pop morality

[Jenny A]

While I grew up along side people like all of you, I was never completely invested in any of it though. I can and do enjoy limited detachment from society, but only in so far as to not hold anything sacred, that I do not see a value in revering that way.

Then you can understand why atheists have no reverence for god's righteousness.  We do not believe it exists and see little of value in it.  

Growing up I found the rules of a society to be trivial and often times based on tradition and what people felt comfortable with. This was illustrated by living in a home that represented two polar opposite cultures. The things my Father and his family held on to, were completely different than the things my mother and her family held on to, for completely different but equally trivial reasons.

Yep, those would be those relative social norms.

My mother's family would often question and wonder why my father would follow stupid american traditions when to them it made sense to act and behaive a different way, and vise versa. All of that taught me was to be objective and to not blindly hold to tradition/culture simply because that's what everyone else does. To break down social patterns and use them if and when they were needed, rather than rituallistically bending my knee to them each and every time society demands it.

Most of us question societies norms, and family norms from time to time.  Christianity has generally been part of those norms in Western society.  I question it too. Why shouldn't I?  Why shouldn't you?

Now put the two things together and you have someone who can honestly objectify and analyze the sacred social structure (and Religion, And anything else people get so emotionally attached to they can see straight) for its good, bad and ugly attributes without being pressured to conform to popular morality or thought.

I don't see you looking at god's righteousness, as you call it, objectively.  If you look at it objectively, you we see that it is arbitrary and not necessarily good by any measure other than the circular one of god's measure.

For instance whether you like it or not the United states of America would not be anything like it is today with out slavery. say what you will but it was the taxes the government collected from the work and profit of rich white land owners, that we were able to buy out the french and Spanish colonies, and without this money (which we had no other way of generating at that time) this continent would have been subdivided into french, Spanish, and English colonies possibly even today, if infact hitler did not take control when he invaded those nations, taking the resources those colonies/states offered for himself making him and his ideals unstoppable...

Yes, on an individual level I feel for and would hate to have been a slave, but on a survival of a diverse species level (because hitler was building a single master race if you remember) the slaves and the work/money that slave labor provided had to be done at the time it was done so the survival of multinational humanity

This is an insane way of justifying slavery.

Of course the United States would be different had there been no slavery here.  Just how it would be different is not so easily determined.  Cotton was not so profitable in the U.S. until the invention of the cotton gin in 1793.  In fact, at that time it looked like slavery would die a natural economic death due to lack of profit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin And yet the U.S. was prospering as a whole. The Louisiana Purchase took place just ten years later in 1803. It seems unlikely that less than ten years of prosperous cotton farming made all the difference.  https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferso...a-purchase

Besides, in 1800, the U.S. federal tax structure looked nothing like it does today.  There was no federal income tax or federal property tax.  Most of the federal government's income came from customs duties. http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/153529/ France offered us the territory at a bargain price because it was not profitable to them and they did not want it in British or Spanish hands.  Chances are, if we couldn't have paid $15 million for it, they still would have sold it to us.

And in the end slavery cost this country an enormous about of money in the form of the Civil War which cost the North roughly $6,190,000,000, and the South $2,099,808,707.  http://www.civilwarhome.com/warcosts.html And that's not counting property damage and loss of life. Makes $15 million look pretty small doesn't it?

Nor is it easy to determine whether the world would be worse off had we been poorer and smaller. In that case, we would not have been able to aide France and Britain in WWI.  The Germans would have won WWI or the war might have ended in a stalemate.  In either case, Germany would not have been suffering under the enormous war debt that lead to political unrest there, which lead to the rise of Hitler.  No Hitler, no WWII or at least not the same WWII.

The bottom line is we really don't know what this country or the world would be like without slavery.

The same could be said about the American Indians. They were in their infancy/stoneage (by choice) when the rest of the world was well into the ironage/just shy of pre industrial age. again from a species stand point what was done how ever brutal and 'immoral' was needed for the continual survival of a diverse species.

The slaughter of the American Indians might have been necessary for the colonization of North America by Europeans.  But it was not necessary for the survival of the species in any way shape or form. And it was certainly not good for the Indians.

We can not simply ignore or judge our pasts without weighing both the positive and negative attributes even the most appalling events yield. Like for instance the slaughter Germany leveled against the Jews. Bought them back their holy Land. to you this may seem trivial, but it was on top of every jews prayer list for almost 2000 years! The millions that Germany slaughtered was the price "Moral Man" demanded in 1948. We know this to be true because after WWI when the same nations that won WWII (minus Japan) divided up the world, no consideration was given to the Jews. But after WWII and the world was told millions died in camps, and after we saw the pictures, pop morality then demanded that they be given back their home so nothing like this could happen again..

Change an event in history, and subsequent history would change.  What of it?  It wouldn't necessarily make the present better or worse, just change the winners and losers. And I'm not sure that those you call the winners feel the way you do about it. Your understanding of what the Jews wanted in the 1940s is limited at best.  And what of the people living in the "Holy Land"?  Had they no feelings about their homeland?    

Nothing I've said here is untrue, it's it not something we want to acknoweledge because self righteous morality does not like to acknoweledge anything 'good' to come out of immoral acts, but in truth it is out of 'immoral acts' that the state of human survival hinges on. its because in western culture, you do not like to talk about or be reminded of what harsh brutality affords us. you like to think yourself as better than our forefathers, better than the rest of the world because you yourself do not have to get your hands bloody, but you all fail to ever look at the blood on your feet.. Because WE all stand on the backs of men who thankfully did what they had to do to put us in the position where selective empathy and self righteousness is a luxury we can afford to have if indeed we are so inclined to delude..

Yes I am reaping the rewards of the behavior of our ancestors.  I'm also suffering the consequences.  And while I don't judge people in the past by modern standards, I don't conclude that their actions were good simply because things turned out the way that they did.

Or is it??? That's the bases of the question I want you all to ask yourself. Is your empathy and self righteous/ current version of pop morality some how better than the morality of Hitler's germany, or 18th century America or even late 19th century America? where millions suffered and died.. If so how would you know if nothing you believe strays outside of the right and wrong defined by pop culture affords you? Again all of these cultures mention, saw themselves as 'moral' and what they did as being 'moral' just as you do because their morality like yours is/was sourced from the culture. So then how do you differ?

Most cultures see themselves as moral.  Morality is after all a human construct.  It is based on empathy and we feel the most empathy for those most like us.  That leads not only to generosity and fairness for ourselves, but also to war on others.  Morality is also based on rationality. We understand the advantages of a civil society and civil relations with our neighbors and act accordingly.  It is far from perfect.  But it is what we have.

We also have clever human explanations for doing what we want to do.  God is one of those.  So are various other ideologies.  

It is far better to look at our morality and question it, than to say we'll stick to the morality in this book from around 100 CE.  

You are in a mind set where you see two alternatives:  god's law and popular morality.  I don't see god's law as an alternative. I see god's law as a justification some people use to justify their popular morality. And the Bible provides them with plenty of flexibility to do just that.  You see, it's all popular morality.  It's just that some people use god to shut down the conversation about what that morality should be.