Morality isn't real. Neither good nor evil are genuine properties of any object or event.
However, it does approximate something of use; the tension between long-term and short-term, and in particular cooperation vs. defection.
Evil cannot be truly real due a punishment dilemma. If evil is an intrinsic property, like colour, it must be independent of punishment. We can imagine someone committing a sin that nobody minds, which nobody wants to punish them for, and they are in fact not punished. If no one cares, not even the heavens, then we have a contradiction: there is no reason not to do it. Being evil is indistinguishable from being not-evil.
By contrast, we can imagine [drawing forth punishment] is an inherent property of evil. If punishment is provoked, then avoiding the action isn't done because it's evil. It's done because avoiding punishment is selfishly prudent. Being not-evil is indistinguishable from being selfish to a perfectly narcissistic degree, which is again the opposite of what evil is supposed to be.
If punishment is not inherent, then evil is not-evil, and if punishment is inherent, not-evil is not-not-evil. In any conceivable world, evil is not-evil, and thus evil is inherently a self-contradictory idea.
Now I'm going to violate the is-ought distinction and sketch a derivation the rules previously called [morality] using only facts and logic.
You always want your interlocutor to cooperate with you. No matter what you're doing, it's more profitable if they're not opposing you. If you defect on your interlocutor, they will try to defect back on you, unless they're retarded.* A particularly intelligent opponent will predict your defection, because your intent has tells, and thus will defect on you before you can defect on them. Defection provokes punishment, and thus avoiding defection is always prudent.
*(If they are retarded, you don't want to cooperate with them anyway. A stupid ally is worse than an enemy.)
Caveat: enough humans are retarded enough that cooperation is not possible, and attempting it is foolish. You also can't cooperate with a rock, and in a classic example of the world being unfair, enough humans are too stupid to be properly human. Or: Aristotle's [natural slaves] is a larger set than is thought (for example) by Aristotle.
In the short term, assuming you have the proper advantages to get away with the betrayal, you can profit from defecting against a potential cooperator. In the long term the costs are always higher, not least being the lost opportunities for future cooperation.
Broadly speaking, defection performing an act on someone without consent. As such, it is always prudent to obtain or otherwise guarantee consent. Thus, we have, more or less, morality. Theft is wrong. Murder is wrong. Not morally wrong; merely incorrect. Irrational.
More generally it is always rational to secure long-term gains in favour of short-term gains, because the long term lasts longer than the short term, and is thus bigger.
However, much as a stupid person can be betrayed without noticing, a stupid person is often incapable of understanding long-term gains. The long term is more complicated and difficult than the short. Not everyone is capable of being sufficiently rational.
Corollary: being stupid is (rationally speaking) indistinguishable from being a criminal. It makes perfect sense for most prison occupants to be stupid.
Present governments do not obtain consent, and are thus evil, which is why they reliably guide their societies into decay and ruin. However, in these cases the long term is long compared to mortality. The present government will die before it descendants have to pay their debts. This continues to be true until the Visigoths suddenly sack Rome. Humans have certain instincts telling them to sacrifice themselves for the survival and dominance of their children, but these do not cover the act of buggering your own society for personal gain.
The Gyews noted that enough humans are especially incompetent at appreciating the long term, and tried to get them to think about it using early version of the myths that became [eternal damnation]. As usual, lies are bad. They painted themselves into a corner by reifying sin so concretely. Sin became something you accumulate. Because humans are trash it became obvious everyone was accumulating unbearable amounts of sin, and they had to do things like come up with scapegoats, which were literal goats in the original. You would pass your sin to the goat and punish/sacrifice the goat. The burnt offering. You had to char it real bad so nobody would be tempted to eat it anyway, which would make a mockery of the idea of sacrificing it to the gods.
Of course the fact the gods don't come and eat the thing either also makes a mockery of the sacrifice, but apparently that one is complicated enough to be covered by cognitive dissonance.
(Remember: just stop defecting and start cooperating. These elaborate mythologies only serve to entangle you and make this easy solution somehow hard. E.g. nobody will believe you're trying to cooperate, even if you in fact are, unless you've sacrificed a goat first. Lies are defection, and only encourage more defection.)
Yeshua's great innovation was being a scapegoat for everyone. "It's cool, I'll take all your sins and then sacrifice myself, and I'm a Big Deal so it will be one and done." Plenty of folk though this was a great idea. Using this trick, apparently you could perform a verbal (virtue-signalling) penance instead of a material one to take care of any ongoing sins you committed.
In practice, Yeshua granted a license to sin. The Christ was the Anti-Christ all along.
It's all cope. Cooperate rather than defecting, or you're just not good enough. Do various forms of penance work? Unless they convert a long-term incentive to a short-term incentive that ADDled humanity can vaguely understand, they don't work. Thus, sale of indulgences.
Also, a wonderful opportunity for Evil to seize the reins.
It is true that almost every single moralist is trying to hold you back. Isn't it natural that Evil would don a false cloak of righteousness? Conquest #1 - Evil will be quite good at this. Also, Darwin; idiot Evil cannot long survive, because defection is so expensive. The Devil is a scammer. He offers a Deal where the goods cost more than they're worth. You take it because the Devil is smarter than you.
Christianity was a false cloak of righteousness to start with. Constantine barely had to tweak it.
