Nietzsche's most famous points about god, "...who will wipe the blood from our hands..." etc. isn't so strictly 'negative about religion', rather it points to the deeper question of discovering a new morality in the obviously godless modern reality that we live in. Essentially, anybody who has their head screwed on in the modern era can recognize that there is no proof for the biblical god, that the bible is man-made, that the burden of proof lies on the believer, etc. That kind of atheism is practically a 'truth of thumb' in academic circles, right?

The issue isn't about whether god 'actually' exists. It's about the idea of god as being a source of ethics. The murder of god by logic and science has left a vacuum of fleeting Christian morals.

For example, the idea of value for the Samaritan, that is, finding value in people other than your own tribe, is a fairly radical notion and seems to be a religious idea, particularly when you consider that the reward for such arguably stupid selflessness is eternity in heaven. Without the promise of heaven to motivate us, why would we bother to go outside our tribe? Why would we bother with something like humility if there is nothing but ourselves? What can humble the average person? Please don't say science, which is largely ignored by the average person.

In a world of rapid globalism, I would argue that we need this Samaritan, universal ethic more than ever.

Even without god, as an atheist, I still rely on the societal remnants of Christian morality and ethics, which has dominated the west since it took over the west. I was also raised Christian. So try as I might, I am a product of these ethics. Not all of these ethics are good and not all are bad. I have tried to do away with the ethics that I don't like - but I can find no materialistic basis in certain, very useful ethics. Of course there is the issue of making sense of this hellish reality and meat sack that I'm stuck in - humanism has little say about meaning and purpose other than telling you what you already know - that you've got to figure it all out for yourself. Some help that is.

The question is what we do next as a secular society. Of course, we aren't truly a secular society, but perhaps this speaks to our fear about what to do next. I don't believe in god, literally, but I often wonder if a symbolic belief in ritual, community and spiritual ethics is required to make sense of the radical Samaritan ethic. Of course, this just depends on what kind of world you want to live in.

So to believe in god might mean to pursue faith in direct opposition to all the evidence for the purpose of living a meaningful life. To reject god is to reject that the Samaritan ethic requires justification, it is resigning oneself to a life of searching for reasons for Samaritan ethics, of searching for meaning and justification. Or of course, just a plain old embracing of quasi-darwinian ethics.

Revenge of the mods! I felt I did post a coherent argument, otherwise I wouldn't have posted it.

It's a lot of twaddle is what it is.

I do not wish to continue this line of questioning, so if you don't mind, I will continue on with other lines of questioning that I feel are more worth my time. Thank you for the welcome now good day sir!

I see, maybe I was confused. I think we're saying the same thing. :up:

Wouldn't you agree that within our evaluation of the 'greater good' there lies the calculation of suffering and value? Means and ends, so to speak? My point would be that even in the face of a widely unpopular and unjustified war, many families still sent their sons to war primarily because of this flawed calculation of suffering and value - and it isn't an accident that evangelical conservatives broadly supported the Iraq war, despite the evidence - their entire doctrine is based around this flawed notion of suffering and value. They are the easiest to sway with an argument of sacrifice.

In a broader, more anthropological mindset, this pattern of propitiation is commonly repeated - the idea that sacrifices must be made to bring good fortune. In other words, a grieving mother whose son is sacrificed on the altar would have to have a reason to allow her son to die. Telling a grieving Mother that one death saves many people, only then she will 'allow' her son to die, because she believes that her son's death is justified. This is the tragedy of war! It is why veterans are haunted by the question of what it all meant, what it all added up to, for the amount of suffering occurring in a war never adds up to an equivalent amount of value. Despite this, we are generationally convinced that we need to fight and kill each other to produce value - in reality the consensus is that we hate war, we don't want to fight in wars, and that wars are almost never worth fighting.

How can you square the opposing facts; that on the one hand we all recognize that war is terrible and that it is primarily old men sending young men to die, and yet still fall for the same old tricks over and over again? I claim it is at least partly because we are easily led astray by this repeated idea of value being earned through suffering.

