RE: As a nonreligious person, where do you get your moral guidance?
November 26, 2022 at 2:11 pm
(This post was last modified: November 26, 2022 at 2:30 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
If religious people actually consulted their magic books or their traditional hardlining shamans for moral guidance, then their religions would not be changing to fit society in every generation. They don't, and never have. Religious texts and traditions are a memorialization of a moral view-in-time. Not generative, in any sense, for anyone, ever.
A few pages back someone mentioned that it's a fair bet people's ideas about how to treat other people predated religion, and that certainly seems to be the case in a very important way that ties in directly with why we maintain texts and traditions like that. Ritual burial is an expression of value in the dead, which, by extension, offers us value in life, even if (and especially when) the worst or the inevitable occurs. It's because we already felt a certain way about people, and about ourselves, that we decided to dress the graves of the departed, or engage in little ceremonies, or attend to a specific set of actions. To this day, religion grounds itself in death, often to the exclusion or in explicit rejection of life. We started doing this before full modernity, and certainly before any religion as we would understand them today, though, from an academic standpoint, this is the earliest evidence of a religion of any kind. That people are sacred, even or especially the dead, and that it is taboo to deface them. In extension, so too are those dead peoples possessions, and even their ideas. There are lots of hypothesis about why we might feel this way, I'm sure the idea that we do this as a sort of selection mechanism ala "well, bob and bobs ideas got us this far, so we should stick with them" - but I think that implies a level of cold calculation not exactly in evidence in human response to death. In grief. In the rejection of loss any way we might manage it. I think it is and was always more personal and emotional than that. That, to me, is the really fun and fascinating bit - knowing that for whatever reason, or no reason at all, people 100k years ago or possibly even more, despite their being different from fully modern people in a great many ways, were exactly like us in at least one regard.
A few pages back someone mentioned that it's a fair bet people's ideas about how to treat other people predated religion, and that certainly seems to be the case in a very important way that ties in directly with why we maintain texts and traditions like that. Ritual burial is an expression of value in the dead, which, by extension, offers us value in life, even if (and especially when) the worst or the inevitable occurs. It's because we already felt a certain way about people, and about ourselves, that we decided to dress the graves of the departed, or engage in little ceremonies, or attend to a specific set of actions. To this day, religion grounds itself in death, often to the exclusion or in explicit rejection of life. We started doing this before full modernity, and certainly before any religion as we would understand them today, though, from an academic standpoint, this is the earliest evidence of a religion of any kind. That people are sacred, even or especially the dead, and that it is taboo to deface them. In extension, so too are those dead peoples possessions, and even their ideas. There are lots of hypothesis about why we might feel this way, I'm sure the idea that we do this as a sort of selection mechanism ala "well, bob and bobs ideas got us this far, so we should stick with them" - but I think that implies a level of cold calculation not exactly in evidence in human response to death. In grief. In the rejection of loss any way we might manage it. I think it is and was always more personal and emotional than that. That, to me, is the really fun and fascinating bit - knowing that for whatever reason, or no reason at all, people 100k years ago or possibly even more, despite their being different from fully modern people in a great many ways, were exactly like us in at least one regard.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
