Illusion said:
See that's where I disagree. I believe that we are all born with an innate and fallen desire to do evil. It's by developing virtue that we learn to overcome it and embrace the best qualities in ourselves. I remember doing bad stuff when I was even 5 years old, yes I did learn how to express these ugly feelings from others but the underlying feelings and tendencies were there on their own. Losing my temper, getting jealous of a friend or having ignorant/discriminatory thoughts about people that looked/behaved differently than me were all things that just happened, I didn't have to be taught how to feel these feelings or have these thoughts. That said, I had to be taught and really had to work on overcoming these bad temptations and it is constant process to keep from falling back into it. The problem is that we live in a society that teaches that it is OK to hate conservative Christians, Trump supporters, those that don't want to take a vaccination, basically 50% of society and that it is good when they lose their jobs, etc. But then people are expected to have a cult-like love for any of the identity politics labels that are championed by the left. This is a completely inconsistent and shallow virtue signal that completely fails as any kind of moral philosophy, in my view. Our society today sees the value of morality as being something incredibly superficial and there is really no reason (that we can explain) to be good if nobody is around to see it or congratulate us. Can you even explain the underlying reason as to why it is wrong to be an a*hole to somebody online? Yes, it hurts somebody, but why is that wrong? You need to be able to answer these deep, underlying questions if you want to impact and change somebody's deeply held moral compass, otherwise people will only comply when there are consequences in place to enforce it. Online, people know that they can get away with a lot without getting caught and so the decision not to mistreat somebody really comes down to a person's own moral compass. People with spiritual belief (not even necessarily Christian) understand that there are eternal consequences for mistreating our neighbor and even with the veil of anonymity, doing wrong to others will have consequences on us. As a result, to compensate for this absence of actual morality, our society looks to bring in more rules, restrictions on freedoms to enforce compliance with the prescribed and increasingly shallow belief system. So if you hate Christianity, fine, pick another belief: Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. I am a Christian but you would be better of with any of those beliefs by far than with the current prevailing value system in our society which is basically just leading to total authoritarianism. Almost any religion/spiritual philosophy teaches the reality of good vs. evil and the necessity for us to work hard to be excellent human beings where love of one's neighbor is always a central value. That is the only way that you are going to change people's behavior on their own will, the only other answer is massive police-state authoritarianism to force 100% compliance which is I guess where we are headed. |
And what do you say to the con man ex president that tried to overthrow our government acting like he is a Christian when he obviously is not? That is authoritarianism.
