📜 So - middle of the night reflection, because I can't seem to post the Patreon piece I need to without saying something deeper here, o CoSo, where the "human" in me is at its safest:
I'm in an odd spot. I'm able to care for many, but I'm in no position to help myself. I'm an immigrant in constant precarity, and also not at all the most vulnerable of immigrants in the world (or of people living in the land of their own birth, for that matter). /x
I grew up atheist, and therefore full of wonder at our indifferent cosmos. No god, no purpose save what we make for ourselves. But we keep making TERRIBLE choices.
And it can be unbearable.
A child often has a better sense of right and wrong at times than we adults, many of whom have crafted lifetimes' worth of elaborate and academic/political vocabularies to justify the unequal and unjust positions into which we were so unthinkingly born. /x
@MLClark Please allow me to make one observation: in this thread (I have read further into it) you lament the troubles of the world but it is in this particular post where you mention your upbringing being atheist.
I will be the first to tell you of the moral failings of modern christianity especially in America. The church has *never* managed to live to up to its ideals but in striving to it has created a lot of good in the world.
I do not, because I am a student of history. That supposed recent decline of faith manifested in many eras prior to our own: a very loose Deism, at best, was common in other centuries, along with atheism.
I'm glad faith provides you with solace - I have no interest in taking your belief from you - but the deep history of humanity speaks for itself. We have always contained multitudes, & many generations before our own believed they were living amid what you consider novel chaos.
@MLClark You are correct when you speak of a general deism, etc. There was a general and pervasive sense of a god or gods in control for millennia which can still be seen in many under-developed places in the world. However, you seem to be unaware that atheism was extremely rare before about the start of the 20th century, before humans began to congregate in large urban areas. WWI shattered the faith that many had in humanity that it was, for lack of a better term, evolving.
Oh, no, you're speaking to a scholar of literary history with a focus on 19th century literature and a broader literary background that marks the presence of atheist thought back to the ancient Roman era.
Again, I have no interest in taking your faith from you. If you're Christian, you still very much believe in a relativistic god, but you move in a context that allows you to think that there's an "objective" moral standard. Glad it works for you, but it's ahistorical. Cheers!
I will point this out - granted it is but one study, and I am not educated enough in general or in social sciences to judge its veracity, but the idea, I think, is worth considering:
People aren’t becoming less moral, people are just changing.
We humans are famously bad at distinguishing “different” from “bad.”
Indeed, there are some theories that posit the “Uncanny Valley” phenomenon is an instinct that pushed early Homo sapiens to fear and loath anything that was also a hominid… but wasn’t quite Homo sapiens.
And/or it’s an instinct to make us avoid selecting people with harmful genetic mutations as mates, and/or to simply avoid people with pathogenic diseases.
It makes all kinds of sense to me. And it, to me, explains a lot about why humans are the way we are.
@GlytchMeister @MLClark I suppose I should clarify something. I never meant to suggest that our modern moral failure was entirely new or novel. In fact I think humans are just as capable of evil / mistakes / etc. as they ever were. We are no different in that regard than the ancients. What's different today is the concentration of it. The ancients were limited by everything: communication, travel, information exchange, medical care. We have overcome them all yet we aren't building to a utopia.
@GlytchMeister @MLClark Once COVID19 set in there was a lot of talk about the end of the world. In Christian literature this is the under the heading of #Eschatology. And many elements were a match! In point of fact the world didn't end but how have we reacted since? Did it wake us from our slumber on climate change? On solving world hunger?
No. We are back to where we were. If anything those that didn't care before about their fellow man have all hardened their hearts even more.
@GlytchMeister @MLClark This defies rational thought and normal logic. Everyone knows that working together is the best way to care for everyone but it seems there is a deeper, uncontrollable selfishness buried in our innermost being. And "where we go one, we go all" (WWG1WGA) to borrow a filthy phrase. We are marching to our own destruction and it seems rational humans are unable to reign in the crazies among us.
Only this time the crazies have communication, travel, and some nuclear weapons.
@GlytchMeister @MLClark How can we understand this?
I think an insight comes from understanding Trump's appeal to MAGA: he hurts the people that they want hurt. Therefore, they will never leave him. Such people are driven by hatred for their fellow man. And Trump has given them a poisonous taste of anarchy but called it freedom.
As a believer I see all this as sin and Trump leading his followers to their own destruction. Climate change won't stop because humans won't stop it so I trust in God.
No regret for being atheist. If that's the takeaway you read from my post, I'm sorry for not being clearer. There is no god. There are maybe 6.5 billion *conceptions* of a god in believers, but that's something different.
The problem is that we haven't built a better system of truly humanist care to address the indifferent cosmos in which we all reside. My humanism is big-tent. If you're a humanist of faith, our shared opponent is nihilism. I'm thankful for allies in that fray.
@MLClark As a believer, I see a connection between the general loss of faith that has occurred, broadly during the 20th century, and the increase in general moral failure. When people are not taught the difference between right and wrong as an absolute given by a moral deity, and they instead choose their own set of moral principles to live by, isn't the result chaos? Isn't this what we are seeing and experiencing?
It's something to think about. I just wonder if you see that connection too.