The Alonzo Skelton blog exists as a forum for discussions of Alonzo’s sometimes rambling, sometimes laser-focused thoughts, interests, and opinions on art, literature, politics, and a little cultural voyeurism.
Frank, my Gun Toting, Bible Thumping, Trump voting, flag
waving, libtard hating, gay bashing, camo cosplaying acquaintance tells me (and anyone else
within earshot) that he has proof of (1.) a god's existence (he doesn't elaborate
on which one), and (2.) proof that the 2022 mid-term elections were rigged.
When I asked which god? He responded:
"Duh, the only one, Dumbass."
"So, The Invisible Pink Unicorn."
That sent him into a rage, a rage that didn't answer my
question. A series of Bible verses written by stone-age poets convinced me that
he meant the god of the Bible.
"Oh," I said. "You mean Elohim."
"No, Dumbass, I mean Jehovah, the One True God."
I stand corrected.
"Have you discussed your proof with any scientists, or
universities, or peer-reviewed journals?"
A rhetorical question. I already knew the answer.
His "proof" was a document that makes the
claim--The Bible. That's like using the Quran to "prove" the
existence of Allah, or Bullfinch's Mythology to "prove" the existence
of Zeus.
Frank wasn't buying it, though. Every word in the Bible is true,
he says.
"Even the parts that contradict each other?" I
asked.
There are no contradictions, he says. You have to know how
to read the text to understand it.
"So, God inspired the writers of the book to encode it
so that only a select few know the secret to translating it.
At that point Frank refused to talk to me any further on the
subject, leaving me confused. We didn’t even get to the part about the so-called thrown
election. Ah, but rest assured, Frank will have something to say about that soon. He is, you see, a member of that demographic who identifies with his hate--a demographic that brings to the rational observer both amusement and concern. And hate, like pain, is a condition that demands expression.
An article
by Brad Press in the Hill begins with the headline, “Texas GOP adopts
anti-LGBTQ platform, refers to being gay as ‘abnormal’” As always, Texas
Republicans seem suspiciously obsessed with how other people express their
sexuality. I’ve already had one of those Texas Republicans tell me that, when
Trump returns to the White House, “those people” will be isolated from honest
hard-working Americans, along with “evolutionists,” atheists, and abortionists. He
did not specify what form that isolation would take, but judging by the tone of
his comments, it would not surprise me if he meant concentration camps complete with ovens.
Read the full story
at: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3529268-texas-gop-party-adopts-anti-lgbtq-platform-refers-to-being-gay-as-abnormal/
“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”-Immanuel Kant
The ethics of Aristotle taught young men his virtues as a moral code and as key to happiness until 529 B.C.E., when Byzantine Emperor Justinian I converted the empire to Christianity and forced the closing of non-Christian schools of philosophy. For nearly a millennium Christian and its dependency on interpretations of Biblical text ruled the western world.
The fourteenth century’s Renaissance broke from dependence on scripture and church authority of the medieval age for guidance in matters of morality to shift its focus to the classical Greek and Latin texts. The Renaissance found in the Greek philosophers a system of ethics handed down from Aristotle that provided an absolute morality without dependence on the commands of a divine being. Aristotle’s virtues combined with Christian theology to rule philosophical thinking for centuries, until Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica (1687) and demonstrated a universe ruled not by supernatural commands, but by mechanical forces. The Principia ushered in a new era, the Age of Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment gave birth to Immanuel Kant.
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 at Konigsberg, in what was at the time of his birth a part of East Prussia. He grew up under the rigid dogma of Pietism — an evangelical branch of the Lutheran Church — and was later influenced by the works of Christian Wolff and John Locke at the Albertina College at the University of Konigsberg.
A flurry of works in the 1780s included The Critique of Pure Reason (1781,1787), Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and The Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790). At that time the Age of Enlightenment was coming to a close to make room for the Romantic age and the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment had come into existence as a result of Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe and the consequent belief that man did not need religious authorities to tell him how to live or what to believe. He now had reason to guide him. Inherent in that view was the belief that human, scientific, and industrial progress would support tradition and a belief in a god and in the compatibility of science and religion. But that tradition required freedom to choose what is right over what is wrong, and Newton’s science, created a crisis in philosophical circles with its insistence on a nature governed by mechanistic laws. If the universe operates on mechanical laws, then humans too are subject to those laws. If human behavior is mechanical, and therefore deterministic, man has no freedom to choose his actions. Newton’s science, the fountainhead of the Enlightenment, came to threaten the freedom essential to Reason. In The Critique of Pure Reason Kant sought to reconcile traditional morality and religion with Newtonian science.
