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:

• The truth exists.
• The truth is important
• We don't claim to know the truth, but we do claim that no one else knows the truth either
• 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.

Benefits of being an omnivore

I've always heard that the main benefit of being an omnivore is a greater variety of food, and therefore a more diverse source of nutrition, and there is probably also a lot of benefit in having a large number of food sources to fall back on if one becomes scarce, but I think there's another benefit as well, and one that others may not of thought of yet.  A lot of foods have some low-level toxins that, if eaten in large quantities may cause problems.  By eating a lot of different types of foods, you're getting a larger variety of toxins, but you're getting less of each type of toxin relative to the total amount of nutrition your taking in, so that no one toxin is accumulated in enough quantity to do you any harm.

(I know, not the most interesting or relevant post in the world, but I just thought it was an interesting idea.)

A new kind of super hero

When I hear stuff about the bad things people are doing around the world, I always wish I could go over there, somehow being protected from harm, and tell people to do the right thing, and out of those thoughts came the idea for a new kind of super hero.  The idea is that he, or she, doesn't have super strength, or invisibility, or lasers shooting out of their eyes, or anything like that.  They have no power to do anything, but they are impervious to people doing something to them.

In fact, what I'm thinking is that, if anyone tries to kill him, or injure him, the injury just kind of bounces back to them.  If anyone tries to kick him in the face, he will be fine, but the person doing the kicking would suddenly feel a foot in their own face.  If anyone tries to shoot him, the instant the bullet reaches his chest, it will suddenly enter the chest of the shooter instead.  If anyone tries to cut off his head, the sword will pass through his neck without doing damage, and the executioner's head would suddenly be separated from his body.

But, what happens if the executioner is only following orders?  Is he really the one responsible for the act, or is it the guy who gave the order?  When I described this to my daughter, she thought it should be the guy actually swinging the sword, but I thought it should be the guy who gave the order.  I'll describe the reasons a little later, but let me give some more description first.

My original idea was that the guy would be a reporter, but then I realized they could just take his camera and cell phone, and he wouldn't be able to let the rest of the world know anything, so I decided that he also had the power to broadcast what he saw to the rest of the world.  That way, any injustices he saw, everyone would know about.  And I think he should be able to broadcast his own ideas, in addition to just images of what he's seen.

However, there should be a limit to the way in which these ideas are broadcast.  I think he should only be able to broadcast words, and not actual thoughts.  Thoughts are too compelling, and I want what he transmits to be on equal footing with any words that anyone else might say.  His only power is really to break down the barriers of communication, not convince people that he is right.

Since I originally envisioned this person as being me, and since I originally envisioned myself as going to the middle east to solve the ISIS problem, I also wanted to have the ability to speak and understand all languages, but if this is going to be some kind of comic book super hero, I wouldn't want it to appear that we thought it should be some westerner going over there to fix things.  It would probably be more effective if he was actually some poor farm boy from the Sunni Iraq area, and then he wouldn't need to learn the language.

However, what if, after he (or 'she', my daughter keeps reminding me) solved all of the problems in the middle east, wanted to go to, say, North Korea to solve that problem?  Either then they would have to have the power to speak Korean, or maybe, once one problem is solved, the power transfers to someone else from within the culture that is being fixed.  I actually like this better because we can then get to know another person, and see the world through a new persons eyes.  Also, I envision each of these stories as lasting quite a while, so by the time one story is finished, we'll be ready to meet someone knew.

And should we really call them problems?  I'm trying to not be judgemental here (or, actually, I'm trying to be judgemental, but with the appearance of being non-judgemental).  What he's really doing is simply breaking down the barriers of communication and letting everyone know what's really going on, and then letting them decide.

What I kind of envision here is that this guy, or girl, simply woke up one morning knowing they had these powers, but not really knowing what to do with them.  They probably start locally by exposing a few crimes, but then get inspired to tackle bigger and bigger issues.  They have this vague feeling that they were given these powers by God (or Allah, or aliens or whatever), that they have a mission, and that the powers could be taken away at any moment if God (or Allah or whatever) suddenly decided he, or she, were unworthy.

However, there is no actual confirmation that this is the case.  God, or whatever, didn't actually speak with this person, and didn't tell them what to do with it.  The person isn't perfect, but thinks that maybe God chose him or her because they had good ideas of what's right and wrong, and thought that they would make mostly good decisions and give good direction to everyone.  This is important.  I've never liked religions that claim that their sacred texts are infallible, such as the Koran claiming to be the exact words of God, or the Bible having been inspired by God.  If God hasn't actually spoken to this person, he has no real authority other than by convincing people that his ideas are right.

