TPOLJ: Comparing the three great philosophies of Jesus, Mohammad and Buddha

Jesus taught a message of "Turn the other cheek":

"You have learnt how it was said: Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.  But I say this to you: offer the wicked man no resistance.  On the contrary, if anyone hits you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well."
— Matthew 5:38–39, Jerusalem Bible

This is a brilliant strategy for staying alive in an environment where your enemy is overwhelmingly more powerful than you, which would have been the case in Jesus's time during the Roman occupation of Israel.  But I'd like to contrast this with the messages (as I understand them, which is probably pretty poorly) of Mohammad and Buddha.

I don't want to simplify Mohammad's message too much, since I'm sure there's a lot more there than I would give him credit for, but I would like to contrast the concept of an external Jihad with Jesus's message of "turn the other cheek".  The Quran states:

“Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged.” (Qur'an 22:39)

Jesus's message of "turn the other cheek" is a great way to escape death if your enemy is far more powerful than you, but it still leaves you in a much worse position than if you had fought back and won.  If you have a decent chance of success, however, following Mohammad's strategy could leave you in a much better state.

The real key here is in choosing the right strategy for your situation.  It's easy to say that Mohammad was right in following his strategy and that the Zealots should have followed Jesus's strategy because, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Mohammad won and the Zealots lost.  It's much harder to make that determination when the outcomes are unknown.

Buddha taught a message of peace, very similar to Jesus's, but the situation with Buddhism is very different.  Buddhism really caught on about 200 years after his death with the adoption of Buddhism by Ashoka the Great.  After about 7 or 8 years of bloody conquest, Ashoka adopted Buddhism, which proved a very effective way to rule over his newly united kingdom.

History relates that he chose it because he was troubled by the violence of his war of conquest, but such an obvious, and well publicized ethical transformation doubtless contributed to his ability to hold onto the territories that he had conquered without much trouble.

So we have two, maybe three, different philosophies (the messages of Buddha and Jesus being fairly similar).  Which one is "right"?  Clearly different philosophies are appropriate in different situations, and this ties in very neatly with the third tenet of the Path of Truth:

3. We don't claim to know the truth, but we do claim that no one else knows the truth either

Each religion thinks that their philosophy is universal, but the reality is that each philosophy owes it's popularity to it's effectiveness in handling a specific situation.  Okay, sure, and to its adaptability to help in handling a lot of later situations throughout history, but no one philosophy is best for handling all situations.

TPOLJ: Am I a Christian?

 I'm an atheist.  I don't believe in the existence of God, or that Jesus was the son of God, so I think most people would not call me a Christian.  But I was raised as a Christian, and the symbols of Christianity, such as the cross, still evoke a sense of reverence in me.  And even though I believe that Jesus was just a man, I still believe in his message, "Love thy neighbor", "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", etc..

I believe that these messages are, in large part, what has allowed Western Civilization to flourish.  They allow larger groups of people to cooperate with each other peacefully, forming larger and stronger nations and groups of nations, as well as form large powerful corporations like the British East India Company.  The ideas of fairness led to the development of the patent system to protect intellectual property, which led to the Industrial Revolution, which catalyzed the rise of western civilization, and specifically the British Empire.

As if that weren't enough, I believe the power of Jesus's message of peace may have contributed to the relative peacefulness of the Galilee region during the Zealot revolts around 67 CE, sparing Galilee from the total destruction visited upon Jerusalem and Judea by the Romans in order to quell the revolts further south.

This destruction led to a mass exodus of Jews out of Israel, creating a much larger Jewish diaspora, which led to a lot of resentment of Jews in Europe, which led to the Holocaust, the return of Jews to Israel, the pushing out of the Palestinian people who were then occupying Israel, the resentment towards Israel by the Arab states, and much of the conflict that is going on in the Middle East right now.

I'm sure that there have been a lot of other contributing factors to this history that I'm either unaware of or ignoring, but I can't help but wonder that, if Jesus hadn't been crucified, and had been allowed to continue preaching his message, might this message have permeated more towards the south, reducing the zealot revolt, softening Rome's response to the point where this large exodus would never have happened, and basically stopping this large chain of events that I just mentioned, resulting in more peace in the Middle East today?

How far do we want to evolve?

I've thought of a couple of blog posts over the last week, but I've always been too busy to post and now I've forgotten what they were 😞.  I envision a future where our minds are always connected to the internet and we can just mentally post our thoughts to our blog, making it much easier to do a post.