By cloaking itself in a cooperative disguise, Evil automatically invokes a double bind. By corrupting the perception of Law, anyone who breaks through the first layer of lies is tempted to disparage Law entirely, thus becoming outlaw. They're no longer effective agents of Evil, but they also become wholly ineffective opponents of Evil.
Example. Thou shalt not covet your neighbours wife? Problem: there's a distinction between the social [you] and the actual [you]. The actual [you] isn't the one coveting. If your neighbour's wife is hot you can't help coveting her. The double bind is echoed. You must not covet her, but can't stop. The genuine cooperate vs. defect distinction is about actions, not thoughts and feelings. If you don't commit the theft you imagine, then no sin has occurred. Of course Christian bishops don't ask for consent. They're evil. They're defectors. They want you twisted up in knots worrying about avoiding their imaginary sins so you don't notice their very real sins.
Is it better to be a saint who is not tempted by the wives of others? Sure. That's not the point, though. The point is to get along.
A) you realize the coveting isn't [you] exactly, because it's not under your control. When you will it to stop, it doesn't, exactly the same way that if you will the Sun to go out, it doesn't.
B) you realize this coveting doesn't stop you from leaving your neighbour's wife to your neighbour. The social [you] can appear not be coveting at all, even when some internal [you] covets a great deal indeed. A difference of no difference is not a difference.
C) you start to wonder which other rules are stupid and destructive, and it's tempting to conclude that all of them are dumb.
It's even worse than this, because Nietzsche was correct. Machiavelli said: do no small harms. He said this because anything which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. (Further they realize you're defecting on them, so do a big enough harm that they can't try for revenge.)
Yeshua ""saved"" you from your sins. In other words, saved you from that which wasn't killing you. Which was making you stronger.
Yeshua tried to ""punish"" the sinners. For the most part, not enough to kill them. It's supposed to be about forgiveness and redemption and mercy.
Evil cannot survive without paying tribute to virtue. It is not supported.
Good, however, is supported by Yeshua. It can be weak, and depraved, and incomplete, and still survive.
Thus Yeshua was all about empowering sinners and etiolating the virtuous. Result: Evil is strong and Good is weak. Thanks Yeshua, all your attributes are sublime, including your misanthropy. A real God's God. Proof: refer to what has in fact happened. Remind me: who said to know them by their fruits?
2 comments:
Christianity was a false cloak of righteousness to start with. Constantine barely had to tweak it.
I always wondered why Constantine was so uncharismatic. Just found out that he allowed much more than just Phèdre scenes. Not a coveted wife himself, he was neither a coveted husband just because of his official position. Phèdre goes way back to Euripides and Seneca, although the Racine is generally used (there's a movie of the Racine, and also a movie called Phaedra with Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins, for chrissake--I could never understand how he was cast apart from these fabulous dames like Mercouri and Sophia Loren. I never knew why mother-stepson was such a big deal after Oedipus and Jocasta. Martha Graham's Night Journey is about the day Jocasta and Oedipus get the news from Tiresius--but NO, NO, NO, I won't recommend it just because I love it. Maybe it was because these mother-stepsons were fully aware of their behaviour.
Within two years of the defeat and surrender of Licinius, Constantine had not only put his brother-in-law and former co-augustus to death, but also executed his nephew Licinius II, the son of his sister Flavia Julia Constantia. According to the Latin histories of Ammianus Marcellinus and Aurelius Victor, after a trial whose real circumstances are mysterious, Constantine executed Crispus at Pola (Pula) in 326. Fausta, whose son Constantius II became caesar in November 324, was also put to death, and the Late Greek historian Zosimus and the Byzantine Greek writer Joannes Zonaras wrote that Constantine had accused Crispus of incest with his stepmother. After his death, Crispus was subjected to damnatio memoriae.
Couldn't control his own wife's and son's lust, and it's doubtful that the rest of his issue salved the wound of his cuckoldry, so ending up a catechumen was little different from the garden-variety eunuch once he got his late senile career going. Even when I learned of his *Monumental Splendour* in dreadful 'Social Studies' class, it made Rome seem fully dead instantly--although Gibbon describes Constantine going back to Rome and how his procession there made him lose his senses, i.e., "he let it go to his head". Constantinople must have seemed like Brasilia during that parade.
But after such a proclamation, he could not be expected to really "act the way a Christian is usually thought to be expected to be", so may have thought not continuing along Roman-style assassination tradition was not possible just yet. So that was probably literally the only 'tweaking' he bothered with, the scumbag. When Constantine made Rome Christian, was he defecting? It is interesting that Rome loses all of its awesome attraction the minute Constantine does this, coinciding with a faithless and sex-obsessed family capable of defecting on him in quite heavy ways--and he sure thought they were worthy of punishment: it must have hurt his feelings. LOTS more than I knew from the Gibbon. Interesting that Julian the Apostate was so much more virtuous--what a season or two in Athens would do to a young Roman.
And such declines had already been seen earlier in Rome: Augustus is supposed to have been 'great'...however, it comes across that Julius Caesar makes Augustus nevertheless look emasculated, but Constantine would have been an unimaginable tiny mite even at the beginning of the Pax Romana.
Indeed.
Further, Julius was the kind of person who becomes the SJW now. Couldn't follow a law to save his life. I would say 'exactly' the same kind but Julius came from vastly sterner stock. He was also in the effete city-dweller set, but only effete relative to his own time, not even remotely effete relative to ours. He crossed the Rubicon solely because the alternative was submitting to the just punishment for his own lawbreaking.
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