defending also.
For this deep appreciation for the very basic human values to be built we need not to see these things as absolute and unmoving truths, but only just as the best possible truths available to humanity just at the moment.

I do think that even the most loving, good and and in all ways recommendable ideas are still just opinions and not absolute truths, even if would impossible for a normal, caring person to see why would one ever reject them.
I do think that we just must get used to living with the best possible or exceptionally good or even fantastically truthful truths instead of absolute and unmoving truths, if we want to humanity to develop any further.
Of course having absolute certainty is a very pleasant condition for a human. As human being is a pleasure seeking animal, a person will willingly succumb to it time after time, the more so if he is not aware of the dangers inherent in this kind of thinking.

On the other hand passion is the very essence of human life and the engine of all worthwhile human enterprise. Exaggerated and overblown passion is, however, the real curse of mankind, as this overblown, exaggerated passion is just the basic fault in human thinking that so easily leads to birth of ‘absolute truths’. Too much of any good thing is simply is all too often bad.
Most of all love could just be the most relative thing that there is, and just in the name of love of one’s neighbor the most passionate and dangerous ‘absolute truths’ are born and manufactured.

The Italian philosopher and scientist Giordano Bruno was burned naked, gagged and tied to a wooden stake at the Campo de’Fiori in Rome at 17. of February in the year of 1600 condemned as a heretic.
The main reason for his sentence was of course that he had strayed from the Christian version of the absolute truth.
St. Augustine states that "whoever draws away anyone from the universal Church to any sect, is a murderer and a Child of Satan". St. Thomas Aquinas says in “Summa Theologica II-II, Q.10, art.3, ff; art.6: "The unbelief of heretics, who confess their belief in the Gospel and resist that faith by corrupting it, is a more grievous sin than that of the heathens, because the heathens have not accepted the faith in any way at all. Hence, the unbelief of heretics is the worst sin."

So, why did they burn Giordano Bruno? Not because they would have hated him personally, but because they loved their neighbors so much that they wanted to spare them from an eternity in hell, because of an heretic like Giordano Bruno could have lead them astray from the only possible absolute truth and to spend an eternity in hell for this heinous crime.
These just and righteous men who burned him simply had an an absolute truth that they had never questioned.

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When Christianity took over in Europe, the mystical and supernatural got the definite upper hand, but the big difference was that Christianity did not respect the rational side of humans and it was totally suppressed for a long time.
There were of course thinkers who tried to make Christianity more rational, as the rationally inclined people did not disappear even during its heyday in the medieval times, they just had to try to adjust Christianity to suit also their needs, for which it was sorely ill equipped.
However, as the mystical side of humanity had a clear and unchallenged supremacy in the early medieval times, the majority of the naturally more rationally inclined part of the population just had to bide their time.

The new resurgence of rationality was however luckily not far away, as Renaissance and most of all the Age of Enlightenment were just signs of the return of rationality to societies.
In the end rationality got the upper hand again in Western Europe and the modern western nations can well be described as societies that are based on central ideas of rationality.

I do not however think that a completely rational society is ever possible. There is a unavoidable irrational element in all of us. In some people it is always more marked than in others.
Even if I do claim that the best, most workable and just societies have been those where rationality has had the upper hand and it has been the primary guiding voice in society, but in where also the mystical side of human thinking has been allowed to flourish.

The misery of medieval Europe did show how the unchallenged superiority of the mystical will lead society to a terrible dead end. On the other hand the example of Soviet Union did also show where a totally unchallenged belief in the absolute superiority of purely human ideas can lead.
In the end the core problem in Soviet Union was of course the irrational and very religion-like belief in the absolute superiority of certain human ideas.
I have said in this blog before that I do think that in s successful society all interest groups in the society must have a say in how the common affairs of a society are run and most of all parties of society do respect the rights of others.

Similarly I do think that both the rational and the mystical side of human nature must be respected in a successful society for it to achieve a true state of flourishing, even if I think that the basic guiding principles of the society must be based on rationality.
The most successful and most of all enduring societies in human history have been those where ideas have been free to flow. The mixing and matching of ideas does produce new ideas and new ideas are the real fuel of human progress.

Even if I am an atheist, my goal is not a society where there would be only atheists, also because I do fear that it is simply impossible to achieve. There has always been people who are ultimately drawn to the mystical and there are no indications that this tendency would be disappearing in the future either.
Even if I accept this, I can however fight for a society where social, political and economical decisions are made on the base of analysis of reality as much as possible and not based on any religious dogma in my own society and in all societies of the world.

This does not mean at all that I would be striving for rooting out of all religions, but I am fighting for the diminishing of their role as a basis for decision making on the level of society.
I do think that a human society does need all kinds of ideas and (even bad ones) to really flourish, as the battle of the ideas is a major thing in producing new social, political and cultural innovations.

However, not all mystical and supernatural ideas are equal; some are more limiting and demanding of their followers than others.
I think a true free-thinker does not need think of all supernatural ideas as one big lump, but need to see that some of them offer a markedly better base for human flourishing than others.
For example the modern protestant state churches of the Western Europe represent a wholly different kind of world view and practical guidelines to life than their predecessors a few hundred years ago or the Pentecostal or other revivalist movements of today, that have made life and politics especially in the United States so difficult for more rational people.

The modern western Protestant state churches have evolved so that they can exist respecting and operating within the framework of the modern pluralistic, free and open societies, when Islam for one is still waiting for this development to happen. This applies to a lesser degree to the extremely conservative mainstream Catholic Church also.
All this does not mean that I would not think that rational humanism is the best medicine for the main ills of humanity, but that I just think that the irrational, mystical side of humanity needs to be allowed to be find expressions also, if we want to create workable and most of all stable societies.

I'm saying that even though I do think that rational humanism is the overwhelmingly superior answer; but I think it can never be the only or absolute truth.
If I would ever make a claim like that, I would not be any better than those who believe in the 'absolute truths' so eagerly still offered by the religions.

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I however think that the thing works even more the other way around; living standards tend to rise when the number of children per family does actually drop.
I don't say that Hans Rosling would have it wrong; I'm just suggesting that the thing works both ways and the other is a necessary and vital component of the other and it is very difficult to have the other without the other too.

Admittedly everyday logic is not always the best tool in economy, but here it works in a quite straightforward way. The more people there is to share of the accumulated wealth of a nation, the less a single individual will get.
Of course the accumulated wealth is just a small part of the equation, as the important thing in modern growth economy is producing new wealth. One can well suggest that the more there are consumers, the more they will produce and buy and make the economy go around faster.
However things are not so easy at all in economics. One very important thing is that the more there are new children, the more resources must be used to educate them. In fact the share of a individual will be the smaller the more there of them are to share the limited resources.
So the more children are born, the less education they will get individually and the less useful they will in general be for the economy.

Even bigger thing is that in a situation where the number of available work-force greatly outnumbers the available openings in the workplace, the price of work will not rise.
The average income of the workers in western world has risen for a great deal during the last century largely because there has been scarcity of labor.

Employers have simply had to pay more to attract workers. This is largely because the rise of easy to use and safe methods of population control kicked in and greatly diminished the flow of new workers to the markets.
Modern western mass-markets were born when the scarcity of labor and of course also the major work done by labor-movements did cause a rise in the pay of the workers to such a level that they could finally start consuming.

The great paradox of capitalism is that in the end it needs workers that have a enough money to create a market for the very goods capitalism produces, but single capitalists are never willing to pay for their own employees more than they are forced to do.
A single enterprise looks at only after its own narrow interest and pays just as much as it is forced to do by the current circumstances to be able to give as much money as possible to its owners, as it simply exists for the sole purpose of creating short-term profit for its owners.

A very important factor in this situation of course is the impact of trade unions and also of leftist political movements. Unions are however also in a major disadvantage in situations where there is a oversupply of workers available, as is currently the case in the developing world.
I would go as far as to say that that the rapidly expanding population in third world countries is in fact one of the greatest obstacles in achieving any kind of economic, social and political progress in these countries.

Economy is of course a immensely complex thing and population is only one factor. It however affects so many other moving parts of the economy that it may be one of the most wildly underestimated and universally not-openly-spoken of factors of economy.
There are many different reasons for this rejection. One important thing is that it does not fit into political agenda of the anti-imperialist movement´.
Considering over-population as a factor would seemingly in their mind diminish the importance of their ideological agenda of imperialism and colonialism as the major or even sole cause for underdevelopment in the Third World.
They seem to fear that taking local factors into account would undermine their overriding single Great Idea.

The sad fact is that have all too often wielded an unholy alliance with the major religions.
A sad fact of life is that do all too often even wholly oppose population control, as the Catholic Church is or are so interested in growing their support-base that they do in practice oppose population control as is the case with Islam and more or less with Hinduism, even if no real doctrinal reasons for this opposition do not exist.

This highly unholy alliance has produced a situation where even discussing population control as a remedy for the economic ills of Third World seems to be all too much for many.
When ideologies like religions come to play the very simple and practical matters become all too often complicated and impractical.
The rise of China after the madness of strict Maoism was possible largely because of the one-child policy, that was the cornerstone on which the current rise of China is built.

I would suggest that real, fast and extremely concrete investments in population control would produce results that would outshine soon the results of all of the current aid to developing world.
The developing countries simply would soon have more to invest to every child that is born and their way to respectful and full life would soon be made much easier than it is now.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html

Comments

This letter came to limelight just a couple of years ago and it did bring new light to the troubled relationship Albert Einstein did have with religions, which has been a subject of considerable debate throughout decades.
As you see he uses expressions that are very hard to see as any kind of support for organized religion.
Einstein did expressly gave up all notions of Jews as some kind of 'chosen people'.
Einstein did send this in reply letter to philosopher Eric Gutkind, who had first sent him his book 'Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt'. Einstein's letter ended up in private hands where it did stay until it surfaced again a couple of years ago.

Einstein was born into a Jewish family, but he did go to a Catholic school, where he experienced a wakening to Judaism, but gave up even that religion at the tender age of 12, when he started to doubt the truth value of the biblical stories.
His parent were in practice very secular and very attached to general German culture. Einstein did once describe his parents as 'non-religious'.
Later Einstein did describe his giving up of faith like this in his book Autobiographical Notes:

"Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression. Mistrust of every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude toward the convictions that were alive in any specific social environment — an attitude that has never again left me, even though, later on, it has been tempered by a better insight into the causal connections."

However in his later years he sometimes used expressions like 'cosmic religious feelings' and his earning to feel 'the universe as a cosmic entity'. Famous is also his expression that 'God does not play dice' when he spoke about the quantum theory.
The Christian are fond to show that Einstein did value many Jewish and Christian traditions and he really did think that religions are vehicles for transferring cultural values.
However he discarded in strong words the very idea of any kind afterlife and the idea of a personal god.

In the book "The World As I See It" (1935) he wrote:

"I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts.
I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

However in an interview he gave at the year 1929 he denied being an atheist, but on the other hand thought that the label of pantheist was too restricting for him.
On the other hand in the same year of 1929 he did send the famous telegram to rabbi Herbert Goldstein, where he said he believed in the 'God of Spinoza' this is to say in pantheistic god that in practice is the entity of the Universe.

He wrote:
"I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings."

It is good to remember at this point that philosopher Baruch Spinoza was driven out of the Jewish community for presenting just these ideas and he was condemned in a rare state of cherem, where no Jew was allowed to have any contact with him.
Of the contemporaries of Einstein the Cardinal of Boston William Henry O’Connell rejected the Einsteinian religious thinking with strong words and thought that his ideas were just a "authentic atheism, even if camouflaged as cosmic pantheism."

It is easy to see why William Henry O’Connell would have said what he did, as in reality any personal relationship with the idea of god has no real value for Christianity if this god is not The God of their religion and nothing else.
A pantheistic idea of god is of no value at all for Christianity, as it does not lead to accepting Christianity as the only source of truth.
From the viewpoint of Christianity Einstein was a pagan, as he did not believe on their version of god at all.

Einstein probably was not a true atheist, but he was not a true theist either. The older he got, the less he could stomach the religions and religious organizations of his day.
However, he generally avoided public row and was often very gentle in his public criticism, but as the private letter in the beginning of this piece show, he did harbor even very strong negative sentiments about religions.

He did never have any kind of personal connections with any kind of organized religion and his visions of a pantheistic universal idea behind the existence of nature were not compatible with the very basic ideas of Christianity of Judaism at all.

In this quote is finally the answer to the question in the headline:

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion.
A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man...
I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

Albert Einstein in "The World As I See It"

Comments

I claim that this was a example of zeitgeist or “The spirit of the age” at work at its purest. The universal perception of what is good and permissible behavior had simply changed in Great Britain.
After the mental change there was just rear-guard actions to make the change possible in real world.
There were of course people in Britain who did not see any need to change the existing order, but they were just overrun be the incredible force of the zeitgeist in this case.

Of course the changes in zeitgeist do follow and mostly are direct results of real social and economical changes in societies.
When for example the new class of wealthy bourgeoisie emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, this emergence caused a major change in zeitgeist of the time.
Ultimately even the legitimacy of the god-given order of feudalism was questioned when this new social and economical force wanted to have a say in running affairs of the society.

I would even go as far as to say that many or even most of the true big permanent changes in human history have in fact been caused by changes in prevailing zeitgeist.
The rising zeitgeist often gets often a practical implementation in some new form of formal ideology. However ideologies do change societies much more subtly than just recruiting followers and gaining power, as the reactions towards a new ideology can have more even important consequences than the ideology itself would ever produce.

The role of zeitgeist has of course been greatly intensified by the advent of the mass media, but it has always played a great role, as just a few book could change the way the elite perceived the world. In the world before advent of democracy a surprisingly small group of educated humans governed and guided whole societies and their development.
A major change in their thinking could change the way how the society was run quite instantly.

Many scholars think that the American revolution and war for independence were finally triggered by publication of a handful of treaties and books by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and other future leaders of the revolution.
Of course there were deeper economical, psychological and social reasons for the revolution, but in the end the new breed of writers changed the prevailing zeitgeist in America to such extent that rising against the god-given order of things finally did became mentally possible.

How would the revolutionary movement of the "Mad Year" of 1848 have affected in a few months countries all over Europe, if the emerging zeitgeist would not have been preferring revolution?
However, the year 1848 is a good example of how changes in zeitgeist does not always immediately lead to permanent changes in societies, as in the end these revolutionary movements were destroyed with the use of brute force in the year 1848.
Changes in zeitgeist do not often affect those in positions of power and raw physical power is often the thing that really counts in the end.
Similarly the rapidly spreading revolutionary zeitgeist of the year 1968 was crushed under the Soviet tanks in Prague in the spring of 1968 and in the street-fighting in Paris.

The changes in zeitgeist can be sudden and unpredictable. For example suddenly it was on lips of every thinking person that it is a really a evil thing to own slaves, even if a thinking person like Mark Twain saw nothing wrong with it in is his childhood as late as in the 1840’s.

This incredible force of zeitgeist is in my mind also the force behind the incredible transformation of the modern Christianity. It is all too easy to forget how incredibly dictatorial, closed-minded, change-resistant, bigoted, ultra-conservative and anti-intellectual the Christian world was just 300-400 short years ago.

Of course there are strains of Christianity that are still all that, but overwhelming majority of the modern Christians do not look at world though their religion at all or religion has very little real influence on their thinking in practical matters of running a society at least.
If religion is observed at all besides the traditions in use at the holidays it does not dictate or even guide in any way their views on matters with real importance.

There has happened an incredible transformation from the quite recent times when in Christian lands one was bound to see in fact all issues through the distorting lens of religion. Religion ultimately dictated the whole mental outlook of most Western societies as late in as in the 19th century.

The rise of humanism in Renaissance and the re-discovery of the great humanistic philosophers of the Antiquity started a road to change.
The rise of science and finally the Reformation did help to foster produce a incredible change in the zeitgeist of the western world that did in the end change also the modern Christian churches in a way that was never seen before.

At first dozens, then hundreds and finally thousands of books, pamphlets and treatises did show that one can just quite forget the teachings of the Church altogether and use reason to find out new things.
The final blow for the earthly power of the Christian churches was the secularization of the state that was carefully tried out first in emerging United States, but started in earnest in the revolutionary France in 1789 and continued to spread even if force of that revolution itself was spent.

The most important single thing was of course the simple observation that secular science works and it can bring real world benefits with it.
This simple observation did slowly eat away at earlier times so solid and closed Christian world-view. It was slowly and laboriously replaced with a more open zeitgeist in which religion played a smaller and smaller part.

In this process also the Christian churches were often changed beyond recognition when they accepted values that had earlier been propagated by secular humanists.
The core values of most of the Western Churches were turned into a radically more human and humanistic direction.

This change in zeitgeist of the age is the main reason why so many Christians were in the end prominently involved in the abolition of slavery, even if the Christian doctrine had always blessed and sanctioned slavery and serfdom and the very core texts of that religion still do openly approve and bless that evil institution.
This process is of course the reason why so many religious leaders are so impatient in debates where they are reminded of the original "divine" articles and dogmas of their faith.
They know quite well that the practical policies of their religious movements are just man-made constructions that are in a constant state of evolution.
They know very well that the original articles of faith are something that are just paraded at big feats to please the crowds and amuse the slow ones.

For example they know quite well that their sacred texts do tell that slavery is a god-given thing, but they do not think that their god had it right.
They know also that if they would admit this publicly, the "divine" base of their religion would fall off, as then they would admit that their religion is just a man-made thing that men do constantly alter.

The claims for divine origins are however the only things that do differentiate religions from other ideologies and no religion wants to be treated like a normal ideology it really is.
The more so as they have fought long and bitter campaigns to secure special privileges to any ideology, if it just claims to be a religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist

Comments

I do honestly think that to lead a happy and fulfilling life a human must have goals that are even a tiny little bit larger than life.
I think that these goals can very well be unreachable in practice, but the very act of striving towards them could lead to improvement in any area of the human enterprise.
This normally requires commitment to some ideas and ideals that humans have developed when they have been thinking on how our societies could be improved and developed further.

For example, I do personally think that the weak and defenseless will always need special attention and support from the society, as the mentally and physically strong will always survive without special support.
I also see employed need defenses against the danger of absolute rule of the employers, as employers have all the good cards in the game. To even this field there must be a counter-force to prevent somebody wielding a absolute power.

I want to fight for a society where are humans are treated as equally as possible, even if true equality is really unattainable in practice.
These all are all just human ideas invented by ordinary humans, but I do personally think that they are necessary ingredients in building just and well-working societies.
However one needs not to rely just on beliefs on these issues, but one can quite rationally study how different kinds of real-world societies have succeeded or failed while taking into account or ignoring these basic ideas.

I do not however think that all people should think as I do. I really do think that also the strong and well-to-do must have their fair say in making the decisions that are made in a good society.
I do think that all interest groups must have a say in how a society is run for it to be successful. I do not want that people who share my ideological goals should ever wield absolute power in the society.

I think that all members of the society should be able to accept at least at some level the basic ideas on which a society is built on for it to work properly.
This is of course the Scandinavian model and it has been a real success-story. Of course it is not the only possible model for a good society, but one does not need to be a believer to see its full merits, as they can be observed in the real world.

In the same vein I do think that this idea of real ideological pluralism should be applied in religious matters too.
I do think that for example Christianity has never been able to cater for spiritual needs of all kinds of people, that do think that they need and want a source of spiritual guidance in form of a formal religion. I also believe that this group of basically dissatisfied customers of Christianity have been growing fast during the last few decades.

There will without doubt always be a big market for religious ideas, but I do also think that one could well also introduce also a more rational systems of thought to compete with the existing religions, that are still quite universally based on irrational claims of 'divine' origins of their central dogmas.

The ancient Rome was a magnificent example of an well-working open marketplace for religious ideas. Very different religious ideas competed fiercely for audiences until the rise to power of the extremely intolerant Christianity did finally put on end to this intellectual freedom.
In the Western world we have had of course a very similar open marketplace for a while, after all forms of Christianity were finally slowly and painfully forced to accept a certain level of religious freedom.
Of course it has had the force of tradition and in many nations also the schooling system to prop it up and give it a major and solid advantage in its quest for souls.

In the Roman world one size did not really fit all in religious matters. There were different kinds of religions of offer for different kinds of people and Epicureanism was the preferred choice for more rational and logical people in this supermarket of religious ideas of Rome.
Epicureanism is in the end not a real religion at all in the modern sense.
It is basically just a tightly knit and comprehensive philosophical system of thought, that does not claim any kind of divine inspiration as its source.
However it also offers a very clear-cut set of ethical and moral rules that many people seem to be looking for in religions.

Epicureanism is basically just a practical philosophical solution to the problem of achieving greater mental stability and even happiness in a society where securing the basic needs of life did not require much effort anymore and where people could finally afford the luxuries of weltschmertz and angst.
Epicureanism was the 'religion' of choice for the many of the more educated in the ancient Greece and Rome. Pronouncing oneself to be a Epicurean gave one a religious identity in a society where such labels were expected from all.

However followers of Epicureanism did never aim at converting the whole of population, as it was clearly seen that one needs to personally really want to start a search for greater peace of mind to become a Epicurean.
In the religious freedom of Rome those drawn to tradition could choose to worship the old Roman gods, those more inclined to mysticism could choose Mithra or cult of Isis and the more logical and rational ones Epicureanism or also its old adversary Stoicism.
Btw. Stoicism did introduce a taste of deistic way of thinking to the Epicurean base, when Epicureanists managed well without any kind of ideas of supernatural entities.

I do think that there are a lot of people who are searching some ideas and basic rules to guide their lives.
I do think that rational and logical Epicureanism would and could still be a very usable answer to many if it just could be brought out again to compete in the modern open marketplace of religious ideas.

The important point for a modern man is that Epicureanism really can produce real world results in the form of increase in peace of mind and even in general happiness and satisfaction with life.
Of course if these results fail to materialize, as inevitably will for some (as one size does not really fit all), it is in an open society very easy to discard it and try something else.

Also Epicureanism is of course just a human invention among many similar inventions, but I see that it offers a rather convincing and very helpful system of seeing and understanding the very basic things that are really important in human life.
However, I do not think at all that Epicureanism would ever be the ONLY possible answer and not at all that even that it would suit all people.
It seems that some level of life-experience and even some familiarity with philosophical thinking seems to be a requirement for person really to be able to appreciate the Epicurean way of thinking.

In any case, I do not think that Epicureanism should be taught as the only possible way to think to infants or even to young people in schools, even if I do think that giving all people at least a taster of Epicurean ideals could not be a bad thing at all.
However the central ideas of Epicureanism also could well be presented of the grand tour of all great human ideas, that should be part of curriculum of every school in the world, but is so sadly lacking in most.

I do also ultimately think that it could well be possible to revigorate the rational Epicurean school of thought to really compete it out with the modern theistic religions.
Epicureanism was of course once defeated and utterly destroyed by Christianity. However this defeat was not inflicted on the fair battlegrounds of the original open marketplace of ideas.
It happened only after Christianity finally achieved the status of ideological monopoly and the force of state behind it after the dictatorial rulers of Rome did finally choose it as their preferred religion.

In a modern open society the clearly defined but basically very rational system of thought offered by Epicureanism could just be the real thing for many people that do find the theistic systems of though as unsatisfactory and seek for other sources of moral and ethical guidance.

I do not however know how this revigoration of Epicureanism could be achieved in real world, but I do know that there already is a solid base of individual Epicureans all over the world.
They have often have found this rational system of thought through individual explorations to history of philosophy. The very existence of this quite spontaneously born community speaks volumes of the value of Epicurean system of thought for also a modern person.

I have presented and tried also to explain (according to my limited abilities, of course) the basic ideas of Epicureanism also in this blog, see:
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/tags/epicurus/

More info on Epicurus and Epicureanism at:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Epicurus/79493658728
http://www.epicurus.net/

Comments

Karl Popper was of course talking about the Nazis and Communists in this quote, but there is a much earlier case where this quote just might have been applicable also.
As paradoxical as it may sound, but I think that the Romans who fought against the rising tide of Christianity were quite possibly not acting out of intolerance but they were out to defend tolerance. I admit that claim of this magnitude needs a little further explanation.

The basic thing is that Christianity was the first modern world-religion to claim to be the holder of The Universal and Only Possible Truth, and its followers consider it to offer the only righteous way to live for every human being on the planet.
Later there have been others that have followed suit, but Christianity definitely started this fashion.
Up to that point religions had the very practical purpose of binding together a certain tribe or later a political entity like the Roman Empire. They also gave a common reference point on what would be the preferred and allowed mode of behavior in the tribe or society at question.

Until the rise of Christianity most people understood that the neighboring tribe or people just had a different religion, but that was not better or worse than one's own, it was just theirs. They also often had a different language that was not better or worse than one's own language; it just was strange and unintelligible.
The religion of the neighbors was of course normally seen as inferior, as all the things one's own tribe do are normally seen as superior, but there was generally no need to make others worship your own gods even if you achieved political dominion over them.
The Persians allowed all of the people they conquered to continue worshiping their own old gods if they did not challenge their over-lordship of the empire.
The Romans had a very similar policy of tolerance as a central tenet and policy of their empire-building.
In that sense the Persian and Roman (and later Parthian) empires were very modern.

There was a definite freedom of religion and belief as long as the religions or beliefs of the subjects did not hurt the best interests of the empire.
Christianity was born out of Judaism, which was a basically just a tribal religion without any evangelical ambitions. Jews of course considered their religion to be superior than the others, but they did not see the need to convert their neighbors.
More so as according to their holy book the right way to deal with unbelieving neighbors was simply to kill them and plunder their possessions.

However, even in that religion there were embedded the seeds for the coming trouble, as Jews did already make a claim that their religion contained the Only Possible Truth about everything and it was just not Jewish version of the truth, but the Only Truth.
However, they were just not interested in the fate of other people than their own tribe, as their religion was still a tribal affair and would remain as such to this very day.

The idea of being the carrier of The Only Possible Truth was taken over from Judaism to Christianity, but the dangerous thing was that the Christianity was soon pulled out of the original Jewish tribal roots.
In the extremely multicultural environment of the Rome the brand new cult of Christianity was developed into a universal system of belief that was not tied to any particular nationality or tribe.
It must be remembered at this stage that only the existence of the Roman Empire made the spread of this new non-tribal religion possible in the first place in a manner that did really happen.

The act of creation of this empire had broken the national and tribal borders that would have made very difficult to spread a universal belief-system like Christianity before the rise of the Roman Empire.
Even more important was of course the religious tolerance of that empire, which made possible to spread this brand new cult in the first place.

This new model of universality in Christianity was largely derived from the mystical cults like the cult of Mithra and Isis that were very widespread in Roman empire the time of launching of the new cult that was to be a new religion later.
The amalgam of ideas of The Only Possible Truth and universality produced finally a religion that loudly pronounced that it could not live side by side with any other religion.
By doing this Christianity introduced a quite new class of religious intolerance into to that point a religiously very tolerant society.

