Religion is famed for its silence when it sees people living out an inconsistent morality. As long as the morality is reasonably acceptable to most people, the Church will take advantage of it to get members and influence. For example, people call themselves Catholics and they believe that they are good Catholics despite living in sin with people they are not married to. The silence of the Church is deafening but it will pay lip-service to things such as good manners and justice to keep a hold on the people.
Saying that somebody is a
wonderful and loving person translates into, “I don’t care what she or he does
or has done to anybody else”. But X is
not a wonderful person if he or she hurts anybody and neither are you for
praising her or him. To harm one person
is to say you would hurt anybody else if they were that person. Priests and clergymen continually go over
such whitewash as the eulogies they make at funerals especially. They may really like the person but they do
not love the person when they praise their evil side. That is what they are doing. By praising others they are trying to make
you praise themselves for saying such sweet things. We know that the more evil you have that you
do not regret, the less good your deeds are and the more sycophantic your good
works are. Why? Because you are declaring that you want good
not because it is good but because it suits you and you only care about it when
it suits you.
Free will is the doctrine that we are to blame for the evil we do and cannot blame secret forces in our minds for doing it and programming us. If you don’t believe in free will you can be grateful to people for it is not they who are bad but nature. You only think of one thing at a time. The very second when the person does good to you they are not aware of the evil will that they have. They don’t mean to be evil then. If they have free will then because the doctrine of free will presupposes the power to form a wilful union with evil they are to be condemned with the evil they do. Evil reveals you, it is not just something that you do. So sin cannot be separated from the sinner and to hate one is to hate the other.
Everything we do we think is right.
Even when we do evil it is because we have come to temporarily believe
that we ought to do it. If doing good
just because it is good is the moral law then it is immoral to seek to reward a
person. You cannot reward them even by
praising them for doing good for they do not want it and should not want it.
Their attitude is that virtue is its own reward. They are satisfied just by doing good and
consider that to be the only real reward.
So the reward then is insulting the person. It is not a reward at all. It invites people to do or take what they see
as wrong. Christianity wants God to have
all the credit for human goodness but still it praises people because it has an
eye on their wallets and just cannot be sincere. Jesus started that in his parable of the
Pharisee and the Publican. In that
parable he had it that the Pharisee was a bad person just for praising God for
making him a good person. The Publican
who had no praise for himself but just asked for mercy all the time was praised
by Jesus. Society has to believe that we
are all naturally selfish creatures to gain anything from the giving or
receiving of rewards. Rewards are meant
to encourage people to do good and be selfish.
In that case, they are not really rewards but bribes. You need free will to justify rewards but the
truth is we don’t give a damn. We would still
give them whether we believed in free will or not. Its what people do.
Egoism is the view that we get pleasure for ourselves in doing even
seemingly altruistic things – so the good we do is done for us not the other person
though the other person benefits. It’s a theory about motives. How can you praise a person for handing you
back your wallet that they found on the street to you if they are egoists? If egoism is true then it seems that praise
still means nothing for you only do it to please yourself. It is not the other person you are concerned
about but what they have done to please you.
But it is the good feeling towards the other person that they like in
you and are pleased by. It does have
value. Even if we have free will the
feeling cannot be helped and it is what appreciation is all about so the denial
of free will is not to the detriment of gratitude.
The following sayings are condemned as evil but are only evil if free will is true. But still they show the hypocrisy and saccharine selfishness that is rife in the Church and society. For religion to be so hypocritical is bad enough but when they invent a perfect God to endure all this hypocrisy and to endure it being offered up to him it is far worse. The God belief makes hypocrites worse not better.
"Charity begins at home"
The person from the wealthy west who goes to work among the poor in Nigeria or wherever is accused of doing wrong. People will say he should be working among the poorest in his own country. The attitude that charity begins at home contradicts Jesus Christ who said that the man who leaves father mother and family and children to do a thing like that will get amazing rewards. Jesus himself focused more on helping outsiders than people from his town and the gospels never mention him even lifting a finger for his family. It is outrageous that the life of a man who was not a family man should be held up as the ideal role model for any age never mind our modern age.
Charity begins at home has led to Churches keeping funds for their own members and refusing to help Muslims and pagans who are in the throes of poverty.
"Why don't you talk to Father Bob about it? He won't judge you."
It is impossible for him not to. He will be judging in his mind though he may not say anything. Some of us seem not to mind people judging us as long as they hide it or lie to us pretending that they don't judge. That is another human irrationality. Why do we hate the whole world knowing our private business and judging us when we don't seem to mind a few knowing it? If one or two know then why not let all know?
"If he takes that attitude then he is not worth bothering about. If he doesn't trust you after all this time, then you are doing yourself a favour by dumping him".
That implies that people are only worth knowing if they are very decent. It is very negative. It doesn't take account of the fact that people cannot be all bad. People tell wives or husbands for example that the spouse that hit them is not worth worrying about for hitting them. This is to console the victim. Christians ought to see how it tries to encourage an unloving attitude to comfort. If we listened to that faith and practiced it consistently we would soon be spreading misery.