It is a simplification of Hitler's rather complicated rise to power, but I'm dealing in broader subjects and trying to tie a theory to reality. If that example is too flawed, could you respond to my example of human sacrifice, as I see that as a much more eloquent example? Absolutely, Churchill made a similar point and it worked like gangbusters, people were stirred and willing to sacrifice and fight on the beaches and so on. In that case, Churchill was supposedly justified to employ such a tactic because Britain was under threat, yet the fact remains that wars are fought by young men who must be prepared to offer themselves as sacrifice for the greater good - despite the fact that wars are instigated by primarily old men with conflicting ideas who are often manipulative of the general public.

A grieving Mother seeking value in her son's sacrifice would be reassured to know that the sacrifice did have a bigger value. This is why military culture is all about stressing that young men die for their countries. If you want a modern example, take Iraq. Why would so many young men sign up to fight in the divisive and arguably morally bankrupt war in Iraq? What are they told? What is the general public told by the government? What are their grieving Mothers told? That their sons died for their country. That their sacrifice was for the greater good. What is the greater good, in reality? That they died for an ideal?

Or that the war in Iraq was based on the lie that they had WMDs, that it was a political power move made by a government that had an interest in dethroning Saddam Hussein and furthering American interests in the middle east, including the establishment of large American oil and gas companies that stood to profit from the invasion, or the private military groups and arms being produced. Never mind the civilian casualties, Guantanamo bay, a lack of international consensus for war, and the failed responsibility of creating and fostering a new nation.

In essence, it was easier to just explain to everybody that they died for the greater good - and that made sense to a lot of people and was all they needed to hear - I claim in part because of our inborn nature to understand suffering as the creation of value.

As stupid as a nickel -- wow some welcome to forum I'm getting lol. I thought I left reddit for a more welcoming community. Obviously, I was mistaken. Why such meanness? You still do not understand my points - further, you are not even trying to understand my points. You are simply trying to brute force your way to victory. Which doesn't make sense, because I'm not trying to argue with you. It's astonishing that you still don't seem to understand what I'm trying to say, which is surprising considering that any backwoods caveman could get it - what does that say about you, I wonder?

I can't make heads or tails out of most of the endless "old man yells at cloud" that you're saying, other than the below-the-belt insults and oddly misplaced (yet very intense) anger. That I can understand, unfortunately. You seem very upset by my post! Or perhaps are addicted to the rush of hate-posting. A known phenomenon that I would urge you to explore. ie: https://www.vice.com/en/article/a33yq8/trolling-addiction

You seem befuddled by my assertion that suffering both has meaning and has no meaning. It's not a binary, both are true. It's possible that sometimes, suffering produces meaning, and sometimes it does not. Only my point would be that we often seem to make the assumption that suffering has meaning more often than the assumption that it has no meaning. Which leads back into my points, which you seem to assert require facts. I dispute that points require facts! It is possible to have a point and not have a fact.

For example, you yourself once wrote in a quite long, complicated, and awfully essay-like post, "All our pursuits in life are essentially a pursuit for fulfillment, for happiness. In some extreme cases as in loonies, if they pursue unhappiness, naturally, it is still a pursuit of happiness." which is your first point, and yet I do not see any facts.

Rather you are stating your personal opinion, and rather ironically, your personal opinion is that all our pursuits in life are seeking fulfillment, which is mighty close to saying that mankind is searching for meaning. Yet if I assert something like that you see it as absurd. Seems pretty unfair to me.

It would seem that you don't follow the rules that you seek to enforce.

Which would be the hallmark of one suffering from a delusion of self-importance...

I propose no antidote to this so-called 'problem of mankind' (which I never frame as a problem of mankind, that would be an oversimplification) - I don't understand where you are pulling this 'positive thinking' thing from. I see no antidote for there is no antidote and we wouldn't want one if we had one. We have no choice but to create meaning from suffering like one makes shapes from clouds. It is our in-born nature. Only that we must guard this instinct and be wary of falling into traps of delusion in which we seek meaning where there is none. That is my point, good sir!

Now I would appreciate it if you respond you avoid the ad-hominem attack as they do nothing to prove your point and make you look like a fool.