But even then we're still limited.  It still takes a fair amount of thought to formulate a post.  If I'm busy with another task, I can't always interrupt it trying to write a post.  What we really need is a way to 'fork' mental versions of ourselves to do these tasks, and then have these versions merge back to ourselves once the task is done so we can reap the benefits of this versions experience.

I'm purposely avoiding the term 'clone' here because that usually implies a physical genetic clone of your body, which would not have your memories and personality, and I'm talking about forking off a mental version of your memories and personality, which is kind of the exact opposite of a physical clone.  This forked version (not a clone) would only exist in the internet and could only do internet things.  I guess having a physical clone that could also have your memories and personality might be more flexible, but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to limit myself to only exploring the forked mental version.

Merging the forked version back into yourself avoids the problem of the forked version wanting to having to die.  Maybe an exact mental copy would still have a will to live and not want to merge back, but we could probably find a way to modify the copy somewhat so avoid this problem.

The problem is that, with today's technology where the internet is just a bunch of 0s and 1s, this mental copy isn't going to be exactly like you, and these new experiences that get merge back into you won't be exactly like what you would have experienced had you actually done the task yourself.  It would be like the difference between analogue and digital music.  With enough bits maybe we could make it similar enough that we can't discern the difference, but it would never be exactly the same.  What we merge back would always be a little bit alien.  Are we willing to make this leap?

The Path of LeRoy James

One of the big arguments against atheism is that it doesn't provide moral guidance, and this is true to a certain extent, but it doesn't have to be.  We, as a species, have evolved a moral conscience that helps to guide our behavior.

Societies, also, have developed rules to guide our behavior, and as we grow up in these societies we internalize these rules into our conscience causing us to behave according to the rules of our society.  I believe that societies have also gone through the process of natural selection such that the societies with the 'best' rules are the ones that are the strongest and last the longest.  Here I'm defining 'best' as the sets of rules that help strengthen a society, which is kind of a circular definition, but it's really the only one that matters when speaking in terms of natural selection.

The key thing here is natural selection.  The fact that we, and societies, have evolved these characteristics (and natural selection is the mechanism that guided this evolution) means that they must benefit us somehow, so paying attention to our conscience and our societies rules is important.  By studying these rules, both explicit and implicit, we can create the moral guidance that atheism currently lacks.

One key point to remember, though, is that Atheism is not a religion, in that it isn't a single belief.  It is characterized not by what they believe in, but by what they don't believe in, i.e. a god.  This means that different atheists can believe in completely different things.  However, I think most atheists do believe in evolution and natural selection, and science in general.  So when I talk about 'atheists", these are the ones that I'm talking about.

FWIW, I consider myself to be both an Atheist and a Christian.  I'm an atheist because I don't believe in God, but I was raised as a Christian in a predominantly Christian society, so it is Christianity's icons that are most impactful to me, and the teachings of Jesus, at least in terms of the parables and the golden rule, that I have internalized as my own.

Getting back to how natural selection can provide a moral framework, we have to look at how natural selection has caused us to be what we are.  This is a feedback process where we look at what we think we are, and then ask ourselves how natural selection may have shaped us this way.  Trying to figure out what we are is fraught with error, but taking the additional step of trying to figure out how natural selection may have made us that way gives us some degree of confidence that our ideas about what we are may be correct.

For example, natural selection should select for those individuals who can best pass their genes on to future generations.  This will not only be those individuals who are best able to survive long enough to have kids, but for those who also prioritize raising those kids so that they will be likely to survive, have kids, and raise their kids to survive, have kids, etc..  And if you want your kids to be successful, and their kids, etc., you need to give some effort or thought on how to make your society more successful and stable.  Or, if that seems unfeasible, you migrate to another society that is more stable, as we are seeing so many people doing these days.

This is a far cry from the selfish, only in it for themselves, stereotype that most people have of atheists.  I don't think most atheists are selfish, but maybe they are, and if they are, it could be because of the lack of moral guidance.  One characteristic of humans in general is that our instincts are very weak compared our rationalizations, and even if people have an instinct to spend time raising their kids, if they live in a society that values monetary success more than raising your kids well, then that is what people will focus on, and that is why atheists need a moral guidance that they can believe in and that is meaningful for them.  This is not to make them better than members of a more formal religion, it is to shore up the one area in which formal religions are superior to atheism.

A new religion

 I think the world needs a new religion.  It needs it to unite all of the other religions without each religion having to give up anything.  In order to do this, the new religion needs to be a superset of the existing religions.  I think this can be done by worshipping the truth without trying to state what that truth is.  This forces the acknowledgement that there is a single truth out there, but allows each person to define for themselves what that truth is.  The only thing that people have to give up is the idea that their truth is the real truth, and that anyone who believes differently is wrong.