"I would love to look after my mother if she got sick or was dying."
That is just a boast even if it is true. If everything we do is based on self-interest then you are saying it is your self interest to help your mother - so your compassion is really fake. It is not about you helping her but about you helping yourself with your bad feelings in relation to her suffering. If you do it for her sake and not yours then you won't love it. As long as you love doing it for her and not you you are saying that people should not care about their own rights and if you believe that then you don't have much honour for her and your helping her is done with a bad attitude. It is not about helping her then.
Everything we do could be about our self-interest because even if we do something for another and seek nothing back we are getting back the pleasure of being so altruistic. Believers in altruism say we are being altruistic because we don't look for the happiness - it comes from a side-effect of doing good. If that is true then there is a 50/50 chance that we are being altruistic or non-altruistic. What should be the default position then? Considering how much time we spend thinking of ourselves and how we wouldn't suffer all our lives to spare other people and how we want the side-effect of happiness the default position is that we assume no act is altruistic. Also we want the side-effect of happiness. Not thinking of the happiness in order to be indirectly happy is not altruism but self-interest. We know that the more we want to be happy the more we annoy ourselves and drive it away but if we just forget about the desire then we get the happiness.
"Don't become a prostitute. Its very dangerous. You could get raped or beaten up."
This contradicts the notion that we should think positive and trust and encourage people to work to eliminate risk. Christians urge people to convert to Christianity even in dangerous Islamic countries and yet they would say the above to a woman contemplating prostitution. It makes them look caring and concerned. If they were more honest and were saying, "Our disdain for prostitution isn't about you, but just against the law of Christ that a woman should never prostitute herself - even to a client she knows would never hurt her" the woman would see their true colours. They would have no problem with a wife selling her body to her husband even if he is psycho rapist brute.
The more honest Christians will say that prostitution is not bad because of the results but bad in itself and that it only has bad results because it is bad. This sneaks in the idea, "If you get beaten up lady you brought it on yourself!" The prostitute does not ask for or make any man beat her up or rape her. It is not the prostitution that is to blame.
God is good - according to the Christian faith. We are expected to trust God. It is true that he can let prostitutes get raped and beaten up. But what if he changes? Are we not insulting him then? Would a doctor who made mistakes in the past be respected if people warned his patients that his treatments might go wrong? It insults God.
"I wish I could help you. But I can't tell you what you need to know. I have to observe confidentiality."
"Wish I could break this confidentiality but I can't" is the translation.
Perhaps it only means that he wishes it was not confidential and he could tell it? But its confidential for its bad to tell it. Christians praise the man who says the words above though it contradicts their doctrine that one should not desire to do evil. They condemn those who do good with reluctance. Where is the condemnation for this man?
"I feel so upset that people would burgle my house. It is not what they took. I just don't feel safe in the house anymore."
People say you should think the best you can of everybody and give everybody the benefit of the doubt. If they really believe that then why don't they tell people who say the above, "They didn't mean to hurt you but they just meant to take what they stole. Don't take it so personally. Don't do them the wrong of thinking of them as worse than what they are"? Why don't they protest when the courts sentence them primarily because of the upset they caused? Why don't they blame the victim's attitudes? They are just two-faced. If you love the sinner and hate the sin you will do your best to avoid saying anybody sinned. You will only do it if you get absolute proof that they sinned and were not forced or mentally sick. You will accuse them as leniently as possible.
"He fell and hit his head because he had too much to drink. In the hospital he had the decency to say that he was sorry for giving the hospital and his family this trouble."
So you think he should be sorry for bothering you - how unselfish of you! So he is to be praised for degrading himself by giving in to your selfishness? So the injury would be fine if others didn't get the trouble! What kind of self-respect is that?
In a computer class x is feeling down for y and z completed their exercises no problem and x feels he can't use computers. The tutor tells y and z not to say they got their exercises finished quickly for it makes x feel bad.
Translation: What does x want? For y and z to be as bad as him? Does x want his feelings protected instead of realising that others should not be thought about and he should do his best and forget about their success?
"Please do not bring children on to the premises. We do not take responsibility for injuries to children that may occur."
#Translation: If parents or guardians bring children here and the children are hurt then they shouldn't have brought them here in the first place. This is harsh and unfeeling.
##Translation: If a child is hurt on our premises it is getting no compensation. Tough. No compensation means suffering more. But that is not our problem and we refuse to be bothered. We are sorry but not as sorry as we would be if it were us or our children. Even Jack the Ripper felt a bit sorry for the prostitutes he carved up.
"You will be fine".
We all reassure people by saying this. But God might have other plans and Jesus said that we are not to presume that we know what tomorrow will bring and that it is a sin to. It is the sin of presumption. If we are sinners we don't know we will be fine and so saying to somebody they will be fine is saying they are not sinners.
If it is a problem for an unbeliever in God to say someone will be fine then how much more of a problem is it for a believer to say it? Religion wouldn't last long if it ceased to be so hypocritical.