All right bear with me here: I did not set out to strictly have an argument, firstly. I make no comment on suffering being necessary for a full life. I don't know what a 'full' life might entail and certainly wouldn't wish to comment on it. Nor do I know what a 'good' life would entail. Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced as Kierkegaard says. I'm working with broad brushes here, that's part of it.

My point, as initially stated, is to talk about our natural inclination for finding meaning in this reality of suffering. In order to understand my point, you have to accept a few axioms. Which is why I have to take the time to explain them.

My terms would be:

Suffering: entails strain, pain, work, sacrifice,
Value: entails reward, enlightenment, good fortune, opportunity

Now keeping in mind my terms, my axioms would be:

1. All of reality is hostile to human life
2. To survive the suffering of reality, we assign value to suffering to make sense of suffering
3. In assigning value to suffering, we begin to make the correlation that suffering has inherent value

If you accept those axioms, then we get to the discussion I was hoping to have, which is that our relationship with value and suffering is dangerously flawed and can be taken advantage of, particularly when we begin to make the false assumption that suffering always entails value and fail to recognize that sometimes suffering is just suffering, full stop. This may seem obvious, but I would argue that it isn't and that we are extremely prone to falling for this false correlation.

The example I use is the swindling of the German people by the Nazis into accepting authoritarianism and then war and then genocide. Hitler used promises of good fortune, enlightenment, rewards and opportunities to make sense of the sacrifices and sufferings of plunging Germany into war. It is common to justify war as a sacrifice for the future good. I see this common theme repeated in many avenues of life and in history.

The most blatant historic example is when we literally sacrificed human beings in the mystical belief that we could sort of 'buy' good fortune from the gods. If you accept that we assign value to suffering, then it would seem to make sense to a more primitive mind that by increasing the sacrifice and suffering to the maximum, we would stand to gain the most amount of value. I hope you can see what I mean. This is a very extreme example of fundamentally failing to understand how reality works, but all of human history has been walking back this misunderstanding, from literal human sacrifice to the sacrifice of animals, to the much more palatable symbolic sacrifice of the perfect man Christ.

In this way, we misunderstand this reality we live in! Especially because Christian teachings tell us that suffering is a good thing, that bearing your cross and emulating the suffering of Christ is a good thing, we are prone to making fatal mistakes about life. One of these mistakes is assuming that just because we work really hard, sacrifice and suffer we can increase our value in society by making ourselves rich, or by making ourselves enlightened. It's true that we can work hard to get a better job, but it's also true that many people work hard at their jobs and don't make any money at them, even if their intention is to get a better job.

My point is not to suggest that nothing has value or that suffering can't have value - that would be absurd. It's to talk about the times when we get swindled by the promise of value, it is to talk about our instincts and our historical relationship to suffering and what has become an expectation of value. That is what I'm interested in. I fully recognize the pedestrian fact that suffering can lead to value.

I can see her now, bending over a hot stove - only I can't see the stove!

But honesty, as Billy Joel once said, is such a lonely word.

I'm sorry that your worldview does not accommodate answers that are non-binary, good sir.

I'm not really sure how to break this down into a smaller chunk because the main point is highly dependent on a lot of surrounding information and is not a simple idea. I also don't really understand how you interpreted defensive attitude out of my response. This leaves me head scratching. Trust me, I don't hold on to my beliefs so dearly. The gist of every human story is "a man or woman faces an obstacle and overcomes it or does not" but that is not a substitute for consuming entire stories. If you are TL/DR'ing my posts, that's fine, but don't expect me to distill the entire idea to ten words, because I don't know how.

I fear I have side barred too far away from the main point. The point is that the broader correlation of sacrifice/suffering relating to good fortune/meaning is a dangerous and flawed assumption. *See skyblack response hehe.

Yes I think we agree on the opulence thing. That's pretty much how I feel about it. The only distinction is that I would say that the opulent do not eliminate their suffering because they are opulent. That is just part of the dream. Also I would say that the opulent are some of the worst offenders in peddling this whole 'suffering = wealth' thing, because of the moral problem of being rich. Perhaps this is why so many wealthy people are conservative republicans who think that anybody could be as rich as them if they only worked hard enough.

