To All the Women I Love and Admire...

To all the women I love and admire...

I'm so sorry that it's looking like this is not the year we'll get a president. We had so many great candidates who had no penii. We really SHOULD have a female running to beat Trump, this WAS the year and I'm sorry it's looking like it's looking like it's not turning out that way. They clearly were the better candidates.

In honor of what should have been, I'm re-posting a poem about resistance, along with some of my art of strong women.

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Rise up wild daughter of the woods

dance and romp

struggle and scream

kick and punch

Persist. Resist. Insist. Consist

of and within your

own sweet and glorious dragon Self.

Kick at the stones and 

split the sky into 

one thousand shards of color 

bellow in rage

fight

spin

sing.

Or don't. 

Just rest and relax or do 

whatever

it is your own unchained soul wants.

It IS your life. 
Live it by your rules. 

This poet stands with you and your choices.

(Not that you need my approval.)

Understanding Morality

Craig has been asking questions at his blog (and at mine) about what grounds would we have for choosing some behaviors as immoral and others as moral. I've suggested the common idea of Do No Harm to Innocents/The Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you...") which is found in all the major world religions in some form or the other, and which many if not most non-religious folks can affirm, as well.

Craig has appeared to not find my reasoning (our reasoning, those of us who agree with this common sense measure) to be appealing and he points to the many real flaws with it. Most of these flaws come down to people not fully recognizing/acknowledging when they are doing harm to others. Although, he has yet to offer what he'd prefer to see in the place of the appeal to the GR/Do No Harm approach. 

Craig stated, on his blog...

"I do love how you’ve staked your entire moral code on a rule..." 

It's a rule with straightforward, understandable reasoning behind it. What is immoral? That which causes harm. That which we wouldn't want someone else to do to us. 

What's wrong with the appeal to this reasoned approach to morality?

This is a reasoned position. People can understand it. It's rational and overtly obvious to all people, regardless of background or culture. 

Why should I not do that action which causes harm to innocent people? Because it causes harm to innocent people, and we wouldn't want someone to do this to us if we were innocent. It's exceedingly reasonable. 

Do you disagree? 

The problem with appeals to a particular religion or a particular God is that not everyone agrees that a given God exists or not everyone agrees with a particular tenets of a given religion. 

"Because my religion says..." is a very limiting way to try to define morality. That's fine for the 30% of the world that agrees with the particular tenets of your particular version of your particular religion, but it doesn't fit everyone, nor does the appeal have much of a way to unify everyone.

Additionally, you have humans (traditionally throughout most of history, powerful men) deciding, "This is what I think God calls moral..." and humans are famously oftentimes mistaken about what the gods believe. 

After all, of the dozens of other gods and religions in the world, most of us  no doubt don't place any credence in what these other religions teach to be moral, do we? We can just agree that OUR God's rules/teachings are right... and even then, "we" in "our" group regularly disagree with one another on many rules even within our group.

On what rationed consistent basis would we choose one religious group (or, some subsets of one religious group, since religions often don't agree with each other even within one religion) to be the authorities on what is and isn't moral?

Appeals to one particular subset of one particular religion is very limiting and would perforce exclude many others (as opposed to help us find common ground). Appeals to a Golden Rule/Do No Harm to Innocents rule is able to unite us and, generally speaking, we can agree upon it, even if imperfectly and we can appeal to it in areas where we disagree.

Appealing to "my group's interpretation of our group's understanding of our group's sacred text" holds little hope of pulling us together in common ground.

Where am I mistaken?

What benefit is there to appeals to one particular faith tradition's sacred text as a rulings book (especially when so much of that text might be opposed to using the book as a rulings book, as in the case of the bible)? I'm not seeing it.

One of Craig's apparent gripes about appeals to the GR/Do No Harm is that we won't always agree on some actions... that people won't live it out perfectly, that it's not objectively provable. And it's true. Humans DO have a history of not living out the GR and of finding reasons to, for instance, own slaves or oppress women or gay folk or others. It IS an imperfect measure of how to live morally.

But two things:

1. It's really not that hard to grasp. We humans get that we wouldn't want someone to rape us or our loved ones, to take our stuff from us, to assault us, to abuse or oppress us... these harms are obvious to most people and appeals to the GR/Do No Harm are a way of saying, "Hey, we shouldn't do this!" and most of us understand why on nearly all the huge harmful actions. Yes, Christians in the past and others today have found a way of saying, "...but we CAN own slaves because..." and finding a reason that allows them to justify that sort of oppression/harm. But that's a human falling prey to hypocrisy problem, not a problem with the measure. 

After all, Christians in recent history were able to appeal to their religion's sacred text and traditions to justify oppressing slaves and women and others, so it's a problem with either method. Christians today in parts of the world (along with Muslims) are using their religious texts and traditions to jail and cause harm to gay folk today.

1a. Harm IS measurable. If someone rapes, assaults, kills, steals from, oppresses another, we can see and quantify the harm being done. Sure, when it gets down to finer details, there's more room for disagreement (are coal companies polluting streams - a toxic negative - to generate power that we rely upon - a reasonable positive - a net moral positive or net harm? ...for instance.), but in broad strokes, it's something most of humanity can generally agree upon, even if imperfectly.

2. What's the alternative? One group's particular opinions about what God (or gods) think is moral? Another, more limited, measure that is not objectively provable?

No thanks.