"Don't be upset at what Clara said to you. She is only jealous of you".
We are all influenced by what the people around us say to us no matter if they are right or wrong.
Jealousy deludes you into seeing faults in the other person that are not there. The jealous person who condemns you is no different in the essential ways from a person who condemns you because they really do see those faults and the faults are there. And you are expected to be upset about critics who have the hurtful truth about you and who are not afraid to say it.
Clara may be jealous but she wants to harm you. To say you should not be upset about that is to say you should not be upset at all when anybody would hurt you for whatever reason.
"John is bad but we mustn't let him think we are talking about him".
Translation: John feels he should be bad and not gossiped about and we want to encourage his arrogance. It is all right for him to hurt others but not all right for others to hurt him. If he knows or thinks he is not being talked about it will encourage him to be bad.
Proprietor: "There I have mixed the cheap vodka with the good vodka".
Bartender: "That isn't right".
Proprietor: "You won't be drinking it so don't worry."
Translation: Just worry about yourself and nobody else.
"He was in a lot of pain. He's at rest now."
Translation: Be glad he is dead. People are better not coming into existence to suffer. People are better dead than suffering too much. You are selfish for mourning him. You are selfish for thinking that a person is so valuable that they should exist even as they suffer.
"Its not my business what you think of me for I can't do anything about what you think. "
First of all you can do something about what people think of you for the more they see you do and hear you say the more information you give them about yourself. You will not be able to do anything about how they feel about you. It is possible for one to hate a really good person and know they are a good person but still have ill-feelings towards them.
Secondly, it was what Jack the Ripper thought of the women he killed that directly caused the Ripper murders. To say this was no concern of theirs is to say they have no rights. They have no right to life.
Thirdly, even if you suppose you can't do anything about what somebody thinks of you it does not follow that it is none of your business just for that reason. The law might not protect you and might let thieves rob you but you don't argue that it is none of your business just because you can't do anything about it.
"It is best to think the best of people."
If you really think that people are basically good, then if somebody tells you that you are ugly or stupid or both then you will be inclined to believe them.
The same happens if you think most people are good most of the time.
You will blame any obvious wrongdoing you see on human weakness or on some factor beyond your knowledge so you will not see them as evil when they actually are.
The woman who loves her husband will be happy as long as she thinks of nice things and sees only the sunshine in life. If she thinks of his dying her happiness will become pain. We switch off our perception of unsavoury possibilities all the time to be happy. Happiness is based on a lie, on self-inflicted blindness. Happiness must be a sin if religion is right that God forbids all lies and all deceit for he makes all things the way they are and is ultimately responsible for everything. To lie is to attack reality and what he has made and therefore to hold him up for condemnation.
If people know you only see the sunny side, then they can use that to manipulate you.
If you look up to people who put you down and are negative about you, you will end up thinking the best of everybody but yourself. If everybody followed your example all would be in misery.
"I can't take my dog to the vet to have her put to sleep. So I am getting Sarah to take her."
If it is right to have the dog put down and you believe that then you are getting somebody else to do the favour for your dog. Your love is emotional but is not real love. Real love celebrates the freedom and rights of the other person. The husband who rejoices in his wife's individuality loves her. The husband who feels great passionate love for his wife and beats her up may feel love for her but he does not love her. Feeling love for her does not mean he really loves her.
"Before you judge my life, take a good look at your own."
The Jews, according to the New Testament, were sinners though respectable ones. Despite lying in religious affairs and taking the houses of widows to finance the faith, they were looked up to. Jesus however condemned them for condemning others such as prostitutes and tax collectors. Jesus preferred the sinners who were looked upon as filth. The reason the condemnations by the Jews were considered to be so socially acceptable was because people believed that good people condemn sin in an effort to root it out. The leaders then were claiming to love the sinner and hate the sin.
When Jesus condemned the Jews for condemning sinners though they were no better themselves, he thereby rejected their excuse that they were condemning the sin and not the sinner. He said that you must not see the mote in your brother's eye when you ignore the plank in your own and that the judgment you pass on others will be passed on you so judge fairly (Matthew 7:1-5). He was admitting that you cannot love the sinner and hate the sin. They had to use this excuse because everybody would have hated them and they would have been hated by one another. Jesus was being purely spiteful for his teaching left it wide open for his followers to make the same excuse! How? Because he taught loving the sinner and hating the sin too. If you love the sinner and hate the sin you have to hate the sins of others even if you are a sinner yourself. And Jesus said that all people were sinful. The Christians say they love the sinner but hate the sin and that they condemn the sin not the sinner which if true means they can condemn the actions of a person who is not as bad as they are. And if you can really love the sinner and hate the sin then why not condemn the actions of people who are worse than yours? Why not condemn people's sins because you want them to be better off than you and cleaner in the sight of God? When Jesus commanded the hatred of sin, he went as far as to say you should wish you could lose an eye rather than lustfully look at a woman with it, he was commanding the hatred of sinners and he knew it.