This is a point where a person familiar with only the traditional Christian narrative asks; how can you claim that Rome was tolerant when Christians were persecuted for hundreds of years?
The point is that Rome was tolerant towards only those who were tolerant themselves, as only tolerant ideas that can live side by side with other religions can really live in a society built on the idea of tolerance.
Of course the thing that triggered most of the persecutions was that early Christianity was seen as a real danger to the empire, as Christians refused to acknowledge the ultimate overlordship of the Roman emperor on religious grounds.
In the end the power of Emperor was the only thing that did hold the Empire together at that point. This obstacle was removed at last by the conversion of the emperor to Christianity.

Romans destroyed mercilessly all those who stood up to their political power and for example the political entities of the Jews were utterly destroyed after they had challenged the Roman rule with their uprisings.
However, even after their failures Jews were however allowed to continue their old worship, even if the future political uprisings were made impossible by the physical dispersion of the members of the physical Jewish nation, that ceased to exist.

If you really think about it, it is not surprising that a new ideology that was seen as a direct physical threat to the idea of Empire was a subject to persecution.
The persecutors of the Christians quite correctly saw that they were defending their own religion and even their whole way of life from a new kind of ideological threat.
I must beg for forgiveness in forehand for the following figure of speech, but there is definite vision in my mind of leukocytes or white blood cells in the immune system fighting a bad case of severe mental infection; a infection that takes over completely the mind of its victims and makes them believe that no other idea has any worth anymore.

The element of intolerance towards all other religions was very easy to see in Christianity from early on. It was very easy to see at a very early point that given enough power Christianity would not simply let any other religion live.
This is also just what also happened when Christianity could eventually wrestle the ultimate power in Roman empire through succeeding in locking a ruling emperor to its fold.

All other religions were soon enough completely rooted out from the whole length of the vast Roman Empire.
The job was so thorough that in the end not a single village or even a single living person was left that would have been able to worship the old gods of the Romans after a century of persecutions, relentless official indoctrination and forced conversions.

All this was possible also because the original end-of-day cult of misfits and slaves was in the same time transformed into a tool for governing empires. This incredible transformation was carried out under the watchful eyes of the newly converted Roman emperors.
Emperor Constantine took personally part in the big church meeting in Nicea at 325 that took the big decisions that transformed Christianity beyond recognition.
These decisions made it possible to turn this religion of the poor and downtrodden to be the true and trusted friend of the mighty and powerful, but still retain an illusion of being also still the former also.

However, I must hasten to add at this point that one must not read this as an endorsement of physical persecution of even of the most intolerant people.
What Romans did to Christians was simply humanly wrong and I personally never could accept a policy like this to be applied to followers of any ideology, tolerant or intolerant.
On old problem is to see that understanding the reasons for actions is not the same thing as accepting or endorsing them.

Rome was a cruel and barbaric military empire, that was build with cruel and barbaric military campaigns. All enemies of the empire were treated mercilessly and cruelly.
As long as Christians were seen as enemies of the Empire and of the established order they were treated as mercilessly and cruelly as any other threat to the Empire and to the established order.

It is good to remember that after Christianity had become the chosen religion of the rulers of the Empire, Christian themselves started the persecution of their own to destroy all the other religions, which they also swiftly accomplished and there ensued nearly two millennium of a extraordinary intolerance and uniformity of thinking.

This strong embedded tradition of extreme intolerance in Christianity was broken only by the advent of the secularist humanist ideas in the beginning of the 18th century.
Slowly also the Christian churches were forced to lose their traditional system of extreme intolerance, as societies around them became more and more secular.
The real turning point came after force of the Catholic Church was eventually broken by the Reformation. In its aftermath the new national versions of Christianity started adapting in earnest to the tremendous changes that were happening around them that were largely brought about by the advanced in science.

This happened also because some of the religious leaders of the time were seeing the light of the message of western humanism. This development brought about also the renaissance of the religious tolerance.
The modern mainstream Christian churches are generally quite tolerant forces in society in stark contrast to their Roman and medieval predecessors.
This tolerance had by then been missing for millennium and half after the Romans had lost the battle to the forces of intolerance.

PS. The quote by Karl Popper in the beginning of this piece continues like this:

"In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."

PPS. Many ideas concerning the tolerant empires presented in this little essay come originally from Amy Chua, see: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2010/01/03/can-intolerance-make-empires-fail-7687330/

Comments

I wanted also to explore why it is so hard to accept people who think or live differently than oneself for so big part of the human kind.
In this blog there are now 239 little essays that have been commented 683 times and they have been seen by 315 021 visitors after the founding of this blog at December of 2007.

This blog is not a traditional web-diary at all, as no entry has any connections to my own daily life or the daily news or happening in the world at large.
This blog is just a personal journey into world of beliefs, that I have been observing as a outsider ever since my early childhood.

This collection of little essays is a tentative attempt to answer the question I presented in the beginning of this piece.
I know that this may sound quite preposterous, but I think I have also succeeded in finding at least some good and even very possible answers to these questions.

These are however generally not my own answers, but the essence of ideas presented in this blog come from Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Robert G. Ingersoll, Mark Twain, Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Karl Popper, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Kurt Vonnegut, Andy Thompson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michel Onfray, Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, Bill Bryson, Alain De Botton, A.C. Grayling, Jared Diamond, Colin Renfrew, Benedict Anderson, Steven Weinberg, Nicholas Humphrey, Amy Chua, Carl Sagan, Christopher Tyerman, Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, Lewis Wolpert, Victor J. Stenger and many others, whose work have been a source of inspiration for most of these essays in some way or another.

These essays are not science as such, even if they are always based on the facts that are known to me, as there are no references and no sources.
They are a free amalgam of the ideas of the all the books, essays, video-appearances, speeches and lectures on this issue that I have gone through during my 52 years on the surface of this little blue planet of ours.

My lifelong passion and love-affair with world history hopefully shines through in these essays, and I personally see as my strongest point just the ability to set different belief-systems in their real historical context.
I may sound preposterous again, but I see that these 239 little essays form a honest effort to explain what science knows now about the origins, development and nature of some of the most important world-religions.

I know that I have pushed the limits in some essays and presented some strong opinions, that are mostly based on my personal vision on the history of mankind.
However I think that new ideas need to be explored as they just might throw new light on issues that have been looked at from a certain often restricted viewpoint for some time.

Comments

The major problem however is that the moral codes of all major modern religions were born in a quite different ancient societies. Their answers to moral dilemmas facing people in extremely different modern societies are very often simply outdated and even wrong ones by now.
For example 2000 years ago overpopulation was not seen as a problem as there was no means to control it anyhow.
Now overpopulation is a major problem threatening the whole future of humanity, even if we have the means to keep it in check, if only some of the most widespread religious moral codes would allow using these means to control populations.

Some religions have responded to the tremendous change in societies better than others even in this respect. For example the modern Western Christian Protestant state churches of Europe are top pupils in this respect and Catholic Church and Islam the real problem cases.
The basic problem of course is that things that are seen as good and bad in different societies are not absolute truths, even if religions like to claim some kind of absolute “divine” source for their ideas in morality.
The sad truth however is that even they are just human ideas, even if people might have learned them from a source they trust very much and could be shared by many people they know.

Of course the idea of good and bad is underlying all decisions we make as humans. Every human being has thanks to the social evolution of human species in his mind an inbuilt device for asserting bad and god and most people normally act according to it.
There really is strong evidence that we all human beings share this inborn evolutionary sense of justice, as Marc D. Houser has argued in his fine book “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right & Wrong”. (More about this at: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2010/01/25/is-there-an-inherent-sense-of-morality-shared-by-all-humans-7873171/ )

Sometimes of course these devices are corrupt or missing altogether from the minds of criminal or mentally ill people, but all normal people have this faculty.
The problem is that there still are endless variations on how this inner device works and culture, inherited traits, societal pressures and personal history can make different people see different and even contradicting things as good or bad.

This is of course the reason why we have commonly agreed laws in all developed societies, as a successful society just needs commonly agreed rules on what is seen as bad and what as good behavior in a society.
Religions were an understandable attempt to create moral stability in ancient unstable societies. Remembering this one need to remember that the monks and priests who burned old ladies in medieval Europe thought that they were acting extremely morally just by burning these old ladies.

We know now that they were wrong, but they represented the absolute moral high ground of their day in their culture.
The thousands of priests and monks involved in burning witches generation after generation were not personally mostly bad or insane people at all.
They were just led to believe that there really is a source of objective morality that is outside the reach of humanity and cannot be changed of challenged by mortal men.

They were just implementing this divine moral vision and that did lead to an insane implementation.
A sad fact is that it happens all too easily when people see themselves just implementing a higher "objective morality" that is out of their reach and cannot be questioned at all.

All societies all over the world have very similar sets of moral rules. The inner sense of justice that is grown out of the needs social life of a extremely social animal is one factor.
The other is that any larger human group just needs a certain set of very similar rules of conduct to flourish. After all humans in all societies have basically very similar basic needs.

However, I do see that the practical implementation of the shared basic common human vision of right and wrong is always inevitably culture-dependent and has always been that way.
Anything like "absolute morality" just does not exist and has never really existed.

I do not think that this diversity in morality of different human societies is a real problem in normal circumstances.
On the contrary I do see that culture-dependent morality is not a problem, but a solution to the problem of how to create moral rules that suit different kinds of societies in very different stages of development and needs.

I do think that for example just the widening gap between the Catholic morality frozen in time and the reality fast changing world around it was a major cause for the Reformation, as there simply was a direct need to mold the moral code in society to represent better the reality.
However, the inevitable cultural relativity of morality becomes a pressing problem in situations where members of cultures with very different views on morality live mixed in the same society for extended periods of time.

For example the Islamic honor-based culture of morality does very often become a problem when it is used inside societies that have long ago abandoned this very ancient model of morality.
This can become a major problem, as life becomes much easier if people sharing a common society should share a similar vision of basic moral outlines.

A clash of cultures is a inevitable result of trying to enforce two very different basic ideas of morality at the same time in the same society.
We have of course already seen these culture-wars during the last decades, but clashes do become the more dangerous the bigger the differences remain.

I do also think that we can judge different versions of morality on their usability and the good they do produce for the society in practice, as morality is in the end a tool for producing and maintaining good and healthy societies.
Different visions of morality can be objectively judged only by the practical benefits they do produce also for the individual, but mostly for the society, because morality is a social tool. A person living totally alone does not need morality.

One should also remember that morality is at very basic level just the inner willingness to accept the inevitable common social rules that do make living in large human groups possible.
Some kind of morality just has to be there, as social life would become impossible without the predictability of action that a commonly shared basic moral codes does produce.

PS. There are of course people like Sam Harris who think that science can ultimately give objective criteria also for morality, but I do think that true universal objective morality is pipe dream in moral issues.
However, I wait for Sam Harris's forthcoming book "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" to see if it can convince me out of this opinion.

Comments

Any belief in a final and uncompromising truth can be a danger, the more if one is willing to be killed or kill for it. The other side is that a believer in any Single Truth is mostly unable to compromise and this inability hinders badly development in all societies that are ruled by a Single Truth.
This idea is verified over and over again if you study history. Successful societies have always been based on compromise and even the fabled Islamic Caliphate of medieval times was so successful just because it was a result of a grand compromise.

The brand new Muslim ruling elite just had to make a compromise with the mainly Christian and Zoroastrian populations they had just conquered, as they were at fist just a parasitic tiny ruling elite.
As a result of this there was created a open and vibrant society with science, medicine and commerce that had no rivals at the time.
However with time the need to compromise weakened, as the population was slowly Islamized mainly through the generous tax-incentives given to Muslims.

The Islamic world was frozen from the 16th and 17th century onwards from inside into a state of no development. This thing was crucial for the future, as the new there rose a new challenge from the west.
The rise of the open and vibrant societies of the Western Europe took place, as they were societies where the ability to tolerate new ideas soon rose to a new height, simultaneously when Islam turned its back to the other ideas.

The idea of tolerance as a basis for successful societies is one of my favorite issues and you can read more here: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2010/01/03/can-intolerance-make-empires-fail-7687330/

There is of course nothing magical or even very special in democracy; it is just a human idea that is simply found to work very well in practice as a tool for running and maintaining complex modern societies.
Successful democratic societies are however built on the ability to compromise, as only in society built with compromises all parties are drawn into building a good society together.

Democracy combined with social justice brought about by the democratic process itself just works extremely well in unleashing the true potential of a collection of human beings that are called nations.
This ability to compromise works in fact so well that far-away, cold and inhospitable Scandinavian countries have created societies with a level of welfare, social justice and equality that has never been experienced before in the human history.

I claim that this has largely happened because no single group or idea has been able to wholly dominate these societies and these societies were created by compromise, even if there was strong originally socialist ideas behind building of the welfare societies.
These ideas were however in time accepted quite universally and only by this acceptance they could be realized. Major changes in society did not come about because the brute force of a ideology, but because of the ability to compromise of its followers.

In especially the Islamic world nobody could have never even dreamed of the general level of living that is on offer for also ordinary menial workers and even unemployed that has been reached in Scandinavia of today.
Democracy is however not the ultimate achievement in the human development. It is happens to be a handy tool for creating error-correcting systems of government.
The single most important thing in democracy is that rulers can be rotated when they are too corrupted by power, have lost their ability to handle new situation or are just representing ideas that have outlived their welcome.
This system is not perfect at all, but it can be improved at will and any part of it can be changed if it turns out to be counterproductive in the future.

On the other hand a true fundamentalist follower of Islam is tied to having been presented with the ultimate and final truth that cannot be altered any more.
A society built on the original idea of Islam will ultimate always be a feudal dictatorship, as the original Islamic model of government just happened to be feudal dictatorship.
A added problems is that dictatorships are not as good at handling change as a democracies are, In a democracy new ideas can rise rapidly and change society when change is needed to ensure the stability and future workability of the society.
This is of crucial importance as the survival of any nation in the modern world is about the ability to handle change. This ability is more and more the key to success or failure also in the future.

This inability is the thing that is so sadly lacking is Islam at the moment. It is a thing that will hinder the development of Islamic world until this ability to change is revived in Islam.
Islamic world had this ability it in the beginning and it got the upper hand for a while, but unfortunately it lost it after medieval times and with it lost the ability to compete with the western world.

To be able to compete in the future, the Islamic world needs to change and change fast. To be able to change, there is a most pressing need to change that religion to a radically more open and less restrictive direction, if the Islamic world is to ever achieve its past glories again.

PS. I have pondered this issue before from a slightly different angle at: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/03/what-is-the-secret-ingredient-of-a-successful-society-6639914/

Comments

The basic thing is of course that there are no real cases of paranormal or supernatural phenomena working also in well controlled or laboratory conditions.
There simply is no "dogma of science" fighting against the paranormal or supernatural things just because its followers would not want to admit them to be true. There is just a simple lack of real, trustworthy scientific evidence.

If somebody can produce really such scientifically valid results, science will change accordingly.
That is the way science works. If there is new evidence, old "truths" fly out of the window, if they turn out to be wrong.
Until that happens I am making simply an observation of existing reality when I state that paranormal or supernatural things do not exist. It is not an opinion, or belief, but a statement of a known fact.

One must of course also remember that things are classed under the labels of "paranormal" and "supernatural" simply just because they are unproven, as if they are proven and explained, they would not be "paranormal" or "supernatural" anymore, but normal parts of our reality and also normal parts of the scientific inquiry.
To re-phrase an old quotation from Bertrand Russell: nobody can prove or disprove that there is not a teapot circling the star of Andromeda, if I happen to make such a claim so for my own reasons, as we have no means of checking this claim out.

One can still quite safely assume that I have no means of knowing this fact either and I make a false claim if I claim to know about the teapot circling Andromeda.
If you say that there are things that cannot happen in controlled situations or in a laboratory, but which do happen regularly in homes of believers of paranormal and supernatural, you simply are slipping away from reality.

Modern science is of course basically just a method for gathering information and it just happens to be the only reliable way to do it that we know of now.
You don't have to "believe" in science for it to work; airplanes fly without faith, vaccines work without you believing in them and your mobile phone works fine, even if you lose faith in it.

There are people who seriously claim that people trusting only in things that can really be proven to exist are "believers of science" and are followers of some kind of "scientism".
This is of course an age-old trick and it is used all over again in countless discussion all over the world.

The basic trick here is simply trying to make it seem that "believing" in the existence of provable, real things and believing in unproven and unreal things are similar "beliefs". This is all too easy cop-out for all believers in paranormal and supernatural.
The big thing here is of course where to draw the line; what unproven thing do you accept, if you start accepting unproven things at the face value?
Is Atlantis really a valid theory? Have aliens really abducted millions of people? Did my grandfather really come secretly from Venus on a golden chariot in the year of 1896?
Or to look at it from other direction: to make you believe in a unproven and unscientific thing, do you need a hundred, or thousand or a million of other people to have believed in it first? Or could just one, but very deeply convinced person be enough?

Again, there is no such a thing as absolute truth in science; even all the most established old "truths" do change if we receive new information that contradicts them.
If we receive valid scientific proof that for example "remote viewing" is true, it will be part of science in no time and it will be studied and used to advance our knowledge as any other finding is.

Of course one needs to have a certain level of trust in science, but this trust can be based on millions of real word things that science has really produced.
One must of course ask oneself that if you don't trust science in these things, can you similarly lose your trust in medicine, geography or physics also, if they just happen to contradict any point of your beliefs or somebody just makes unproven and un-provable claims that you just find very intriguing?

For example the blood types of all humans have never been tested and will never be tested; can we therefore honor a claim that there are dozens of unknown blood types, if I just make this claim for my own reasons, as I just happen to believe in this kind of things?
Will only blood-testing all humans make my claim invalid? In science it is just the other way around; only things that are somehow proven to exist can become part of the scientific knowledge, but new things are added there as fast as they are proven to really exist.

All people are of course entitled to all of their beliefs if they make them happier persons, and I don't have problems with that.
The only problem for me arises when believers of these things do claim them to be "true" even if real proof does not exist for these things.

Comments

I would personally go as far as to say that at least the most important and valuable features of advanced western societies that we respect and cherish the most today do mostly originate from the ancient Greece and do not stem from this fabled Judeo-Christian heritage at all.
Let's take democracy fist as it is the basis of the whole of the modern western way of life.
It was undoubtedly invented in Greece and even the very idea of democracy is quite unknown and even totally non-existent in the basic Judeo-Christian tradition.

The Jewish kingdoms of the Bible were feudal and totalitarian societies, where there was only one allowed ideology or even a way to see the word; the faith of the fathers, the Judaic faith.
This religion approved, sanctioned and cherished the ancient feudal kings and their unlimited power, if they just succumbed themselves to this religious ideology first.

Things did not get any better with the rise of the Christianity. Christianity did in time become also the religion of Roman emperors, who were by this time military dictators with unlimited power.
After Rome fell, the Church associated itself eagerly with all of the new brutal feudal rulers of the Medieval Europe.
Only after the Age of Enlightenment and the great modern upheavals has the democratic model gained slowly support among the Christian clergy also, which has always however throughout history dragged its feet on any expansion of democracy everywhere.

Both Judaism and Christianity are based on model where there is a single absolute and undisputed ruler in the heaven and these religions are really better suited to autocratic and dictatorial societies from they originated.
These religions have however been later developed further to be usable also in conditions of a democracy.
After suitable changes in ideology, they found out that they can thrive also in modern democracies, even if the more conservative variants of them always have had a preference for different kinds of dictatorships.

Second in my list is the freedom of speech, that is one of the cornerstones of our modern democratic societies. Here we are also forced to note that this is also a Greek tradition that has often been strongly opposed by these two religions.
Christian medieval Europe was a place where a extremely strict censorship was in place for hundreds of years. This abated only after when first the power of the Catholic Church was broken in more modern times.

Until that one was allowed to develop and even alter the Christian doctrine to fit the needs of the day, but never to really criticize it, as is the case in modern Iran also, which many mistake for a democracy, even if it is a Islamic Democracy, which is a huge difference.
Jews did not have it much better at this time, as is shown by the example philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated in the year of 1656 for doubting the Jewish orthodoxy.

Third on our little list is the idea of basic equality between humans. This belief is also one of the true cornerstones of the of idea of a good society at least and this idea is the basis for the modern welfare-states of the world.
Equality of the sexes is of course non-existent Judaic and Christian traditions. They are simply based on the idea of patriarchy. The modern idea of equality is based on the great humanistic tradition that has been born quite independently and has always been opposed by the ruling Christian traditions.

One can also well also argue that many of the parts of Christianity that are still palatable to us are of Greek origin. Many of the builders of the new Christian faith were well versed in the Greek philosophy and they included many ideas from current philosophy to their newfangled faith. In this process they also transformed the original end-of-days cult to a real religion.
After Christianity had taken over the whole of Europe and had it in its iron mental grip, the first feeble steps of true progress were founded on old Greek ideas that resurfaced from time to time and caused the first cracks in the mental power of the all-powerful Church.

The first dissenters were of course clergy themselves, simply as there just were no other kind of learned men on offer. The great ideas of the ancient Greeks caused turmoil in the heads of these men and eventually some of them started to doubt the existence of One Single Truth of The Church.
One could with a good reason claim that the story of progress in the western world during the last millennium is the story of the ancient Greek ideas fighting the basic ideas of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Also our legal system is not in any way based on religious dogmas, but is based on the Roman model of law that has been molded by the Germanic ideas of justice.
“The Civil law is a legal system inspired by Roman law, the primary feature of which is that laws are written into a collection, codified, and not (as in common law) determined by judges, Conceptually, it is the group of legal ideas and systems ultimately derived from the Code of Justinian, but heavily overlaid by Germanic, ecclesiastical, feudal, and local practices.” - So says trusty old Wikipedia. Very little of the inspiration for this system comes from the Judeo-Christian traditions.
The fact that we do not steal, rape and murder at will are not because of any kind of Judeo-Christian traditions, but because these things have been forbidden in all human societies that have existed.

However the fact that many of us do still see sex as something disgusting comes mainly from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The Greeks and Romans had much more modern and healthier relationship with sex; in fact they had very similar uncomplicated view of it as most modern secular people do. In also this respect the Judeo-Christian legacy has also been pushed to the sidelines in European societies at least.

The western world also derived most of its aesthetic values from the Greco-Roman world and the original Jewish artistic traditions (if such a thing has never really existed) had very little effect in the long run.
The buildings of the new Church were built on the old Greek and Roman models and the pieces of art that were ordered to them were molded on old Greek and Roman ideals of beauty.

The very basic thing of course is that the origins of modern science were wholly and completely based on ideas that were originally developed by the ancient Greek.
In fact the rise of the modern science happened in spite of Judeo-Christian traditions fighting against it and not at all because of it.
The early scientist were of course Christians, as no other people with any kind of education were in existence in those totalitarian Christian societies of the Medieval times.

The proponents of science also continued to be Christians just as long as a public belief in Christianity was mandatory in western Societies. Science was wholly separate and also liberated from religion only when the whole society was liberated and the freedom also not to believe was slowly and painfully established.
This of course happened largely after advances in science had eroded away the belief in Only Possible Truth of the Church. This was in fact a self-feeding spiral towards a mental liberation that produced in the end the modern science as we know it. It is basically just a continuation of the old Greek tradition after a millennium-long pause caused by the Christian rule.

Advances in science are in the end the most important of the forces that have made our societies what they are now.
The other extremely important thing has been the humanistic tradition that has produced the drive for equality and social justice that have ensured the longevity and stability of our societies.
This humanistic tradition has of course also influenced the modern spectrum of different Christian churches also during the last two centuries. These humanistic influences have changed also them tremendously.

This tremendous positive change we have experienced in our societies and in all of our thinking (and in our religions) during the last two centuries has not been not ultimately based on the original Judeo-Christian values at all, but on ultimately on the revolutionary new ideas we have inherited from the ancient Greeks.

Comments

One must only ask oneself a few questions to get to the bottom of this issue.
How is it possible that these esoteric things never work in laboratory and in controlled situations?
How we always have only anecdotal evidence, that is just stories of strange happening that can never be repeated under the weary eyes of real scientists?

Could it just be that there just are a lot of people who really would like them to be true?
Could it just be that these people will always shrug off all evidence that contradicts their beliefs and they will gladly believe all charlatans and tricksters who have found out how easy fame and even money is to be made on things like this?
Could be so that there a lot of people who see that their religious ideology benefits from clinging on to these claims?

However, apparently even the CIA has given up on these things. According to Wikipedia "Remote viewing was popularized in the 1990s, following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20 million research program sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government to determine any potential military application of psychic phenomena. The program was terminated in 1995, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community."
In other words the whole thing appeared to be just bullshit, as there simply was nothing to it.

Wikipedia tells also this; "There is little beyond anecdotal evidence to support the idea that people can actually "leave the body". The so called "out-of-body -experiences" have been scientifically explained for a long time. We know now that they can be induced in a person at will using several well-known and documented techniques: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience
There is really nothing supernatural in these sensations that are really caused by the basic functionality of the brain.

As I see this thing myself, the incredibly complex human mind is a product of long evolution. It has evolved over millions of years to steer a bit by bit more and more complicated biological system, when more and more less central functions have been transferred for the subconscious part of the mind to work on.
So the human mind does a lot of things we are not aware of and this subconscious activity can very easily mislead a person to understand some processes as happening somewhere outside his "mind".

So, it is normally just the good old physical brain working, even when we see the results of our mind produces as something we could not have foreseen at a conscious level.
The human mind is simply a collection of central functions of the brain and when the brain stops to function, there is no mind no more. The mind is a just a fancy name for the higher and more complicated mental faculties.
We do not know how the "mind" of other primates or other animals does work, but I could bet on that that the real difference is just in the complexity of the processing their "mind" does.

These beliefs of a "mind" existing also outside the brain are of course an old and widespread ones and there are a lot of people who really wish from the bottom of their hearts that they would be true.
Even a sincere and widespread wish does not however transform a wish to status of a fact.
The more so, as the motives for which these wishes are spread are well known. These ideas simply fit in nicely in many kinds of religious ideologies that do employ millions of people full-time all over the world.
A cold fact of life just is that according to what we know, the human brains does not have any kind supernatural capabilities.
The inner workings of the brain are however far too complex for us to really comprehend. This fact easily causes the feeling that there is something unworldly going on.

On a lighter vein, there are people who believe that some people can alter the mind of others with using just mind-power. I think that they are of course referring to the television, that really is a powerful tool for projecting ideas and images to other people's minds and ultimately to even control their minds remotely.
A handful of people can make for example a whole nation of millions hate a single person on a flip of switch, when they feel the need for it.
They just project this idea through to other minds with the extremely powerful tool they have, that is called the television.

The same kind of effect is of course achieved also through use of radio, newspapers and books, but the effect is not as instant and sure.
Television just is a tool that affects through strong emotions and to all of your senses at the same time and the especially the strong images projected can stop rational thinking altogether.

Comments

People have of course the right to love these pompous royal events as form of popular entertainment.
Just this entertainment value of course is the real reason why people are still willing to pay a lot of good, real and hard-earned money to upkeep these royal families that do not have any real functions in a modern society any more.

Monarchism is naturally a human idea invented by humans for human consumption. This is of course true of everything humans think or do.
Similarly nation states are human inventions that will vanish if people lose faith in them and their usefulness.
Quite similarly for example international sport would vanish from the face of the earth as a popular form of entertainment the moment people would stop believing that it has a real meaning.
However, this fact does not make monarchism less of a remnant of the past, that has no more real useful applications for a modern society.