I'd like to call this new church "The Church of Truth", but that's already taken (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Truth), but maybe that's okay, since the word 'truth' already has connotations of Christianity.  Maybe we should call it "The Way of the Truth", or "The Path of Truth".  These evoke a similarity with Taoism, which is simply "The Path" (or so I've been told), but that may be okay since Taoism is not nearly as aggressive at trying to convert people to it's ways than some of the other major religions.  In fact, if Taoism already allows people to maintain their own belief system (I should probably research that), then maybe Taoism is already the thing that I'm trying to propose.

The key tenets of this new religion would be:

1. The truth exists.
2. The truth is important
3. We don't claim to know the truth, but we do claim that no one else knows the truth either
4. Each person's journey to understand the truth must be respected

This gives us a couple of benefits:

• It prevents any one religion from claiming that they alone know the truth and that everyone else is wrong.
• It places a moral value on the truth, making lying a sin, hopefully causing those who lie for a living (think politicians, advertisers and lawyers) have moral qualms about straying too far from the truth.  (I don't want to malign these professions too much.  Many of them are merely making sure that their side of the truth is represented, but, and this is just my opinion, these are professions in which outright lying is rewarded more than in most other professions.)

I remember reading once that Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, placed a high value on honesty, and I think this may have contributed to the greatness of his empire.

I see all of the current religions, then, as being branches of this all-encompassing religion, whether they acknowledge it or not.  After all, every religion out there is simply representing their theory on what the truth is.  All that would be needed is for a majority of the members of each religion to acknowledge the validity of this "container" religion and to respect that choices of other people to follow other paths.

I see this new religion as a web page, where there is one one parent page and then nested sets of "paths" or "ways".  Each major religion, if they so choose, could create a "path", and then members of that church can add their own sub-paths.  In this respect, I think it's kind of like Hinduism or Islam where different gurus or imams have their own followings.

Of course, not everyone will want their views published in that way.  You wouldn't have to have a sub-path on this web-page in order to have your belief be a part of this church, it's just a mechanism that people could use to organize and share their viewpoints.

Supreme Court decision regarding religious gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic

 I read this article recently regarding the Supreme Court's decision that banning religious congregations violated the separation of church and state:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/26/supreme-court-religion-covid-barrett-440808

One of the arguments was that a ban on religious gatherings, but not on liquor stores, constituted discrimination against religious gatherings.  Not mentioned, but I think equally relevant, is that God would never let you catch covid-19 at a church service.  Cataclysms  like this are always the result of people turning away from God, as is well documented in the biblical stories of the great flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra.  The fact that the pandemic started in a heathen country like China makes perfect sense in this context.  Therefore, it would make no sense if God were allow good Christian people to catch the disease while performing their religious obligations.

Of course, this would only be true of the "One True Church".  Those worshipping in false churches would probably be even more likely to catch the disease.

In fact, I think we have a rare opportunity here to prove which church is, in fact, the "One True Church".  We should let all churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.  hold their services as they normally do, and let their members attend, as they usually would, and then collect the data on which churches have the least amount of new covid-19 cases.  No fair wearing masks or maintaining social distancing at these events though.  We must let God do his work.

I believe that God, in his mercy, would spare not only the members of the "One True Church", but also the members of other churches whose doctrines are "close enough".  The closer a church's doctrine is to the "One True Church", the more it's members will be spared.  In fact, it may well be that no church existing today has the truth exactly right.  It may well be that all churches are a little off the "One True Doctrine" by varying degrees, and that their members will spared or afflicted proportionally.  In this case, we should be able to compare the data from each church, and factor in the differences in their doctrines, and extrapolate out to find the real "One True Doctrine" that God, in his mercy, wants us all to follow.

And what the heck, we should factor in the data from liquor stores as well.  Who knows, maybe liquor stores are the "One True Religion" after all.