If you can really love the sinner and hate the sin, it makes no sense to forbid ANYBODY from judging their neighbour. To forbid is to acknowledge that the love is counterfeit.
The saying, "Before you judge my life, take a good look at your own" simply means, leave me alone to sin or do wrong. Give me the right not to be criticised. I don't give a damn what kind of world the attitude I am asking of you leads to. I don't give a toss.
"I pray that you will get the job"
Translation, I want to influence God to get you the job by making other suitable candidates sick, by killing them, by making their car break down, by making them tired so that they perform badly at the interview, and on. I pray that you get the job regardless of who needs it as much as you or more. I want you to be warmed by me praying for this for you despite all this. I therefore want you to be as bad as me. If you really believe God does what he wills you will feel no different if I pray or not for God does what he pleases. You are pleased when I pray for you for you feel that prayer is twisting God's arm and controlling him.
"John: Your dad hit my son. He is only a little boy. I am going to the police. Ann: Please don't, if that comes out he will lose his job and we will have to go into care. John: All right but if he touches my son again I am going to the police".
Translation, It is wrong and cruel if I go to the police. But if he touches my boy again I will do this wrong and cruel thing. Condone me by thanking me for my mercy.
If he hits my boy again even if he doesn't hurt him as much as he did before I will get him punished.
"It is because I love you that I hate what you have done."
To love the sinner and not the sin is impossible for the sin reveals the kind of person committing the sin therefore to hate sin is to hate the sinner. It is never a person's actions you hate but the person because it is the bad character of the person, ie the person you hate. To say you hate somebody's sin is to say you are superior to them and know what is best for them. It is prideful. It is not helpful for people feel you hate them with their sin.
To separate the sin from the sinner is impossible. If you pretend that the sinner and the sin are separate you prove you know they are not by thinking of the person as a sinner. The love for the sinner is pretend love.
Christians love sinners so much that they still send them to jail to suffer sentences that make little sense. They demand a life sentence for a man who murders a dying old man and also a life sentence for the man who murders a young person. Christians admire the shopkeeper who forgives and forgets when a girl steals from his shop and they still admire him if he gets her jailed. Oh the hypocrisy!
"Walk tall and straight as if nothing has happened and show your dignity", is the advice given to a woman who says, "John climbed into bed with me and my husband found us and thought I had committed adultery with John. Now I have a bad name and I cannot face my neighbours or go to the club."
The advice urges you not to care what people think. It is very good advice if you decide to live up to your reputation or despite your denials you have been living up to it. The advice in fact surreptitiously encourages you to do this. It forbids you to take what other people think about you as a deterrent from doing wrong.
If somebody says something mean about you people often advise you to pay no attention to it and not get upset. This says that people who sue for libel are doing wrong and being irrational. It is advising the abdication of all concern for preserving one's reputation. If the gossip is thought to have little credibility that is only what people think. They could be wrong. People who believe the worst about others will take what the gossip says about you seriously. The advice is asking you to do away with the need you have for a good reputation. Without that need, you can do whatever you wish.
Religion urges people to do what it wants and what it says God wants even if everybody is against you. Jesus said that you are blessed when you are persecuted for practicing religion as he formulated it and if you are not there is something amiss (Matthew 5). We describe the person who does not care what others think as a psychopath. Religion is dangerous. When religion commands such things it clearly has to enforce its will on its people for the sake of controlling them. Why? Because if religion trains me to ignore what others want and feel no need to go along with what they want then I will take this with me if I join another religion or decide to ignore religion and make up my own mind. I would be dangerous for example if I decided that murdering gay people was okay for God commanded it in the Bible.
"If you don't stop sleeping around, you will get AIDS. If you don't stop complaining about everybody, you will have no friends".
Focus on the word "will". There is no will about it. Many people sleep around and don't get AIDS. Many moaners have friends and misery does love company.
When people say bad things will happen to you if you do such and such, you may feel cared for. They would not be saying you will get AIDS or otherwise suffer unless some part of them hopes you will get them if you carry on living the way you are.
People don't like to be wrong. They want you to get AIDS or to have no friends when they talk to you as if you will suffer these things unless you change.
They are also trying to use fear to control you. They would not deter you if you wanted to be a fire-man or a soldier though the dangers there are greater.
"Charity begins at home".
If your flatmate donates money to the poor instead of helping you paying the gas bill you might say that charity begins at home. But helping the poor has better results than paying the gas bill. Religion ignores that. It says the gas bill should be paid. If poverty was eliminated all over the world there would be problem getting gas bills paid.
If everybody thought that charity begins at home then what if there is a poor country that needs help from a bigger neighbour? The bigger neighbour was a poor country at one time. If the bigger neighbour puts its funds into bettering its own citizens and gives none abroad then the poverty of the smaller country will never end. The bigger country will always have something to do with the money it has. It may be funding drug rehabilitation programmes or whatever.
The people that say, "Charity begins at home", are glad that those who disagreed with it to help them did so. Their hypocrisy is interesting but not surprising.