Now you might think:  "So what?  So what if the guy can go anyplace without being harmed?  He still can't stop bad people from doing bad things!  He can't put the bad guys in jail!"  But, he can let the world, including their own followers, know what they're doing.  If potential ISIS recruits could see what ISIS is really doing, can see soldiers gunning down innocent women and children, they would be a lot less likely to be recruited, and the soldiers already working for ISIS would probably think twice about what they were doing.  If the people of other nations really saw what was going on over there, and their leaders knew that everyone knew what was going on over there, they'd have a lot more incentive to become involved themselves.  Also, in the case of North Korea, not only could this person let the rest of the world know what was really going on there, but, more importantly, they could let the people of North Korea know what the rest of the world was like, and let them know more about what was really going on in their own country.

Some interesting things that can be done with this:

The guy is powerless, so they could just lock him in a cell so that he can't see all the injustices being done.  However, by the time this happens he would have already become well known, and transmitted a lot of views of injustices.  By then he will already have a lot of people on his side, even from withing the group who has captured him, and he'll still be able to transmit from within his cell; then, you could have one of his captors set him free.

In the beginning, the hero would tell people who he was and what would happen if they tried to kill him, but they wouldn't believe him, and they would try to kill him anyway.  Then people would try to get smart and order someone else to kill him, but that wouldn't work, and the person who ordered the killing would be the one who gets killed.  People who still try to think of ways to "outsmart" the power, but it would always know who the guilty person was, and they would always be the one who dies.  Eventually people would stop trying to kill him, and he would be able to just walk through the conflict effortlessly.

There are two ways a person can lose the power.  Once peace is restored, and the hero no longer needs the power, the power should just leave him one day, and he goes back to leading a normal life.  However, if the power goes to the hero's head and he begins mis-using it, he should lose the power at the most inopportune time, and end up getting killed.  Then the power would transfer to someone else to continue trying to restore peace.

Why do people rural areas tend to be more conservative, and those in cities more liberal?

I've wondered about this for a long time. For a while I figured that those living in cities tend to be more educated, and that more education allowed you to see the truth more clearly, and the truth was that liberal was better. Since I'm a liberal, this fit in nicely with the way I viewed the world.

However, I was never completely satisfied with this. "Uneducated" people may not have had a lot of formal education, but that doesn't mean they haven't learned anything, just that they got their learning through real-life experiences rather than in a class room. Also, there are a lot of uneducated people in the cities, and yet they still tend to be liberal.

This morning, I came up with a different theory. The idea is that we have a natural tendency to establish a certain level of social pressure in our societies. Where there are more people, the amount of social pressure that each person expresses has to be less in order to maintain this level, and where there are fewer people, each person has to express more social pressure.

To put it another way, when there are strangers all around you, you always feel a certain pressure to behave properly, and the last thing you want is more rules telling you how to behave. If you live in an area people live farther apart, there's a lot more opportunity to just do what you want, and people naturally feel a lot more responsibility to keep the people around them in line.

Of course, as I write this, I'm thinking of a lot of other possibilities as well. In the country, people tend to all know each other, whereas in the cities, there is a lot more anonymity. You often hear people who move from the country to the city saying that in the country, you can't do anything without some neighbor finding out about it and telling your parents. (Okay, I guess I heard this back in college from people who'd come from rural areas, but I think it applies to all age groups.) It may be that people who prefer more social freedom move to the cities, so it may be that the cities attract more liberal people rather than the cities make them liberal.

Another related factor may be that people feel the most pressure to conform during their teen years, after which, they've internalized the rules of their own society. It may be in the country, where everyone knows each other, and more importantly, know your parents, there is a lot more pressure to conform. If you stick it out, rather than moving to a large city, you adopt the rules of your society as your own.

It may also be that, in a rural society where everyone knows each other, there's really only room for one set of social rules. As you grow up there, you're only exposed to one set of rules, so you naturally assume that those are the right rules and everyone else should have those rules as well. In the city, there are a lot more people, and they tend to form sub-cultures, so people who live in the city can witness a lot of different ways of thinking first-hand.

And we shouldn't rule out the "education" effect either. The ideas that we learn through a formal education tend to come from people who've written books. Social ideas come from people who've written books about society, and these tend to be people who've done a lot of thinking about society. People think about the challenges they face, so the people who think a lot about society may tend to be those who don't fit well in their own society, and who wish their society was a little different, or at least a little more forgiving of their eccentricities, i.e. liberals.

There are probably a lot of factors that feed into this difference between rural and urban areas, some of which may be opposing, but the end result is as obvious as looking at a red/blue political map during an election. Rural states, and rural counties within states, are almost always red, and urban states and counties are almost always blue.