With the Groundwork on the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant laid the foundation for his deontological (duty-based) ethics. Duty, not the consequences of an action, he said, marks the distinction between a moral act and an immoral one. His views on morality are most interesting in that they focus on absolutes with only oblique reference to a god. God gave us reason, he said, so that we may know right from wrong. Until Kant, ethics were relative, meaning the ethics of a situation relied on the situation itself, or they were rules and commands from a supernatural being. Rules of morality were situational or God inspired with little wiggle room in between.
Central to Kant’s philosophy was the concept of good will. With good will, he rejected consequentialism, the belief that the outcome of an action dictated its morality. He maintained an action to be moral if the actor’s best wishes lay behind it. As long as we maintain good will toward others, our actions are moral, regardless of the consequences of the action.
Having rid of consequentialism and established duty as the basis for his philosophy, Kant moved on to the question: What commands will guide our good will and duties?
The answer: the Categorical Imperative.
He defined two types of imperatives, the Hypothetical and the Categorical. A hypothetical command is one we obey because we seek a specific outcome — a consequence. Those types of commands follow an “if, then” formula. If I desire a certain outcome, then I must do this. If I want to earn a degree, then I must go to school. If I want a cola, then I must have the correct amount of money or credit for the purchase. The hypothetical imperative must be obeyed only if and when we wish for an outcome.
The categorical imperative, though, is a command we must always obey. . .all the time and in every situation. This imperative tells us that any action we take must be one we grant to everyone else. If you tell your girlfriend the little white lie that those slacks do not make her look fat, you grant the world the right to tell the same kind of lie. On a more serious note, if you steal a box of tools from your neighbor’s garden shed, then you give permission to the entire world to steal. . . even to steal from you.
Kant’s Categorical Imperative and his insistence on good will could alone make his ethics a viable system for all of us, but he didn’t stop there. He devised two formulations of the Categorical Imperative. The first states, as above, that we must conduct ourselves in such manner that we give to everyone the right to act as we do. The second formulation informs us that we may use nature’s resources to our own end, but people possess free will and can think for themselves and are therefore a “kingdom of ends.” Individuals have their own ends, and should not be used by others for their ends only; doing so violates their autonomy and reduces them to mere objects. The modern meme states it as, “treat people as ends, not as means.”
Kant’s philosophy in the second formulation might come across as an ivory-tower academic’s musings, but Kant kept it bound to the real world with the acknowledgement that we may, in fact, use others if we take into our considerations that they are human, that they have their own ends and their own free will. When a waiter brings our meals, we use her to achieve our end — that of getting food into our bodies. But, Kant says, we must acknowledge to ourselves that she is serving her own ends by selling her labor for financial gain. Grant her respect and humanity, and the act of using her is not immoral.
In addressing the problem of what to do about the free rider — the unethical person who will violate Kant’s ethics for as long and as often as he supposes he can get away with it — Kant offers a solution: respect the criminal by holding him responsible for his actions. The criminal could have chosen a different path, but didn’t, and thus tacitly accepts and gives permission to his punishment. He did not ask himself, “If I do this, am I not giving everyone else the right to do the same?” Instead, he committed the criminal act because he received a gain from it and blocked from his thoughts that others will lose from his action — and he thought he could get away with it.
“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime,” say Kantian ethicists
The writer of a paper on the subject of ethics will likely find that he can fill several pages on various philosophical and religious theories and many more on terms, and more again on a seemingly endless list of philosophers and theorists who have contributed to a maze of sub-categories under the main branches of the subject. That is an ambitious project for the scholar, but what of the man and woman on the street who wants only to do what is right? High-sounding theories and ten-dollar words offer interesting reading, but in the end do nothing to help the average person know how to behave in situations in which the “right” choice of action is unclear. For that reason, this essay does not dwell on those arguments that rely on supernatural authority.
A look into the study of ethics reveals a glaring question that the reader cannot ignore: do ethical rules of behavior exist outside the individual? Does the external world contain something called ethics? The question persists even without reliance on supernatural authority.