"I know Jethro has done wrong to you. But you better not say anything about it to him. It would only lead to a falling out."
If Jethro falls out with you because you stand up to him then he is not a true friend anyway and is no loss.
If you think Jethro would fall out with you for standing up to him then you have a very low opinion of him and it is no loss to him if he never has anything to do with you.
"Faith in others is a good thing."
A person will be happier if you love them because you know them and not because you have faith in them. To know is to be sure. To have faith is to have a lesser degree of sureness. It is to be less sure. Faith is a necessary evil. It is not a good thing.
Glib people say that when a murderer is incarcerated that it won’t bring
the dead victim back. This is a way of
saying that the punishment or revenge is wrong and that it is a pity of the
person who faces justice. It is saying
that if the dead person can be brought back to life it would not matter if the
criminal were not punished.
That is quite an evil attitude to claim that the murderer should not want to be deterred from murder and it mocks the victim.
If you do what is criminally wrong of your own free will, then the courts are honouring you by making you pay for it. You can't be expected to enjoy the punishment but you can be expected to embrace it and accept it. The courts are asking you to make an example of yourself by accepting this punishment so it is a good work done in return for the evil you did. If others got off lighter than you, this is still true.
If punishment is not an honour and does not respect your dignity, then it is simply revenge. The Church has led people to see punishment as dishonour and it teaches that you can be punished uselessly in Hell forever which goes a long way in explaining its attitude. Thus though it condemns revenge and says it condemns it without reserve it gives it a new name, punishment, and that is supposed to make it all right!
Jane is friends with Anna. She sees Ernie, Anna's husband, with another woman. She informs Anna. People may say, "She was only interested in splitting up that marriage. She was always jealous of how happy Anna and Ernie were."
If she was jealous that does not mean her main motive was to satisfy this jealousy. She might have enjoyed imparting the bad news but the jealousy could have been a lesser motive than her wish to help Anna by telling her the truth.
To say she was only interested in causing trouble is to judge her as being totally jealous. It is a false and exaggerated judgement. Who can know it was her only motive? To say she was chiefly interested in causing trouble doesn't make much of a difference. Yet these assumptions must be made if her action is to be condemned.
If Jane can't do it for any main reason except for jealousy the Church forbids her to tell. Jealous acts are sinful. The Church is concerned about the morality but not about Anna.
Society and the Church condemn those who rob banks. They refuse to assume that the robbers wanted the money to better life for their children. They judge like that. They make assumptions. And then they claim to be acting and thinking lovingly towards the robbers!
"I am sorry I dragged it out of you." A girl thinks her lover has cheated on her and she drags what she thinks is the truth out of his best friend. If the friend lies that the lover was doing something nice for her and was not cheating on her she will say, "I am sorry I dragged it out of you."
How could she be sorry when she felt she had to drag it out of him and be sure? She thought he was cheating and needed to know if he was. There is a false wisdom in hindsight even if the hindsight is wrong. People like to think themselves wiser after the event or what they think the event was.
·
“I don’t
want to put you to any trouble”.
Altruism is doing
good for others without the least concern for yourself. You would die to do the act if you needed or
you would go to Hell forever to do it. The
altruist cannot say, “I don’t want to put you to any trouble”, this for his
philosophy contends that it is best for everybody to be altruistic. It has to be his will that others be
altruistic and put themselves to trouble.
The egoist can desire that other people would not burden themselves for
him.
We may find ourselves asked to do something we feel or think is bad for,
“if you do not do it somebody else will”.
So, is it all right to steal for somebody else will do it?
Is it good to murder somebody who will be killed soon?
Maybe you are doing the bad person a favour by preventing them from doing
wrong by doing it before they get the chance.
But the person wants to do it and has already sinned so letting them do
it by not doing it before they do makes no difference. However, you should not do wrong to prevent
wrong but do right to prevent wrong.
You are admitting that the act committed by the other person would be
wrong but are claiming that this justifies you doing it yourself. This is a denial of human equality. You are saying that you are more important
than the other person.
You do not even know if the crime will be committed for the future is a
mystery to us. You would be committing a
sure evil to prevent a possible evil.
It is better for a person to be willing to steal or murder or whatever than for you to be willing to do the same over that person.
·
“Calm down a
bit. Remember it was not all John’s
fault when he slept with your wife. She
wasn’t forced to sleep with him”.
That is saying that you should resent both half and half. But when both are equally in the wrong that means that if you should resent John with all your power you should also resent the wife as much. The absence of logicality in the advice shows just how terrible it is to believe in free will. If you deny free will and change your emotions towards bad people as a consequence you will avoid being torn by resentment.
·
“You had no
business hurting that son of a bitch for he wasn’t harming you”.
Here the person is being condemned for hurting somebody who deserved to
be hurt. The vast majority of people
have a morality that craftily sides with the evil person against the less evil
person who attacks him for being evil.
They hide it well. Morality is
popular because people like to take the high moral ground though they will
often alter the rules they were given to suit themselves. They encourage the evil person to take the
high moral ground, “He had no business attacking me”, as if he never did the same
and worse.
