Moral Decline
Sez Who?
What is morality? Once when I was young and naive I thought it was easy,
Moral people were good. Immoral people were bad.And good and bad were easy to get too. Helping an old lady across the street is good. Knocking her down and taking her purse is bad.
Even the bad people recognized the distinction.
Later I absorbed the 10 Commandments. Most of them seemed to me to be common sense memes that help people live together as societies.
There were a few of the Commandments that were a bit iffy - the ones talking about honoring God. God wasn't a big deal for me so i didn't sweat it.
Fast forward 50 years.
The term morality got taken over by the religious right. That mightn't be so bad if religious people were good. Turns out that we can't assume that.
Canada is a secular country but the colonists from Europe imported various sects of Christianity and even now Christianity is a dominant social force.
And all over the world religions are quite dominant in their societies.
That is not working out well.
It seems that over that time, religions detached morality from good/bad and instead focussed on the 'honoring God' bit. I admit that a part of that perception may be just me growing up and losing a naive view of reality. But not entirely or even mostly.
I confess that I'm a news junkie. The news is an ongoing narrative by various power groups about what's happening in our world. The news can have some connection to reality but ya gotta read between the lines a bit.
TV brought Howdy Doody to our attention - but it also gave a platform for tele-evangelists. The tele-evangelists presented a stunning display of what should have been called immorality - but somehow lots of people took them to be moral authorities.
The tele-evangelist mindset infected the right wing of politics. America presents an extreme example but is by no means alone.
But we have the spectacle of supposedly religious people saying that the obviously bad Trump was "appointed by God" to fix America.
That's not a moral decline. That's a moral catastrophe
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.