Entries by tag: morality
One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”
The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”
“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”
—Martin Buber, Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 (1991)
—Martin Luther King Jr.
The evening question: What good have I done today?
~ Ben Franklin
I've come to a bit of am impasse with my medical practice, writings, even studies. I'm losing interest. It seems so fruitless. I learn all this stuff and then nobody cares what I have to teach them. If they want it they think it should be free like what they get from wikipedia. Dr Google will be the death of me.
The more I read and study I am affronted by the tendency of humans to believe. We want to believe. We look for excuses to believe. It saves us a whole lot of trouble just to believe in something, that way we can ignore all evidence to the contrary and enshrine every tidbit that supports our belief, and voila, the world is meaningful and live is worth living. Just because we were believers.
Atheists and agnostics really have a hard row to how. How do you create meaning in life, how do you form a community or tribe, without a belief-based grouping? Can there be such a thing? I have seen skepticism elevated to dogma. Anything can be dogma. If you think you are not dogmatic, look again. Everyone is a hypocrite.
The great lesson
is that the sacred is in the ordinary,
that it is to be found in one's daily life,
in one's neighbors, friends, and family,
in one's backyard.
~ Abraham Maslow
--Matt Ridley in Evolution of Everything; How New Ideas Emerge, page 270
"If one allows the infidels
to continue playing their role of corrupters on Earth,
their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger.
Thus, if we kill the infidels
in order to put a stop to their [corrupting] activities,
we have indeed done them a service.
For their eventual punishment will be less.
To allow the infidels to stay alive
means to let them do more corrupting.
[To kill them] is a surgical operation commanded by Allah the Creator."
--Ayatollah Khomeini, 1984
Don't forget: We live during the least violent time in all of recorded human history. We have done this by abandoning tribalism and embracing the, cosmically speaking, very new ideas of compassion and empathy. What we are seeing are the death throws of an old morality, where honor and vengeance and the death you could inflict were how you judged yourself as a person.
So the proper response to a terrorist attack shouldn't be hate or bloodlust, but pity; pity for a group actively choosing to be forgotten and disregarded by the long eye of history.
--Keegan Blackler
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