If a person does wrong or what many only see as wrong but which is not
other people have a right to dislike it.
If you don’t care about right and wrong except when it happens to you
then you are living and practicing egotism and not egoism. As long as you are okay to hell with
everybody else. Strictly speaking, it is
an uncaring insult to tell anyone to mind their own business when they
castigate what you have done for it does affect them even if you didn’t do it
to them.
There is a dilemma then. To say
the person shouldn’t have been hurt for he wasn’t hurting you is to say that you
not being hurt entitles you to respect him.
That means that what he deserves for doing to others doesn’t matter so
the others don’t matter. The only way
out of the dilemma is to deny free will.
That way you can forbid attacks on evil people and not have to make dirt
of the perpetrators to do it.
Attacking a person shows just how humble and repentant for their wrongs they really are for they will usually respond with outrage. You will see then that human beings are really selfish and that altruism is just a facade.
·
“Don’t mock the
afflicted for you will/could be afflicted yourself”.
This says that you would not want to be sick so you should act towards
the sick with compassion. But you can
turn your sickness to your advantage. Under some conditions you could be glad to be
sick. The terminally ill enjoy life
better than we do because what time they have left is so precious to them. The saying contradicts the Christian view
that sickness can be a gift from God and a good thing. Christianity teaches that God works to turn
all evil to good.
The saying presupposes that you should not be sick and others should not
be. It suggests that sickness is
necessarily bad.
If you are freely cruel to the sick, free of your own free will, then you
deserve to be sick so the saying is morally defunct.
Also, how likely is it that you will get the sickness you mock in another person? If it is improbable then the saying becomes useless. All right and wrong depends on the calculation of probability and the saying is denying that. It would only be wrong then to mock if it were probable that you would get the sickness yourself.
Person A, "I should have killed that person when the king asked me to. He said if I did that he would spare the fifteen people. I refused so it is my fault".
Person B, "You are not responsible. Nobody made him do it. You didn't know he was going to really do it."
Reply: You believed he would do it. You knew you would probably be causing the deaths of those other people. You are as responsible as he was. If you had killed the person the others would still be alive.
"I promised my wife I would steal the money. But how could I have the right to keep an evil promise like that?"
Christianity forbids lies. Also it says promises must be kept but you can break promises like that. What about the idea then that the promise must be honoured but it is overridden by something more important than prevents you keeping it. It is like a promise you should keep but cannot. It is like promising John your bicycle but when you are about to give it to him he drops dead. The promise is not broken or dishonoured but prevented. A false promise is bad for the same reason a lie is so Christianity will have to honour bad promises better!
"My sister Mary won't come to my wedding because I am marrying a divorcee and her Catholic faith says my marriage is a mockery of her faith and her God."
Mary expects you to support her faith by supporting her decision not to come to the ceremony. If you know her faith is not true, you are expected to support her all the same. Where is her support for you? Her idea of support would be asking you not to go through the wedding.
The Roman Catholic Church claims the right to cause upset and division. It bars Protestants from its altar. What right has a religion to do this when it knows from its moral philosophers that for most things there is just no way to work out what is right and wrong? Any ethics book will tell you that and demonstrate it. The faith is a disgrace.
·
“Steal from him
for he would do that to you”.
But he hasn’t yet. You cannot be
sure that he would do it until he does it.
Your stealing from him will be something you will be sure has happened. His inclination to steal from you is not so
certain. It is illogical to do harm over
probable or possible harm for the latter is less certain. You don’t do a real harm to avoid or dodge a
possible one.
These days it is common for people to perform actions that they believe
to be wrong because everybody else is doing them. But wrong is still wrong no matter how many
do it. Evil is increased the more people
do wrong not decreased.
·
“I feel sorry
for John for he had to leave his job and he was not the only one doing wrong”.
If John did wrong he has to pay for it.
The others getting away with it has nothing to do with it or him and
does not justify you feeling sorry for him.
The assertion implies that we should feel bad if somebody is caught
doing wrong and yet those who would say such a thing are glad to see many types
of criminal caught.
·
“I’m only
thinking of you”.
When a person wants to go and tell the boss off for letting bullying go
on in the workplace and risk getting fired a friend will advise against it and say
he or she is only thinking of her or him.
In other words, it does not matter as much about the others as about her
or him. This is elitism. Falling in love leads to it too.
·
“We are all
ageing and will die. You are not alone
and that is the consolation.”
Translates as: “You should be glad that others will have the same
terrible fate as you”. It is hard to
beat that for selfishness. Others enduring
suffering similar to you should disturb you more than you already are, not less.
The saying which is a soft way of advising people to be glad that others suffer
too is
something we all agree with and it proves that human nature is not selfless at
all and is selfish in being selfless for being selfless is a pretence. Altruism
infers that you should wish only you had this fate and that every other person should
wish the same thing to themselves. To
tell people that they are not the only ones to have been cruelly dumped by a
beloved girlfriend or boyfriend or not the only ones to be laid up with the flu
is to grievously insult them and yet it is an insult that is often unnoticed.