If the answer to those questions is “yes,” then the individual is naturally ethical, and unethical behavior is an aberration. If the answer is “no,” everyone must answer to a code of behavior imposed on him from the outside, whether he chooses to honor or violate that code. Society, in that event, decides what constitutes an unethical act.
Thrasymachus thought that “people believe in right and wrong only because they are taught to obey the rules of their society. Those rules, however, are mere human contrivances. Thrasymachus added that the ethical code of a society will reflect the interests of it ruling classes…” (Rachels, Problems from Philosophy, 2nd ed. p.149). But Thrasymachus did not have the benefit of our long view of history; a view in which we have seen that it is the ruling classes most in need of ethical codes. It is the reverse of Thrasymachus’ thesis that appears true — those morals or the lack of morals by rulers “trickles down” to their subjects. That is, we, the people.
So, in societies in which religious courts hand down draconian punishments, shouts of approval by the citizenry reflect the corrosive influence of the courts and of the corruptive power of the society’s religious influence. In societies such as ours, in which commerce and profit carry tremendous power, the citizenry is often quick to apologize for the crimes and atrocities of the ruling class.
The disagreement about objective moral values need not rely on dictates from a god or on the arbitrary rules of a society. Enter Evolutionary Ethics. Philosophers disagree about the existence of, and the nature of evolutionary ethics and many do not even take the subject seriously. Yet, morality as a factor of a psychology that has its roots in survival answers the question of whether ethics exist in the “real” world. In the sense that human and animal behavior is “real,” the answer is “yes.”
Philosophers like to nit-pick the details of any particular ethical theory, but such microscopic scrutiny does little to aid our average man and woman with day-to-day ethical choices. A woman seeking an abortion will (unless evolution has failed her) consider the consequences of her actions. She will look at her own beliefs and opinions as well as those of her society. She will short-cut some of those considerations, ponder over some, and eliminate others. But her final decision will come from a soup of her personal philosophy, her religion, her place in society, and the whisperings of her psychology, both genetic and learned.
A soldier might consider that killing is wrong, but his training and the survival merits of killing the enemy can outweigh any thought of philosophical absolutes. He knows it is wrong to kill his kin or a member of his group, but the killing of an enemy in combat contributes to the survival of the kin or group. After all, morality has survival value, and the fine-tuning of his moral code is every bit as important, and likely more so, than any absolute statement concerning moral behavior. Apes have been shown to practice reciprocity in lice-picking by other apes. If a fellow simian does not reciprocate in the practice, he will be shunned in future lice-picking sessions. If a human behaves ethically toward another, he will cease that behavior if the other does not in turn behave ethically toward him.
But humans have shown an amazing ability to rationalize their behavior in ways that are not beneficial to the group, and to believe their own rationalizations. When banking and business executives brought down the world economy through acts of unregulated greed, enhancing their own fortunes by vast amounts of money that drained retirement, pension, and investment accounts around the world, they continued to pay themselves and their cronies extravagant wages out of taxpayer bailout money. They justified their actions by stating (and believing) that ludicrous compensation was necessary to keep the best executives in place and not lose them to foreign markets. Their rationalization was so complete that they were unable to see that those “best” executives had displayed incompetence beyond comprehension.
If an objective morality exists, and if it exists in the evolved mind, then we can assume that the mental fountainhead of morality does not “think out” the fine tuning of an individual’s decisions nor does it offer perfect answers to the problems of lying and misinformation, larceny and greed, and murder. That is left to another part of the mind/brain. The evolved morality knows only that it is wrong to injure a member of the family or group or to engage in behavior that limits his survivability.
Dependence on supernatural authority for our morals is to rely on unicorns. The average person without formal education in philosophy must depend only on his and her own evolved mind to provide a moral code. We can only hope that when listening to that inner ethical voice, he and she will hold to or develop the understanding of rationalization in the role of violating both their own moral code and the ethics of their society.
##
This essay also appears online at https://kenshel717.medium.com/everyday-ethics-5f48cbbda3dc
“In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.” ― Eugene Victor Debs
The First Amendment to the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Read that first part again. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...."
Michelle Bachmann didn't read that part. It's the First Amendment. I can only wonder if she has read the rest of them.