You said, "The entire history of technology is built around comfort and avoiding suffering and making life easier and pampering the human body." So I was responding to that.

I leave semantics for the birds. Of course the entire construct of language can be reduced to nonsense shapes and vowels, but all in service of the communication of ideas, which is the main point.

Not exactly, it's a little complicated and hard to reduce to short sentences. It's more like: Mankind thinks that there is a correlation between sacrifice/suffering and good fortune/meaning. This is both wrong and right. It is right because we can work to improve our situations, and that work often entails sacrifice/suffering. It is wrong because there is not always a correlation between sacrifice and good fortune. Despite this, we can easily be convinced that a sacrifice is acceptable because we are so used to good fortune being earned through suffering. We can forget that sometimes good fortune lands on a person's lap because of fate, or that sometimes sacrifice/suffering is just needless suffering without the promise of good fortune.

In the strongest example, I claim Hitler could convince the people of Germany that the war and the Third Reich were a necessary evil on the basis of this faulty correlation of sacrifice. If you look at Hitler's speeches, one of the most common themes is this notion of sacrifice and the promise of rewards to come.

If you've ever read Animal Farm, there's a character called Boxer who is a powerful cart-horse. His motto is "I will work harder". Boxer thinks that if he just works hard enough, the dream of the utopia of the Animal Farm will come true. As more and more animals perish on the Animal Farm in search of utopia, Boxer only works harder, partly because he is being indirectly implicated in the murder of innocent animals. So to make the entire utopian promise 'worth it', he must work harder and harder to make up for all the suffering. I claim that we can become swindled like boxer because of this correlation of suffering/sacrifice and good fortune.

I would see increasing technological improvement as inevitable in our time and secondary to our search for meaning, which existed before technology and I believe would outlast technology.

I would also say that consumer capitalism is all about status, about opulence, and about those who don't have status or opulence idolizing the people who've 'made it'. It is true that the more opulent a person is, the easier their expensive technology will make the chore-like aspects of their lives, but this is a vector that correlates to level of material wealth.

I would argue that the drive of consumer capitalism is not strictly to eliminate suffering, but rather to rise to opulence, so that all of your suffering can be directed to further increasing your wealth - then so you can hire people to suffer and increase your wealth for you and those people can hire people and so on. Poorer people often buy cheap products that shoddily reduce the chore-like aspects of their lives, but ultimately this is only historically in emulation of the rich.

As the living standard increases, so does the baseline for the underclass. Also as a sidebar to a sidebar, I don't think that technology has been developed predominantly to pamper the human body - what about missiles, medicine, etc.

Sure, I can try to lay it all out smooth: we exist in a hostile reality, to survive this hostile reality, we have evolved an inherent ability to seek out the meaning in our suffering. ie: "Without that cancer diagnoses, I wouldn't have reconnected with my Mother." Taken to the next logical step, we also understand that suffering is broadly the only consistent way to improve one's situation, ie: doing sit-ups and dieting will help a person lose weight. So armed with both of these recognitions about reality, we end up in the false belief that nothing 'good' can be attained without some kind of suffering and that suffering must inherently cause meaning, or good fortune of some kind. We see this as being positive, more often than not.

However, we make mistakes about reality when we believe these things, since it's not true that suffering is the only way to create meaning in your life. For example, we can be benefactors of sheer good fortune without directly 'earning it' with suffering. Good fortune can also spark meaning.

It is also true that the very rich more often than not don't have to directly suffer to earn their wealth, just as it is true that a poor person can inflict tremendous amounts of suffering on themselves or their family in the search for wealth, or good fortune, and still die penniless. Thus, the expectation that just because we suffer we will achieve good fortune, or find a deeper meaning, is dangerous and sadly widely unrecognized.