If I were running for President, here would be my financial proposal

 

• Get rid of, or drastically reduce, the minimum wage, and get rid of the idea that anyone with a full-time job should be able to support a small family with it.
• There are too many double income families, or single income individuals that either share a home with other income earners, or at least don’t have a family to also support.  These people will have way more spending cash than the single income families.  Even if we raised the minimum wage so that single income families can support themselves, the dual-income families would have enough extra cash that they would cause prices to go up, and single income families still wouldn’t be able to afford all they need.
• Also, by getting rid of the minimum wage, we reduce the entrance barrier to getting into the job market.  People who have jobs won’t be making as much money, but more people will have jobs, and employers will be more likely to take a chance on someone just entering the job market because the cost will be less.
• Adjust tax rates based on a mathematical formula based on an ideal slope between rich and poor, and that taxes the rich more based on the steepness of this slope.
• Instead of trying to raise taxes on the wealthy to make them pay their fare share, or lowering taxes on the wealthy to spur investment and encourage them to keep their wealth within the country, this method would mathematically determine how our tax rates would scale based on income.
• We would decide what ideal difference is between the incomes of the rich and the poor (the slope of a line who's y-axis is income and who's x-axis is # of people at or below that income level).  The steeper the slope, i.e. the greater the divide between rich and poor, the more we tax the rich, and the shallower the slope, the less we tax the rich.  Or, to put it another way, the greater the divide between rich and poor, the more we tax the rich to compensate for that difference.
• People will still argue over what the ideal slope should be.  It should be steep enough to give people incentive to work hard and reward innovation, but shallow enough to enable most people to live comfortably, and to buy enough stuff to keep the economy going.
• People will also argue about how reactive tax rate changes should be based on how the division between rich and poor changes.  For example, should a small change in the division between rich and poor trigger a small change in the tax rate, or a bigger change.  I think the change in tax rate should be big enough that it encourages people and corporations to stay close to the ideal line, but not so big that it can throw our society out of control.  It's probably best to start small, and then gradually experiment with different tax change rates.
• I'm actually seeing one problem with this proposal as I write it, in that the tax rate depends on large scale economics, but that people behave individually.  In other words, there's really no more incentive for an individual wealthy person or company to suddenly start paying their workers more money, because they'll reduce their own income without really affecting the rest of society much, so they'll still end up paying a lot in taxes.  Anyone have a solution to this?
• Provide basic necessities for free for everyone, regardless of income.
• There are several problems with welfare today:
• Once you get a job, you lose your welfare, so unless you’re able to get a really great paying job, it really makes more sense to stay on welfare.  With this system, everyone is welcome, so you’re still able to take advantages of the services even if you do get a job.
• There is a lot of overhead in determining who is eligible for welfare.  A lot of people who shouldn’t be on welfare successfully cheat the system by submitting a false claim, and a lot of people who really do deserve welfare are denied it because someone doesn’t believe their claim.  If the services are free to everyone, then there is no opportunity to cheat the system, and there’s no denial of services for those who really need it.
• The level of services provided need to be spare enough that people would rather get a job and move beyond those services.
• We could just write everyone a check.  Taxes would have to go up to pay for this, but for a person of average income, the amount of the check they receive would be designed to be equal to the amount of extra taxes they pay.
• However, if we want to keep costs down more, and thus reduce the tax increase required to pay for it, we could just provide homeless shelters, soup kitchens, donated clothing, etc..  Anyone could take advantage of it, but if you can afford better, you would, and you would no longer use the free services.
• If we wanted to control costs even more, we could limit the amount of resources available for free so that the more people tried to take advantage of the free services, the less would be available for each individual person, thus encouraging more people to find other sources of income.
• Provide post-high-school education for free, but limit number of recipients based on national and/or corporate need, and award based on merit, with perhaps some scaling based on race or some other nationally recognized disparity.  Also, scale amount of education and subject matter based on national and/or corporate need.
• The goal here is to make our nation stronger by educating the best and brightest among us in the most cost-effective way possible.  We don’t need everyone to have a PhD, or even a bachelor’s.  There are plenty of jobs available for people with no college.  There are also a lot of jobs that require education in a specific area, but don’t require a more general education.  And then we also need people, the top decision makers, to have a broad education that allows them to see beyond their immediate field.
• We could have government control the number of people we educate at each level, and what subjects we should educate them in, but I think it would be preferable to allow industry to decide.  If IBM needs a lot of hardware engineers, it should specify how many people it needs educated, at what levels, and in what subjects.
• Companies can also be incentivised to help pay for the educational system by giving them more access to the top students based on how much they paid into the system.  We might even allow for a kind of indentured servitude if good enough controls can be enforced to make sure that people are treated fairly.
• People can also pay for college themselves if they are unable to qualify through the merit-based system.
• One reason people feel a need to go to college is that incomes are so much better for college graduates.  This causes people to take out loans and do whatever they can to afford college, which causes college tuition to skyrocket.  Critical to getting this to work is to lower the division between rich and poor so that the incentive to go to college matches our societies need for college graduates.