“If you want take away my religious liberties,” she once said in a radio interview with Lars Larson, “you can advocate for that but you do it through the constitutional process and you don’t intimidate and no politician should give away my religious liberties or yours.”
Somehow, in that muddled brain, she equates the call for gay rights as a move to take away her religious rights, and then assures us that her religious rights are esconced in the Constirution; that human rights are a violation of her interpretation of the Constitution. Can she perceive why the term "batshittery" was invented to describe her incoherent ramblings?
Some of the more conservative elements within the Christian religion have translated Bible verses in any manner that they feel promotes their views. It doesn't matter what the scripture in question actually says, it only matters how it can be twisted, spun, bent, and mangled. That same thinking drives those Christians into reworking the Constitution, our history, the words of the Founders, and the pronouncements of political figures. Anything can mean anything to semi-literate, and it does.
Michelle Bachmann and her current cronies-in-kind-- Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, among a legion of others-- thrive on fear and hate, the two-sided coin that drives the reactionary right.
A wise man once told me, "Do not ever-- ever-- make a crucial decision when you are in the throes of fear or hate. Nothing good can come of it. Wait until your senses return, and then decide."
It's unfortunate for our country that many of our right-wing politicians have not had a wise man or woman in their lives.
"Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction." --Erich Fromm
Fuck Congress.
A
little dramatic? I suppose, but then, without drama, what? Treacle? There is
always the danger of carrying drama into purple prose, but purple prose at
least displays a level of effort and confidence. I'll have to watch out for
that tendency to be heavy-handed, though. It comes, partly, from my current
reading of James Joyce- now being tempered by John Kennedy Toole's A
Confederacy of Dunces.
I
once read of a prominent author (I have forgotten who he was) who avoided
reading contemporary writers for fear of contaminating his work. Wouldn't
reading only the classics put the author in danger of being influenced by them?
Did he, for fear of sounding like Joan Didion, come across like Herman
Melville?
We
live in a litigious culture in which it seems everyone wants to get rich from
everyone else's labor- a trait drilled into us by our elected officials and
corporate executives. I suspect the author's reluctance to read copyrighted
work came more from a fear of accusations of plagiarism than from concerns about
influence on style and voice. A charge of plagiarism is a burdensome shame for
a legitimate writer, though all of us carry phrases, voices, and styles in our
hidden memories from works read, dramatizations seen, and music heard. All
writers live with the danger of these suppressed memories coming to life on
paper. I see in my own scribbles the influence of, say, Joyce's phraseology.
Might I have also inadvertently used a phrase or a sentence? Modestly, I am not
of the caliber of writer to work in the words of that kind of genius; but of a
lesser writer or one who engages a more vernacular style, there is certainly
the possibility of a string of words belonging to another showing up in my
pages.
I
like to believe that if I were to see a bit of prose rightfully mine but
appearing in someone else's work might be handled- and corrected- without my
resorting to the theft of his entire work through subpoenas and demands for
obscene amounts of cash, but then, my Congress- votes to give themselves yet
another pay increase, and I've got to pay That bill, don't I?
Members
of my congress force their ever-increasing wealth on the public with no thought
of the burden it places on others.
Pay
for their insatiable need, I will; in the same spirit it was fostered onto me--with
contempt for the greed of the officials who make themselves wealthy beyond the
common working person’s imagination.
This blog has suffered through abandonment and fresh starts,
indecision and neglect, and the lack of a theme. It is that need of a unifying
theme that has had me stop and start so often. I began with politics, but soon
saw that meant dealing with idiots, so I changed to religion and philosophy.
That won’t work as a theme either. There is only so much I can say about the
incredulity of religious claims.
I considered a “How to Clean” theme but, though a clean
freak, I am no expert on the subject.
Architecture. That would be great. I do love the fields of
art and architecture, but there is a problem: the cost of graphics. I cannot at
this time afford the cost of images of those works on the internet.
So, I’ve chosen to blog with no theme. I have a wide variety
of interests on which I think I have something to say. With no unifying theme,
I can write about cleaning hacks, post-modern architecture, the current
political climate and its threat to the democratic experiment, the military,
books and literature, my own short stories and essays, and even the adventures
of an amateur cook. The field is wide open.