Finally, I would trace these instincts back to our earliest days, when we believed so strongly in the idea of suffering causing good fortune that we would sacrifice fellow human beings in the hopes that tremendous suffering and literal sacrifice could swing things in this overtly hostile reality in our favour. I argue that we have not shed this mindset and that we still chase suffering as a means of enlightenment or good fortune, to the detriment of ourselves or our families. This does not only apply to wealth, it is just easier to understand when talking about wealth.

Interesting thoughts; I would disagree with you, however. I do not agree that modern Western culture is all about the avoidance of suffering. After all, Western culture is Christian culture.

Rather, I see a still-broadly Christian culture that is also broadly obsessed with material wealth and the wealthy and equally obsessed with the means of how to acquire such wealth - and most of those highly publicized methods contain needless sufferings at their core and do not adress the tuth of the matter, which is that odds are if you weren't born into a lot of wealth you will not be able to become very wealthy.

Take the best-selling Amazon non-fiction book of the past couple years - Atomic Habits - which is entirely about discipline, overcoming lack of motivation, designing a personal environment that is spartan and inherently success-orientated. Rich people tell us that if we only suffered more, or found better, more elaborate ways of suffering, we could all be like them - rich!

Take the many fads of dieting that inflict needless suffering on a population obsessed with eternal good-looks. What suffering people will endure to 'look good'. The goals of Westerners may often be vain, but the means are all to do with suffering and the expectation of meaning being derived from it.

I also don't believe that we have shaken off our Christian heritage. It is as you say, Christ is the sacrificial lamb who endured suffering for us and to emulate Christ is to embark on a life of suffering. Yet, he is only an echo of the older times when we actually did sacrifice human beings to swing the tide of fortune in our favour. This is because we inherently believe that suffering and sacrifice can bring about good fortune - which is false.

Sure, we can work harder and make more money or find new opportunities, but that's not the end all be all. We often inflict suffering upon ourselves with the expectation of receiving the gift of good fortune, and then do not receive such a gift. It is also true that we sometimes just have good fortune and don't do anything to deserve it. This causes a lot of friction within us because we expect good fortune to always be accompanied by suffering...

I have a pet theory that this is why the very wealthy often become uniquely obsessed with personal health, trainers, nutrition, fasting, fad diets and the like - because the reverse is also true, that richest people must (possibly unconsciously) believe that they have suffered for their success and seek out forms of suffering to justify their wealth. I have found that rich people are very defensive about if they actually deserve the wealth that they have.

The ruling or wealthiest class must believe that wealth can be earned through suffering, or they face the moral crisis of holding tremendous amounts of wealth and having not actually earned it with suffering. This is why the wealthiest classes literally hire people to eradicate the shame of being as visibly wealthy as they are. I also believe that this is why the wealthiest often see themselves as exceptional, because there can be no other answer as to why they are so much more wealthy than ordinary people. In other words, the lie of suffering creating wealth and prosperity is pervasive in our society from both sides.

I would be very hesitant to assume that suffering is the only way to find meaning. This is kind of what I'm trying to talk about, our expectation that suffering inherently holds meaning. I would argue that it does not, only that we have an in-born need to find meaning in suffering to continue being happy and productive. My broader point is that our in-born need to find this meaning is problematic.

In my own life, I have also found that my search for meaning in the face of an event of great suffering can also become a fruitless exercise. In other words, searching for meaning in the face of life's great cruelty is not always the antidote for suffering. By this I mean that the lesson of massive cruelty in life can be reasoned into hatred or depression or a venom of some kind. Sometimes it is better not to seek meaning where there is none and to resign one's self to the knowledge that life is cruel, and it may be a healthier option to shift focus back onto other, more positive things. Lack of meaning as meaning? Is that an ouroboros? I think maybe!

Also, a well-placed positive event can also provide a very deep sense of meaning. So I could not agree with the claim that all meaning derives from suffering.

Also yes, I started out born as a single byte and through the years I have evolved from 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit and now 64 bits.

You've proven my point! Okay, so I would have to disagree with you there - my definition of suffering would certainly include strain. I don't know if you've ever tried to cut weight, but I think almost anybody on the street would count that as a form of suffering, sometimes even immense suffering. This is why people fail with dieting, etc. I would claim the only distinction between strain and something like loss is the severity of the suffering and the increased difficulty in finding a 'point' to the suffering.

