Hypatian Society

  Are Defined Rules Needed?

The short answer is –Yes, evolution requires it. (It’s a long story, please see: Physical Reality)

And the first reaction from this is generally on the order of we are going to be the False Messiah for everybody? Well, let me point out that since animism 300,000 years ago no god has brought peace to mankind and neither has atheism!

How has atheism used their stated ability to use science and logic to adapt and improve progressed through the ages? Fundamentally it has not. The same arguments made today by the recognized atheist leaders are the same arguments recorded 1500 years ago. This is best pointed out by Timothy Whitmarsh in his book Battling The Gods where in the chapter A Dialogue he states:

THERSANDER: The gods are dead. Their withered bodies lie immolated on the altars of science and reason. The pious are exposed for credulous fools.
DIOTIMUS: Nonsense! Belief in the gods is stronger than ever. It is true, of course, that the peacocks of the academy deceive themselves that their worldly knowledge is all. But you should get out into the streets. Leave behind your chattering dinner parties and take a walk through the city: the shrines are packed, the temples blackened with the smoke of sacrifice.
THERSANDER: Their belief is skin-deep. They act this way because they have always done so, not out of deep conviction. They do not have the time or inclination to question; they are too busy trying to survive, while their foolish leaders pitch them from one disaster to another.
DIOTIMUS: The people need their gods, in this perilous world of ours. It is their comfort and stay.
THERSANDER: Yes, of course religion offers comfort and hope. But it also makes for anxiety and fear! It plays on the emotions of the credulous. It has nothing to do with truth. Only observation, testing, and rational enquiry can lead us to proper understanding.
DIOTIMUS: You blind yourself to the truth that is not of this world. It is obvious that humans are born capable of glimpsing the divine. All people have that capacity, even if some choose not to use it. That is why there has never been, and never will be, a society without gods.
THERSANDER: Humans created gods. Primitive humans saw divinity in the sun, moon, and stars, in the cycles of the seasons. They lacked scientific understanding of matter, the cosmos, and nature. In time, politicians and rulers realized the power of religious belief and cynically twisted it to their own ends. There are no gods overseeing social order, punishing wrongdoing; that is simply what our leaders teach us, to keep us in check.
DIOTIMUS: Atheism is a fad. Future generations will look back on it as a passing folly.
THERSANDER: Quite the opposite: it is religion that is dying. It has no answers to the questions of the modern world, only adherence to outdated dogma and ritual. I know that belief in the gods is deeply rooted, and those who profit from it will fight tooth and claw to preserve it. But as true understanding of the world grows and spreads, it will be exposed for the vanity that it is.
This dialogue, between a religious devotee and an atheist intellectual in Athens at the end of the fifth century BC, did not take place. But it could have. All of the ideas in it are to be found in ancient Greek sources. If the terms of the debate seem arrestingly modern, that is no coincidence. We are still, in the twenty-first century, grappling with issues that are at least two and a half millennia old.”

Atheists often promulgate the idea that everybody is born with an innate sense of what is right and wrong. And let me tell you that this argument is a total failure! 75 years ago people of the European and Asian continents started and supported a war that killed around 75,000,000 people, or about 3% of the worlds population at that time. And apparently this characteristic is dominant in most leaders and their populations as is shown even today by the dominant country on earth whose motto, pledge to its flag, and money all scream out god to their high heaven started a war based on lies that killed a best estimate of 400,000 (average of 3 studies) non combatants. And by the way, that was 1.6% of their population in 2003. If 1.6% of the US population had been killed that would be 4,492,141. That’s about 4 times as many as all the combatants lost in all the wars the US has fought.

Maybe we need to look at mankind a little more critically since it is obvious humans don’t all have a sense of empathy for their fellow humans and no-one has convinced them they need to change!

Atheism, like theism, has had 300,000 years to bring mankind together but has used the same faulted condition of multiple writings with multiple authors attempting to define the philosophy of a proper life with as many fancy words as possible just as the theists have. And let me tell you that this method has also been a total failure!

Based on all of this, a multitude of other failures of mankind for the last 300,000 years, and the fact that most people are holistic thinkers and will follow A leader it appears that a new tact is needed. And a small set of specific rules would appear to be the best. By providing a small set of fairly simple instructions that the masses can understand without them having to immerse their entire lives in analyzing and cataloging instructions prevents the “leader” people from being able to pick and choose from a large set of conflicting and complex rules to get the sayings they want to get people to do bad things.

It also shows that life isn’t so complicated that you need tens or hundreds of thousands of words to be moral. It also lets you explain your view in simple terms that anyone of reasonable intelligence can understand, and most will be able to recall when making decisions.

You can see The 21 rules here http://hypatiansociety.org/The21.html/





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(Saturday July 01, 2023)