In a message dated April 23, 1998, HOWARD8984 writes:

First of all, morality is not "above man," it is a discipline which man has invented and requires for his survival. Man does not serve morality - as if morality had anything to gain from man's service; morality serves man. As AirwaveBoy had stated in his earlier reply to this post of Howard's, morality is a code of values which gains man's actions and choices.

Without man, morality would be meaningless, unnecessary and non-existent. Objective morality does not obligate, it guides. Morality presupposes a standard: man's life (his own life), and a purpose: to provide man with the tools of survival. Rational morality guides man in his actions and choices by reason, principle and values; rational morality does not aid or guide man through threats, fear, or psychological coercion. Instead, it offers him incentive and rewards for right action.

Morality also presupposes that there is an alternative. Without an alternative, no morality is possible. Rational morality is man's means of achieving and protecting his values. It is goal-oriented. It does not need to coerce man into right action, as the reward of right action is sufficient incentive for man to follow the moral path, which is therefore selfish in nature.

Selfishness is essentially the condition under which man is the primary benefactor of his own actions. When you eat food (action), you benefit (reward), therefore it is moral, since it works to achieve and/or keep one's value (his life) at his own expense, and selfish, because the actor is the primary benefactor of his own action. When you bathe and practice hygiene, you benefit, therefore it is moral. When you purchase a pair of shoes, you benefit; when you rest, you benefit; when you work to produce values and earn money, you benefit. All rational values are chosen by rational means and achieved at the individuals own expense. Rational morality is reason + self-interest.

The Christian view of morality is one of threats and coercion. Its mechanism is the rule-sanction, which is arbitrary in origin and nature. Man must obey, submit, prostrate himself, says the religionist, or else. The religionist will say that man has a duty to be moral. This misses the point of rational morality, which offers man incentives and rewards for right and just action and choices. It also fails to provide man with the tools necessary to analyze particular situation that offer him alternatives and determine which one will serve in the furtherance of his needs for survival, his rational desires and his happiness.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced, the commanded or the coerced; the moral is the understood, not the obeyed.

First of all, this statement makes no sense. You attempt to go from metaphysics to value-judgments without considering an epistemological component to bridge the two disciplines. That is not possible.

You also ask a question which reveals your subjective view of morality, as AirwaveBoy also pointed out in his response to the same post. Matter, or more broadly, is neither moral nor immoral; it merely exists. Existence neither has nor requires inherent purpose in order to 'justify' itself; it simply exists.

For instance, if you dig down ten feet and unearth a large stone, there is no teleological reason why it is there; it's there because no alternative was possible. That's the nature of objective reality: causality in the metaphysically given environment is not determined by a 'conscious designer', but by the Law of Identity and the Law of Causality. Man can come along and give purpose to the stone he finds in the earth - a purpose which only he can give, and from which only he can derive benefit. However, that purpose which man gives to the metaphysically given is not a purpose that is inherent to the metaphysically given, but man-made in nature.

In the case of man, he requires no purpose to justify his existence, he merely exists. Man, however, must choose to govern his life by purpose if he is to survive. The purpose of the rational man's life is not to serve others, whether real or unreal, but to live and enjoy his life. It is through the morality of rational self-interest that makes choosing and constructing a rational purpose for his life possible. Man does not secure a legitimate purpose for his life by the morality of sacrifice - which a system of morality can only enable him to serve the purpose of others.

Correct (if this statement, which is a bit ambiguously constructed, generally means: "Just because we observe a certain behavior does not mean that that behavior ought to be that way"). This is the task of the morality of rational self-interest: to provide man with the proper tools necessary for his survival. Rational morality guides man's choices and actions according to his purpose (survival) and his standard of value (his own life and mind). Without his life and mind, man cannot value anything. His first purpose as a rational animal, however, is to value himself. Moral action presupposes an objective, a goal - such as acquiring food for a meal. This goal presupposes his higher purpose: his survival. Survival as a purpose presupposes that he has chosen this as his purpose.