·
“Glad it is them
and not us” or “Rather you than me”.
People tend to be more fascinated by bad news than good news. They get more pleasure out of bad news than
good news. Why else are the newspapers so
popular despite being about human evil and human problems? Do
people hate the
unfortunates? Possibly, although they do
not know them. Some men hate all women
though they don’t know all women. Or is
it that they are just delighted that the terrible things have happened to
others and not them? I am sure of my
existence but less sure of that of others.
Therefore I am more sure that I deserve to suffer for my sins if I am
free than I am that others should suffer.
It follows that I ought to wish that it was me instead of them.
Ignoring that, if I am glad that suffering is their experience and not mine then I am glad not I think because they deserve it but because it is their experience and not mine. That is evil and cruel for it is not their fault that they cannot experience what I experience. It is like gloating over a racist attack on a black person not because they deserve it but because they are not of my race. I do hate them if I let myself feel relieved that it is not me.
People who are sick in hospital with pneumonia or some other illness feel grateful and are asked to feel grateful that they are not one of the worse off patients such as cancer patients or so on. They are happy that others are suffering and not them. What kind of love of neighbour as oneself is that?
·
“What’s done is
done”.
You cannot change the past. What
is done is done but people use the cliché to justify forgiveness. The cliché aspires towards condemning people
for being punitive but it upholds a double standard when it allows rewards for
good works which are in the past and cannot be reversed either. Forgiveness cannot be granted on the grounds
that the past is immutable and unalterable for it would be malice to pardon a
person based on such a deceitful and unfair standard. Malicious forgiveness is a contradiction.
·
“I feel sorry
for Fr Paul. I know he covered up for
priests abusing children but it is so hard on him and he can’t undo the past.”
Compassion is an unpleasant feeling and should be reserved for the most
deserving people. Why degrade yourself
to lament for Fr Paul when there are babies starving in the world? Transfer your energy to that cause. Paul is stealing your compassion for he
certainly wants it.
Given that most people believe in free will and hold that nobody is
innocent and that punishment is for your own good and still have compassion for
one another so that they have mercy we see that compassion in the context of
saying that the past cannot be changed no and so what? is clearly saying the
sin does not matter. If it does not
matter then the criminal should be apologised to by society for they made a
fuss about laws being broken and then they turn around and make out they never
mattered. How could you have compassion
on people who deserve to suffer? People
say you can’t punish everybody so you have to have pity and forgive but why not
just not punish instead of forgiving?
Forgiveness given because you can’t punish is grudging and is not
forgiveness but only looks like it. You
would not be loving yourself as much as your neighbour if you let yourself get
upset or think you should get upset over somebody that deserves to suffer. Many Humanists luckily deny free will for
free will implies that compassion is always evil. It means the criminal can take no
satisfaction in people’s compassion for he knows they are having it because
they are made that way and not because it is right. It’s false.
The love your neighbour as yourself doctrine as taught by God, Moses and
Jesus is just a call to be false and two-faced and self-deceiving.
·
“If you won’t go
and get those chest pains seen to for yourself then do it for me”.
That is telling the person to love you more than himself. It shows how wrong and hypocritical the early
Christians and Jesus were to say that love your neighbour as yourself was the
basic rule of morality.
So Adam is good because he harms himself not you? That is loving yourself more than your
neighbour. If you loved your neighbour
as yourself you would be as opposed to his harming himself as you would be you.
To say that John’s action was despicable is the same as saying he is despicable if he was responsible for it. To say it was despicable is to say implicitly that John is despicable. It is to infer that John is despicable. The person might be saying explicitly that John’s deed was despicable and implicitly that John is despicable but that doesn’t mean that one is meant any less or said any less than the other. There is a perception that what is implied is not as important as what is made clear. That perception is wrong. You can’t separate the sin from the sinner for it is not sin that people abhor but the character of the sinner. In other words, they despise the kind of person the sinner is. To hate the sin is to hate the sinner.
The hypocritical claim that you can love the sinner not the sin is foundational to the Christian, Jewish and Islamic system so the whole system is based on a lie. Would you believe a person who said to you, "I have nothing against you. It is just your sin I have something against"? Love the sinner and hate the sin means love the sinner in spite of the sin which you hate so it is grudging love - if it can be called love at all. It can hardly mean you must love the sinner because of the sin you hate for that is impossible - you can't both hate the sin and love it. Religious love is fake love.
The person that says this is taken to be an altruist. But is it altruism to tell people to make
friends to avoid having a bad life for themselves? Of course not! It is telling people to have friends not for
the sake of the friends but for their own.
Mother says, “Son, ignore her. She is the one with a problem”.
If you are to hate the sin as Jesus said, - he said you are better losing
limbs than sinning - you have to worry about it even if you can’t do anything
about it.
If you care about the woman, and she has a problem, she needs help or
counsel and the advice is really saying that she should be left with her
problem even though it could make her do evil again.
