Sam Harris is creating a bright shiny new Objective Morality

[Daniel Davis]

Daniel Davis wrote:

Lately, though, Sam 
has found his own God, an Objective Morality, and he is
increasingly preaching the Good News. The latest in the series appears 
at
his web site, with the now unintentionally ironic name - The 
Reason
Project.


Svein Olav wrote: 
Maybe not so ironically named if we remember the battle between Stirner and his contemporaries. His opponents were all speaking in the name of exalted Reason, the faculty seemed to be the sole ruler on high and whose commands were always in the form of maxims, general statements. General moral rules. Kant's "Pure, Practical Reason" in all so many guises.

Our atheists are pious people indeed.

You're right. But it was easy for me to forget, watching the atheists battle the nonsense of the religious apologists, that they would likely be just as eager to bow and serve as the religious, and would find a way to do so without supernatural intervention. If the will to servitude makes the religious will to believe nonsense, why wouldn't it make the rational will to reason nonsense? Certainly a ton of precedents for it.

It seems that the will to servitude comes first, and some nonsense will be found to support it. Or maybe it is just how that will is inculcated into the young through it's societal pervasiveness. Any grand speculation on the will to servitude? Any speculation on why we have not got it?

To play evolutionary biology for a second, which I generally dislike because it seems to be engaging in post facto central planning, I've wondered if the will to credulity and the will to obedience has some evolutionary advantage, particularly in children. For children, it is easy to see why in dangerous environments blind obedience to adults would keep them alive. Even that will to credulity would help them to learn the scant knowledge that their elders had. 

And for evolutionary pressure, it's hard to top the the millenia of witch hunts, crusades, and forced conversions. If there is anything genetic to being an unbeliever, the differential evolutionary pressure on believers and unbelievers would be huge.

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