But in reframing strain as a form of non-suffering, you have illustrated my point -- that our personal definitions of suffering are indeed malleable, particularly because we do not consider suffering with a 'point' to actually be suffering.

So my further point is that this ability we have to reframe suffering with a point as non-suffering is both helpful and widely unrecognized as deeply problematic. It could even be potentially extended as an explanation of great tragedy; ie: we expect that suffering will grant us a reward or enlightenment to such an extent that we have historically sacrificed fellow human beings as propitiation to vengeful gods in the stone-age belief that such great suffering could somehow swing the tide of fortune in our favour. The only antidote to tragedy is meaning - as long as the outcome outweighs the means, we are capable of great evil.

I will have to add that book to my pile. I've heard of it but haven't read it. Sounds fascinating.

Yes I would agree that poverty is class-linked, obviously, but I do not believe that generationally poor people can so easily get themselves out of poverty. This is what makes them generationally poor. Peasants who fled Europe, like the Irish, fled from generational opression and poverty - many poor Europeans have fled literal genocide to arrive in North America. These people who arrived with nothing and no education are not the same as other white people who came from the aristocratic British ruling class. To ignore the class history of England is to make a critical error in judging all white people in America.

To large extent, class is determined by origin, as everybody knows, and the mistake occurs when primarily middle-class or upper-middle class people make racist sweeping judgments about all white people and refuse to acknowledge the diversity that lies within that label, or the poor white population among them who by no fault of their own are in poverty - or to forget about the many working-class people in America who made their living in factories that have left since the country.

In other words, there's no need to throw the baby out with the bath water and assume that because there is systemic racism against minorities in America there can't be poor white people who also face unique problems that must be addressed. Of course, there is the terrible history of slavery that America has yet to reckon with - which has left its mark on the country. Lawmakers and lawyers and the ruling class are still made up of wealthy white people, but that doesn't mean that all white people had an equal shot at becoming a member of that ruling class. Many of the wealthiest families in America have always been connected and generationally rich. George Washington, for example, came from a wealthy, well-connected family - his great Grandfather studied at Oxford, his great-great-Grandfather was High Church rector of the Church of England.

It's also not very common for the very rich to fall down the social ladder to the bottom. Mostly poor people struggle to get themselves out of the lower classes, generationally. Poor people face fewer prospects, lack of education, exposure to crime, or to violence, abuse, drugs, single mothers, etc. These things then limit their ability to be 'good citizens'. Poor people are poor people regardless of ethnic background. Which can exist as a statement along with the statement: minorities in America face systemic oppression that white people do not. Both can be true.

I always sense this dismissive nature about men's issues in particular - which we never really take seriously - after all, we don't really care if men get brutally beaten to death on screen, but for a women to get assaulted brutally on screen...that is jarring for all us. Historically, we simply don't value the lives of men as much as we do women. It was not so long ago that men were outcasted and called cowards or given the white feather for not voluntarily deciding to face the machine guns of the world wars.

For example, there are many more men in prison, many more men overdosing or strung out on drugs, many more men die prematurely because of preventable health issues, more men are prone to serious mental health issues, and yet we don't really seem to care very much about and of these issues, certainly not as much as we care about women's issues. This is not personal prejudice, as you say, it is systemic prejudice, only it is unpopular to defend men's issues, particularly because people on the internet dismiss them with name calling and mob mentality, as you have done here, OP.

It's the either or mentality that blows me away; it's perfectly possible for men's issues to coexist with women's issues and have them both be recognized as problematic. Dismissing white blue collar issues has become something of a hallmark of popular liberal politics. For educated, 'enlightened' (and probably socially indoctrinated) city-dwellers with decent jobs, a multicultural environment, and liberal friends it is practically impossible to understand the culture and unique problems that are currently plaguing the rust belt, where generationally poor and disadvantaged working class white people are facing an economic and manufacturing crisis as that is running hand in hand with an opioid epidemic. You dismiss these issues at your own peril, ie: enter Donald Trump.