All goal-achievement requires volition, assessment and action. The end does not justify the means (as mystical philosophy would have it); instead, according to rational philosophy, the end determines the means. It is up to man to assess these means in accordance with his rationality and his values-hierarchy in order to determine if those means are indeed moral. This is a very complicated and delicate process, and nothing can substitute for man's acutely conscious intellection which morality requires of him. Prayers and supplication will not determine right action.

In order to determine what man ought to do, he must practice moral judgment, which will be the single greatest challenge of his conscious life. Man cannot practice moral judgment if he's sacrificed his intellectual independence to gods or church brethren; he can only practice rational moral judgment if he is his own highest value. He cannot surrender this task to commandments of supernatural 'entities', nor can he surrender it to a collective. He will have to look out for himself. Man forfeits his mind at his own risk.

This is a question each individual must decide for himself. For me, I love my life - in fact, it is my highest value. Without my efforts to survive, I will cease to exist. I love existence, therefore I love reality. By love, I mean value, indeed value strongly, ardently, richly. Love begins with the self, stems from the self, benefits the self, is consistently selfish in all its application. Man can only survive if he chooses to, and takes the proper actions necessary for his survival. I choose to survive because I value myself.

Again, this is a choice that belongs to the individual himself; one cannot make this choice for others, as your statement seems to imply. It is true that I will die one day. There is nothing I can do to prevent that inevitability. That fact, however, only emphasizes how precious my life as a value is to me. To man existence is given - that by his parents. However, survival is not: he must put forth the effort to survive. This is true whether one is rich or poor, religious or non-religious, a genius or an idiot.

Positing an 'afterlife' only cheapens life. If one accepts the claim that there is life after death, that man's soul survives the death of his body, he automatically removes from his psychology the fact that life is finite, and therefore that it is in precious demand to himself. The net effect of such arbitrary doctrine is the undermining of what should be his highest value: his life. The more seriously one accepts and practices this belief, the more detrimental will his philosophy be to his life, and consequently to the lives of others.

Take for instance the Islamic terrorist who boards a bus in Jerusalem with a bomb strapped around his chest. Here is a man who has suspended his rational judgment and accepted a belief in an afterlife, an afterlife full of rewards if he sacrifices himself in this life - and the others on board the bus - in the name of his 'loving' 'merciful' god. All god-belief coupled with belief in an 'afterlife', to the degree that it is taken seriously, will lead man to this end - in some fashion or another - whether it is a violent, immediate suicide, or a life of misery, boredom and self-immolation. Either way, it is self-sacrifice; the means is only a detail.

Again, look at the 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult that committed suicide in a San Diego suburb in March of 1997. Look at the Branch Davidian's 'blaze of glory' in 1993. Look at Jonestown and the kool-aid fest. It's all motivated by the same kind of primitive philosophy: deceive man into accepting unearned guilt and thus destroy his spirit, his love for himself, his self-esteem, his independence of thought, his ability to determine a rational purpose for his own life. The result is a form of suicide either way you look at it.

Hence, the crucifix - an instrument of torture and execution - is a fitting symbol for Christianity.

Here you seem to confuse morality with politics, which is a philosophical doctrine dependent on morality, but not interchangeable with morality. Morality is the tool of the individual; politics is the application of morality to interpersonal relationships. Moral action is to be determined and chosen by the individual, not by the mob, the group or the collective, such as a church. A group of individuals as such does not have rights: man does not acquire new rights by joining a group. Man is a unit, an entity, and an end in himself; he is not subject to the demands of the group, no matter how the group attempts to justify its coercion.

Your question implies another typical presumption of the mystic: that morality is either based on a god-belief and obedience to his commandments, or morality -without the 'benefit' of god-belief - is given to arbitrary whims, and thus is anarchical and chaotic in nature. This is a confession of the religionist that, without obedience to his god's and 'fiat standard' - to use your term, he would not know how to govern his life. This likens man to a ship which must either be anchored to the shore or set meandering adrift, but never able to determine its own itinerary and achieve its goal to reach a new, deliberately chosen destination, which is the very nature of ship. Such a view of morality infers the religionist's metaphysical premises, which are subjectivism, determinism, the malevolent universe premise, the soul-body dichotomy and the view that man is innately helpless and inherently depraved. It is upon this view of reality that the religionist builds his dreadful, primitive philosophy.

Tindrbox

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