Modern western European monarchs are of course just symbols that are used to define nations. However if this system would not exist some other symbols would be in use.
This of course the case in the neighboring republics of the modern monarchies, that have for a variety of historical reasons chosen to abolish the monarchy when the feudal system that created it had already been eroded away in all nations of Europe.

Monarchs of today are quite universally simply just descendants of people who at some point of history had the chance of taking over the national throne thanks to a ability to find the right allies in a right point of history or who at some cases had the necessary ruthlessness to destroy the other contenders to the throne.
Some are even just descendants of people who just happened to be in a right place at the right time.

The monarchs of today can of course be fine and even marvelous people. They generally are quite harmless to the society at large even if they would be evil and vicious people, which could of course be the case as well, if they are what they are simply because or the accident of birth and not because of their true abilities.
They simply are incredibly restrained by their positions as very visible figureheads of a society. Their value as sources of popular entertainment cannot be underestimated either.

There is however one thing that really bothers me in monarchy. This is the idea of the sanctity of inherited privilege, that is still deeply embedded in the very idea of monarchy, which is simply basically just the idea of having inherited positions of power in society.
The problem is the very idea that a simple accident of birth entitles you to certain privileges that are not be had in any other way than just this accident of birth.

This idea just is not compatible with the marvelous ideas of inherent equality of all humans that are so deeply embedded in the great traditions of the western democratic humanism that I happen to value and respect.
These humanistic ideals are of course just simple human innovations just like the idea of monarchy was in its time. However, I personally happen to think that these humanistic ideals we use and respect in our everyday lives do represent a step forward in the road of human development, when monarchy just is a remnant of the ugly feudal past of the humanity.

Comments

Things that are seen as moral and immoral in Christianity or in the even more un-evolved Islam have, however, changed immensely during their existence.
For example for hundreds of years owning slaves was seen as a quite moral thing in both religions to do. Also only a few hundred years ago burning old ladies on big bonfires ceased to be a highly moral thing to do.

The plain truth is that this ‘divinely’ ordained morality has always been created by mortal men. It has always changed according to the current requirements of the society, as all morality basically do exist to protect society and its members from behavior that can harm the harmonious co-existence of its members.
There can't be a society without a moral code in use, as it would fall down very rapidly. There is only the question about its origins; is morality derived from outside the humanity or is morality something humans themselves create to further the interests of their societies and through this also to ensure the happiness of their own family and ultimately of themselves?

The fundamentalist approach of unquestioning obedience to all rules has some clear-cut advantages. It makes accepting the current moral norms automatic and if these claims are accepted at face-value, a automated response to moral problems is created that can be beneficial for a individual facing moral dilemmas.
A big thing in this religiously motivated morality is that not being able to question the basis of what is currently deemed as moral or immoral eases the mental load of a individual.

A person can rely blindly on tradition without a need to really analyze ones actions at all. Many people find this very liberating, as really answering questions concerning morality can be very difficult in many cases.
In fact a person can return to a status of a child with the fundamentalist approach. A child has the ability unquestioningly accept all that is handed to him by persons in positions of authority.
Many find this kind of situation extremely liberating, when they are relieved from the need to make personal choices and decisions in difficult issues.

Freedom is much more difficult in this respect than a state of submission, as a free person is held accountable to his or her own decisions.
The cat is however often out of the bag when one realizes that these religious rules are in fact laid out by ordinary human beings, who all too often use the their Holy Texts as only as vehicles for furthering their own prejudices and conservative agenda.
On the other hand there are of course also a lot of progressive and well-meaning, warm-hearted people also who see adopting the Christian or Islamic morality as a good short-cut to ensure a better and healthier living and especially as a tool in ensuring that the coming generation does not fall outside the civil society.

We are in fact facing a dilemma here; do the dangers inherent in automatic submission to authority out-weight the benefits gained from such a system, when we know that this kind of submission can save some people from falling outside the society?
This is a tough question and I do understand the pain of people from have put their faith in this system and who feel threatened by those who reveal the human origins of their faith.

A very basic problem is that the automatic submission built in this system falls easily apart when the real nature of religions as man-made ideologies is revealed to a person.
So a system based on absolute submission cannot really flourish in a situation with a fully free flow of information in place. The worst part is that striving to curb the flow of information will inevitably foster undemocratic and totalitarian tendencies and undemocratic and totalitarian societies tend to fall behind in overall development.

A system that ensures that our sons would not fall into drug-use and would keep our daughters home on the evenings sounds like a very tempting preposition, if only it would really work.
There is however no guarantee that it will work in the end and there is also a heavy price to be paid.
A very real danger is that this requirement gives all too much power to people who in many cases are drawn from the ultra-conservative fringes of the society.

The fundamentalists all too often oppose equality, social justice and even the very basic freedoms in society that so many of us take for granted.
Relying on a religious ideology to supply the needed basis for morality has also the very clear danger that the base for this version morality disappears, when one loses faith in the ideology itself.

If this happens a person is all too easily left hanging in thin air on moral issues.
However, I would suggest that there is are alternatives for building a true sense of morality in young people which does not require submission to just one religious ideology.
In a world where multicultural societies are becoming the norm, also the idea of morality supported in a society cannot be tied to a single overwhelming ideology like a dogmatic monotheistic religion anymore.

I think much is already gained if a person learns from his or her earliest childhood that families, kindergartens, schools and societies have rules that are in place to protect all their members besides the need to ensure their smooth working.
It would be important also to learn that all societies all over the world have quite have similar rules for quite similar reasons. If a person understands that these rules are in place because we all will benefit from them one goal is reached.
A small victory is won if he or she also understands that a person can also work try to change these rules, if he or she feels that they the rules are somehow wrong.

When a person really also learns to understand that 'do others what you want others to do to you' is a universal, golden rule of all human societies, that is not only part of a single religious ideology, I think the risk of losing the sense of morality by losing faith in a single ideology is a lot smaller.
If young people ultimately could learn to help and protect all other humans just because of their common shared humanity, we could just have reached a new level in morality.

I would claim this level of universal humanity is unattainable in more fundamentalist versions of religions at least, where the circle of those who belong to the group of 'us' is often frighteningly small and all other humans are classed as 'them' who deserve no respect from the believers.
I would even claim that a strong input of universal humanistic ethics in kindergartens and schools would give children a very strong basis for building a real personal sense of morality, if it would be done in all seriousness and in a way a child can really relate to.

To finish this thing off, here is a fine example of how universal humanistic thinking can work:
"Ten Humanist Commandments
By Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
1. Proclaim the natural dignity and inherent worth of all human beings.
2. Respect the life and property of others.
3. Practice tolerance and open-mindedness towards the choices and life styles of others.
4. Share with those who are less fortunate and mutually assist those who are in need of help.
5. Use neither lies, nor spiritual doctrine, nor temporal power to dominate and exploit others.
6. Rely on reason, logic and science to understand the Universe and to solve life's problems.
7. Conserve and improve the Earth's natural environment - land, soil, water, air and space - as humankind's common heritage.
8. Resolve differences and conflicts cooperatively without resorting to violence or to wars.
9. Organize public affairs according to individual freedom and responsibility, through political and economic democracy.
10. Develop one's intelligence and talents through education and effort."

From: "The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles" Prometheus Books, (ISBN: 978-1-61614-172-1), 2010.

PS. Ram Swarup writes in his book "Understanding the Hadith: The Sacred Traditions of Islam": "Morality does not determine the Prophet’s actions, but his actions determine and define morality. Muhammad’s acts were not ordinary acts; they were Allah’s own acts."
(Prometheus Books, ISBN: 1591020174)

Comments

The crucial difference between a fanatic and a believer is the ability to accept the existence of other possible views of the issues currently at hand. A fanatic is created at the very moment when a person sees that his or her views on any issue are the only possible ones and in worst cases the only allowed ones.
I think that one can have deep faith for example in equality, social justice and democracy without being a fanatic, but the moment when one claims that the true merits of these ideas cannot be discussed at all, one is inevitably a fanatic.

I personally see that the Hegelian view of the development of civilization is giving some very meaningful answers on the mechanisms of how human societies do evolve.
I think that throughout the last three or four millennium all of the meaningful and lasting new human ideas have evolved through the Hegelian mechanism of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.
A idea is forwarded, its success creates a inevitable backlash and only the end results of this conflict can create longstanding improvements in the human societies.

A typical recent example of this cycle is feminism. It brought some extremely important issues to the general discussion, but its success has created group of quite fanatical people who see the whole world trough this one issue only.
The success of feminism has created a antithesis. I suggest that also in this case only the results of this conflict of thesis and antithesis will create lasting improvements in the human condition, when the original thesis is in this process molded into a compromise.

Lasting results are achieved only if this compromise is acceptable to the society at large and in this particular case to both men and women. Both parties will be forever present in all societies and the a truly lasting result simply cannot be built on the expense of the other party.

Hegel did also speak of the end of history, but I think that this process is never-ending, as the synthesis that is the result of a earlier conflict is soon challenged by a new thesis, that creates a antithesis and a new synthesis and so on in a never ending cycle.
A human society will never be ready and a paradise is simply not to be had. That does not mean that things would not steadily improve.

I would say that the communist system failed because there was no antithesis for the original thesis left in the societies that the communists took over.
Fanatical devotion to a single idea was able to rule those societies. This devotion did lead inevitably to failure, as in the long run lasting and workable societies can be built only on compromise of the different interest groups that are forever present in all societies.

Similarly the Iranian theocracy is already doomed, when the fanatical thesis of the Mullahs is never allowed to be challenged.
It will inevitable corrupt itself, as a social system without any kind of error-correction in place is always doomed.

The Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis -system is really the ultimate society-wide system of inbuilt error-correction, but it can work only in situations and societies where there is enough freedom to present the antithesis for the current ruling thesis.
I would go as far as to say that no totalitarian society will ever be able to in the long run compete with societies with the inbuilt error-correction in use.

However even the most totalitarian ideas can be tools of change, if they present the needed antithesis for the current ruling thesis.
The problem is they do prevent the creation of synthesis if they acquire power and the error-correction is lost, which is needed to create lasting results.

So, small doses of extremist radical thinking are often necessary for bringing forward new ideas in societies.
However, extremists should never be allowed to acquire any real power, as they will inevitably shut down the machinery that really keeps our societies evolving.

Comments

The rise in the general level of knowledge and ability to find things out things on one's own have produced a quite new kind of level of awareness in societies. It has in fact already risen to a level that has existed never before.
It is just more and more difficult to make irrational or false claims of reality and expect that they can pass unrevealed, when most of the people have the necessary sources of information a few mouse clicks away.

Spreading myths and misinformation of course not impossible even now, as there are so many people who are comfortable in just accepting only the information that suits their closed view of the world.
There are however always the moments of doubt. Now there is an easy to find route to all kinds of information available to everyone, that is there waiting for you round the clock every single day of the year.

I would go as far as to say that the one single thing that has changed the landscape of knowledge most is the Wikipedia.
There is a very good reason why so many theists attack and belittle Wikipedia as a source of information, as the free availability of reliable information is simply poison to systems of thought whose propagation has always so much relied on the ignorance of the recipients.

Wikipedia has simply revolutionized the availability of information in our society. One must just remember that of course all content is in Wikipedia too for a reason. Every writer has also there his or her own motives for writing.
One must simply take this fact of life to account when one reads things in Wikipedia. However, when you learn to always think and question the motives of the writer of each item first, you soon learn to use it quite safely.

For example most of the articles concerning Islam or Christianity in Wikipedia are written by followers of those traditions.
They are however also usable just because of this, as by reading them one can understand their way of thinking and one quite can easily see the bias, when one just first realizes its existence.

With keeping this important limitation in mind I could however say that the simple existence of a single generally very reliable source of information that is most of all easy to access, has simply also revolutionized the general level of discussion in our societies.
People in positions of authority are not able (as easily as before at least) to barricade themselves and their ideas behind a solid barricade of catchphrases and fine and difficult words.
Now anybody has the ability to easily check out what they really mean and what they are trying to hide behind their fine words.

However, the single most important thing in Wikipedia is that it has an inbuilt system of error-correction and it is in my mind fact very much like science in this respect.
I'd like repeat here what Karl Popper said in the quote in the beginning of this piece; "The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error. But science is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected."

Now we have a source of information (maybe the first in human history) where there is a similar inbuilt system of constant, round-the-clock error-correction in place.
Building Wikipedia is of course very human activity just like is science too. There will always be mistakes and errors, but the inbuilt system of constant error-correction will lead to steady rise of quality of the content.

Of course there are always subject that simply do not have a single simple "truth" and there will always be a tug of war in Wikipedia in certain issues.
However just this fight will also help to rise the quality of the content, even if a wholly impartial repository of information will always remain just a pipe dream, simply because we all are just humans.

Comments

The very simple truth, however, is that the earliest scientists were Christians just because in those times and societies nothing else was possible, even if they were already probing into things that would later stir much trouble to the Only True Church.
Modern religious freedom, especially the freedom not to believe at all, is a very new thing. From the beginnings of modern science until the 18th century all western European societies were quite uniformly and forcefully Christian, where even doubting any faculty of the existing God-given social order was often rewarded by death.

How dangerous it really was even to be accused of renouncing the basic teachings of the church also at the later times is illustrated by the examples of Étienne Dolet who was strangled and burned in 1546, and Giulio Cesare Vanini who received a similar fate in 1619.
At the very late date of 1689 the Polish nobleman Kazimierz Łyszczyński was condemned to death in Warsaw for atheism. He had allegedly denied the existence of God in his philosophical treatise De non existentia Dei. He was beheaded after his tongue was pulled out with a burning iron and his hands slowly burned.
Similarly as late as in 1766, the French nobleman Jean-François de la Barre, was tortured, beheaded, and his body burned for simple act of alleged vandalism of a religious symbol or a crucifix.

It is all too easy to forget how a totalitarian system of thought like Christianity works when it has the total control over a society, when ideology starts working with you at the very moment when you learn to understand speech. If you think of the Russia of the 1930's you can get the basic idea.
In the medieval Europe Christian ideology had completely taken over the society and what most important, the whole system of education. The situation was quite similar to situation in the modern Saudi-Arabia or Sudan.
For centuries there simply was no other kind of education than fully and completely Christian education. In the darkest hours few other people than monks and priest were even allowed the luxury of the ability to read and write.

The only learned men in medieval Western European societies were for many centuries priests and monks, who also held all the important positions available to others than the feudal masters and their cohorts in these deeply unjust societies.
Every single member of these societies was systematically year after year forced to the local Church every Sunday and told there how there was only one possible way to think and also what terrible future would wait those who would dare to doubt the Only Possible Truth in any way.
It was a real miracle that in the end there surfaced some courageous enough people who could start even thinking about things that contradicted even the peripheral teachings of the all-powerful Church.
It is no wonder they were dealing with quite innocent sounding things like the movements of the heavenly objects at first.

However the first things that contradicting with the teachings of the Church were found from the old Greek and Roman manuscripts that started inconveniently popping up when the advent of Renaissance first opened up the avenues for reaching them.
The for the time extraordinarily open-minded men of Renaissance started searching for old manuscripts that had been hidden from public view for many centuries.

Until this point only the few suitable teachings of Plato and Aristotle had been allowed reading for all Christians of all of the texts of Antiquity. Now there was a flood of ancient writings that contradicted even these thinkers, who had gained the position of demigods among the medieval Christian intelligentsia.
These "new" ideas of the Antiquity were simply quite revolutionary material at the time. After centuries of indoctrination telling otherwise, there suddenly was people who started ultimately seeing that the Church had not the Whole And Only Truth, but only one version of it.

Accepting this fact was a major revolution in itself and it sowed the seeds for the later Age of Enlightenment which finally broke the grip of the religion had also over science.
Only this ultimate revolution in thinking finally produced the first great minds who at last dared to cut their ties to the Church completely in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Until this happened there were some people who saw new revolutionary things though the new methods of science. However they did live in uniformly Christian societies and after a lifelong indoctrination they could commonly not even think of the possibility that one could really turn against The Church.

It has been claimed that there was freedom of thought in the Medieval Europe, as questions of doctrine were at times debated wildly among the learned Christian thinkers of the time.
These debates were however never real challenges to The Church at all, but they just aimed at adjusting the overall system. Also later they tried to include elements of newly found ancient Greek thinking into the mainstream Christian thinking the keep it up with the chancing times.
They were in fact very much like the Third Plenum of The Communist Party adding new dogmas to the system and altering the old ones to fit the needs of daily political needs.

Besides the forceful indoctrination and the tremendous force of tradition, there was for centuries a very tight censorship of all written material.
Even the first brave souls who started the change in the zeitgeist in the time of Renaissance and who did create the first feeble seeds of scientific thinking did never dare openly even criticize the central tenets of the Mother Church.
One very important reason for this was that they would not have had anything published in that case.
The first real and open critiques of the all-powerful Mother Church were in fact the first precursors of the Protestant movement who found secular patrons opposing the power of the Church to protect them.
Only after their rebellion the flood gates were opened, as it was soon very easy to see that to formidable grip of the Church was breaking away.

Comments

A sad fact of history is that all the major Christian denominations in Germany embraced Nazism and Adolf Hitler openly until his downfall. Also all too many of the Christian organizations abroad saw Hitler as a savior or Western civilization against the godless Communism. One of them was the papacy of Rome.
This hideous failing of judgment has been carefully blotted out of the history that is taught to us.
Commonly are ever mentioned only the likes of Christian opposition men Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who were later sent to concentration camps.

The fact that what these men really opposed was the official Nazi line of their own official Christian church is never really mentioned.

In his study The Holy Reich, the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall writes:
"The insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years. ... Exploring the possibility that many Nazis regarded themselves as Christian would have decisively undermined the myths of the Cold War and the regeneration of the German nation. ... That Nazism as the world-historical metaphor for human evil and wickedness should in some way have been related to Christianity can therefore be regarded by many only as unthinkable."

The Christian apologetics very commonly persist on their claims, even if they are presented with formidable new evidence saying that they are wrong.
As true believers they just brush aside all new evidence as lies. They just want to believe in their invented inner states of mind for Adolf Hitler that do not in fact have any kind of real evidence.

The hidden, secret inner convictions of Adolf Hitler will of course never be known. We however know very well what Nazis did in the real world. We know that all humanistic and atheistic organizations were strictly forbidden in Germany in the very first year of Nazi rule, that is in the year of 1933. On the other hand no established official Christian organization was never even harassed during his whole reign because of religious reasons.

In a speech in the year 1933 Hitler proudly declared: "We have… undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."
The prewar great freethinking movement of Germany was crushed without leaving a trace, when church bells were rung to rejoice the victories of the Fatherland during the whole of reign of the Nazis.

Among the chairmen of German Freethinkers League was Max Sievers, who was beheaded at the guillotine by the Nazis in 1944.
The German Freethinkers League had by 1930 a membership numbering around 500,000.
The League was closed down, however, in the Spring of 1933 when Hitler outlawed all atheistic and freethinking groups in Germany. 'Freethinkers Hall', the national headquarters of the League, was then converted to a bureau advising the public on church matters.

The only true Christian opposition ever to materialize against Hitler was the Confessing Church, that was formed by some brave lonely souls who were actually fighting against the official Nazi line of the German Protestant churches.
Its leaders like Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were later sent to concentration camps. They formed however just a tiny splinter group with around 12 000 members according to some sources, when the official Protestant churches that supported Nazis had 45 million members.
So it is true that also individual Christians were targeted and persecuted, but only if they were presenting real opposition for the system. One has also to bear in mind that similarly targeted were all other individuals of any creed who caused any similar trouble to the system.

A sad fact of life is that the official Christian institutions of Germany never caused such trouble.
One of the main assets of the Christian apologists has been to present those Nazis who advocated a twisted form of ancient German mythology as some kind of atheists.
However, these people were theists, who just chose to switch the Christian god to the old Germanic ones. A person advocating even an old god is not an atheist. These beliefs did however never gain the upper hand even in the Nazi Party, and both the Nazi Party and the Nazi Germany remained a overwhelmingly Christian entities to the bitter end.

It is also good to remember that Nazis did persecute Jews because they had a strong belief in the inherent inferiority of the Jewish "race".
This belief did not rest on any kind of true scientific basis, but rested on their willingness to accept unproven strong beliefs and unsupported strong claims as basis for real world actions.

In the real world Hitler also made a amiable agreement of power sharing with the Catholic Church or the famous Reichskonkordat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat with the papacy as one of his official acts as the Chancellor of Germany.
The Nazi relations with papacy were admittedly strained at times, as papacy was seen as a threat to the absolute control of the party. These issues were however always resolved.

The Catholic Church did never officially oppose the Nazi government of Germany and the Nazis never attacked the official institutions of Catholic Church in Germany.
Of course also Catholic individuals who opposed Nazism were persecuted, as were all other known opponents of the regime.

Hitler had even more amiable relationships with also the all of major German protestant Churches of his day, which at times could not think enough things to do to please him.
The Protestant Reich Church or the Reichskirche was formed in 1933 to merge the 28 regional churches into a unified state church that espoused a single doctrine compatible with National Socialism.
There was also a powerful and openly Nazi Protestant group called the Deutsche Christen. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Christians

I would however never claim that Hitler was a "true Christian" the more than Winston Churchill was. Churchill was in fact in private even more skeptic in religious matters than Hitler was.
At least in the "Churchill: A Life" by Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill is quoted as calling religion "a delicious narcotic" and indicating people shouldn't be too concerned with the afterlife.

I know that there is an old tradition in Christian circles in claiming that if Christians do commit crimes, they have simply renounced Christianity for the duration of committing those crimes, at least.
Building on this base it is easy to say that Hitler was not a Christian because he did un-Christian things.

It is of course also clear that he did not do the terrible things he did to promote Christianity either, but because he had invented a new kind of ultra-nationalistic creed and in the end he only used Christianity to further this ideology.
We however have no kind of evidence for that he would have done the things he did because of some kind of "hidden atheism" either.

He simply used a religion that propagates total submission to authority as a extremely handy tool for achieving his own ends, as well as Winston Churchill was very apt on using religious sentiments to further his own goals, even if he did not personally have much faith in religion.
This however does not make Hitler an "hidden atheist", as some Christians stubbornly still claim just because it makes them feel better and what is most important; it helps to hide away the terrible secret of Christian Nazism.

To really finish this thing off, here are some of original quotes by Mr. Adolf Hitler himself on the issue of religion:

"Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time."
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 5

"Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord's grace smiled on His ungrateful children."

- Adolf Hitler reflecting on World War I, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 7

"What we have to fight for is the necessary security for the existence and increase of our race and people, the subsistence of its children and the maintenance of our racial stock unmixed, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland; so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 8

"But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 10

"This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief. The great masses of a nation are not composed of philosophers. For the masses of the people, especially faith is absolutely the only basis of a moral outlook on life. The various substitutes that have been offered have not shown any results that might warrant us in thinking that they might usefully replace the existing denominations. ...There may be a few hundreds of thousands of superior men who can live wisely and intelligently without depending on the general standards that prevail in everyday life, but the millions of others cannot do so."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 10

"In short, the results of miscegenation are always the following: (a) The level of the superior race becomes lowered; (b) physical and mental degeneration sets in, thus leading slowly but steadily towards a progressive drying up of the vital sap. The act which brings about such a development is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator. And as a sin this act will be avenged."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 11

"Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 1

"Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the 'remaking' of the Reich as they call it."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 1

"It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2

"That this is possible may not be denied in a world where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily submit to celibacy, obligated and bound by nothing except the injunction of the Church. Should the same renunciation not be possible if this injunction is replaced by the admonition finally to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created?"

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2

"The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will."

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 10

"To do justice to God and our own conscience, we have turned once more to the German Volk."

- Adolf Hitler in speech about the need for a moral regeneration of German, February 10, 1933

"The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgment of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism is hostile to religion is a lie."

- Adolf Hitler, speech to members of the Nazi Party on the Nazi-Vatican Concordant, July 22, 1933

"May divine providence bless us with enough courage and enough determination to perceive within ourselves this holy German space."

- Adolf Hitler, Speech, March 24, 1933

"We don't ask the Almighty, 'Lord, make us free!" We want to be active, to work, to work together, so that when the hour comes that we appear before the Lord we can say to him: 'Lord, you see that we have changed.' The German people is no longer a people of dishonor and shame, of self-destructiveness and cowardice. No, Lord, the German people is once more strong in spirit, strong in determination, strong in the willingness to bear every sacrifice. Lord, now bless our battle and our freedom, and therefore our German people and fatherland."

- Adolf Hitler, Prayer, May 1, 1933

"I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work."

- Adolf Hitler, Speech, Reichstag, 1936

Source for the quotes: http://atheism.about.com/od/adolfhitlernazigermany/tp/AdolfHitlerReligiousFaith.htm

More on the issue of Nazis and Christianity: http://atheism.about.com/od/adolfhitlernazigermany/a/NaziChristian.htm?nl=1

Comments

All current major world religions are the result of accumulated work of hundreds or even thousands of intelligent individuals. They have often worked century after century towards a common goal; that is to perfect the ideology that has employed them to do just that.
I think that just there lies one of the main reasons why so many people have no difficulty in accepting the claims of supernatural origins for religions.
We humans simply have difficulty in understanding how the results of a collective and very longstanding human effort can result in something that seems to be much more than its individual parts.

People can be in awe of extremely complex religious reasoning and argumentation, without realizing that these are simply the result of a vast collaborative effort.
There needs however not to be anything supernatural in the process that produces even the most complex religious systems; they are just results of the simple human perseverance.

This process of refinement is what creates the big and easy to see difference between cults and established religions.
In fact established religions are simply former cults that have had the advantage of getting more work-hours put into refining their message and their organization.

Cults appear so raw and unsophisticated because they are often the result of the work of a single charismatic figure, but their way to world stage and position of a religion can normally commence only when enough effort is put into developing and refining them.
Similarly of course also science is much, much more than the sum of its individual parts, as thousands of people working towards common goals can also in science achieve unbelievable results, that individuals could not have never even dream of.

Scientists and builders of religions are like stonemasons building a cathedral. One, two or even three masons could never complete it, but a thousand masons working diligently can build a magnificent cathedral even in their lifetime, if they work together towards a common goal.
There is however a single big difference between building a religion and building science and this difference makes science the ultimate winner.

The big thing is that science never claims to have found the final or absolute truth in anything, but the main selling point of all major world religions is just the claim of offering the final and even absolute answer to all of the big question troubling mankind.
The religious method of refining already given basic dogmas of "divine" origins can produce magnificent looking systems of thought, but this method will never further the common knowledge of mankind.
This is the main reason why things like medieval scholasticism are just curiosities and did not produce anything of lasting value.

As Cornish scientist Humphry Davy (1778 – 1829) said: "Nothing is so fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer."

The greatest thing in science however is that is so deeply human and does not claim to be anything else, with all the best qualities of humans used to good effect, but also taking into account the failings of us as humans.
Good old Jacob Bronowski famously said: "We are always at the brink of the known. We always feel forward. Every judgment in the science is on the edge of error and it is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we acknowledge the fact that we are fallible."

