Ethics, anarchy and atheism

[Kolohe]

I find the idea of hell ridiculous and also the law of 3x3 karma quite implausible. I am not sure about reincarnation or any kind of afterlife. Yet, I believe- do no harm, do what you will is an excellent principle and really not that difficult to apply in theory or practice. Not because of any consequences, it seems like the right thing to do and I think that is enough. Do people really need the idea of these consequences to keep them from committing harmful acts, I'd like to think our inherent human condition better that that, but I could be wrong. If it was decisively proven (it's hypothetical, I have no idea how) that there is no karma and no afterlife at all would people become unethical degraded beasts or might we actually be more united by removing the whole divisiveness of which way is the right way and focus on the here and now?

Kolohe

[hedge*]

Do people really need the idea of these consequences to keep them from committing harmful acts, I'd like to think our inherent human condition better that that, but I could be wrong.

From my experience you are wrong. I wish more people applied the idea of consequence to their lives. It seems far too many people live their lives without thinking of consequences or repercussions that I often wonder if they are aware these words exist.

All is not doom and gloom with me I promise you.

Edited to add: Sorry that this seemed rather cut off - but I wanted to wait before I went any further.

[jcrowfoot]

I cannot speak to the whole "three time back at ya" thing. However, by my experience, doing curses and so on DOES make your life more difficult.
The more hostile energy you work with, the more hostility seems to be around you. I don't pretend to know what mechanism this happens (save, "what you call DOES come"). I also find that, in general, when I do positive magick there is more positive energy around me. If I consume myself with hatred, continually worry about revenge and the like... my life starts sucking in general much more than, say when I'm sending healing energy to friends.

It's a thing.

Granted, bad stuff does happen even if I avoid hostile magick for years and years and years. However, I'm in a better headspace and can deal with those challenges more positively when I'm sending light and love.

On the Other Hand, Sometimes you need to be defensive. It is rare time when this force needs to be applied, and it MUST be done with careful and through consideration. ALL actions have consequences. Even good actions can have negative side-effects. It's really too complicated to put across as simple math, I'm sorry, I'm a realist. Peace in Our Time is not always the correct answer. But in this day and age, it is often the right
choice.

[[Obsidian]]

Research on deterrence (well, criminological research) has shown that there are three types of people. The first group will not offend, irrelevant of whether there is a deterrent or not, the second group is unaffected by the deterrent too and will offend either way. The third group, finally, are people who respond to deterrence and act according to their assessment of the consequences.

I personally don't believe in the three times thing either but I do believe that, one way or the other, you reap what you sow.

Harry

[jcrowfoot]

I spent my childhood being the first group. I was beaten senseless quite frequently, despite bending over backwards to not offend.
I've now become a member of the third group, and feel better for it. Yes, I have harder decisions to make, but damn it, I prefer having the option to defend myself.

[hedge*]

I firmly believe in "reap what you sow" yes definately.
One way or another - what you give out will come back to you - like a boomerang.

The more hostile energy you work with, the more hostility seems to be around you.

*nods head
Negativity does attract negativity and likewise positivity does attract positivity. It's all about sate of mind and perspective.

[Sacred]

No, I think we are born with the morals already instilled in us. Religion just "re-iterates" it. Religion did not give birth to the idea of morals & ethics or those who are atheist & agnostic (?) would not be moral or ethical, and we all know they are.


ETA: Going back and re-reading what I wrote it sounds snotty & I totally didn't mean for it to be. LOL!

Also, I do not adhere to the 3 fold law. I believe in Karma and that is enough for me.

It is "proven" that thinking positively (doing positively) will attract positive "things" to your life. This is called positive affirmations. They are quite popular among pagan religions and self-help books of ANY religion or lack thereof. You will also find Dr.'s "preaching" of the importance to think positively.

Now, it can only be duly noted that the same would be true for negative thinking/doing.

[Eretik]

"Religion did not give birth to the idea of morals & ethics or those who are atheist & agnostic (?) would not be moral or ethical, and we all know they are. "

Agreed.Well said.Not all religious people are moral,not all moral people are religious.


What is Ethics?
Developed by Manuel Velasquez, Claire Andre, Thomas Shanks, S.J., and Michael J. Meyer
A few years ago, sociologist Raymond Baumhart asked business people, "What does ethics mean to you?" Among their replies were the following:


"Ethics has to do with what my feelings tell me is right or wrong."
"Ethics has to do with my religious beliefs."
"Being ethical is doing what the law requires."
"Ethics consists of the standards of behavior our society accepts."
"I don't know what the word means."


These replies might be typical of our own. The meaning of "ethics" is hard to pin down, and the views many people have about ethics are shaky.

Like Baumhart's first respondent, many people tend to equate ethics with their feelings. But being ethical is clearly not a matter of following one's feelings. A person following his or her feelings may recoil from doing what is right. In fact, feelings frequently deviate from what is ethical.

