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What does it mean to "promote life and liveliness?" This is so vague as to be a tautology. I think we need better definitions, and in my opinion, it is really not that hard to get them.

Concepts of good and evil tend to devolve into tribal relativism when divorced from any axiomatic first principles. "My tribe good, your tribe bad." This is the human default, the state of nature, and we can see that atheists often revert back to it without even realizing what has occurred.

If we consider religion as our species' moral evolutionary process, a sorting algorithm for good and evil refined over millennia of collective human experience, we now have some strong starting points for good and evil. God and Satan can be properly understood as embodiments of correct and incorrect behavior, cultural technology used to guide mass behavior. The modern atheist conceives of Christians as irrational bigots, and yet if one adopts the virtues and behaviors espoused by traditional Christianity, they are unlikely to go astray in life. Be humble, be honest; work hard; do unto others; get married, have children; avoid drugs and sexual deviancy; go to church. This is pretty much never a recipe for failure in life.

Deviation from this lifestyle advice, on the other hand, often ends in tragedy and disaster. It's safer to indulge in many vices today than it would've been in the past, but modernity has also brought with it some unique dangers such the widespread availability of extremely potent drugs, the omnipresence of pornography, and the ease with which people can sink into sloth, going nowhere and doing nothing, until they eventually realize that their life is meaningless and it's too late to turn the ship around.

It's no coincidence that the moral authorities who have guided our people for over two thousand years eventually forged a particular set of norms and values that is very well-adapted for long-term life satisfaction. And you are of course correct in demonstrating that the left is generally more opposed to these values than the right; it is also no coincidence that the right is the side of religion. Technology has changed massively in recent history, but human nature has not, nor is it likely to. The modern left is what you get when people become arrogant and think they can change human nature, casting off ancestral wisdom in the process.

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R Casey's avatar

Beautifully written.

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