When religions claim to have avoided the human failings altogether and to be able to deliver some kind of the pure 'divine' truth, science has never fallen into that trap. Science is always nothing else but the results of the work of fallible humans, and it is never claimed to be nothing else by sensible people.
However in building of the Great Cathedral Of Science the failings of the individual scientist becomes less and less important, the grander and sturdier the building becomes, if its buildings blocks just are consistently made in the continued, never-stopping process of pursuit of the best possible knowledge available.

The more people gather together in the pursuit of the best possible answers the more likely they are to find the best possible answers, but this possible only if they are not tied up by dogmas that prevent the rise of new thinking at any point.
The modern scientific method just happens to be the best currently known way to achieve the best possible scientific consensus among the people who have dedicated their lives into studying of different aspect of our life, our world and our universe.

This method has simply been proven to work in thousands and thousands of real world cases, as the whole modern societies and their unprecedented wellbeing is built on the results of the science.

Comments

In the medieval times there was not much difference between these two religions in the violence and oppression they caused. Islam was even if possible a bit less oppressive and more open-minded than the extremely bigoted Catholic Christianity of those times.
However, during the last few centuries Islam has been refined as a closed system of mind control and tool of government with its total submission to authority and strict rules governing every single waking moment and action of a believing Muslim.

After the totalitarian power of the Catholic Church was broken in the Reformation, Christianity was pushed into a quite opposite path of development. The mainstream versions of it slowly lost most of their original violent and oppressive characters.
With time the major modern forms of Christianity did became more and more personal systems of belief instead of being totalitarian tools for ruling deeply unjust and oppressive societies, as Catholic Christianity still was in the early Medieval Europe.

This great evolution of religions has led to the situation where the mainstream versions of Christianity now embrace the freedom of individual and all the basic freedoms in society, when the modern mainstream versions of Islam embrace total submission and renounce the freedom of an individual to make individual choices concerning even his or her own life.
The biggest problem with modern Islam is that it is still so heavily based on the ancient honor-system of justice, which leads to the unbelievable cruelty embedded in the Islamic Sharia Law and most of all to the ongoing oppression of women.

The very same ideas of submission of women were present in the original versions of Christianity, but the modern versions of it have generally come to accept the general equality of women, even if in the more conservative Catholic and Orthodox versions of Christianity the equality of the sexes is still less developed than in most of the other mainstream versions of Christianity.
So, generally leaving Islam and accepting a modern and more enlightened reformed version of Christianity is inevitably a major step forward especially for a woman. When women in Islam are property of their husbands, the women in modern Christianity is an equal partner with equal rights and responsibilities.

Even if I well understand this reasoning, I would, however, prefer another solution myself for those who seem to need fixed guidelines and rules to give direction to their lives that are normally offered by religions.
Namely, I would suggest the philosophy of Epicureanism for these people, as it forms a clearly defined fixed set of rules for living a good and moral life.

Epicureanism is a of course system of philosophy and not a religion in traditional sense. It is clearly just a rationally built system of thought and is not based on any kind of claims of containing some kind of divine message. It however offers a set of very clearly defined rules, which aim to help people to live their lives so that they will not hurt themselves or others.
(The basics of Epicureanism are explained also in this blog. In the “Tags” in the right side of this column there are links to 20 little essays about “Epicurus”.)

There clearly are people who seem to need rules in their lives and for whom the sets of often quite arbitrary rules presented by the religions is better than no rules at all. Epicureanism is in its essence coded to the 40 Principal Doctrines of Epicurus, from which one can deduct rules for all occasions.
Epicureanism is however not based on absolute commands as Islam largely is, as most of rules of Epicureanism leave room for personal variation and are just ground rules for building a good and respectful life.

I know that is not very realistic to suggest that people with a purely Islamic education living in the hard darkness of Islam in for example in Saudi-Arabia or Sudan could switch to Epicureanism on their own.
I however think that for example a second generation educated Muslim person living in Nottingham or Oslo could just find the teachings of Epicurus a real alternative, if he or she just could give it a try.

A major and often insurmountable obstacle would of course be the loss of community, which leaving Islam would inevitably mean, as Islam is designed from the ground up to make leaving it as hard as possible and it has also succeeded in this, as it often seems impossible for Muslims even to consider it.
Islam has succeeded in sucking in and destroying the original cultures, traditions and even ways of life in the countries in which it has acquired also power over. This has happened to an extent that there seems to be no alternatives to it on offer anymore.

This situation is present also in Muslim communities in the Western world, as renouncing Islam would often mean renouncing one’s whole community, history and lifestyle, as their religion has successfully sucked in all these elements.
This is all too big a price to pay for many and they continue supporting a religion that is at odds with all the basic principles of the societies they live in. They cling to the religion, even if it means that they remain outside the mainstream society, as they cannot fit in it mainly because of the demands of their outdated, medieval form of religion.

This may sound like a pipe dream and even complete foolishness, but I think that Epicureanism could offer a solution to this dilemma.
It offers a clearly defined set of rules for people who are extremely used to living by clearly defined sets of rules, but choosing it would not mean getting simply sucked in the mainstream culture, as switching to Christianity would very easily entail.

The loss of community would of course a major obstacle, but the emerging Epicurean communities could soon offer an alternative that could bring in people from all walks of life and create a alternative avenue for getting to grips with the society that is all around them and in which they choose to live in.

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The situation is caused by the simple fact that every believer has in real life a quite personal god in his or her mind that fits his or her personal needs and requirements.
This is normally the case even if that person would personally believe that he is sharing a quite common god with his or her co-religionists.
A human mind just works in a way in which it picks and chooses things from a complicated and wide-ranging thing like a religion according to his or her preferences without even realizing it.
A modern rational Christian may pick and choose only rationally acceptable bits and parts from his or her religion and may come to eventually see his or her personal religion and god as a quite rational construction.

However, the core problem is that all the gods of the modern organized religions are simply very strongly rooted on irrational claims.
In fact the very essence of faith is to believe in something unbelievable, as only this act of believing in itself makes you a true believer.
Have you noticed that in the core of every single one of the successful religions there are some irrational claims that are very hard to believe?
Believe me; they are there for a purpose, as without taking the leap of faith that a true belief in those claims requires, there could not be true bond of faith all really successful religions require from their core adherents.

Only when this core group is assembled and high enough social status for the religion is achieved by their work, the great indifferent mass will follow by force of tradition and social pressure.
Religions that do not have this kind of leap of faith have already become quite extinct, as this kind of leap of faith just happens to be the only way to create the extremely lasting glue that binds followers hard enough to a religion in the long run.

The very hard mental exercise that is needed to accept the unbelievable claims of the religions is also an investment people do not want to go waste.
They are often willing also to protect this big investment they have made and this willingness is a important tool in the making of long-lasting religions.

So, if you sincerely believe in any of the gods any of the major current world religions, you are out in the cold in the field of rationality, as your faith must be irrational to be faith at all.
The Einsteinian pantheistic entity that is also called god is a another thing altogether. In fact this deistic creature has nothing to do with the gods of the modern world religions at all, as it is just a way to describe the workings of the universe.

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If we had enough evidence even supernatural or paranormal claims would be no more just beliefs, but real things that could be analyzed and studied like all other phenomena.
Unfortunately such real world evidence is not available about any kind of supernatural or paranormal phenomena.
They remain just something that is based on beliefs, unfounded claims, and hearsay and unverified anecdotal evidence at best.

Humans are capable of creating endless amounts of beliefs and new claims to serve their psychological and emotional needs. These beliefs and claims are very often presented by fine and honest people.
They just happen to believe that they have certain inner knowledge of these matters, even if this knowledge resides only in their own minds and cannot be verified or tested in any kind of scientific settings.

A hard fact however is that there has been no real and acceptable scientific evidence of any kind of supernatural phenomena to this day.
However, the whole situation would be changed instantly and dramatically, if there would be real, scientifically verifiable evidence of any kind of supernatural phenomena.

Paranormal phenomena would instantly become official parts of science and would be studied as any other real phenomena are studied, but alas, this has never happened and there is very little reason to believe that the situation would be reversed in the future.
On the other hand it is good to remember that in the more philosophical issues concerning the inner workings of human beings and their societies there is and never can be any single truth, as there is just different ways and paths of seeing things that have had a different level of popularity at different times.

The paranormal phenomena have been subjects for hundreds of different scientific experiments throughout the last few decades, but with always same results.
Reading minds, telling the future or moving objects with mind-force alone (or praying) have never been successful under the bright lights of a laboratory.

The existing belief in paranormal issues is however a real-world phenomena and it can be studied also fully scientifically and it is also studied in a scientific way.
Science can study beliefs in paranormal phenomena as well as it studies religions and their impact on humans and human societies, even if the supernatural claims on which religions are based are impossible to verify or even really study.
Psychology, sociology, anthropology and many other areas of science can find out why the paranormal and supernatural phenomena continue to interest people and most of all why they seem to have a direct need to believe in them, even if there is no real evidence of their existence.

The most fantastic part in the true scientific method is that the "truth" in science always changes when new information is received. On the other hand even very popular hypothesis that do not gather true real scientific findings to back them up end up outside the realms of science.
In science there are also extremely speculative hypothesis, but they will not became part of the current scientific 'canon' before they are verified in truly reliable way and they are shown to bring something truly new to common pool of knowledge of humanity.

Those theories and hypothesis that do not gain enough real world evidence to support them will disappear into darkness of history.
Scientists can use their imaginations freely to explore and try to find radically new avenues, but their work will not be real science before the scientific community at large finds that there is real evidence to support their radical theories.

The finest part of the current scientific method is that there is no fancy council or jury that would decide what is real science and what is not.
The current scientific approximation of truth is based on the common understanding of the whole worldwide scientific community. This truly border less and truly international community is formed by the some of the best minds of the world.

This scientific community forms continually a new view on which are the most reliable and trustworthy ideas at the moment.
This consensus is the current scientific 'truth', but it will change always when good enough and reliable enough evidence shows that it should and must be changed.

If one just would present enough reliable scientific evidence on the paranormal phenomena (or supernatural beings, for that matter), the scientific community would change its consensus. These things would certainly then form a part of the common scientific knowledge of humanity.
As long as this evidence is missing, paranormal issues live just in the tabloids, fast-selling pseudo-scientific books and most of all in the imaginations of people who have psychological needs that these beliefs seem to fulfill.

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Practically all humans fear death at least at some point of their lives. The basic problem is that the fear of death is not a thing that could be eradicated at will, as it is based on very deeply embedded and important psychological functions, that have in fact played a major part in the continued existence of our whole species.
I think that this inevitable fear can however be greatly diminished by looking at it rationally in the Epicurean way. This analysis leads into accepting the fact that there really is nothing else to fear but the fear itself. In the Epicurean thinking death is just the return to the status in which we were before we were born in which there are no sensations. Death is so also the end of all pain and all suffering.

On the other hand this fear can be greatly increased and enhanced when one starts imagining things that may or may not happen after death, even if the original purpose of these theories of different kinds of afterlife would have been to create a reassuring way to bypass the problem of death altogether.
A very basic problem present in this thinking is that there can never be a any kind of certainty of the existence of any kind of "afterlife".

However, if one takes the ideas of some kind of an afterlife seriously, one is easily drawn into mental roller coaster where hopes of eternal life go up and down. In fact this very basic uncertainty in itself can became a major problem for a person.
I believe that diminishing this basic uncertainty and underlaying fear is one of the major reasons why for example many devout Christians are so eager to attack all people who don't share their beliefs in general and in the existence of a afterlife in particular.

The simple fact of the existence of unbelieving people feeds the underlying fear and uncertainty, when the Christian promise of a afterlife really works as deterrent of fear of death only when it is swallowed wholly and uncompromisingly.
In the end I think there are two main strategies to choose from in this very basic and important issue: One can either choose the Epicurean way of accepting the inevitable fact of death as similar important part of life and nature as birth or one can choose the religious way of simply denying death.
This latter road however all too easily leads into clinging to promises that can never be verified and which do remove fear and uncertainty only if the ideology making these promises is believed and accepted in its totality.

The will to live is one of the strongest basic instincts we have and it could not be otherwise, as only the humans and their predecessor with this kind of basic instinct could have survived in the long run in the long evolutionary struggle for existence.
This extremely basic instinct for ensuring one's survival works of course mainly by feeding the fear of death, and so fear of death is a very basic important evolutionary mechanism in itself.
However this fear can be also a problem when it allowed to dominate one's life, as very many important and valuable things in this world can have also negative aspects, at least if their role is exaggerated.

As it is a very basic property of all humans, the fear of death can never really be totally removed. In reality I suspect that not even religions with their promises of afterlife have not had a very good success rate in really deep down eradicating this fear of death among the rank and file of their followers.
Even if this fear will inevitably always be with us, we can at least lessen its impact by not allowing our lives to be dominated by it, as all too easily happens when the religious promises of some kind of eternal life get a position in our minds.

"These are the root of all evil: fear of god, of death, of pain, and desire which goes beyond what nature requires for a happy life." - Diogenes of Oinoanda.

"It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death." - Epictetus

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Epictetus/128360143856143

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I fear that this is in fact is the real purpose of the Islamic militants, as they want to stop the inevitable process of assimilation and accepting of western values that is already going on in the Muslim communities in the west.
They expect that Muslims are more and more radicalized when they encounter growing racism and xenophobia, that are in turn in to a great extent fact fueled also by the actions of the Islamic militants.

In their religious zeal these militants are not concerned by the fact that just this process of radicalization will make the practical situation of the individual members of the Islamic communities in the west more and more difficult in the future.
The process of assimilation is soon stopped and soon the antagonism with the mainstream culture rises. This process will not benefit the individual Muslims living in Western countries at all; on the contrary it will make their own lives much harder to bear.

I think that the urgent main priority for the Islamic communities in Western world should now be to forcefully condemn the extremists and clearly and in the end throw out them out from their communities, as just now they hurt their fellow Muslims by their actions far more than anybody else.
Islam is a very communal thing and the elders of the communities could do a lot, if they just would realize what a threat the rising Islamic extremism really is for their own communities, if they want to go on living in the Western countries.

The very basic idea of the recent 'Everybody Draw Prophet Mohammad Day' was not to insult Muslims at all, but to make them realize that they cannot go on ordering people who don't share their system of beliefs what to do and what not, even if admittedly some people took the advantage of the situation just to insult them.
The main point at stake however was that for example Catholics are strictly forbidden the use of contraceptives, but they do not go around threatening or killing people who do. Muslims living on open, democratic societies just must at some point realize that they cannot impose any of their religious dogmas on others. People originally coming from strict Islamic monocultures inevitably have problems in realizing that, but there are no real alternatives.

Only if they come to understand this inevitable fact of life, can they really live in peace in lands that are not under the control of their own religion. There namely will always be people who will not stand being ordered around by religious fanatics from a religion they do not share or even like.
The solution cannot be that all other people quietly give way to every demand Muslims happen to have and to invent in the future. What If they later say that they are offended by people eating in the daytime in the time of Ramadan fast?
Should we just shut out all of our restaurants for a month, as not to offend their religious sensibilities.

The only real solution is that Muslim communities learn to not to expect a similar level of obedience from people who have nothing to do with their system of belief as is expected from its own followers.
This just is a fact of life every other religion in this planet has been forced to adopt to in modern open societies in which there exists more than one religion.

The original idea of the Everybody Draw Prophet Mohammad Day was also to dispel fear of Islamic extremists violence that is so prevalent in the west by showing that threat of violence is useless when enough people stand against it and refuse to comply with their demands.
A stark fact of life is that the Islamic communities themselves would be the main beneficiaries from the dwindling away of the fear of the Islamic extremism. In the end only by getting rid of this extremist element among them can they hope for peaceful co-existence with people of other religions and also of course with the fast-growing non-religious communities.

The Islamic extremists however do not want this kind of peaceful co-existence at all, but just confrontation. They are in fact just now the main threat facing the future peaceful existence of the members of the Islamic communities in the Western world.

PS. Other thing altogether is that there were truly offending pieces of dirt that were published on the Everybody Draw Prophet Mohammad Day that had the very goal of offending Islamic people.
I think that the day would have best served its goal if everybody would have just made a very basic stick figure with the caption Prophet Mohammad. Maybe next year?

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In the end there is no official, true philosophy concerning the workings of humans and their societies, even if there can be official, for the moment true scientific ideas, and there can never be. Philosophy just deals in all varieties of life and there is endless variety in life and in societies.
Not even the wisest and the most enlightened philosophy can be the right one for all of the people in all different societies and in all circumstances.

Philosophy is however also not religion which is of course also always just on opinion on how people should think and act. They are mostly based on ideas that were current in the time of the lifetime of the founders of a religion.
Even a tightly knit school of philosophy like Epicureanism does not, however, make any claims of "divinely revealed" ideas, as true philosophy is always based on rational human analysis of the universe and human existence.

The real big difference is that a typical religion demands absolute subordination and claims to be the holder of some kind of final "divine" truth, when a school of philosophy never makes such claims.
So when I say that I am an Epicurean or a follower of Epicurean school of philosophy, I do not mean that it would be the only possible solution to the spiritual needs of the whole mankind.
I just feel that it is the right life-stance for a person with my personal history, my personal situation in life and most of all my personal fields of interest.

One falls all too easily in the trap of believing the a thing that works for me is the best one for all of the others too, and one all too easily forgets the immense diversity among humans.
Religions are typically schools of thought that are based on the idea that one size must fit all. Most of religions aim at ironing out or at least hiding from view of the immense differences that inevitably exist among all human populations.
On the other hand, saying that I am an Epicurean does not mean that I would renounce all other schools of philosophy, as accepting a religion normally demands renouncing all other religions.

It does just mean that I personally think that Epicureanism is in my mind the best and most comprehensive collection if ideas that suits me personally best out of all schools of philosophy on offer just at this very moment.
I do think that for example Stoicism contains many great ideas, but in my mind it loses out for Epicureanism because of its elements of mysticism and most of all its ideas of predestination. However the great Stoic philosophers did present many ideas that supplement nicely the Epicurean school of thought.

One can of course take any school of philosophy and treat also it a as final truth. One can for example treat Epicurus as some kind of 'übermensch' even if he just did put his mind to create a comprehensive set of directions that can be used as a basis for building a good life.
A very appropriate question at this point is of course why would one want to choose a ready-made school of thought like Epicureanism as any kind of basis for building a personal life-stance? Why not just take bits from here and other bits from there?

This is though question and I have thought about it a lot. I think that a good and firm house needs a good set of foundations and similarly a personal world-view is in my mind easier to build, when you have a firm set of foundations for it.
Nothing however prevents me from building a four-storey house filled with all the treasures of the later schools of thought, when somebody else just wants to build a nice little terrace on the same foundations.
Of course many people would not want anything to do with any foundations, as they want to just cruise around in their trailer-van and there is of course nothing wrong with that. Just at this stage of my own life I quite like the idea of having something more permanent on which to rely on.

I think I personally gained tremendously in the process when I really thought about and commented on all the 40 basic Epicurean sayings for the Epicurus fan-page at the Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Epicurus/79493658728

I already hope that I have already achieved a tiny little bit of the mental tranquility and ability to set priorities in life that was the real goal of the Epicureans of the Antiquity.
I may of course be guilty of just a bunch of wild wishful thinking, but there is the distinct possibility that the inner mental movement for greater tranquility propelled along by Epicurean school of thought could really have produced a real increase in tranquility also.

My ponderings on the Epicurean basic principles are btw. also available here in this blog at:
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/16/the-epicurean-principal-doctrines-are-a-collection-of-forty-quotes-6738702/
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/17/are-fame-money-and-status-the-real-goals-of-life-6747014/
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/18/does-scientific-knowledge-dispel-fear-6753521/
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/19/why-change-does-interfere-less-with-a-wise-man-6761851/
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/20/is-it-easy-to-obtain-that-which-removes-the-pain-6769743/
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/21/what-is-the-most-important-ingredient-of-happiness-6775326/
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/22/is-there-such-a-thing-as-absolute-justice-6796589/
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2009/08/23/why-does-epicurus-feel-still-so-current-6803026/

PS. According to good old Wikipedia tranquillity (also spelled tranquility) is the quality of calm experienced in places with mainly natural features and activities, free from disturbance from man-made areas.

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The message here is to accept the fact that you can well be more happy also in your current situation, if you just really take your mind into it.
So, the pursuit of happiness really can stand in the way of really being happy, if people believe that they can be happy only by achieving something new. There is however the very acute risk that these new things fail to deliver any new improvements in one's state of happiness.

It is not however about giving up improving oneself and one's circumstances, but realizing that these new things do not necessarily make us more happy.
A lot of happiness in life is of course derived from successful struggles and most of all from the act of mastering new skills, but it is a different thing than expecting to find happiness from a bigger house or higher rank in organization.
Of course also they can also bring with them new challenges that make you happy when you learn to master them, but it is not always possible to advance in life and then the important thing would be making the best of what we already got.

I said earlier that this is a Epicurean idea, but it is of course really the central message of Stoic's also. As the greatest Stoic of them all Marcus Aurelius said: "Very little is needed to make a happy life."

Real point here is that you can achieve happiness by also doing the thing you already do in a different way or most importantly with a different attitude, and you must not think that only new untried things can bring increase in happiness. New things can of course also well increase your happiness, but as well the novelties can fail you time after time.

Philosophies like Epicureanism or Stoicism are course not science, but just opinions, but I would go as far as to say that a good well and argumented philosophical opinion that is based on reality can be at time even more valuable than a thousand facts, when this opinion is used in a right way.
A philosopher is a person who has taken to his or her task to think about the very basic things in the nature of the humanity and I'm afraid many of them are always matters of opinion only.
I do think that there will never be any kind of final scientific truth on how to be a happy person.

On the other hand I think that a philosopher can truly help you achieve happiness in your own mind by creating a solid base on where you can rest your own thoughts.
After all happiness lives inside one's own mind only and there is no real objective scientific definition of happiness that would include all possible ways to be happy.

Achieving greater happiness by controlling ones urges and lowering ones expectations is one of the core messages of Epicureanism. This message has not lost a single bit of its actuality, as the general economic growth in our societies has been fueled by just these non-reachable expectations.
Striving to fulfill these expectations has brought us kind of wealth that has never been seen in the history of mankind before, but another thing altogether is if this rise in wealth has made us happier in similar proportions?
It just could be that at least some of us could improve the very quality of their life by not constantly wanting more and bigger things in life.

PS. I know all too well that is it all too easy to sit in an nice house in an affluent society and moan how all this affluence is destroying us, when in real world I am not willing to give up anything I have achieved.
However, I personally may just have reached the plateau where more and bigger does not give any more satisfaction. I think that this may be the case for some other people too. I also think at least some of them would benefit from the idea that one really can stop struggling for more in the material sense at some point of their lives.
I however do not mean that all members of our society should refrain from aiming forward and upward in their lives, as this process simply makes our societies go around.
I'm just suggesting that certain individuals at certain points of their lives could perhaps benefit from being more content with what they already have in their quest for happiness.

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According to Gnostics the stories of the Bible are just metaphorical references to a higher wisdom. Gnostics were ready to accept wisdom from also other religions when the people Freke and Gandy call Literalists believed the stories of Bible to be the only literal truth and that the Bible contained only real historical facts.
Freke and Gandy say that traditional Christian history-writing has told us that the Gnostics were just a small and insignificant subgroup of Christianity and the Literalists were the dominant group from the very beginning.

Freke and Gandy however say that this is bullshit. They say that Literalism was just a small cult that was born in the Rome in the end of the second century. At this stage the Christian Gnostiticism was a international phenomena that thrived throughout the Mediterranean basin, but especially in places like Alexandria, Edessa, Antioch and Ephesus.
The writers make rather straightforward conclusions in not so clear issues and it is easy to see that they aim for a revival of Gnosticism as a religion. Still there is much food for thought, when one marvels how very different conclusions people have made based on the very same material.

This book sits seamlessly in the long tradition of historical research, where it is shown that there is and has never been real proof of even of the existence of a biblical Jesus. There is just a bunch of stories, that are marketed as they would be written eye-witnesses, but there is no real knowledge of their origins or the true personality or even nationality of the writers themselves.
Many modern theologians are united in assessing that these texts were written down decades after the alleged incidents that are described in them. They say quite uniformly that these writers had not themselves witnessed the events they describe and they just repeat the stories they have heard from the earlier followers of this new sect.

Even if Jesus was a historical person, it does not really matter if we discuss the extremely tall claims that he was the Son of God, who could walk on water and turn water into wine and did came back to life after his death, as any of these claims is not in any way tied to the historical existence of a person called Jesus.
Personally I am quite ready to admit that there could have been a person called Jesus, but there exists a very logical and even very probable explanations why there is no need for any real Jesus to have existed.

The real deep question here is not what was nature and quality of the teachings that were marketed in the name of this Jesus, or if this person existed, but if this person really did do the extremely supernatural things that are attributed to him. Only these supernatural claims form the basis for the claim of Christianity for being the source of the only possible truth and not the quality of the teachings of Jesus at all.
Most of real historians have avoided this hot potato and they have just retold the stories submitted of the Christians and have not often questioned their real historical value at all to avoid controversy.

The real truth in this issue is extremely hard to come by, as Christianity has for nearly 2000 employed a vast army of scribes and biblical scholars with a sole task of creating thousands upon thousands of scholarly looking works that have had a single aim; to protect their dear faith and belief-system and to create as seamless-looking history out of the bits and pieces presented in the Bible.
This work has never been real science, as the end result has been always clear when the work has been started. It is just impossible to do real scientific work if there is only one possible answer, as has been the case at the so called 'biblical studies', that have been created generation after generation by the good sons of the faith.

The end result has been thousands upon thousands of books that use the same arguments, which are in fact quite useless as sources of real knowledge because of the extremely strong original bias.
It is very easy to be awed by this massive onslaught of "scientific"-sounding work, as it is all too easy to forget how these works were born just to prove the ideology of the writers to be the only possible one and not to find any kind of real scientific proof of the issues at hand.

When the theologians write of these issues they are protecting their own livelihood and their strong ideology, that has often taken over their mind completely. Luckily there are others, who can have more scientific approach to these things.

Why then do I believe that even the majority of stories in the Bible could be pure fantasy?
Is it odd that somebody has invented persons like Don Quixote, Pantagruel, Odysseus or Romulus and Remus or characters like Noah or Adam? People just are able to create very believable and lifelike characters in their own minds when they are trying to create figures that work as metaphors and symbols of different ideas,.

It is well known how stories in the oral traditions do accumulate details, new twists and new color by every recital. There is no need for any single person to have created to whole story by himself, but these stories can have accumulated new believable twists and details through time.
In real world there are no other real proofs of even the existence of the man named Jesus than the stories told by the followers of this new cult, that are in real world just as reliable as eye-witness stories as the stories told by the closest friends of Uri Geller of his exploits.
The historical references to Jesus that are found in the secular contemporary sources are based on the stories told and propagated by the followers of this new cult, and there are no direct real outside eye-witnesses of even the existence of Jesus and even less of his alleged magical powers.

When one reads even the often cited citation of Josephus on Jesus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus it is easy to see that he just repeats the claims made by the early Christians and he in fact has no real firsthand knowledge of these incidents.
What court would approve as evidence a story by a person that tells how he has heard from s third party certain things?

