Reply To: The Strong See Brutalizing the Weak As Their Prerogative. Only the…

[Simon Paynton]

It’s interesting to consider that the way to follow, and live out, a rational religion is different from the case of the monotheistic religions, and even different from Buddhism, which is pretty intellectual (too much so sometimes).

In a “rational religion”, thinking for yourself is the operating principle: being guided by the human faculty of rationality, which we know from science and mathematics can be very powerful.  Aside from classical texts, Buddhism depends a lot on the mystical experience and training of meditation; Christianity and Islam have prayer; all of them make heavy use of rituals and communal worship.  I’m sure these are all very effective.

Religion as pure rationality is something new: using facts and knowledge to reason about everyday social life.  This implies that 1) nothing about it is binding, there’s no real “authority” that bosses people around and tells them what to do; 2) there’s a lot of freedom of choice in what is “right” – people aren’t really given some one-size-fits-all version of what they should want, they have to make their own minds up, based on fundamental principles, which are also up for discussion; 3) you are required to think and reason for yourself, and if you don’t, it doesn’t work.  The way to be a “good rationalist” is to be well educated and honest about being rational.

Having new insights is a normal part of the process: when you apply the knowledge and reasoning to your situation, this is what happens.  These insights will always be too numerous to contain in any one place, but hopefully, the world will be full of people talking about their insights, which just creates more.

So religious people will say, this means we see right and wrong as just opinions, and it means anything goes, why shouldn’t we —- [punch a cat in the face, or whatever].  We could respond, that atheists and religious people have differing value systems.  Our value system is ethical human flourishing, backed up by simple scientific reasoning that is open to everyone.  Their value system is a cherry-picked version of the Bible (in the case of Christians).  So we can show that it has merit, from that argument, and in fact, it is a science, that has flexibility, and is open to progress, like normal science.  We can also point out that the underlying value system is the same in both cases, but the two cultures are probably, inevitably, different (one is authoritarian and conservative, the other is anti-authoritarian and innovative by nature).