In the coming days I will post a short story centered on
illicit sex, another, a historical fiction featuring the Joseph McCarthy
political with hunts of the 1950s, and a bio and review of one of my literary
heroes.
I hope that the freedom to write a themeless blog will be as
entertaining and informative as it is liberating.
All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate
itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to
reach. --Adolf Hitler
#
A disclaimer: Readers who have some psychological need to
convert others to belief systems involving supernatural characters will be
offended by some of the contents of this essay.
I’m almost finished reading Revolutionary Characters, by historian Gordon S. Wood, and have
recently read biographies on George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. I intend
to squeeze in Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton as soon as I
can acquire the books, and I’ll look up the others on the internet. I look
especially for information on their religious views. So far, I have found
nothing to indicate that the founding fathers were religious men. They were
deists, the prevailing sentiment held by the educated upper classes of the
time, and they held in varying degrees of indifference and contempt the
evangelical Christianity of the masses.
The religious right in this modern age like to point to
references to God in the founders’ letters and documents as proof of the
religiosity of the framers of the Constitution, but the God of the deists bore
no resemblance to the angry meddling God whose words contemporary evangelist
would have inscribed on every surface of every federal facility on the planet
and taught as science in the classrooms of our public schools. Appeals to God
in those letters and documents were appeals to Providence, not to some
denominational creator who heaps beneficence on the faithful and severe
judgment on those not obedient to His authority as expressed by one or another
interpretive branch of His dictates.
George Washington, ever aware of his public image, attended
church to display his affinity with his constituency in much the same way
modern politicians, steeped in corruption and self-interest, cater to a
religious constituency to appear as one of the people. Alexander Hamilton used
Christianity to achieve political ends, and did not express any adherence to
the faith until the early nineteenth century, decades after his prominence in
Revolutionary politics. John Adams openly expressed in belief in deism, but
thought church attendance essential to man’s morality. Thomas Paine’s
masterpiece, The Age of Reason,
promoted deism and criticized Christian doctrine. Benjamin Franklin considered
himself a deeply religious man, but in his writings he often refers to “the
deity” and “providence,” without mention of Christianity. He endeavored to
virtue, but of course, virtue does not rely on religion for its practice or
existence. James Madison rigorously defended and promoted religious freedom. Of
the founding fathers, only John Jay and Patrick Henry attested to orthodox
Christianity. They did not belong to the class of educated men who adhered to
the prevailing theology of deism among the landed elite in the northern
colonies. Evangelical Christianity was, to those who aspired to a republican
aristocracy in the Age of Enlightenment, the religion of the unenlightened
masses.
Proselytizers and enforcers of religious have only the motto
“In God We Trust” as a wedge and as justification for their attempts to force
fundamentalist Christianity on an entire nation, but that motto did not appear
on American currency until nearly a century after the signing of the
Constitution, at a time of religious revival in the United States and was not
adopted as the national motto until the Eisenhower administration in 1956, when
the aristocratic values inherent in the Age of Enlightenment ceased to have
relevance.
The most militant atheist quarrels with inscriptions of the
national motto on currency and the Ten Commandments on the face of federal
buildings, but most Americans view those allusions to religion with
ambivalence. The motto refers only to “God” and does not promote the god of a
favored group, and the Decalogue represents a historical event and is not the
sole province of any particular philosophy. The exact wording belongs to the
Judeo-Muslim-Christian heritage, but identical admonitions come from multiple
cultures and religions ranging from the code of Hammurabi to definitions of
proper behavior in Scientology. It does not require religious thought to know
that rules set forward in the Commandments represent common-sense applications
for an individual to live by if he is to live at peace in a society. The
problem many deists have with religious graffiti on taxpayer-funded property
lies in the rigid enforcement by brown-shirt religious leaders to limit those
inscriptions to their particular faith. Why not include Buddhism’s Eightfold
Path, and the Sutras of Patanjali? Buddhism and Hinduism, are, after all, well
represented in American society, as are Wicca, Paganism, Scientology, and any
number of groups and doctrines that have sprung up to challenge the rigid and
chauvinist dogma of Christianity and its history of torture, mass murder, and denial
of reason and free thought to enforce its adherence.
If I sound critical of militant religiosity, it is only
because the Flying Spaghetti Monster (www.venganza.org/) has not received equal
billing with Christian thought.