The same things applies to all others mentions of Jesus in the contemporary sources of that time; they can just testify the fact that even early Christians did spread stories that did tell about a character called Jesus.

There are several good books on the issue:
Syntagma Of The Evidences Of The Christian Religion, Robert Taylor, 1828.
The Christ Myth, Arthur Drews, C. Deslisle Burns, 1910.
Jesus—God, Man or Myth : An Examination of the Evidence by Herbert Cutner, 1950
The Jesus Myth, George Albert Wells, 1998
The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Acharya S., 1999
The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ?, Earl Doherty, 1999.
The Fabrication of the Christ Myth, Harold Liedner, 2000.

Also these books delve into issue in some level:
Bruno Bauer, 1841, Criticism of the Gospel History of the Synoptics
David Friedrich Strauss, 1860, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined
Thomas Whittaker, 1904, The Origins of Christianity
William Benjamin Smith, 1906, Der vorchristliche Jesus
Albert Kalthoff, 1907, The Rise of Christianity
John M. Robertson, 1917, The Jesus Problem
Georg Brandes, 1926, Jesus – A Myth
L.Gordon Rylands, 1935, Did Jesus Ever Live?
Edouard Dujardin, 1938, Ancient History of the God Jesus
P.L. Couchoud, 1939, The Creation of Christ
Karl Kautsky, 1953, The Foundations of Christianity
Guy Fau, 1967, Le Fable de Jesus Christ

PS. In the year 1828 reverend Robert Taylor wrote this in the preface for his book:
"Prisoner in Oakham Jail for the conscientious maintenance of the truths contained in that Manifesto."
"Thou hast in this Pamphlet all the sufficient evidence, that can be adduced for any piece of history a thousand years old, or to prove an error of a thousand years standing, that such a person as Jesus Christ never existed; but that the earliest Christians meant the words to be nothing more than a personification of the principle of reason, of goodness, or that principle, be it what it may, which may most benefit mankind in the passage through life."

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Widespread absolute certainty is normally bred only in an environment where there is only one kind of information available. The real-world influence of believers of a absolute certainty tends normally to be smaller in societies where there are many independent sources of information.
Any widespread form of absolute certainty can create a vicious circle of conformity that ultimately shuts off free thinking in a issue or even the society as a whole.
As long as there are many competing absolute certainties, level of freedom in a society is normally guaranteed, as even carriers of absolute certainties are normally advocates of free thought and speech as long as it allows them to continue marketing their very own version of absolute certainty.

However when a certain threshold is crossed, the freedom starts to crumble. The threshold is normally crossed only when the the flow of free information is restricted. Absolute certainties need to be insulated from conflicting information if they are to succeed. Only then can followers of absolute certainties start acting against followers of other absolute certainties to build up their power base.
In reality there are no absolute truths outside the realms of mathematics and natural sciences. Every story in the world of human endeavor has at least two sides. To be able to form a absolute certainty one needs to restrict the flow of information that does not support the absolute certainty at hand.

Of course every person holds a set of at least near absolute certainties, but in a open society at least normally some degree of benefit of doubt is allowed in most issues, when the rich variety of information available makes most people see that there can be other sides of issues. Under these conditions the absolute certainties just cannot get a similar hold of ones mind as in a closed society.
In a free society there are normally only small core groups of believers of any absolute certainties. In a open society even most of their followers have normally even some reservations of their own on which things to apply that absolute certainty and on which not.

Retaining the benefit of doubt is the key issue in keeping a society free. When any issue is build into one where there can be just one side and just one truth, there forms a absolute certainty as the other side of the story is at the end easily suppressed totally.
Even grave injustice is always possible also in an open society when an absolute certainty gains so much momentum that is suppresses all other possible ways seeing the issue at hand. This process can happen in very narrow individual issues too.
It can happen any time when there are powerful enough group of well-meaning carriers of any absolute truth, who can push their version of a absolute truth so that it finally gains a status where nobody dares to challenge it publicly anymore and tell the other side also. A fact of life however is that here nearly always is the other side too.

Another issue is that in a human society decisions have to be made constantly. However I do not think that truly wise decisions can ever be made based on incomplete evidence. Unfortunately this all too often happens, when people allow themselves to receive only the information that supports the absolute certainties they already have.

True wisdom is the ability to face also the contradictory evidence and make the decisions based on all the facts and views and not on just the ones that do happen to support one’s own old prejudices.
True wisdom is to face all sides and make decisions on true merits of the issue at hand and not based on how the decision conforms to the ideology one already has.

The biggest problem with any kind of absolute certainty is that it all too easily makes this kind of balanced decision making difficult or even impossible.
I must hasten to add that I do not mean that people should not have even strong convictions, as convictions have always propelled humanity forward, but I mean that they should never be allowed to make it impossible to even acknowledge and review also the contradictory evidence.

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Yoism is very interesting as it is the first open-source religion in existence. It's members do decide in a democratic process what things are included in the religion and what not. In practice Yo gives wholly up the age-old practice of religions of having unmoving and unchangeable central tenets.
Yoism does refuse similarly all the explanations offered be existing religions and most of all they definitely refuse to believe in the angry desert god of the Abrahamic religions, that is of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

They do have a concept of god, but for them god is just a original cause that does not interfere in the affairs of the mankind or real world in any way. So Yoism is a Deist or Pantheist religion in the true Einsteian fashion.
The "Ten Sacred Principles" and "Five Pillars of Yo" of Yoism can without doubt be accepted by every humanist also: see http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/40 and http://www.yoism.org/?q=node/49

I must admit that it took a long time for me to be assured that the thing was not just an extended joke and I am still not quite sure of it. At places the website of Yo feels like a grand joke, but at very many places there is a genuine feelong of true and genuine philosophical pondering of the nature of humans and reality.
In fact the true nature of Yoism does not matter, as this nagging fear of being just had adds a new layer of interest in reading the hundreds of pages of text available in the Yo-website. You must always think if any particular thing is written tongue-in-cheek or does its writer really mean it. This kind of suspense is rarely on offer in older religions! Yoism is really the very first religion with a sense of humor.

This discrepancy can be of course due to the very open-source nature of Yo, as there just might be people who treat the thing more lightly than others, who might be really out there for seeking a way to combine the feelings of spirituality with a realistic view of our world.
All in all, in my eyes the Yo-thing is a combining all the things that can be worth our while in human endeavor in a single neat package. In the end Yoism stands for all the good things that can further the cause and survival of humanity and our common 'Spaceship Earth'. Ecology is a very central theme in this modern religion, as of course it should be also in the older ones too in this day and age.

There is a lot of New Age -nonsense included, but most of things in the website of Yo are quite rational, honest and well thought out. There is of course alarming amount of idealism, but a religion without idealism would be doomed from the outset.
Yoist's do not believe in life after death, but they would like to build the Heaven on Earth. Not so that they would believe it to be possible, but they do think that striving for this kind of goal can improve the lot of humanity at large.

The future of our common Earth is a very central issue at Yoism and it is addressed in almost everywhere is its teachings. One could easily call Yo the religion of ecology.
Yoism was created by psychologist Dan Kriegman, who has admitted in a interview in Boston Globe that creating a new religion did embarrass a bit him also. Kriegman however points out that Yo is based wholly on things that can be proven scientifically.
Kriegman points out that the followers of You do not bind themselves to any spiritual leader lake Jesus of Buddha, but the teachings of Yo are created by the followers of the religion themselves. Yo does however treat people like Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Bob Dylan as its saints!

Every Yoist has the right to suggest things to be included in the teachings of Yo and if they gather support, they are eventually included in the Holy Book of the religion, called of course the "Book of Yo".
The decision making process in Yo is very much like the scientific method, where the common pool of knowledge consists of a great number of individual contributions, but only the ones that gain real consensus of the community are included in the official canon, but this canon can be easily changed if consensus changes.

I think that in the end Yoism is real experiment in trying to combine the scientific worldview with the spiritual and mystical elements of the human mind that really seem to always exist in the minds of some people. It would be really commendable if Yo could offer a reasonable and rational way for those people who feel that they need a vehicle for expressing their spiritual needs also.

Finally here are "The Ten Sacred Principles of The Way of Yo". I do not think any humanist would have something to say about them:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident,
1. That all humans are sacred beings that come into the world with equal unalienable Rights.
2. That among these Rights are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
3. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That these Rights may be constrained when, and only when, their constraint is necessary for the maintenance and operation of an effective Government that can secure these Rights.
4. That these Rights may not be constrained because of religious beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, race, discomfort with the ideas espoused or actions taken by others, or any other reason that may be put forth to justify constraint other than that constraint that is necessary for the operation of an effective Government that can secure these Rights.
5. That all children should be given the chance to grow, thrive, be loved, and to explore their potential to the fullest. That all people—whether children or adults—who have not had sufficient opportunities must also be given the chance to thrive and grow, to the fullest extent that the community can provide.
6. That, as profoundly social creatures, we can only achieve our potential when we have the option of participating in healthy, supportive, loving relationships and communities. That participating in the creation of such healthy communities is the sacred duty of all Yoans.
7. That adequate food, shelter, clothing, health care, and other material essentials—in addition to free access to information, including the accumulated stores of human knowledge and culture—are necessary for these Rights to be realized. All who are willing (whether able or not) to engage in a fair share of productive work have a Right to have access to these essentials, at least to the degree necessary for the exercise of these Rights.
8. That it is our sacred duty to protect the life sustaining biosphere and the diversity of living creatures.
9. That—in addition to loving, cooperative communities—dangerous ideas, forces, delusions, and sick coalitions of people abound in our world, a world filled with deceptions and self-deceptions. These dangerous others can NOT be identified by the extent to which what they believe conflicts with what we believe. Rather, these dangerous others can be identified by the degree to which they act to deprive others of Life, Liberty, and the ability to pursue Happiness. It is our duty to help others come to understand these Sacred Truths and to enable The Way of Yo to grow into an effective force for healing our world. Simultaneously, it is our duty to continually recognize the danger of defining in-groups (Us) and out-groups (Them), for such definitions have been used to justify and encourage terribly evil actions against others. Toward this end, we include in our Gatherings the singing of The Hallelujah Prayer of Yo.
10. In pursuit of these goals, Yoans are not guided by dogmatically proclaimed, fixed truths. All Yoans turn to the court of their personal, direct experience of the world and then, employing the Open Source Truth Process, join together in our collective attempt to formulate the current (best we can do at the moment, unfixed, and open to further revision by the community) Open Source Truths (OST's) that guide us in our pursuit of these Sacred Goals."

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It is however easy to say that this kind of easy and clear-cut targets for international action and pressure are not present at the moment.
I would however say that the situation of women in Saudi-Arabia or Iran is at the moment a similar disgrace to humanity as apartheid was 30 years ago or slavery was a hundred years ago.

Local women activists in Iran are openly speaking about apartheid against women and in fact a quite similar process of total segregation is going on at the moment in Iran, but not many in west dare say it aloud.
Things are complicated by the fact that both in Iran and Saudi-Arabia this violent, extremely open and unashamed repression of women is done in the name of a global religion with over a billion adherents all over the world.

Targeting this offense to human rights would open the flood-gates for taking the whole religion under critical scrutiny on this respect and all too few dare to venture in this direction at this moment.
However, the main thing standing in the way is simply oil. Most of all Saudi-Arabia with its immense oil-reserves is so important for the industrialized west that they do not dare to even think of meddling in its human rights-situation, which is however all in all a major disgrace to humanity.

When these repressive politics are hidden behind a protective veil of religion, they become things that cannot be touched at all in the eyes of all too many well-meaning people in the industrialized west.
This unwarranted respect for the 'holy' is well used in creating a atmosphere where it is all too easy to say that there is nothing to be done, as it is their religions, their tradition and what are we to say anybody how they should treat their women.

The feudal princes of Saudi-Arabia can use this situation to their great advantage, as they know all too well that any western government is never likely to touch their infernal human rights situation, as long as they are dependent of their oil.
I see that the only realistic way to open up this situation is cut our dependency in oil in general. It is possible and it must be possible, as oil will some day run out after all, and we must find new ways to create our energy anyhow. We need just speed up this inevitable process.

I would even make a the claim that at his very moment every increase in the use of wind power, hydropower, solar energy, biomass, biofuel or geothermal energy is also work for human rights in oil producing countries, where the oppressors are using the oil as one of their major means for staying in power.
The stark fact is that as long as the Saudis or Iranians can use oil as weapon, they can freely do anything they like to the inhabitants of their own countries.

A fact of life is that the crimes against humanity that are committed there almost on daily basis will remain their 'internal problems' as long as we are dependent on their oil.
Cutting the dependency in oil will of course have many other small side benefits.
A small detail of course is that it may perhaps save the world from the perils of global warming also.

Switching to renewables will also one day prevent the disasters like the huge oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico, when there is no more a need to pump oil from extremely dangerous places like the bottom of ocean two kilometers under the surface.
Long before these immense long-run benefits start emerging, we could however reach a point where the dictatorial repressive governments of the oil producing countries would be at last vulnerable to international pressure to straighten out their horrible records on human rights abuses.

http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2010/04/mehrangiz-kar-oped/
http://regimechangeiran.blogspot.com/2005/12/islamic-gender-apartheid.html
http://www.iranhumanrights.org/
http://www.amnestyusa.org/all-countries/saudi-arabia/page.do?id=1011230
http://www.hrw.org/middle-eastn-africa/saudi-arabia

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I have made a decision. I have namely decided to raise my voice every time I see even hint of violent language in any discussion forums I take part in. I have decided to do it even if it is done by those I am generally in deep agreement with.
I have decided to do it even if they are just using violent figures of speech in response to real world violence and atrocities committed by deeply bigoted men and women in the name of their pet ideology.

Besides being a lifelong atheist, I must stress that I am also a humanist and a pacifist. So annihilating people who hold deeply held beliefs differentiating from mine is not the solution that I would ever prefer, if there are any other options available.
Fortunately violence is almost never not the only even more rarely the most effective option available to combat the evil things done in the name of different deeply held ideologies.

Much more efficient and productive way in the long run is to change those ideologies so that they do not cause similar evil things to be done in their names anymore.

For example the at its heyday seemingly all-powerful and unstoppable racist apartheid government of South Africa did eventually come to its senses after a extremely heavy international pressure.
As the world becomes more and more connected the effectiveness of international pressure is becoming greater and greater, if just the pressure created becomes heavy enough and the party being pressured does really feel being cast out of international community.

Were few people remember for example that Islamic world has also abolished slavery during the last hundred years, even though they originally had no internal pressures of their own to do so.
The incentive and pressure to abolish slavery in the Islamic world came almost wholly from the west, which had already been changed by the rise of humanistic thought to see the inherent evilness of slavery.
I do honestly believe that a lot can be accomplished through these non-violent means also in many other areas of life.

Of course this kind of pressure can be effective only when it starts to hurt its object also financially, as in the end it really always is the money that does the talking.
For example when the local elites in Islamic areas in their time saw in their time that clinging to old-fashioned system of slavery would in the long run cost them more than it could bring them in, their attitude towards it changed for good.
Similarly the apartheid-government of South Africa reached eventually a point where it was easy to calculate that the price of continuing the repression of blacks would be greater that of accepting their humanity.

To this day the holy books of Islam (and as well of Christianity also) do sanction and even encourage the evil institution of slavery, but under the constant fear of international pressure, nobody even dares to suggest that it would be re-instituted

The problem is of course that the for example the repression of women going on in Islamic world is not similarly seen universally a problem as slavery or apartheid were. So raising a international movement and pressure is not as easy. I would however still say that it is not impossible.
We should just first overcome the extraordinary barrier of cultural relativism that makes it in many countries just impossible to even talk about the human rights problems in different cultures.

However I think that one should take one clear-cut issue at a time to make any progress.
Just to say that Islam is evil will take us nowhere, but demanding that women should be made equal citizens with equal rights also in the hard-line Islamic countries and communities just could eventually lead to long-term change in attitudes in those communities.
This can work if enough people would take the challenge and make up their minds to trying to provoke such a change by real world actions.

If successful this process would eventually erode the power base of the most repressive forms of that religion also, as its very central teachings would be torn to light and taken under a critical inspection and eventually corrected.

“Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed is the only thing that ever has.”

- Margaret Mead

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

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I think it is a quite different thing to say that "According to my experience of life and according to rational thinking this would be a good way to live one's life" like the Epicureans, Stoics or Humanists do, or to say that "This is the only allowed way to live one's life, as my God has told me so", as the religions do generally say.
I fear that it is all too common in atheist circles to class philosophical schools like Epicureanism, Stoicism or Humanism in the same category as religions, even if schools of philosophy do not make any claims of being of supernatural origin, but are just rational things created by some very intelligent and thoughtful people.

I think that in the world of atheism there are some fiercely independent people who cannot stomach the idea at all that other people can have had good ideas also on how to live a good and meaningful life. These people seem to feel that even studying the existing ideas on living a good life would be a threat to their hard won independence.
I suspect that these people are often people who have struggled themselves free from some religion and are now afraid of falling into similar ideological traps on the field of secular thinking.

Unfortunately by doing so they fail to see the great difference in just presenting models for good life as philosophical schools do and ordering and requiring people to follow such models, as religions do.
Nobody enforces philosophy and nobody nowhere requires anybody to follow the ideas presented by any philosopher. There are no philosophical congregations out there enforcing the purity of the ideas among their members.

There are just people who find some philosophical ideas attractive to them and who find some others unattractive. They are also free to mix and match different philosophical ideas and create quite new kinds of combination based on these old ideas.
The main point however is that there is never a need to swallow a philosophy as a whole hog. On the other hand religions are commonly sold as whole packages, where you must take the bad with the good stuff to be a good follower.
Of course it is true that most people do in fact pick and choose also among the religious ideas the ones that suit them best, even if in theory that is not normally allowed in the weird world of religions.

I think it is not sensible or rational to invent the world anew for every new generation, if some intelligent, human and sensible people have already thought about the same things in the past.
Studying also the old ideas does not in any way prevent people from creating new ideas; on the contrary, old ideas can serve as a good breeding ground for great new ideas.

Moreover these ideas have gone through a rational qualifying process, where nonsensical and just bad ideas have commonly been left to rot in the storage shelves of history. Only the ones that still do have a real meaning have survived and are still actively presented.
Studying the ideas of for example Anaxagoras, Epicurus, Diagoras of Melos, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen or Bertrand Russell can only widen one's horizons.

I think that those people are plain wrong who feel that they are somehow constrained by accepting any kind of ready-made ideas, even when these ideas are based solely on reason and rational thinking on how to live a good life.
A person accepting the basic values or principles of for example my own favorites of Epicureanism, Stoicism or Secular Humanism can go on inventing his or her own ideas, but he or she has a solid foundation on which to build them.

PS. Don't forget The International Day of Reason on the May 6th:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=100568523321443&ref=mf

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That feeling of security is provided by any kind of rigid enough guidelines, if they just give right kind of direction and meaning to one's life.
For example even Scientology or Mormonism can act as this kind source of mental safety, even if they are basically complete and utter rubbish.

In similar vein the Communist movement offered a rigid set of guidelines for living one's life. It had just the same effect on people as the older religions, even if it did not include the notion of god.
This happened even if the very central dogmas of Communism were faulty and in practice unusable, as are the central dogmas of so many religions too.

I do not think that any of the real world Humanists would think that they have found the Final and Only Truth, as the followers of different religions and strong ideologies like Communism very routinely claim.
I think Humanists just claim to have commonly agreed on a good enough approximation of well enough guidelines for good and recommendable human behavior.

Humanists do of course believe that following these guidelines could lead to a better world, if they would be implemented widely enough, as they have been authored with just that goal in mind.
The ideas that are collected under the banner of Humanism are however work of some of the most intelligent, honest and most well-meaning human beings on offer, but they are not a revealed truth and they can be changed if development of human societies does necessitate it.

Humans have always created gods as their own images; new gods have been created when societies have changed and the old image used as god has been rendered obsolete by changes in society.
Ammon, Thor and Jupiter are gone and eventually the modern crop of Gods will follow them.

I would suggest jettisoning the existing religions with their warped and obsolete image of man is now long overdue and there is perhaps time to either transform the old ones or create new ones with a better and more accurate image of their creator; the humans.
Humans have come a long way from the fear-filled existence of the Bronze Age nomads that that give birth to the current major world religions and I think it is time finally either to absorb that change in modern world-religions too or eventually replace them with new ones that are better suited to the new kind of world we do live in now.

The fallible and vein humans leading the current world religions get their power straight from the very nature of current religions.
This power comes from the way a religion works to subdue humans under the claimed Final and Only Truth that is in the hard core of every single successful religion.

The problem lies in the very idea that in the heart of nearly all religions there are claims of the reality that are not of human origin and cannot be changed by humans.
This gives the power base that religious leaders can misuse at will, as they claim to be interpreting the divine will when they are furthering their own power and influence and picking and choosing the bits from their "holy books" that seem to back them up at that very moment.

However, Humanism does not make these kind of claims of having found a unmovable and final truth. A person building his or he life on Humanistic basic principles will have a ready-made set of wonderful advice for a good and moral life.
On the same time he or she knows that these rules can be changed if the world changes enough.

I do personally think that Humanism peppered with the best ideas of Epicureanism and Stoicism can offer a good set of rules to live a good and full life.
I do not of course think that this kind of New Humanism could replace the current world religions in any foreseeable future. I'm personally quite happy if I can choose it for myself and recommend it freely to others that are like me. That will not change THE world, but perhaps It will change MY world to the better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Epicurus/79493658728?ref=ts
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Marcus-Aurelius/123395559393?ref=ts

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The incredible backwardness of the current Saudi-Arabian Islamic thought is extremely well illuminated by a recent case in Saudi-Arabia where a family took a case to local court where the culprit was a djinn or 'evil spirit'.
These evil spirits are in fact included in the core teachings of the Islam and they are mentioned several times in the holy book of the Muslims, where a whole Sura is named after them. This holy Sura carries the name of "Al-Jinn".

In Islam genie or djinn is a supernatural creature which possesses free will. They can be either good or evil. In Islam, Satan, known in Arabic as Iblis, is the iconic genie that refused to bow down to Adam when ordered to by Allah.
Cultural relativity or no cultural relativity, a society that still treats evil spirits as real world phenomena has in my books some serious development work to meet the standards of the modern world.

This Wahhabistic fundamentalist interpretation of Islam leads constantly to inhuman and cruel situations in Saudi-Arabia.
The really sad part is that medieval religious dogmas are often followed to a letter in Saudi-Arabia even when they are in fact nonsensical to begin with. When even interpreting them in a strikingly different modern society in any way is not allowed, there is much grief created a as result.

The latest outrage is the case of 75-year old lady who was found to be alone in a house with two men who were not her relatives. This grandma has to endure 40 lashes so that even the final letter of the cruel and medieval but divinely ordered ancient criminal law is followed.
This kind of absurd situations are in fact inevitable, if even the very basic criminal law is seen as something that mere humans cannot alter.
On the other hand Islam has succeeded in keeping the humanistic ideas out of its domain and so the rights of individuals are quite non-existent in fundamentalist Islamic states and are always subordinate to the demands of One True Religion.

A man boasting about his sexual adventures publicly is a disgusting creature and is a disgrace to his gender. Even in the western world these things are private matters and are dealt with socially. A person making such public announcements just faces the possibility of serious social stigma.
In the strange and distorted world of Islamic fundamentalism a person making this kind of statements can however cause a TV-station to be closed down and the person himself to be flogged until he is half-dead, as happened in Saudi-Arabia recently.

The way in which Islam deals with human sexuality has always been its biggest failing, as its basic strategy has always been the suppression of all sexual urges outside marriage.
The method chosen by Islam for doing this is by threat of horrific physical violence for all those who fail to follow the official narrow path.
In our own world these things have become completely private matters and we have already great difficulty in even understanding the reasoning behind these horrific acts of physical violence that include stoning and flogging.

The pre-medieval Islamic thinking goes from the pre-medieval idea where threat of physical violence was seen as the only way of controlling the human sexuality which was then seen as a major threat to the well-being of the whole society.
We in the west have however already realized long time ago that sexual acts between adult and consenting individuals are not a real threat to society as a whole at all.
Our societies have in fact given up controlling the normal sexual behavior of adults altogether.
In countries like Saudi-Arabia this pointless struggle against the very basic human instincts continues however unabated.

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The Icelandic volcanic eruption is as clear case of this kind of "Act of God" as any happening can be. I think that complaints should now be directed to the earthly representatives of this God, who should of course also pick up the tab on the damages caused by the acts of their God.

The well-salaried full-time earthly representatives of this God are found in nearly every village and town of the world.
They mostly have shiny offices situated on the best areas of the cities and villages. These offices are now the places where people affected by recent eruptions can fill in their complaints and request reimbursement for the damages they have suffered for this "Act of God".

These organizations generally say that they are the earthly representatives of this God of theirs. They quite universally claim to know his will and claim to know how to interpret it in also very practical daily matters like eating and allowed sexual behavior. Now however there is time to take also some real responsibility for the actions of this God of theirs.
Most of these people even claim that this God of theirs has created the whole universe. Many of them even claim that he still manages the daily affairs of our universe; some even go as far as to say that he micromanages and personally directs the lives of all individual humans.

So, if this omnipotent creature of theirs has seen it fit to stop the whole of air traffic in Europe for several days, they should of course bear the responsibility for his action this time also.
Or could it just be, that this all-knowing and omnipotent creature does not bear responsibility for the sad and bad things that occur in this world that is supposedly his own creation?

Ps. All joking aside, it is difficult thing to imagine that there still would be adult and intelligent people who would think that some kind of God-figure is managing the events occurring in our universe, but one look at the different discussion groups concentrating on religious matters will sadly tell you otherwise.

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A person who puts his trust in science believes that a final truth on anything has not been found and will probably never be found, but new and better information can be had on a later date on anything.
A person who really trusts in science will never accept the idea that there would be final and unmovable information available, but he or she believes that every scientific "truth" is only the best explanation available at that very moment, even if it can be quite comprehensive and seemingly very final.

A person who puts his or her trust in science is committed to change his or her view of the world and our universe if the best possible available explanation changes due to the work done by the scientific community which includes many of the most highly trained and many of most intelligent people from all nations, races and cultures found on earth.
A person who puts his trust in science expects that this truly global community is in the end able to select really the really best available explanations as the current scientific consensus.

He or she expects that the many wrong and misleading ideas that are inevitably born in the scientific community will lose out to better and more accurate ideas in the long run.
A person putting his or her trust in science is in the end also humbly accepting the fact that science can be wrong, as well as any human can be wrong at times.

However, he or she simultaneously believes that scientific community has better tools to correct its errors than any other way to analyze the reality around us.
A person putting his trust in science believes that humans have a need to study and analyze themselves, human communities, the environment and the universe and also actively react to changes that occur in them.

A trust in science is based not on any specific set of scientific facts at all, but it is trust on the method that has been used to collect all the data that science has so successfully made available to all of humanity.
A trust in science is a trust in the validity of the modern scientific method as the best possible way to expand and add the common base of knowledge that the whole of humanity has collected during its existence.

