Matrix Management

You can be Religious and Moral.
You can be Areligious and Amoral.
You can be Areligious and Moral

Can you be Religious and Amoral?

Excuse the simplicity here. Obviously the billions of colours in this ranging of human behaviour mean that you cannot argue any of the above points. They may be useful as the starting point for a discussion and indeed that is what they were intended to be when I wrote them first. The last question is I suppose quite valid though of course the answer would depend on whether the question was asked by the answerer or someone else. The bottom line with this discussion, is that I again taking the DeBono route of "I am right and you are wrong" and wanting to see why Religion is used as an excuse for so much which is obviously wrong by almost anyone's standards.

There is the element of being blind to the full picture when lost in the deep complexities of any philosophy - and religion is just a particular type of philosophy - but some acts have to have a very strong promise of religious reward to get people to carry them out. I think maybe you have guessed what I am referring to. Why are so many people willing to die in a most horrible manner, to take many other people with them and to do it in the face of seeing the bloody aftermath created by their predecessors?

My image of religion is a very fuzzy, benign thing, of golden sunlight through clouds, of quiet contemplation and application to betterment. None of this inspired me to anything more than intellectual contemplation though that has sometimes been intense albeit without much conviction of any possible truths to be discovered. What distortion of those quiet views drummed into me by Pipe-Smoking, Tweed-wearing headmasters could ever justify just one murder? Nothing can - ever. Any philosophy which even allows the contemplation of such things is flawed but then again as far as I am concerned the majority of philosophy which involves any element of un-explained (you could say supernatural) belief, is flawed. I have mentioned the idea of not increasing the complexity of creation by asking what created the creator but recent scientific theories have opened up keyholes into the fuzzy super-cosmos that surrounds the big bang. This is where this set of ideas descends into fuzziness and I have to give up. I hold simplified ideas in my head about things beyond the big bang but things which my limited math skills leave me unable to comprehend in any more than basic form.

All these floating particles and colliding Branes have no moral element whatsoever. However, if out of these things, somehow was built a logic analyser which could comprehend everything down to an emotional level as well as an intellectual one, would it not see that Humans have an emotional component, concepts of pain and bereavement and see that acts which most humans would condemn are just not right for this world? Just because humans are irrational and get upset and cry and all the other things which machines and computers don't do, doesn't mean that a machine without these components would see what good and bad actually was. The idea of psychopathy came to me there. Are there humans without emotional sides to their brains - through accident or genetics or even trauma - who can see the difference between right and wrong? (Right and wrong in my logical construct which I hope you have been able to accept.) I expect there are. There are also plenty of humans with as much emotional content as you could wish for who are capable of such terrible things. In comes to me now that of course the people who carried out the recent attacks are fired by a very emotional sense of what is right and wrong. It may be that they are just at the end of a line of escalations, but the question is, how to we intercept that building trail of escalations? I have no answer and I am sure you were expecting me to say that. The problem is I don't know if I am right but I do know that some people are certainly wrong.