Episode 33 - No Masks Outside and Intellectual Incoherency

A quick update on COVID and then I dive into some writings I started years ago. These writings were the underpinning of Mindlob.com. Below is a transcript from the book in part...

Consider two simple terms: “good” and “evil”. When you think of good, you probably think of helping an old lady across the street, solving world hunger, or saving someone from personal harm or abuse. While when thinking of evil, we think of running down the old lady with a car, starving people, or causing emotional harm or abuse. 

Pretty easy, right? Only a madman couldn’t discern concepts like hate, love, compassion, rape, altruism, lie, and truth. What’s great is that we all intuitively agree that good and evil are relatively universal concepts for humanity.

Consider atheist-based campaigns that rightfully advertise the paraphrased message, “you don’t need God to be good”. I love these campaigns because they let us know that all worldviews intuitively understand that “good” is universally acknowledged and understood regardless of your theistic or atheistic persuasion.

Some atheists would agree that good and evil are constructs created as a by-product of human evolution. Somehow these “goods” and “bads” were classified to give humanity a better chance of survival. Ultimately, however, the only difference between something being labeled as good or bad is based upon our primitive ancestors assigning arbitrary concepts to either the “bad” or “good” category. And if primitives looking to survive guided these ancient views of good and evil over generations are those categorizations still relevant today?

 Sure thousands of years ago, murder would be a problem. With the materialistic view, having groups of mammals living together would have given an enormous strategic advantage for survival, but with humankind now being the apex predator and passing seven billion, is it still logical to sanctify each life? Could it be argued that a mass genocide of the weak and inferior is best for the survival of humanity as a whole?

Consider Darwin’s thoughts in “The Descent of Man”:

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which ....