On the other hand a belief in a religion is in reality just believing that the founding fathers of that religion had really found the final and unmovable truth.
A religious belief is believing that just the creators of one's own religion have been the receivers of a real divine revelation and it has not been revealed to the founding fathers of some other religion that makes exactly the same claims of being the carriers of the only and final truth.

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These people still want their holy books to contain a final and unmovable truth. To achieve this they are willing to throw away a big part of our accumulated and extremely valuable scientific knowledge.
There is naturally still hope that also these stubbornly old-fashioned people will choose the way the majority of Christians in western world have done.
These people have just kept the good parts of their old religious beliefs and quietly discarded those parts which have already been proved to be blatantly false beyond any reasonable doubt by science.

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2) Science is really under attack and the sad part is that the attackers are now often coming within the scientific community itself.
These attackers are religious people who have often reached established positions among the scientific community, but are in the evolution-debate mostly operating outside their own field of expertise. So professors of physics have been seen attacking evolution from alleged positions inside the scientific community itself.

This movement has been largely provoked by the arrival of the Intelligent Design- movement. They have in many places succeeded in creating among the lay people at least an impression of ID being a scientific movement and this model is catching up.
These people have often successfully avoided revealing the facts that they have no studies, no real theories of their own or no scientific evidence whatsoever to back up their claims, which are in practice based on the simple notion that modern science is incompatible with their religion.

This onslaught of religiously motivated non-science dressed up as science leads to a situation where these people are able to cross-reference to similar pseudo-scientific works. Soon they hide behind a wall of reasoning that soon starts lo look like science with the usual footnotes and citations to other work in the field.
This self-serving chain of religious bullshit can be presented as a scientific approach, if the validity of the original work is not evaluated in time and the emptiness of this non-science is not revealed in time.

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3) The fundamental difference between science and religions is that science is always capable of changing even some of its most fundamental notions if new evidence arrives that makes old notions obsolete.
On the other hand religions are basically forever married to their foundations that are laid out in their holy books, even if also religions do of course in fact change and evolve greatly in real life even if this fact is not commonly admitted by diehard followers of these traditions.

Science can however always take even the most basic scientific theories and hypothesis and think them wholly anew. This is of course not an easy task and becomes more and more difficult the more widely accepted a scientific theory is.
There is a notion in ID circles that Charles Darwin and evolution are somehow given a free ride and they are not subjects of the same kind of full scientific scrutiny as all other scientific theories are. These claims do not however hold water and there is no real evidence of this kind of special treatment.

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4) The Intelligent Design or ID movement has taken as its mantra the catchy slogan “Teach the controversy”. By that they try to imply that there really are no kind of competing scientific theories on evolution of biological diversity.
The sad fact however is that there are no real scientific theories of a “designer” and how this being has come to be and how he really has created all that we see around us.

In the end this "theory" just claims that there can be no scientific theory explaining all the millions of life-forms we have around us now and the millions that have already perished on the due course of evolution.
ID-people have really not formed enough theory of their own to poke with a stick, as they have just been busy searching for possible problem areas and remaining enigmas in existing real scientific theories.

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5) The odd thing is that for some people there is still a need to 'prove' evolution, but gravity is accepted as a solid fact. Still 'gravity' is just a theory that tries to explain why things with a mass act as they do, as much as evolution is a 'theory' of how living things have developed into their current forms.

The thing really bothers some people in evolution is of course that accepting it means giving up claims of owning the “Only and Final Truth” and because of that many religions are simply having difficulty in accepting it.

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6) A basic argument for the creationist "Intelligent Design" fallacy has always been that the tremendous complexity we see around us could not have been born by itself without a guiding hand.
It is a very easy trap to fall in, as it is a very difficult thing the grasp the immense duration of time it has been taken to bring about the things we see around us.

It is difficult also to remember that all things are build around strict guidelines given by the basic laws of nature or in other words by the inherent properties embedded in all the building blocks of the Universe.
These guidelines of the universe were not invented by humans, but humans have only gradually found out their existence.

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7) It usually comes from where you would least expect it. The countries of the long gone Communist bloc are silently sliding to their old bad habits of living led by old superstitions. The country of Romania has not earned any real reputation with its religiousness and it comes as a rather nasty surprise to many that Romania has silently just dropped evolution from its school curriculum.

According to the census from year is 2002 a whopping 86,7 percent of Romanians belong to the Romanian Orthodox Church which is an autocephalous church within the Eastern Orthodox communion. Somehow the ultraconservatism of the Orthodox Church has escaped attention when world has been focused on Roman Catholics and Islam as bastions of conservatism in the world.

The state officials in Romania say that they still teach normal biology, that naturally includes implicitly also the effects of evolution, but just the name is not used. It is however to be feared that the game is lost if even a mention of the horrible name of evolution is banned in even the most basic schooling in a country.

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8) Even if mechanism of evolution has been successfully explained the secret of the original birth of life still needs a full scientific explanation as these things that did happen 3,8 billion years ago have left very little or no physical evidence.
As the rise of first life forms happened billions of years ago it will maybe never possible to fully and completely know the circumstances that give rise to life, but science is slowly edging towards a solution that would at least explain how the first extremely simple life forms could be formed.

This explanation crosses the bridge separating chemistry and biology as inevitably there is a point where a chemical process did became so "alive" to be described as a biological entity.
The birth of life has however nothing to do with explaining its later evolution, as they two quite different problems. Evolution still works quite nicely even if the birth of life is some day explained in a quite new way through some new breakthrough in science.

Being Human 1-4/2010

Comments

But you see, the Catholic Church has this thing called dogma. The creators of this faith had no personal knowledge whatsoever of married life and in fact did not have any personal experience of any kind of relationship involving sexuality in any form.
However these very people did a very long time ago decide that it is not allowable to have a divorce and end an unhappy or even violent relationship. They at the same time decided that these dogmas can never be revoked or even changed in any way.

Of course there is a good intention behind all this. The creators of this faith sincerely believed that preserving the integrity of the family was of paramount importance for the society. There is nothing wrong in defending the noble institution of marriage as such.
But things start always going in a very bad way when people start making unchangeable dogmas out of good intentions. The dogma in question has lead to innumerable misery in the lands under the Catholic rule during many centuries.
This dogma will go on creating misery as long as this dogma is upheld and there are people that really believe that Catholic Church can give them direct orders on how to act and live their lives.

2. We live in a strange world, where on the surface very modern and enlightened people can very lightly accept the fact that there can be people that are deprived of some very basic human needs, as the closeness, comfort and companionship derived from the strongest and deepest possible relationship between two human beings.
I am naturally referring the Catholic Church, which for reasons of its own is making still demands that its core workers do not have sexual relationships at all.

There is a recent “sex scandal” in the US involving a well-known catholic television-priest. The funniest part is that the ”sex scandal” in this case means just that he was seen kissing a woman, which is the most natural thing a man can do to a woman. The real scandal here is of course the thing that an employer really can still make this kind of demands to its employees, and they are not picketed and dragged though the courts for violating the very basic rights of these employees.

The funny part of the whole sordid thing is that this demand of celibacy in the Catholic Church is not in fact even not based on teachings found in the “Holy book” of that religion. This rule was in fact invented later on, when the leaders of the newfangled religion found out that the married priesthood could produce powerful local clerical dynasties which could undermine the central leadership of the centralized Only True Faith.

The sad fact is that the real need for celibacy is derived from the need to defend the extremely centralized power structure of the Catholic Church and not even of any of real religious doctrines.
This demand for celibacy is however undoubtedly the main reason why also the recent sex scandals rocking the very base of the Catholic Church all over the world have occurred.

A funny thing is that the Eastern Orthodoxy that claims to be more true to the original message of the first Christian church has no such demands for the chastity of its employees.

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3. Christopher Hitchens has famously said that The Catholic Church is acting criminally when it condemns millions of people to slow death from HIV/AIDS by vehemently denying its followers the use of condoms. The value of condoms in resisting HIV-infections is a long-established, irrefutable and undeniable scientific fact.
However a belief is always stronger than any facts, when belief is strong enough, that is.

The Catholic Church formed a very long time a dogma about the sanctity of life that starts even before the actual moment of conception, although the real mechanisms of human reproduction were quite unknown at the time this dogma was formed.
This old dogma later came to include also all means of preventing pregnancy that were also of course quite unknown at the time the original dogma was formed. The real funny part in these things however usually starts when followers of a dogma based just on old religious beliefs start to rationalize their stand by starting to gather real life evidence that purportedly somehow supports their views.

This happened when the current pope started babbling to journalists about how condoms make the HIV-situation worse by promoting promiscuity. There is however nothing funny in a fact that tens of thousands of people will perish to AIDS just because this little old man and his closest pals are clinging to an belief-system originating from a primitive world of herders and small-time farmers.

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4. Human sexuality in all forms it takes has always been a major stumbling block for the Catholic Church. From the start it has dug itself deep in the trenches in nearly all matters concerning sexuality.
The Pope and his followers still sincerely believe that only the mainstream sexual behavior should and could be allowed in any society and things like homosexuality will simply go away if they are declared sinful.

The growing evidence of homosexuality being an inevitable part of humanity that has been known to exist in all known societies in all times does not interest these bigots at the least.
Similarly they are not interested in the fate of those who find themselves on the wrong side of the sexual barricades they are so busy building.

The positive side of this is naturally that this old-fashioned and out-dated institution finds itself more and more out of sync with the societies at large in the developed world which leads inevitably to its marginalization given enough time.
The liberation that gay people have enjoyed in western societies during the latest years has left the Roman Catholic Church more and more out of sync with the western societies at large in these matters.

The response of the authorities of this ultra-conservative and ultra-authoritarian organization has been to tighten the lines and adopt even more and more conservative stance in these matters. It may please the most conservative parts of societies filling the ranks of the dwindling lines of hard-line believers.
This process can however very easily lead to a growing isolation of Catholic Church in the most advanced western nations. Remembering this I’m slightly tempted to say; “Go Panzercardinal, Go, show them your true colors!”

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5. The Roman Catholic Church has decided to commemorate and honor people who died 400 years ago in Japan, when the emerging Christian faith was practically stamped out that county in a brutal pogrom.
It was a naturally a very sad and detestable affair, but we expect that similar courtesy will be someday offered by the Papal office for example for the Cathars or Albigenses of France if this policy of commemorating long forgotten past misdeeds made in the name of religions is followed through.

In the years 1209-1229 tens of thousands of French Catholics deemed heretics by the pope were brutally slaughtered in a Holy War ordered by the Pope Innocent III personally. In Beziers alone it is estimated that up to 20 000 people were slaughtered on a single day when this city fell to the Pope’s army.
A classical incident is recorded on that day of religious slaughter when Arnaud, the Cistercian abbot-commander, is supposed to have been asked how to tell Cathars from Catholics in the fallen city. His alleged reply, recalled by a fellow Cistercian, was "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." — "Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own."

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6. The Catholic Church is one of the most authoritarian institutions in the world, as there is no room for doubting or even debating even the details of the official party line.
What a official church council has agreed on stands until a new council decides otherwise. Who does not agree with that is nowadays free to leave the party, now when burning people with wrong ideas is no more possible.

The extremely conservative current pope Benedict XVI is now however on the road of accepting people back to church that are still in fact in a state of rebellion against the official party line.
He however sees these people as valued allies, as they represent the ultimate catholic right wing conservatism. The current pope can’t have enough of that, as he sees his church surrounded and threatened by increasingly liberal societies.

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7. One of the most peculiar traditions in the Catholic Church is the way of promoting some active members of this faith to a status of a "saint", who are no ordinary people any more, but gain new unearthly qualities in the process of canonization.
Oddest part of this process is that good services rendered to the Only True Faith are not the only basis for selecting new saints, but there is also a requirement for miracles to be performed by the person who is about to be canonized.

This is generally however no real problem, as miraculous healing of mostly minor ailments start generally very soon after even a faint possibility of a persons coming sainthood is even whispered around in future saints neighborhood.

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8. It is a surprisingly rarely known fact that the modern ”state” of Vatican is just 80 years old. This papal “state” was born on the amiable agreement called the Lateran Accord between the then current pope Pius XI and the fascist dictator Mussolini then at the height of his power.

The Lateran Accord broke the dilemma that was born when the modern state of Italy was created in the year of 1870. The newly formed state of Italy then had the nerve to forcefully annex the old Papal States that had been popes own earthly playground and source of revenue for centuries.
The Holy See did never accept the fate of the Papal States. Pope after pope sulked at their retreats in Rome until they finally found a good and trusted friend at the fascist dictator.

Mussolini had by then grown to accept the fact that he had to befriend the church to secure his power in Italy, even if he had been an active anti-clericalist in his far-away socialist youth, but he had left both of those ideas far behind when he finally had a country of his own to run.

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9. The Lent is an old custom in Catholic Church in which by giving up something he really likes he demonstrates his commitment to the religious faith.
This age-old strategy in based on very simple psychology; when you get a person to do something he doesn't really want to do by himself, that person is after doing that in a situation where he must convince himself that this deed was not done for nothing and is eager to receive information that gives the impression that this decision was sound.

So giving up pleasant things because of any belief-system greatly intensifies this beliefs-systems grip on its subjects minds.
Religions in fact sorely need this kind of constant refreshing, as they are just volatile ideologies and changing ideologies is really very easy, as one just needs to start thinking differently. So to just keep it’s old followers in fold, a religion must use a varied bag of tricks.

The times they are however a-changing and the things the believers must give up must change with time so that the desired effect is achieved.

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10. We will end with the joke of the day: "Scientific tests prove bones housed in the Basilica of St. Paul in Rome are those of the apostle St. Paul himself, according to Pope Benedict XVI." What a silly thing to say!
The only thing scientific tests can prove here is that the bones are the same time period in which St. Paul lived. Nobody can say for sure if they were bones of a certain individual, as we have no real means of verifying the identity.

Even funnier thing is that even the Big Papa seems to need 'scientific evidence' in matters like this, but science is suddenly no good whenever it contradicts his beliefs.
I don't know if he was speaking "Ex cathedra" in this matter. A fact is that the Pope can say that there is four liters of milk in the fridge, even if there is just three and be wrong in normal situations, but if he says it officially as "Ex cathedra" – announcement you simply must see four liters of milk in that fridge or you are not a good Catholic anymore!

On the other hand, what real difference it makes whose bones they are? Nobody surely disputes the fact that the Catholic Church was certainly founded by real world flesh and blood human creatures and as their remains can very well exist if they happen to be preserved somewhere.
My main complain is for presenting as a 'scientific fact' the identification of these fragments as remains of a certain person.

The real world evidence just gives credence to assume that these remains can be of a any eminent person from the youth of that then upstart new faith.
There are some fragments of very expensive fabrics found in the grave and these kind of expensive fabrics were reserved for the religious elite. Nobody can however say who this person really was, if one does not add a good dose of wishful thinking to the equation.

Comments

For example killing people can be a quite moral thing to do according to Christian morality, if it is done when sanctioned by authorities in war or as a punishment for crimes.
The innate human feeling of right or wrong is however more to do with the feeling of fairness or justice.

According to scientists like Marc D. Hauser we quite naturally see what actions are fair or just and what are not. The most natural idea for behavior in humans is the Golden Rule or the idea that you should treat other people as you want other people to treat you.
This idea is present in all cultures and it is by no way a product of Christianity, even if Christians have made such claims.
This very basic idea is however present in many older religions and philosophies and is of course a quite natural thing for all creature that lives in herds like humans are.

Christian writers speaking against the existence of a universal feeling of right like to bring up the well known studies where subject were asked to give 'electric shocks' to actors as punishment for failing different tests in a laboratory.
In these studies subjects were universally willing to give shocks that were told to be of a very dangerous level. The Christian writers do say that this shows that we do not have a inner sense of morality, as we are willing to subject people we do not know to severe punishments, which they did not really deserve.

The critical part here is however that the order to electrocute people came from people in position of strong authority in the given situation. The example does just show how willing most people are to subject themselves to authority.
This willingness is so strong that it overrides our inner sense of fairness and this is the point where also religions do come to play.

What religious people mean be morality is normally just following of established social rules hold by the majority of people. There is no inner sense of right or wrong that would say that for example masturbation is wrong and even a grave sin and affront to morality, as all Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism) are so fond of telling people for very obscure reasons, even if the act of masturbation does not violate the rights of other people in any way.

This kind of sexual morality is not a natural thing for humans, but a culturally evolved trait that is wholly dependent on the current status of society and its needs.
Those in positions of power in a society do generally support Abrahamic religions wholeheartedly, because they do generate automatic and unquestioning subjection to authority, that is in the very core of all of these faiths.

By this alliance with the forces of authority in society religions are indeed a major source of morality in societies, but this morality has very little to do with the ideas of fairness or even justice, but has very much to do with blindly obeying the current uniform social norms of the society.
So, religions really are a source of morality, but this religiously motivated part of morality does normally concern itself very little with right or wrong, but very much with the needs of those in power and running the society.
We can very easily ourselves determine what is right or wrong as individuals, but religions are needed to class normal human behavior like premarital sex or masturbation as immoral.

We however in real world do not need religions to tell people that stealing, giving wrong evidence or killing people is wrong, as there cannot be a agricultural society based on private ownership of things that would not prohibit those actions, as allowing them would endanger the whole basis of a society.
What many people consider morality is however set of rules that govern our sexuality. The difficult part of giving up hunting and gathering and taking up agriculture was that humans were now permanently in contact with other humans that were not their family.

Controlling the natural sexual urges was much more easier when wandering in small groups in forests or savanna, but it soon became a major issue in agricultural villages.
There soon emerged a set of rules to harness the sexual urges that were seen as a disruptive forces. These rules were given an air of extra authority by incorporating them in the very core of the new emerging religions of the settled agricultural people.

The new need to control ownership and most of all inheritance was the other major factor in emergence of these new social rules controlling all aspects of human sexuality.
A major problem however is that these rules are still applied in post-industrial societies, where the needs of society have been revolutionized and we have the means to control human reproduction are freely available.

This heavy control of sexuality is not innate in us at all, but is enforced by religions, even if they are not at all necessary for the well-being of the society anymore.
On the contrary the continuation of the religiously motivated bans on birth control pills and condoms do endanger the whole future of the human kind.
These bans are already a major cause of overpopulation in a situation where it is one of the gravest dangers facing mankind.

Comments

This inbuilt intolerance was not a similar problem in societies where there was only one allowed religion and state-supported religions wholly controlled monolithic societies.
The problem with intolerant belief-systems is however greatly intensified in situations where the believers of different intolerant belief-systems need to come more and more to contact with people with different belief-systems and also permanently live side-by-side.

After over 3000 years of gradually intensifying globalization the price paid for intolerance has become greater and greater, as it becomes more and more a hinder for development in the society.
Modern societies simply must adjust themselves to the fact that all their members do not think alike. Societies still enforcing this kind of intolerance are in a clear inbuilt disadvantage, as the development of a society is inevitably handicapped.

The example of many underdeveloped Islamic countries shows how extreme these consequences can be.
A famous quote says "In a society where all people think alike, there is not much thinking done". A successful modern society just needs freedom of thought to breed the level of innovation that drives the society forwards.

The case of communism also clearly shows that also a political ideology can develop into a de facto religion.
This occurs quite inevitably if a ideology is accepted as the only possible and allowed way of thinking in a society.

A ideology like religion can however also be developed into a quite reasonable tool for furthering traditions and to become a building block of civil and tolerant society.
This process has already happened in the Lutheran state churches of the most of the Western Europe and Scandinavia.

A major problem however remains, as all of the Abrahamic religions do still contain the seeds of even extreme intolerance, even if the current majority versions have universally grown out of them.
They are still present in the old bronze-age core dogmas of the religions, which are retained for reasons of upholding a "divine" tradition, even if it is not put to practice anymore.

This intolerance is inbuilt in Abrahamic religions largely because to succeed in a contested religious marketplace a emerging religion just must be extremely intolerant toward other religions.
The original acquiring position of power needs to have this feature in a religion which is not originally born out of the needs of machinery of the state.

A religion can grow and mature out of this original state of intolerance, as the case of western Lutheran state churches does show.
The core problem however is that the message of intolerance is still there and readily available in the old-fashioned core dogmas of these religions.
Inevitably all of the revivalist factions wanting to return to the real, original faith do take advantage of this message of intolerance to further their own goals.

This has happened in Christianity, in Islam and in Judaism. Many of the state-sponsored or majority versions of these faiths have grown to became even reasonably tolerant, as the needs of a modern society just demand this kind of tolerance.
However most of the extremist factions of all of these Abrahamic faiths have taken great pains to keep the original message of extreme intolerance in the core of their message and they do breed intolerance and hatred in societies where a very central need of society would be tolerance.

The well-being of modern societies is very much dependent on how a great role these intolerant versions of faith can acquire in society.
In United States they breed discontent and hatred and in the end erode the basis of the consensus-society.
In Israel they endanger the very existence of that state in being the major source of continued hatred and bigotry towards the Arabs and are also a major cause for the inability to reach a peaceful solution in Palestine.
Among the followers of Islam they breed hatred and fear that in the end endangers the well-being of all Muslim communities all over the world.

The core problem is that the intolerance-breeding parts of these belief-systems have outgrown their usability.
Accordingly most majority versions of these religions have quietly dropped the original intolerant parts from their message.

However, as their original message was carefully designed to fill some very central psychological needs in humans, also these intolerance-breeding versions of religions do unfortunately live on, even if they have become extremely obsolete and in fact a heavy liability for the human race.

Comments

This gloominess of course was largely caused by the fact that television programs were in the 60's extremely dull and uninteresting on a day like Good Friday.
They were often also often telling about extremely cruel and violent affairs that apparently took place thousands of years ago time ago in a little country called Palestine.

Nothing funny or enjoyable or anything we would nowadays call entertainment was allowed in those early days of Finnish television on this gloomy day of Good Friday, as having such things would have offended the then still powerful and vocal followers of the local version of Christian tradition.
Even dancing and watching movies in movie theaters was forbidden in those days, as these things would have made the Christian feel bad, even if they would not have themselves seen or known about them happening elsewhere.

Now, 40 years later, this day is quite different and the gloominess and cruelty of that day seems to have simply evaporated.
This is of course because now it is quite possible to pass the gloomy and bloody religious message of this day quite totally, if one so wishes and even the television is not just a tool in the service of this faith on days of religious festivities.

Of course this is a result of the development in which religion has been largely marginalized in the real power structure of the Finnish society. The wishes of the remaining hard core of dedicated followers of this faith just cannot make the nonreligious majority of the society to act in certain way anymore.
Thanks to this development we can concentrate on the real message of Easter; the victory of spring over winter, the victory of light over darkness and the amazing yearly rebirth of the nature.

The real message of Easter has always been in the drawing of Easter bunnies, painting of Easter eggs and eating of the chocolate eggs. For even a majority of people these things are more important than a bloody human sacrifice that took place thousands of years ago in Palestine.
Easter bunnies and Easter eggs are symbols of the yearly rebirth of the nature and Easter is really the feast of Equinox or the moment when winter inevitably gives way to spring.
Judaism and Christianity have just taken over also this age old feast to further their own ideology, as they have taken over the feast of the shortest day of the year also.

However many of us are now mature enough to forget this unfortunate interlude in human development and return the Feast of Spring to its rightful place and meaning.

Comments

Similarly Islam was born as a private enterprise in an environment where there was no clear dominant state religion in the area. Different current religions were in direct daily competition for market-share in the pre-Islamic Arabia as they were in pre-Christian Rome. Only by building a instantly sellable ideology could also Islam get off and running so fast.
As well as Christianity or Islam, the original version of Buddhism was born as a totally private affair. It has only later acquired in some countries qualities of the state-churches.

On the other hand religions that that are tied to a certain political or social structure have commonly disappeared when that particular social structure has been destroyed by conquest or economic decline.
The religions of the Hittite Empire, Egyptian Empire or Macedonian Empire have vanished without a trace, as they were not private affairs, but tools of state. When these states failed, also their religions vanished.

Christianity and Islam did however evolve after their initial phase of expansion into quite different creatures than their original concept was. This phase of immense religious evolution happened after they acquired real power in their respective societies.
One can of course safely say that a minority religion is always a quite different beast from a state-run religions. Achieving a ruling position in a society will always change a religion immensely.

On the other hand one of the main reasons of continuing success of Christianity and Islam is that they could retain also their outward appearance as personal affairs, when they in fact did became important parts of the ruling machine of the society.
Both Christianity and Islam in fact soon evolved into very effective tools of government, that Feudal rulers of that time very eagerly embraced. The big thing for the rulers of course was that these religions provided a much needed "divine" justification for the medieval extremely unjust and crude feudal rule.

Understanding this process helps to understand also how current religious environments have evolved in very different directions in different religious countries, even if the basic religion remains the same.
I claim that extremist religiosity found both in the United States and the Islamic world have been caused by very similar economical conditions inside the religious marketplace.
On the other hand this religious evolution explains why the calmest and often also most human version of current religions are found in the countries where there is established and powerful state-churches.

I claim that in a environment like the United States where there is no established state-church, the evolution of a religion very easily leads to a situation where the most extreme interpretations of the original religious message can get a even major foothold.
The religious extremists are the ones with best motivation to market their wares, but also often the ones with the easiest to understand and most mind-absorbing religious message and also develop the most colorful and inspiring rituals in their quest for a paying audience.
In a hotly contested religious market-place they very easily gain following on the expense of more stable and cool-headed variants of the same religious meme.

In countries with clearly established state-churches there is much less room for these extremist factions to operate.
The immense force of tradition, but also the immense economic force of the machinery of the state churches normally do keep extremist factions at bay.

Situation in Islamic world is of course very different in many respects, but there is one striking similarity.
In fact in large part of the Islamic world there is a free marketplace inside the Islamic religion, as there are no formalized and state-sponsored organizational structures inside Islamic community in all countries, but the main players are selected according to their popularity and religious charisma.

This situation leads to a very similar situation as in the United States. Very easily the most hawkish and most colorful clergyman with the strongest message rise to top.
A clear extremist message is often the easiest to understand and easies to sell to general public also in Islam.

So the role of the extremist interpretations of Islam is almost without exception smallest in Islamic countries where there are formal state-sponsored religious structures in place and strongest in those countries where there are no formal structures.
The influence of extremism is strongest in Islamic Diaspora, where the local government has no influence in the religious world at all. Here the preachers are dependent on the hand-outs and support of the local communities.
This support is of course more readily forthcoming when these preachers can evoke very strong emotional responses in their audiences.

Hate, fear and envy are the strongest of human emotions. Igniting these negative emotions in local Islamic communities is the surest way to success for the preachers who are economically on the mercy of the deepness of the religious emotions of their audience.
Similarly the TV-evangelists of the United States evoke these strongest of human emotions to make their listeners keen on supporting them also financially. As departing from one's own hard earned money is not easily achieved, the message very easily develops into more and more extreme directions, and of course also because of the competition coming from other similar extremist preachers.

The end result is the same in all hardly competed religious markets: a rise in extremism that can cause immense problems in a society. These problems are normally not encountered in societies where there is a rigid state-supported religious structure, that has a dependable source of income through taxation or other reliable economic means of support.
In the end it all boils down to money also in religious matters; "Follow the money trail, man, follow the money trail."