Nor should one identify ethics with religion. Most religions, of course, advocate high ethical standards. Yet if ethics were confined to religion, then ethics would apply only to religious people. But ethics applies as much to the behavior of the atheist as to that of the saint. Religion can set high ethical standards and can provide intense motivations for ethical behavior. Ethics, however, cannot be confined to religion nor is it the same as religion.

Being ethical is also not the same as following the law. The law often incorporates ethical standards to which most citizens subscribe. But laws, like feelings, can deviate from what is ethical. Our own pre-Civil War slavery laws and the apartheid laws of present-day South Africa are grotesquely obvious examples of laws that deviate from what is ethical.

Finally, being ethical is not the same as doing "whatever society accepts." In any society, most people accept standards that are, in fact, ethical. But standards of behavior in society can deviate from what is ethical. An entire society can become ethically corrupt. Nazi Germany is a good example of a morally corrupt society.

Moreover, if being ethical were doing "whatever society accepts," then to find out what is ethical, one would have to find out what society accepts. To decide what I should think about abortion, for example, I would have to take a survey of American society and then conform my beliefs to whatever society accepts. But no one ever tries to decide an ethical issue by doing a survey. Further, the lack of social consensus on many issues makes it impossible to equate ethics with whatever society accepts. Some people accept abortion but many others do not. If being ethical were doing whatever society accepts, one would have to find an agreement on issues which does not, in fact, exist.

What, then, is ethics? Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics, for example, refers to those standards that impose the reasonable obligations to refrain from rape, stealing, murder, assault, slander, and fraud. Ethical standards also include those that enjoin virtues of honesty, compassion, and loyalty. And, ethical standards include standards relating to rights, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from injury, and the right to privacy. Such standards are adequate standards of ethics because they are supported by consistent and well founded reasons.

Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one's ethical standards. As mentioned above, feelings, laws, and social norms can deviate from what is ethical. So it is necessary to constantly examine one's standards to ensure that they are reasonable and well-founded. Ethics also means, then, the continuous effort of studying our own moral beliefs and our moral conduct, and striving to ensure that we, and the institutions we help to shape, live up to standards that are reasonable and solidly-based.
This article appeared originally in Issues in Ethics IIE V1 N1 (Fall 1987)

[Eretik]

Defining Anarchy.[My political views lean towards Anarchic.]



Anarchy (from Greek: ἀναρχία anarchía, "without ruler") may refer to any of the following:

"Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder."[1]
"A theoretical social state in which there is no governing person or body of persons, but each individual has absolute liberty (without the implication of disorder)."[2]
"Absence or non-recognition of authority and order in any given sphere."[3]
It should be noted that "ruler," if used in the context of the third bullet point, has no explicit connection to the term "rules." In an anarchy, as defined by the last bullet point, it is possible to have rules (laws), however, these must be agreed upon by the participants in the system, and not imposed from above, by a ruler (leader, authority). Some languages, such as Norwegian[4] have two separate words for the two meanings.

A state of anarchy is the goal of the political philosophy of anarchism.

Liberalism
Bertrand Russell wrote on how liberalism aims for a golden mean between despotism and anarchy:

"Every community is faced with two dangers, anarchy and despotism. The Puritans, especially the Independents, were most impressed by the danger of despotism. Hobbes, on the contrary, was obsessed by the fear of anarchy. The liberal philosophers who arose after the Restoration and acquired control after 1688, realized both dangers; they disliked both Strafford and the Anabaptists. "

This led Locke to the doctrine of division of powers and of checks and balances.

Anarchism
Anarchists are those who advocate the absence of the state, arguing that common sense would allow for people to come together in agreement to form a functional society allowing for the participants to freely develop their own sense of morality, ethics or principled behaviour. The rise of anarchism as a philosophical movement occurred in the mid 19th century, with its notion of freedom as being based upon political and economic self-rule. This occurred alongside the rise of the nation-state and large-scale industrial capitalism, and the corruption that came with their successes.

Although anarchists share a rejection of the state, they differ about economic arrangements and possible rules that would prevail in a stateless society, ranging from complete common ownership and distribution according to need, to supporters of private property and free market competition. For example, most forms of anarchism, such as that of anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, or anarcho-primitivism not only seek rejection of the state, but also other systems which they perceive as authoritarian, which includes capitalism, wage labor, and private property. In opposition, a political philosophy known as anarcho-capitalism argues that a society without a state is a free market capitalist system that is voluntarist in nature.

The word "anarchy" is often used by non-anarchists as a pejorative term, intended to connote a lack of control and a negatively chaotic environment. Because of this, some activists have self-identified as libertarian socialists. In more recent times anti-authoritarian has offered another similar self-identification. However, anarchists still argue that anarchy does not imply nihilism, anomie, or the total absence of rules, but rather an anti-authoritarian society that is based on the spontaneous order of free individuals in autonomous communities, operating on principles of mutual aid, voluntary association, and direct action.