Comments

There are two possible roads to fight this problem: either to diminish the inequality in society or to make people less envious of others. The first is commonly achieved through political means, that have for example made the modern Scandinavian countries the most egalitarian places on earth and according to many studies made Scandinavians the happiest people on Earth.
This road is of course possible for all countries, but the sad thing is that one will never achieve a state of total equality.
A complex modern society simply cannot function without some differences in pay and status.
However, the more egalitarian the distribution of wealth in a society is, the less there is tension caused by the economic inequality. This road however has its obvious limits, even if striving for it is a basic building block of any truly just society.

The other possible road is to make people less envious of good fortune of others. This sounds a quite impossible feat to achieve, as envy is a very basic property of human psyche, but there has existed great tools for achieving it for over 2300 years. I am of course speaking of the Epicurean philosophy here.
Epicureans basically just say that you will not get more happy after certain point by just adding more material wealth. Epicureans say that you will find a new level of contentment if you give up striving for material goals only and concentrate more on developing your mind and yourself as a person.

It is of course laughably simple; if you cannot get a thing and not getting it causes you mental pain, not wanting it any more will take the pain away. I even claim that not wanting will do it even more efficiently than getting the thing you desire for.
We also know from experience that wanting something almost never stops at getting something, as we extremely soon develop a want for a new thing after we really get something we have desired for.

Of course there is a immense problem here; our whole economy is based on wanting new material things and if enough people drop out of the rat race, the system based on growth will collapse.
The sad part is that with it goes the social security, theatres, operas, health care and taking care of the elders that are currently paid for with just that material growth.

On the other hand accepting that inequality will never go away sounds also a rather bad preposition, as fighting against the inherent inequality in society is always a basis for creating a more just society.
It also has been claimed that if people would just be happy on the way things are, there would be no real progress in a society. However, I do believe that realizing that some level of inequality is inevitable does not prevent a person from fighting against excessive instances of it in a society, given that one simultaneously realizes how negative effect too much inequality will have.

A person like me offering the Epicurean model of striving for a personal level of contentment has of course to face the consequences of the possibility that the thing would really spread and more and more people would be content and happy with their current level of consumption and current way of life.
I however think that the level of consumption that is keeping up our society can be based more and more on consumption of immaterial things, as is the goal in Epicurean ideal world also.

The rise of computers, digital entertainment and the Internet in general have already shaped our lives immensely; a greater and greater part of our lives is spent on consuming immaterial resources and less and less on material things.
If you observe the life a a typical 15-year old you soon see that he can already live in a quite immaterial world, where the objects he desires for are either immaterial or extremely small electronic devices at least.

In my vision the rise in consumption of immaterial products of mind instead of material products of hand will create a new kind of economy, where the material things are very cheap and produced in great quantities in few centralized places.
A steadily growing of source of employment would come from providing digital information, entertainment and most of all all kinds of local and global personized digital services. On the other hand local service like plumbers, builders, barber shops, restaurants or even local news media will never go away and will always do their important part in a economy.

This world based on immaterial consumption would be immensely more sustainable than the current model, but I claim that it could even produce the level of wealth we are used to. It is of course not here yet and will not be here for a long time, but I see the extremely slow big trends already going on that direction.
If one combines this immaterial production model with some kind of basic Epicurean view of the world the end result would be a sustainable society.
In this idealized society people would in fact be happier than they are now, even if they would have less material goods. When one drops in a good dose of ideas of social justice, equality and personal freedom, one would in my mind end up in a handsome model for a good society.

I know very well that all this mere daydreaming. Affecting the very basic properties like envy in humans might just be a impossible task. On the other hand mankind will never reach any kind of Utopia, but a dream of a such thing just may keep us going.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Epicurus/79493658728?ref=ts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/search/epicurus/AND/

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Richard Dawkins has reminded that a rational person does not for example feel a magnificent scenery as a religious experience, as a religious person can well do, but he or she can for example well feel a great sameness with the whole of universe. Both of these people can have a quite similar experience of elevation, but they just interpret it differently.

There is no reason why a person choosing a rational approach to world would because of this choice become less endowed in the field of emotions, empathy or feelings in general.
A rationally thinking person does have a quite similar need and capacity for love, closeness and forgiveness than any other person and there is no real reason why this should be otherwise.
In fact a person can very easily end up striving for a loving, giving and sharing life, when one realizes that the prizes are not distributed after death, but these things must be reached for in the only real life we have and they are only available from other human beings around us.

Being polite and friendly, taking care of others or forgiveness and love as such do not originate from religions in any sense.
They are universal attributes of human life, even if religions have done incredible amount of work to give an impression that these things would not exist without them, and that the natural kindness of humans would somehow originate from religions.

Appreciation for others, love and forgiveness do not in fact need religions to become a major forces in human life. On the contrary religions often form a barrier into accepting the human worth of people differentiating from oneself.
When one accepts the fact that he or she has just this life on earth he or she can concentrate into making it the best possible one for himself, his or her near and dear ones and the whole of mankind.

Even death is then necessarily not a tragedy anymore, but a necessary and even vital point in the course of rich and full life.
A person can accept the inevitability of death with a new kind of clear mind, when he does not hang on promises of a afterlife he or she will never know if they will be fulfilled or not.

A rational person also accepts the need for social in rules in all societies in a rational way. He or she tries to live by them because he or she knows that it is in his or her best interest that they follow the commonly accepted rules of the society, as society would become quite inhospitable place without common rules of engagement.
A rational person does not do this because he is afraid of divine retribution, but because he or she knows that it simply is the best and most rational thing to do.

A rational person realizes soon that love is preferable to hatred, forgiving is preferable to carrying a grudge, being honest is preferable to lying and in general not hurting others is preferable to hurting them from the standpoint of the individual also.
A rational person does not need be made to believe that these things are somehow divinely illuminated to humans; all he or she needs is to think over rationally in what of society he or she wants to live.
A person just needs to ask him- or herself; do I want to live in a world full of hatred and deception, or in a world guided by respect and admiration for truth?
A rational person soon realizes that he or she needs for his or her own part try to make world a better place to live.

Even if every rationally thinking person can well come to these conclusions also by him- or herself just by analyzing the life and society around him or her rationally, there is however a wealth of great humanistic and secular thinkers, philosophers and writers who have during the last two and a half millennium thought out these things before.
One can speed up and ease the forming of a rationally loving and caring world view by reading what they have said and thought.

For example people like Anaxagoras, Epicurus, Hippocrates, Marcus Aurelius, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Robert Owen, William Hazlitt, Robert G. Ingersoll, Bertrand Russell, Friedrich Durrenmatt, Richard Feynman, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Steven Weinberg, George Orwell and Jared Diamond have already thought out rationally why good and rewarding life requires you to live in a way that you don't hurt other people with your actions and why you don't need divine inspiration in any way to do it.

All these fine philosopher, thinkers and writers are represented also in The Little Book of Humanity -blog at http://thelittlebook.blogs.fi that tries to present at least some of their best ideas on how to live rationally, but also wisely and justly.

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As I was driving to work today, the idea struck me. I saw that followers of religious just might be so eager to forget and hide the fact that we are just a very evolved animal species, because they fear that accepting the fact would make us lonely predators that would fall into bloody competition for the available resources, if there not is a system of harnessing of human needs and emotions that is not visibly created be men themselves and which they could change at will.

I however also saw that this idea is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of the whole human species.
We humans are not at all lonely predators scavenging for food, but immensely social creatures and even the most social of all mammals.
I even believe that we are in fact on most of our life motivated just by social phenomena alone. The resources we so eagerly still accumulate are in fact mostly used to express our social status and not the other way around.

This is just a hypothesis, and I freely admit that, but I claim that the basic nature of human species changed immensely when human species developed into a state where it could use nearly all available vegetarian and animal resources to keep it alive.
After this stage of evolution was reached, the immediate need to secure survival of the individual was not soon the main force driving the development of the species forward anymore. Very soon the social needs did become dominant driving force in the evolution of the whole species.

At that stage the social life and most of all the social acceptance of the community developed into being the most single important aspect defining our species.
According to evolutionary biologist Marc D. Hauser in the very fundamental structure of our minds there is an already formed idea of right and wrong even when we are born. He presents hid ideas in the fine book called “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right & Wrong”.

I do believe that this extremely central idea has been embedded to the mind of the human species during the extremely long period when humans learned that the good of their own community was the real key to their survival, not just stuffing their own belly with enough food every day.
Of course there are nasty, brutish and selfish individuals in every society and probably there is also a good evolutionary reason for having also this type of humans still around, as these traits would have disappeared if their existence would be very disadvantageous.

The real key for human survival just might however be that the overwhelming majority of humans do always act with the best interest of their respective society at mind at almost all conditions and in all different cultures all over the world.
The main thing however in my mind is that the circle of people who's well-being is seen as important for an individual has been steadily rising as human species has continued its cultural evolution.

At first it just might have been the immediate family, then extended family, then the clan and the village. From this we soon evolved into having state-like formations and we started accepting the fact that the well-being of the whole nation is necessary for own well-being, even if we do not know these other people at all.

I'm not the only one to suggest that we might just now be evolving into the logical next step; into accepting that the well-being of our whole planet and the whole human species just could be in this stage of human development be the most important thing to secure the continued well-being of any single human also.
A sad fact of life is that religions do actively cultivate the tribal ideas and fear of all kinds of variation among human beings.
They are in fact becoming main one of the main obstacles on the road to creating real human solidarity that could eventually perhaps really include even the whole of humanity.

The other extremely important mental force fighting against this universal goal is of course nationalism, but extremely often they do walk hand in hand in creating mistrust and hatred towards the "others".
I do believe that containing these obsolete ancient forces that create division and tribalism just could be the next big stage in the evolution of our whole species.

"Faith trumps evidence. But if indeed this is broadly the explanation for how co-operative behaviour has evolved and been maintained in human societies, it could be very bad news. Because although such authoritarian systems seem to be good at preserving social coherence and an orderly society, they are, by the same token, not good at adapting to change." - Robert May, Baron May of Oxford

More on Marc D. Hauser: http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2010/01/25/is-there-an-inherent-sense-of-morality-shared-by-all-humans-7873171/
More on humans as a social species: http://www.alternet.org/story/145955/what_makes_the_healthiest_and_happiest_societies_hint:_it_not_rich_people_?page=entire

PS. As blogging is not science, it is possible to present in blog like this ideas that just that, pure ideas.

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Similarly of course all major religions are created by work of hundreds of people who work over centuries together to build a as convincing system of thought as possible.
Also their group effort often produces something that a single human would never achieve. This end result that transcends the capabilities of a single human is often interpreted as a "divine" thing, even if in the end it all about a group effort, where the end result is again much more than its individual parts.

However there is a one huge difference between religion and science; true science is always built on verifiable facts, when religion is in the end always built on opinions, even if these opinions can be very old and established ones.
There is big difference in constantly seeking the truth or claiming to have already found a final and unmoving divine one. One must remember that the original authors of a religion could come up with anything that did please them and what they thought served the best the selling of their new religious ideology.

These religious basic assumptions are of course often loaned from older and other current religions. They are often based on very ancient ideas of how a working social system should be organized and what kind of rules of conduct a successful society needs.
The basic assumption in religions is that you need rules that are not based on the will and needs of current generation only and which one cannot change.
Religions do contain some magnificent and accurate observations of the nature of humanity. The basic problem is that there is no way to separate these good things out of the jumble of baseless superstition and old-fashioned ideas that do continuously breed bigotry and hatred towards people that are in some way different, as the whole lot has been declared to be a divine and unchangeable Final Truth.

During a lifetime of an major world-religion there can be even thousands of clever and educated people who devote their life into fine-tuning the belief-system of that religion.
They have created magnificent-looking systems of thought, that have only one major fault, but because of this fault, they are just sand-castles waiting to be washed away.
This major fault is of course that the basic rules of conduct, that are claimed to be of a divine origin, have in fact been created by fallible and often very single-minded people and they overall represent a ancient society that has long ago completely ceased to exist.

On the other hand the most important things in science are not the individual scientific findings and facts, but the scientific method in itself.
In scientific method all accepted findings must be re-testable and must go through a process of strict peer criticism before ever being accepted into scientific curriculum.

The main thing however is that also all old findings can be overturned, but only after the majority of the best authorities in given field have agreed on it, and this process can be a very lengthy one.
Only a method like this secures the possibility to evolve in knowledge, but retain a degree of stability at the same time. It is for example easy to forget that the term gravity is just a label that is given a certain feature of the nature.
When we understand it better the whole scientific concept of gravity can still change completely if the global scientific community is convinced enough by some new findings.

There just are no absolutes in science, but some ideas are much more established and solid-looking than others.
These well-established and solid parts of science do build up a foundation on which also those seeking stability and permanence in fast-moving world can cling to, even if science continues its progress towards a better understanding of human species and the universe that surrounds this species in a little blue planet on the fringes of Milky Way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

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In reality we will possibly never have final answer for this question, even if our knowledge of this issue has already improved year by year and decade by decade.
Real science does not however ever even try to present a final verdict on a question like on how our universe came into being. It does not mean that there would not be extremely good and highly probable theories on how these things have happened. Science however improves even in these matters through trial and error.

There is a group of people who have a definite need to believe that mostly illiterate pastoralists, traders and small-time farmers living in small country in the Middle East a few thousand years ago could find from their own mind a better explanation for the structure, history and future of the Universe, as the vast modern global scientific community, that has patiently for centuries built up new explanations and models with extraordinary tools that have only now became available to the mankind.

If you have trouble accepting that there are still limits for the things that can be found out with current tools and capabilities of mankind, and you want final and unmoving answer, you have no alternative than to turn to the religions. Science will never provide them. And if somebody claims so, that person has misunderstood the basic nature of science.

A person turning to the real scientific method will never commit her- or himself into claiming that some fact or even theory is the final word on that area.
A person who puts his trust in science can however be quite certain of the fact that the scientific method is at the moment the best way to strive for the best possible available level of knowledge about ourselves a s species and of the universe around us.

Of course there will always be people that will turn to science just to get affirmation for their own irrational pet ideas, but it is quite inevitable that all things in this world can also be misused,.
However the global community of scientists act as shock absorber with its system of constant peer-review, that will deflect the misuses of science in the long run, even if they can momentarily get the upper hand. The very nature of scientific process is however such that the truth will emerge eventually, given that the scientific method is not suppressed.

As long as all results of science can be re-valued over and over again according to the emerging new facts and ideas, there will be no final truths in science that would permanently lock the thinking of the humans the way in the religions do.
Very many people have learned already that all final truths should be avoided, if human species wants to advance. In Yemen, countryside of Afghanistan or Sudan can one well observe the effects of having just one final and unmoving truth.

The situation just might be that Yemenites themselves would prefer to take the life standard of a western nation, if they just could. The sorry thing however could be that adhering to a certain collection of final and unmoving truths could just be a important reason why they do not have it, and will probably never have it, as long as these final and unmoving truths are forcefully enforced in their society.

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The inner pacifist in me started raising its pretty little head at this point. I was soon pondering how these things are never looked in this way in military history.
This may be because military history is mostly written by those fascinated by bloodletting and mayhem.
The military leaders and generals who kill the most enemies or lead the most heroic even if pointless and bloody defenses are glorified, but the cautious and thinking ones who really think about their men are all too often scorned at or even vilified.

I started thinking how fine it would be to be able to a read a history of great savers of human life in the history of military conflicts of the world.
This history would bring to the fore those wise and cunning leaders who got to their aims with shedding the minimum of human blood. On the other hand it would denounce those who reached for their goals without thinking about the human cost of their actions at all.
In this alternative kind of military history the cunning evasive maneuvers, the bloodless encirclement-actions and the great timely retreats would be given the great military honor they really deserve, but so rarely get.

Foremost in this Hall of Fame for Military Humanity would be those military and political leaders who could admit in due time their defeat, when it became clear that they would lose and by so doing minimize the human cost of the conflict.
On the other hand those who have not had the common sense to admit the final outcome of the battle would be vilified and scorned as the scum of the earth that they really are, the more so if they have continued the slaughter of war just because a personal inability to accept failure.

I believe this new history of warfare would look very different than the standard text-books on offer today. I sincerely believe it would also make an extremely interesting read. However there is one major problem; the military types would not want to read about the military history turned upside down, but the followers of pacifist ideas would not want to read awful stories about military exploits either. So the market for this book would maybe be a difficult one to find.

On the other hand there is a good reason why things are the way they stand now in these matters. One simply must keep all thoughts of the humanity of the enemy and value of human life out of these matters, if one wants to continue the building up of the military might that still goes on all over the world at this moment.
All too many people get their livelihood out of keeping up the myths and ethos surrounding the military establishment, that he real humanistic ideas would never be allowed to be an influence, as they would undermine the basic assumptions and values which keep this machinery of killing going in the world.

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I think that a human being just is built in at way that he or she will extremely easily fall into over-consuming all the things that he or she feels to give satisfaction either in mental arena or in field of physical pleasures.
I think that a person must really put effort into keeping things in perspective and remembering that anything that feels really good can all too easily derail a person, be it hunger for power, urge for social contacts or the classical case of craving for wine.

The big question of course he is what is too much? There is of course no real answer, but I think a good thing turns sour the moment when striving for it makes life more difficult instead giving pleasure. Only a person him- of herself can however tell when that happens.

Of course one never can cover the billions of different situations that arise in even a single human life in a single sentence, but then that is the nature of all philosophy.
Philosophical statements tend to be expressed as absolutes, even if the writer already well knows that world is full of exceptions and situations where the general guidelines do not apply.

Philosophical statements are always just basic guidelines and implementing them is a quite different thing than understanding or even supporting them.
I however very strongly think that all the good, well-working and just societies in the world have been based on compromise and on avoiding implementing extreme ideas without listening to other voices also.

The slogan "Too much of any good thing is bad" is of course basically just a modern implementation of the Epicurean ideals that are applicable in the area of personal life. Epicurus was of course talking on a level of personal life, when he analyzed human life 2300 years ago in ancient Greece.

This simple sentence could also be the motto of the extremist moderate movement that I do wish would exist in the world. This movement would be quite total and unbending in its commitment for seeking moderation in everything in life and in politics in particular.

Here are the main points of the extremist moderate agenda based on this general motto, or let's simply call it the "Moderate Manifesto":
1) All things have at least two sides, and most a lot more than that.
2) All things can change.
3) People can change.
4) There is no such thing as a human being who has no value as a human being, the more so as both the people and our perception of them can change significantly.
5) All things must be allowed to be said aloud, but one must be able to openly and even strongly criticize all things.
6) We think that the only possible final truth is that there are no final truths, but of course we cannot be fully certain of that.
7) Suspect all people who claim to know the final truth.
8) Let the flames die out in your heart first, before making any decisions on anything.
9) A decision can and must be reversed if it proves to be wrong. Just swallow your pride, man.
10) This whole moderate manifesto is of course just a simple idea, but the world needs simple ideas, the more so as our society in is reality built wholly on the slippery and thin ground of simple ideas.

In my mind being a extreme moderate does not mean that one would not have even strong ideas of one's own on how societies need to be organized or how the wealth generated in it should be divided.
On the contrary, I think that as our societies are built on ideas, one must have a strong idea of how a ideal society would look like to be able to really contribute in it.

However moderation means in practice that one is able to see and accept that other people have different and even contradictory ideas. It means that one is able to work with them and influence them to get them accept new aspects that forward and change society toward your own own ideals.
I think that true political moderation is about strongly furthering one's own ideas without forcing them down the throat of others. I do however think that strong, durable and just societies can be built only when all groups in the society can get their voices heard.

Having said that I personally do believe that there must be general overall ideas of social justice and equality that gently guide the development of the society, instead of it being adrift in the rough seas of naked group interests and pure personal greed.

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Islam, Judaism and Christianity are just such very powerful memes, that have been carefully hand-crafted and designed to take over a person's mind and keep it occupied until death, so it will be transferred to the offspring's of the carriers of the meme also.
The groundwork for later religions was laid by the founders of the Judaism. Throughout a time span of several centuries they designed and ultimately perfected a mental system to keep a struggling nation together by creating a system of differentiating the followers of that faith deeply enough from all other people.

This innovation was perfected to a such a extent that it is the only religion of comparable age that has survived the ravages of time, wars and population shifts as a living and breathing meme. This meme secured its existence by making it in practice impossible for its adherents to give up that meme.
It was however doomed into existence in the fringes of history, as this meme was not designed to propagating itself to brand new followers.

The founding fathers of Christianity however soon corrected this failure, when they did build a new and much more advanced meme, which was originally based on those basic characteristics of the Judaism that were easy to see to be very beneficial for the continued existence of the new meme.
This new religion started as a simple offspring of Judaism, but soon its creators and designers saw the wisdom of applying for a wider market in the for a modern man unbelievable cesspool of emerging religions that Roman empire with its utmost level of religious tolerance was.

In the beginning there was a wide variety of these new Christian sects, but that that was in fact extremely beneficial for the new meme, as these varieties tried out and tested many new kinds of tricks to lure new customers into the emerging new religion.
In the end however these sects were stamped out and a new unified Church arose that did collect all the best ideas for selling and forwarding the meme that had been tried out and tested in the early stage.

During the first three centuries a wide collection of different kinds of writings were produced by the followers of the different varieties of the new faith. In the third century the real founding fathers of the new unified Christian church then had the luxury of selecting only the best texts that had shown to give the best results in the practical marketing of the new faith.
Those early text that contradicted these selected ones had to be discarded and destroyed, as the founders of the new faith had also the grand idea of claiming that the texts they had selected were the gods own words, just written down by 'inspired' people.

So they could also rise above the then very popular schools of philosophy, like Epicureanism and Stoicism that were extremely popular at the time, as their texts were just ideas of mortal men.
This collection of then current texts included those texts that contained the best marketing strategies to further the meme; things like eternal life for the followers of the faith only, a promise of close companionship and love among believers, and also the promise of improved morality in the society.

On the other hand those rejecting this emerging new faith were threatened with fires of hell, which surprisingly turned out to be a good marketing strategy also, as the faith could be sold also a insurance policy against just this eternal fire of hell, whose existence was as difficult to refute as the existence of the Christian god, which was carefully designed to have only such properties that could not be tested or proven to be wrong.
The real success story of Christianity was however guaranteed only after the Council of Nicea in 325, when the old religion of the oppressed and meek was transformed into a tool of government under the close guidance of Roman emperor Constantine, who saw it as a tool for building a unified and more durable empire. History did however prove him wrong, as the intolerance and bigotry of the new Christian ruling class alienated the traditional allies of Rome and eventually it fell.

The brand new Christianity of the rulers that was created in Nicea was however a very good tool for the new Germanic rulers also and they soon adopted the meme to build up their own power base, as the Church soon eagerly supported the continuation and building up of the totalitarian feudal system of the Germanic kings.
During the formative phase of the new religion it was perfected as a system of taking over a person's mind completely. It succeeds in it still to a such extent that many people still believe that they simply cannot live without a idea of a specifically Christian god and Christian faith, which they have learned it in their earliest years, when they could not have had any real idea what it really was all about.

However the Christian faith was soon not the only game in town, as the Islamic faith emerged in the Arabian peninsula in the 7th century. This new faith collected all the best ideas of Judaism and Christianity to foster and protect a meme and it soon perfected the system for taking a person's mind over completely.

Christianity had already succeeded in creating a large group of people that see as their affiliation to that meme as the only thing that has any value in their lives. Islam however perfected this for society very risky strategy for maintaining the meme, as when religion is seen as more important than the well-being of one's own society, problems do necessarily arise.

In large parts of Middle East the new faith erased the old local cultures and traditions so fully and completely that these people do not have any other real cultural heritage other than that was produced to foster this meme. Taking away this meme would mean a completely empty life for many of these people and a meme is simply perfected when this happens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

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Science fiction deals with universal themes of humanity that have very often been seen through a religious framework.
The greatness of science fiction lies in that one can drop the unnecessary cultural ballast that has been collecting into so many things and which can eventually hide away their true nature from sight altogether.

In my youth I did devour all science fiction I could lay my hands on (which was of course not very much in the Finland of the early late 60' and early 70's, when the translation of science fiction into Finnish was just starting and I was just starting to learn English.) However, I do not remember that any of them would have included any kind of religious theme. Of course there undoubtedly exist also religiously motivated science fiction, but the mainstream of the science fiction is based very strongly on rational thinking and humanistic traditions.

Also the science fiction in television has always been a very rational affair. It would of course be a miracle if the rampant religiosity so common in United States would not have been taken in account in a popular media like television, but religious themes are still very rare in science fiction even in television, at least as far as I can tell.
Even if these commercial pressured do exist, at least the early episodes of Star Trek seem to be full of hidden atheist agenda. Very many of the early episodes seem to handle problems caused by religions and beliefs not founded on reality.

It can be no coincidence that the revealing of wrong gods are central themes in at least episodes "Return of the Archons", "A Taste of Armageddon", "Catspaw", "The Apple", "Who Mourns for Adonais", "And the Children Shall Lead", "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" and "Plato's Stepchildren".

Gene Roddenberry was the true creator of Star Trek -series and he has spoken very strongly against religions. He said for example: "We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes." and this: "Its seems to me -- it's likely that heaven's here right now. If you could take life with its pain and misery, where you fail and you sometimes win, and if you package it into a game, people would pay a fortune to have this game. And I don't know that I'd want it to be resolved so peacefully that the game would be all over."

It should also be remembered that the supernatural things in science fiction are almost invariably from the field of parapsychology. It was still in the 70's expected to became a new discipline of science and people were expecting science to prove the existence of psychic forces. So using it in science fiction was not disbelief in science, but a sign of belief of a development in science that has not come to fruition.

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In Judaism, Christianity and Islam this impossible sounding feat is achieved by inventing a idea of all-seeing and all-knowing god.
In Buddhism the same goal is sought by threats of grave problems in the reincarnation process if one fails to uphold the moral values of the society.

A common denominator for all these claims is that their factual basis is impossible to certify, but they are as impossible to prove to be wrong. Their truth value can in fact never be certified and they can never be falsified.
Religions do still claim that threats of punishment after death do improve general morality in societies and so religions do provide a clear added value for the society.

The idea in itself is of course simply ingenious. Every society could benefit immensely if every member of that society would really believe that they are under eternal surveillance by heavenly surveillance cameras and also that they would be held responsible for every action they have ever committed after their death, as Christianity so boldly claims.
Unfortunately things are not as rosy in real life. The religious claims of heavenly surveillance cameras are in real life generally accepted only by those who would follow the rules anyway and even part of them they will occasionally forget this thing in moments of passion or fury.

However these threats of punishments after death are very often rejected or pushed aside by those who willingly break the rules of the society anyway and this has always been the case in all societies notwithstanding their level of religiosity.
There have always been sociopaths and psychopaths who are restrained similarly poorly by earthly or divine retributions alike. On the other hand the threat of any kind of punishment has often very little effect on things that are done in the moments of passion or fury.
The level of criminality in a society in fact depends much more on the level of social security and level of general social justice in society, than on the level of religiosity.

So, theory is beautiful, but a beautiful theory is not enough, as even in this case the harsh reality is the final test.
The sad fact is that the Church halls in jails all over the world are packed full every Sunday, as adherence to a certain religion has not stopped people of doing things that are forbidden by the laws of society.

According to most research the general status of religiosity in society has no discernible effect on crime ( http://law.jrank.org/pages/1944/Religion-Crime.html and http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/0/3/6/7/7/p36779_index.html) in modern societies. For example the scientist Paul Scott Heaton from RAND Corporation did not find any correlation between the level of religiosity and the level of crime on either theft or violent crime.

On the other hand the medieval Europe was the most religious society known to man, but the general level of unlawfulness in these gravely unjust and violent feudal societies was such that a modern person would have hardly dared to venture out at all in the darker hours of the day.

Religions do of course also claim that they are bringing values like goodness, caring, forgiveness and friendship to the society. People have however been good, caring, forgiving and friendly long before religions were invented in any society these values have been given room to develop.

Already in the Greece of Antiquity there was born the new kind of humanistic way of thinking that was based on caring, respecting and loving others.
These humanistic basic values have permeated the western societies at least to such an extent that religions are in fact not needed in this respect either.

Comments

Violence is in the end always the last resort for most humans and it is normally used when there are no other means to further ones political, social or cultural goals in a society. Aggression and use of force do not normally occur in societies where people can freely air their grievances and act freely in political field to further their agenda.
Aggression does not occur in societies where even the minorities can really affect government policies and majority does truly respect the rights of all of the different minorities too.
So a real and working democracy is always the best pacifier in inner conflicts that may escalate to become armed ones. I would go as far as to say that the best and most effective long time form of pacifist activity is working to build and support effective and working democracies and to support creation of working and stable economies.

Even democracies are of course known to resort to violence in international relationships. Democracy is of course not a cure-all for all human ills. A clear and undeniable fact is however that democracies are much less inclined to retort to aggression and violence as means of solving international problems than all other forms on government.
A population in a democracy too can of course be roused into a aggressive frenzy, but the task is always much more demanding that in a dictatorship, when a war of aggression can be started by a simple decree.
Of course there are well to-do superpowers like United States that use violence as a means to further their international goals. Superpowers are however always on a class of their own, as the goals and responsibilities they assume in the international arena differ wildly from those of the "normal" nations, even if the United States can be classed as a democracy.

On the other hand the state of economic development of the society is as crucially important. Clear evidence shows that growing standard of living and losing the will to use aggressive force to solve political and social problems have a very strong correlation.
On the other hand wealth must be divided equally in the society for it to have any effect on the level of violence in a society. A society with even a large layer of very rich people but with a simultaneous large layer of very poor people is always much more prone to violence than a society where wealth is divided more equally.
A classical example of this is Sweden which has not fought in a war as a nation in 195 years. One could of course argue if its prosperity is a result of long period of peace or if long period of peace is a result of a long period of prosperity.
I however think that there is a clear correlation between these things, even if in case of Sweden there is a lot of good luck involved in its ability to stay outside all wars that have raged just outside its borders during these two centuries.
Sweden is also the very model on sharing the accumulated wealth among the whole population that is a very important requirement for a truly peaceful society.

Modern well-to-do democracies very seldom attack their neighbors in outbursts of aggressive expansionism, even if they must sometimes defend themselves from such attacks that threaten them. I'm now excluding United States from this picture as it is a case of its own that must be in my mind be discussed separately, as I stated earlier.
A very important thing in creating aggression-free areas is trade. Trade creates interconnectivity and interconnectivity creates interdependence and familiarity and interdependence and familiarity makes invoking the will to start aggression the more difficult to the more interdependence there is.
European Union has been the greatest pacifist initiative there has ever been, as it has created a whole continent that is sewn together with millions of little threads that create a rising sea of interdependence.

EU gives the national elites a motive to stay on the narrow path concerning the use of military force, as they can stay in the union only if they refrain from the use of violence in either inner or outer conflicts.
I claim that only the two terrible world wars made the creation of EU possible, as the national elites of Europe were warned of where continuing the nationalistic tendencies of the past will lead. In a bizarre way we must thank Wilhelm II and certain Adolf Hitler for the half a century of peace and prosperity EU has brought with it to the lands that decided to join it.

I think that even if the final goal must always be the complete disarmament of human kind, it is one of those goals that can be striven for in full knowledge of the fact that this goal is quite unreachable and it is even a quite naive thing to say aloud.
However any work done to further this unreachable, but noble goal can give only benefits for the humanity. We just must realize that wars are fought by humans who fear that they have no peaceful means left to achieve their goals. Violence is inbuilt in the modern concept of a state and only by chancing the states can change their attitude towards state-sponsored violence.

Fighter planes don't kill people, but humans ordering other men to fly them do. A sad fact of life is that only when these people ordering other humans to do these terrible deeds have better and more rewarding alternatives for ordering acts of violence, will the age-old cycle of violence stop.

Comments

George Orwell was a strange kind of pacifist. He was a man who fought as a volunteer in a bitter civil war that was really none of his business. He was seriously wounded while fighting in the trenches for a cause that in the end was not his at all.
George Orwell or Eric Blair was however an ardent believer in democratic socialism and his idealism got him into the Spanish civil war fighting for the Republican government that was just only turning into a totalitarian communist regime when he was there.

He fought among the Spanish anarchist and shared with them the violent attacks of the communists, when they finally turned against their earlier allies.
His experience in Spain made George Orwell lose forever all his illusions on totalitarian communist systems, but he did never lose his faith in democratic, western form of social democracy.

He was even stranger kind of pacifist, as he always supported wholeheartedly the fight against the Nazi Germany. He did however never lose the will and ability to question the basic question of why aggression and wars are still openly promoted and accepted in human societies as a way of solving international problems.
It is very difficult for many to understand that one can support fighting the current forces of evil, but at the same time question if fighting wars really are a inevitable part of humanity.

I however think that one can really ask if mankind could someday evolve to a stage where state-sponsored violence becomes a disgrace and those promoting it would be treated as common criminals in all societies, as are those who would promote slavery, even if slavery was the accepted social norm for tens of thousands of years in all human societies.
To even think on these lines is of course a laughable sign of naive idealism on this day and hour, when states are the main perpetrators of violence all over the world.
However even Jesus of the Christian fame did not question the morality of the system of slavery in his day. Similarly state-sponsored violence has got itself into a position where just nobody even ever questions its existence.

This is of course result of centuries and centuries of continuous and heavy bombardment of indoctrination for accepting the states right to apply violence every time the leaders of state see a political need for it.
Even questioning this right of the state means stepping outside the boundaries of a socially accepted behavior at the moment in most societies. The universal acceptance of state-sponsored violence will of course continue until a large enough group of people in enough number of countries will see that this needs to end. Also slavery did finally come to an end when large and dedicated enough groups of brave people took to their hearts and minds the need to end it.

Armies are in a true democracy never needed to subdue the citizens of the state itself. Armies are not needed in Finland or Sweden or Switzerland or Iceland or Canada or New Zealand or Japan to maintain inner stability in these countries, as there are no groups that are subdued by armed force to follow the will of the majority.
People in these countries are quite willing to accept the rule of current majority, as they have a chance for becoming part of a majority themselves at a later stage.
Internal violence is found only in societies that do not allow the idea of change or do not allow all different kinds of minorities their right to exist in peace.

The threat of state violence from outside if in reality the only reason why Finns or Swedes or Newzealanders do have an active and costly machinery of state violence called army, as police can handle all the existing real inner threats quite well.
The outside threats are basically there just because in the other societies there are people who similarly fear outside threat of state-sponsored violence also. A simple fact is that if your neighbors would not have this kind of active instruments of violence, you would not need it yourself anymore.

All this sounds of course quite naive, the more so when you have been taught all your life that there never, ever under no circumstances will be and can never be any alternatives for the continuation of state-sponsored violence.
This knowledge of the endless and inevitable cycle of state-sponsored violence is one the most basic fundamental truths we know of.
Most of us will sadly never see that it is only a human idea and not a any kind law of nature. It is sponsored and upheld by humans who benefit from upholding and strengthening these beliefs.

Do you know the feeling of being let down when reading of a war-hero and how he finally ended up in a dull work as a welder or assistant manager in a shop?
I however think that his real role in this world was to be a welder or a shop-assistant and the role of the war hero was thrust on him involuntarily.
It is sad that we have been all our life been taught that the killing, maiming and hurting other quite similar people has been his greatest achievement in life.

We also learn to forget the incredible mental agony he has inevitably felt for his terrible deeds towards other human beings in the service of state-sponsored machinery of violence. At least here in Finland a veteran of our last wars has of course served in the end quite good purposes in resisting the incredibly more evil machineries of violence of the neighboring totalitarian systems.

However, I wonder why we celebrate in quite high spirits the agonies the war veteran has gone through and not take solemn vows to let things like this never happen again every time these matters are commemorated.
I wonder why we not do take solemn vows on these occasions to do our best to resist the rise of the evil powers of aggressive totalitarianism in our own country and in our neighboring lands, as this would always be the best guarantee for peace for all of us.

“Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed is the only thing that ever has.” - Margaret Mead

The first part of this essay appeared in my "The Little Book of Humanity" -blog at http://theliittlebook.blogs.fi. I have however gone a bit deeper on the issue here to present a little sketch for a modern pacifist manifesto.

Comments

According to Alain de Botton we are simply paying the price of rising expectations and rising material status with the wellbeing of our psyche.
The system needs us to raise our expectations constantly to produce growth, and in the end we are very easily left at a state where we are never being satisfied.
On the other hand we are constantly watching how others are doing. Our own material well-being can improve tremendously and we can still feel deprivation if the people with whom we want to compare ourselves do succeed in improving their status more than us.
It does not help if there are millions of people who have less, if just the five or ten people who we do see as our closest likes have more.

These facts have of course been well-known for ages or as long as humanity has produced written records of its anxieties. The Greece of Antiquity was a very similar growth-based society, where social and economical status were extremely important.
It is in fact surprising how Alain De Botton has not given room for Epicurus at all in this book, as he was one of the first people to speak for using restraint in material cravings and an concentrating developing ones inner wellbeing.

Alain de Botton gets to more controversial field when he says that feudal societies where psychologically much easier places to live, as one could not affect ones status and one could find contentment in the finality and inevitability of one's situation.
He says that meritocracy and social mobility have created a situation where a person is in a quite new way seen as being personally responsible for the status he or she happens to be in.

The true social mobility is too often only a pipe dream and a person in a difficult starting position in life has in real life very often great difficulty in changing their fate in real way.
Still they are seen as being personally responsible for the social status in which they end up. So a poor person is in a new way personally shamed for being poor.

Alain de Botton gives also some remedies to status anxiety that he sees as a major problem in modern industrialized societies. As the illness is in the mind, the remedies are aimed to the mind also. His medicines are philosophy, art, politics, Christianity and Bohemia. They are all ways of circumventing and denying the status expectations created by our minds and the society.

I must however say that I was a little surprised by the inclusion of Christianity in this lot, even if there has always been a distinctive anti-materialistic streak in Christianity.
Many practical forms of Christianity are however extremely status-oriented, even if in principle there are ideas on offer that can act as a counterbalance for anxiety over ones status that are pronounced in some forms of Christianity.

Philosophy, art and politics have however a clear-cut and meaningful ways of offering routes out of status anxiety, as one can with their aid put the need for the status and needs of the society into better perspective.
They also offer ways to find new to develop one's status in new environments, if one cannot succeed in the primary economical and social arenas of the society.

One can always have consolation that there is always alternative systems of status. These alternative routes can also give one's life new meaning if one is not equipped or willing to succumb one's identity into succeeding in the main rat-race.

Comments

According to Alain de Botton we are simply paying the price of rising expectations and rising material status with the wellbeing of our psyche.
The system needs us to raise our expectations constantly to produce growth, and in the end we are very easily left at a state where we are never being satisfied.
On the other hand we are constantly watching how others are doing. Our own material well-being can improve tremendously and we can still feel deprivation if the people with whom we want to compare ourselves do succeed in improving their status more than us.
It does not help if there are millions of people who have less, if just the five or ten people who we do see as our closest likes have more.

These facts have of course been well-known for ages or as long as humanity has produced written records of its anxieties. The Greece of Antiquity was a very similar growth-based society, where social and economical status were extremely important.
It is in fact surprising how Alain De Botton has not given room for Epicurus at all in this book, as he was one of the first people to speak for using restraint in material cravings and an concentrating developing ones inner wellbeing.

Alain de Botton gets to more controversial field when he says that feudal societies where psychologically much easier places to live, as one could not affect ones status and one could find contentment in the finality and inevitability of one's situation.
He says that meritocracy and social mobility have created a situation where a person is in a quite new way seen as being personally responsible for the status he or she happens to be in.

The true social mobility is too often only a pipe dream and a person in a difficult starting position in life has in real life very often great difficulty in changing their fate in real way.
Still they are seen as being personally responsible for the social status in which they end up. So a poor person is in a new way personally shamed for being poor.

Alain de Botton gives also some remedies to status anxiety that he sees as a major problem in modern industrialized societies. As the illness is in the mind, the remedies are aimed to the mind also. His medicines are philosophy, art, politics, Christianity and Bohemia. They are all ways of circumventing and denying the status expectations created by our minds and the society.

I must however say that I was a little surprised by the inclusion of Christianity in this lot, even if there has always been a distinctive anti-materialistic streak in Christianity.
Many practical forms of Christianity are however extremely status-oriented, even if in principle there are ideas on offer that can act as a counterbalance for anxiety over ones status that are pronounced in some forms of Christianity.

Philosophy, art and politics have however a clear-cut and meaningful ways of offering routes out of status anxiety, as one can with their aid put the need for the status and needs of the society into better perspective.
They also offer ways to find new to develop one's status in new environments, if one cannot succeed in the primary economical and social arenas of the society.

One can always have consolation that there is always alternative systems of status. These alternative routes can also give one's life new meaning if one is not equipped or willing to succumb one's identity into succeeding in the main rat-race.

Comments

For thousands of years the true power in societies was on the hands of people who favored the spiritual explanations. They had often so strong grip of societies that the more rationally inclined people could not often raise their voices at all.
The Greece of Antiquity was the first society where the spiritual side had to give room for the rational way of seeing things, but even there the spiritual explanation was in the end often dominant, as was witnessed for example by the death sentence of Socrates.

I don't believe that this division that is as old as humanity would be disappearing in the future also; only the power and influence of the different sides will vary.
However I claim that in our own developed western societies all the central goals and methods of doing things are already extremely strongly based on the rational model of thinking after a over a hundred years of slow but firm erosion of the mental powers of the religions.

On the other hand in the Islamic world the spiritual way of seeing the world is still dominant and one has just now great difficulty in seeing how it would end even in the future. I however strongly suspect that the pressures for change are mounting in the Islamic world also, as the lack of social, political and economic development in countries under its influence becomes more and more apparent with time.
Here in Europe or in countries like Japan or Australia the rational way of looking at things has so strong position that it is even hard to imagine a situation where it could ever be replaced by the religious model of thinking as the dominant model of thought in our societies.

Even in United States the society is in practice wholly based on the rational principles of governing a society, even if the irrational religious forces seem to be more powerful there than in practice any other developed nation in the world. This situation is however well explained by the fact that hand does often in real world very different things than the mouth speaks.
The religious double standard has reached immense proportions in United States. On the other hand every politician has to prove many times his close relationship and adherence to some religious dogma to get elected.

In practical life this outward professed religiosity however has very often no real practical implications on the policies that are pursued by these politicians that did profess to deep religiosity in their campaigns. The religious models of thought are in reality brought up only in few instances that involve deep questions of morality in which religions have strong stands.

The rest of policy making is in the United States also in reality already based on the rational model, where issues and decisions are judged more and more on their real merits and effects for the smooth working of the society and not on how they relate to a religious dogma.

Comments

He basically answers in this book the puzzling question of if religions haven invented morality, why all societies all over the world do have so very similar basic rules on morality even if they have not been are connected.
He shows in 538 pages how dozens of recent field studies and laboratory studies and experiments all lead to a very similar conclusions. They seem to imply that we have some very basic genetically coded basic rules of morality that are observable already in very little children and are discernible in all different cultures all over the world.

Marc D. Hauser is saying that even if the practical deeds and things that are thought as moral and immoral vary greatly because of different state of cultural evolution in different cultures, there is an deep underlying moral machinery that classifies certain larger classes of actions as moral or immoral.
He calls it “the moral acquisition device” and points out that this system forms a building block on which the actual moral system of every society is in the end built.

His ideas have been to great deal influenced by the findings on Noam Chomsky on the basic common linguistic faculties of humans. Noam Chomsky has shown that there are some very basic ground rules that all languages use as building blocks that are genetically inherent in all human beings.
Even though the languages built on these basic rules differ wildly, they share some common characteristics that are universal for the whole of human kind.
In the same vein Marc D. Hauser does show that all humans share some very basic moral instincts that are the same in every culture, even the practical things that are deemed moral or immoral do vary from culture to culture and in the same culture in different times.

He shows that these moral instincts have a base in our evolutionary history, as most of the same faculties can be found also on in more advanced species in the animal kingdom. Humans have just developed these things further than any other species.
Marc D. Hauser teaches at the moment at the Psychology Department at Harvard University and this book is scientific work and as such not an easy read when he delves into the depths of the scientific data and evidence.

His style is however always fluent and one could undoubtedly could have built a much duller book of the same material. I can heartily recommend this book to anyone who is interested in why we humans are as we are.
His previous popular book called "Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think" analyzed the thought processes of animals.

I must end in a quotation that in my mind gathers together many of the basic issues in the book. This is from the Epilogue at page 456:

"Our biology and the biology of all species on earth sets up on range of possible behaviors. The range we observe is only a limited sampling of all possible behaviors. This is because our biology interacts with the environment, and environments change. But from the fact that environments change we are not licensed to assume that cultures will evolve in parallel, entirely unconstrained. If there is a universal moral grammar, the principles are fixed, but the potential range of moral systems is not."

Comments

One of the most basic reasons why human species has been so successful is its incredible capability to variety. Humans differ from other humans is countless ways that vary from minor outer physical details into vast differences in personality.
These differences in personality, habits and whole life stance have been a cause of multitude of new innovations, when people have started seeing old things in different way and in different light. These innovation brought about the use of tools, use of fire, use of agriculture and all the later innovations that were in the end made possible by these early advances.

The other reason for the success of the human species has however always been its ability to work in uniform manner, aiming together to achieve common goals.
These social skills made possible the first gathering of humans into larger packs, made possible big-time hunting and eventually did lead into building of societies and ultimately made possible the building of modern states.
There has however always been a conflict between these two abilities. The playful, innovative side of humans needs space and freedom to be able to develop fully, but the building of stable societies necessitates curbing freedoms of individuals because of the needs of the state. There will necessarily always be a conflict at some level between these two contradictory goals.

I even boldly claim that this dichotomy is deeply embedded in universal human psyche and is therefore present in all human societies. I claim that in fact the human development has been a continuous struggle between these two major forces that are present in all societies.
I claim that a very big portion of internal struggles in human societies can be explained as a battle between these two very central features of humanity.

The outer conflicts between different societies are however less affected by this conflict, even if the differences in dealing with individuality and conformity can of course lead to situations where whole societies mistrust other societies that have a different enough view on this feature of humanity.
Of course there is a multitude of other major factors and features in humans that drive human societies. I however claim that the drive for individualism and the drive for uniformity have always been there as a deep underlying theme which has caused other more easy to see and notice factors to emerge as causes of friction and conflict inside human societies.

I would even go as far as to suggest that the need for individuality or longing for uniformity could be a factor that is present as a inherited trait in all of us and our upbringing would just strengthen or dampen this inherent trait.
Of course in societies where the pressure for uniformity is very strong, the showing of individuality is more rare than in more loose societies. I however claim that every Roman Legion, every Christian monastery, every Komsomol-group had their clowns and jokers at least, even if dissidence as such was often impossible.

I suggest that the whole human history can be for a big part seen as a battle between individuality and uniformity. Every human society has always had both tendencies, as every human being has these tendencies, but they differ fundamentally on which side of this division attracts them more.
Of course there could just be a lot of people that are not naturally inclined into either direction, but who just follow the current winning trend.

A very crude division would be to say that normally the more individually inclined person would end up as some form of liberals, progressives or radicals and the those inclined towards uniformity would tend to gravitate towards some form of conservatism.
Human species however has a tendency for variation and there is surely a strange mix even in this respect, but I think that the general tendency would be towards a division like this in modern societies, at least.

On the other hand there has always been a conservative and a more progressive element in most human societies, even if some societies the drive for uniformity would be driven to such a extent that the signs of individualism would be very hard to discern, but I believe that one can find them everywhere when one just scratches the surface a bit.
Religion has always been a tool of the conservative forces driving uniformity in societies, even if in some instances the new and emerging religious movements have also been momentarily forces of change also.
However when these new movements have gained power, they have quickly frozen into conservative forces again, driving for uniformity in quite similar manner than the religions they have replaced.

In a modern western world individualism has gained upper hand in a way that has never happened in the human history. I believe that this has been a major factor in creating the explosion of science and technical development.
These things need freedom of thought to be able to develop and they have always blossomed when individualism has had the upper hand, as in the Greece of antiquity.

The drive and need for uniformity that is also embedded deep in human psyche of so many has however not gone away.
I do claim that people that have a inherited tendency for it tend to gravitate also towards the harder and more demanding versions of the religions, where individual can renounce his or her individuality and became part of a bigger whole. On the other hand the modern atheistic movement surely includes a lot of the more individualistically inclined personalities.

I see this as even a major reason behind the rise likes of tight-knit religious formations as Mormonism, Pentecostalism and other radical forms of Christianity and of course the radical Islam. The sad fact just might be that this kind of extremism is not going away, as there will always be people who long to give away their freedom for a common goal.
Religions are going nowhere, as they ride on the back of a trend that is as old as human kind, but however think that the important thing is the general atmosphere in a society; the famous zeitgeist.
The big changes in zeitgeist towards a radically more humanistic world view made once the Christian churches turn against slavery in the 19th century and change in zeitgeist has made the most of the Christian churches to accept women as equals.

I believe that the status of religions can however change and most religions can still grow towards a more forgiving and benign direction. When this happens then their negative impact as source of hatred and bigotry can be greatly lessened, even if I think that they will never go away.
The big thing is just to keep the zeitgeist in the society open and evolving, as religions just have to develop and evolve with the society, as they have already done during the last century in the western world. The big question is of course how to kick-start similar development in Islam. This is just now one of the major issues and challenges facing us.

Comments

One of the most basic reasons why human species has been so successful is its incredible capability to variety. Humans differ from other humans is countless ways that vary from minor outer physical details into vast differences in personality.
These differences in personality, habits and whole life stance have been a cause of multitude of new innovations, when people have started seeing old things in different way and in different light. These innovation brought about the use of tools, use of fire, use of agriculture and all the later innovations that were in the end made possible by these early advances.

The other reason for the success of the human species has however always been its ability to work in uniform manner, aiming together to achieve common goals.
These social skills made possible the first gathering of humans into larger packs, made possible big-time hunting and eventually did lead into building of societies and ultimately made possible the building of modern states.
There has however always been a conflict between these two abilities. The playful, innovative side of humans needs space and freedom to be able to develop fully, but the building of stable societies necessitates curbing freedoms of individuals because of the needs of the state. There will necessarily always be a conflict at some level between these two contradictory goals.

I even boldly claim that this dichotomy is deeply embedded in universal human psyche and is therefore present in all human societies. I claim that in fact the human development has been a continuous struggle between these two major forces that are present in all societies.
I claim that a very big portion of internal struggles in human societies can be explained as a battle between these two very central features of humanity.

The outer conflicts between different societies are however less affected by this conflict, even if the differences in dealing with individuality and conformity can of course lead to situations where whole societies mistrust other societies that have a different enough view on this feature of humanity.
Of course there is a multitude of other major factors and features in humans that drive human societies. I however claim that the drive for individualism and the drive for uniformity have always been there as a deep underlying theme which has caused other more easy to see and notice factors to emerge as causes of friction and conflict inside human societies.

I would even go as far as to suggest that the need for individuality or longing for uniformity could be a factor that is present as a inherited trait in all of us and our upbringing would just strengthen or dampen this inherent trait.
Of course in societies where the pressure for uniformity is very strong, the showing of individuality is more rare than in more loose societies. I however claim that every Roman Legion, every Christian monastery, every Komsomol-group had their clowns and jokers at least, even if dissidence as such was often impossible.

I suggest that the whole human history can be for a big part seen as a battle between individuality and uniformity. Every human society has always had both tendencies, as every human being has these tendencies, but they differ fundamentally on which side of this division attracts them more.
Of course there could just be a lot of people that are not naturally inclined into either direction, but who just follow the current winning trend.

A very crude division would be to say that normally the more individually inclined person would end up as some form of liberals, progressives or radicals and the those inclined towards uniformity would tend to gravitate towards some form of conservatism.
Human species however has a tendency for variation and there is surely a strange mix even in this respect, but I think that the general tendency would be towards a division like this in modern societies, at least.

On the other hand there has always been a conservative and a more progressive element in most human societies, even if some societies the drive for uniformity would be driven to such a extent that the signs of individualism would be very hard to discern, but I believe that one can find them everywhere when one just scratches the surface a bit.
Religion has always been a tool of the conservative forces driving uniformity in societies, even if in some instances the new and emerging religious movements have also been momentarily forces of change also.
However when these new movements have gained power, they have quickly frozen into conservative forces again, driving for uniformity in quite similar manner than the religions they have replaced.

In a modern western world individualism has gained upper hand in a way that has never happened in the human history. I believe that this has been a major factor in creating the explosion of science and technical development.
These things need freedom of thought to be able to develop and they have always blossomed when individualism has had the upper hand, as in the Greece of antiquity.

The drive and need for uniformity that is also embedded deep in human psyche of so many has however not gone away.
I do claim that people that have a inherited tendency for it tend to gravitate also towards the harder and more demanding versions of the religions, where individual can renounce his or her individuality and became part of a bigger whole. On the other hand the modern atheistic movement surely includes a lot of the more individualistically inclined personalities.

I see this as even a major reason behind the rise likes of tight-knit religious formations as Mormonism, Pentecostalism and other radical forms of Christianity and of course the radical Islam. The sad fact just might be that this kind of extremism is not going away, as there will always be people who long to give away their freedom for a common goal.
Religions are going nowhere, as they ride on the back of a trend that is as old as human kind, but however think that the important thing is the general atmosphere in a society; the famous zeitgeist.
The big changes in zeitgeist towards a radically more humanistic world view made once the Christian churches turn against slavery in the 19th century and change in zeitgeist has made the most of the Christian churches to accept women as equals.

I believe that the status of religions can however change and most religions can still grow towards a more forgiving and benign direction. When this happens then their negative impact as source of hatred and bigotry can be greatly lessened, even if I think that they will never go away.
The big thing is just to keep the zeitgeist in the society open and evolving, as religions just have to develop and evolve with the society, as they have already done during the last century in the western world. The big question is of course how to kick-start similar development in Islam. This is just now one of the major issues and challenges facing us.

Comments