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Excerpted from Wikipedia "Anarchy".

[Eretik]

"Not because of any consequences, it seems like the right thing to do and I think that is enough. Do people really need the idea of these consequences to keep them from committing harmful acts, I'd like to think our inherent human condition better that that, but I could be wrong."


Right and the right thing to do.The below seems pertinent.Have you read "The Rights of Man" by Thomas Paine, Kolohe? I recommend it.Paine was an abolitionist also,he decried slavery in all it's forms.A very interesting man,indeed.






Locke and the Enlightenment
Many of the ideas in The Rights of Man are derived from the concepts of the Age of Enlightenment. John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government particularly influenced Paine who ascribes the origins of rights to nature. Paine emphasises that rights cannot be granted by any charter because this would legally imply they can also be revoked and under such circumstances they would be reduced to privileges.

Thomas Paine writes,

“It is a perversion of terms to say that a charter gives rights. It operates by a contrary effect - that of taking rights away. "Rights are inherently in all the inhabitants; but charters, by annulling those rights, in the majority, leave the right, by exclusion, in the hands of a few. ... They...consequently are instruments of injustice. ”
“The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.” According to Paine, the sole purpose of the government is to protect the irrefutable rights inherent to every human being. Thus all institutions which do not benefit a nation are illegitimate, including the monarchy (and the nobility) and the military establishment.


Commentary
Paine’s influence was perceptible in both the great revolutions of the eighteenth century. The Rights of Man is dedicated to U.S. General George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette acknowledging the importance of the American and the French Revolution in formulating the principles of modern democratic governance. The Declaration of the Rights of Man can be approached from his most telling points:

Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights. Civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility.
The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.
The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty; neither can any individual, nor any body of men, be entitled to any authority which is not expressly derived from it. These three points are similar to the "self-evident truths" expressed in the United States Declaration of Independence

[hedge*]

No, I think we are born with the morals already instilled in us. Religion just "re-iterates" it. Religion did not give birth to the idea of morals & ethics or those who are atheist & agnostic (?) would not be moral or ethical, and we all know they are.

Nicely put. I don't think Kolohe was talking about religion though. - correct me if I'm wrong Kolohe.

[Eretik]

"If it was decisively proven (it's hypothetical, I have no idea how) that there is no karma and no afterlife at all would people become unethical degraded beasts or might we actually be more united by removing the whole divisiveness of which way is the right way and focus on the here and now? "



But Karma and After-Life are religious philosophies,are they not?

[Kolohe]

Thank you. There are a lot of good points here. Eretik, I have read some essays by Locke and Thomas Paine, but it's been a while. I do believe in karma to the extent that if you extend peace and goodwill toward others your own life generally becomes more peaceful, constantly having a chip on your shoulder causes difficulties. I was raised in a Christian home (but never really bought into it), became an atheist in college and then drifted into pantheism and paganism. I still think it is better to teach ethics without the religious component, I believe concepts such as hell or supernatural 3x karma don't really promote a mature view and really don't work that well. I think most people would respond better to positive role models, learning problem solving skills and trying to understand others view point. Like Harry said, there is that group that will offend no matter what, so I don't believe in complete anarchy as we need some system.

I came across a Penn State study that addresses this in back of news magazine The Week this afternoon, they were doing research specifically on children lying. They did a study were they left the room to see if kids would peek at a toy, then they asked them if they peeked or not. They were 6 year olds, 76% peeked, 95% of those who peeked lied. Then they read kids either the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf or George Washington and the Cherry Tree first- the ones who heard about the boy who lied and ended up eaten by the wolf actually lied a little more, the ones who heard about George telling the truth cut down lying 43%. Sorry that was long, but I think helps make the point that scare tactics probably not the best way at least for most people.

Maybe again I believe in karma of a sort since I think if we teach people better ways of doing things and set a few reasonable limits and basically show them some love instead of trying to frighten them, especially with supernatural religious consequences- we'd have a more peaceful society.

Kolohe

[Shaman of Bliss]

>,< OMG I just read your signature Kolohe, you are dark! lol

Anyway, I would like to believe anarchy could work, but the point is that we need someone to get rid of those whom would do others harm, and destroy without perpose, Vandals etc. We need an institution to help keep us safe, because unless there is some thread coming from outside the planet, I doubt the entire human race can unite in any sort of reasonable time.

[hedge*]

But you don’t have to be religious to follow the philosophy of karma or the after life, Do you?
Kolohe talked about the law of consequence which isn't a religious concept but it appears I misinterpreted Kolohe's post anyway.
Been up without sleep FAR too long.


As you were