Also, not to care is not to care about the woman. If everybody took that kind of advice, nobody
could be described as bullied. They
would be to blame for how they respond emotionally to the abuse so that it is
really them doing damage to themselves not the bully.
An altruist cannot give this advice.
Neither can an egoist. The woman
if she values her son because he is her’s will be
egoistic in relation to him. But to say
hatred should be ignored is to go against that egoism. It is really egotism on her part.
When you think, you can notice things, things that we just turn a blind eye to. You can see how much we invent our morality. Say people have free will. If they do they deserve blessings and or punishments. I am about to lose a vast fortune. Some person does something, foil robbers or something, that results in me keeping it. I would have lost all the money without that person. That person is entitled to half the money in justice for that is what he or she deserves. But the Church never supported this view which shows that it invents its love and its justice and twists everything so a religion that opposes love and justice as it must see them is hardly likely to be a channel of real revelations from a good God. As deniers of free will, we don’t accept that half of what is gained must be parted with.
So you didn't win the singing contest? What matters is that you tried.
Nobody joins a competition to just try. They join it to win. They join it to be judged the best. You don't try for the sake of trying but for the sake of winning. Trying to win is what matters until you lose! It doesn't matter when you lose! Does it matter or not? The hypocrites cannot make up their minds, they and their simpering consolations!
Nature operates by the law of survival of the fittest. We eat cows and lambs for they are no match against us. Those who have money have it because they are keeping it or taking it from those who don't. The advice above is asking you to be happy about trying and not winning. It is asking you to be happy about not being the fittest or if you are the fittest not being thought to be the fittest! It is asking you to accept danger and to deny that winning matters more than trying! You may say that winners didn't just become winners. They had to try as well. You may say then that trying is more important than winning. But the winners don't feel that. The person that tries hardest and fails to win will not be as happy as the person who tried less and won. To say that John and Joseph are equally good except that Joseph is an untidy writer is to say that if there is a choice Joseph should be allowed to die because he is not as good as John. To attack or condemn the fault is to attack the person.
Assertiveness and aggressiveness are often confused. Assertiveness means you stand up for your own rights without violating another person’s rights and expressing your needs and desires and opinions in an honest and plain way. Assertiveness is asserting your rights without trampling on the rights of anybody else. Aggression is involved when you are getting your rights by showing angry disrespect to others.
It is possible to be aggressive without feeling aggressive. It is possible to be assertive as a means of being aggressive. It is possible to be aggressive as a means of being assertive. If you calmly tell somebody they are useless it is said that you are practicing aggression though you may not feel any. The aggressive person says, "You are useless!" The assertive person says, "You are useless!". So what is the difference? The assertive person has no choice but to say this if it is true and nothing good can be said. It is not always clear where the difference is. In fact a lot of the time there is no difference. This will lead to many people being offended by assertive behaviour. It will make them bristle in anger.
All correction or attempted correction of others is patronising. It is acting the superior. An assertive trainer might say to the trainee secretary, "I used to make mistakes on the phone too. Please don't be offended at me pointing out your mistakes. I am only trying to help". In other words, don't be offended at me correcting you for I made mistakes too. You mean that you only get the right to correct if you made mistakes. That makes no sense and is in fact degrading yourself and denying you have any such thing as a right. If you have the right to degrade yourself then you have no rights at all! The trainee wants to hear you say what you said so that shows how deeply they really care for you! They care for themselves. You mean too that you have to look back on your mistakes before you can correct. Forgiving yourself is a big part of self-esteem. If you look back it is like having buried the hatchet and now you are marking the place where it was laid. You diminish your self-esteem and who you are now by looking back. When the trainee thinks about it, he or she will see that the trainer is still claiming to be superior to the trainee now. The snob who had humble beginnings is not made any less of a snob or a superior by these beginnings. Suppose there were two trainees and one of them was better than the other. Suppose God appeared saying to you that one of them had to die at his hand. And that he left it to you to choose which one. You will pick the better one. The point is that people do not consider or treat everybody with the same value. Sensing that others are better than us disturbs us. It hurts our sense of self-preservation- the strongest instinct we have!
In Christianity, the only rights you have is
to be abandoned by God and sentenced to death by God and sent to Hell forever
when you die. Jesus said that when you
were struck on one cheek turn the other.
So you are not allowed to feel any aggression. To be assertive is a sin as well for he
didn’t say, “If anybody hits you on one cheek and you can’t get away, turn the
other cheek. Don’t say like an assertive
person would that you are going to report them to the law if they hit you
again for their own sake as much as your own.” He would have seen assertiveness
as sinfully affirming rights you don’t have and therefore as a form of
aggression.
Somebody insults you and you are assertive. Then you say to them in a firm but not angry tone, "You have no right to say that to me. Maybe we need to talk about this problem and maybe solve it". You are still exercising violence. You are taking advantage of the human weakness that is so susceptible to influence to make a declaration in an attempt to cause a change in another person. You are objecting to another person's freedom.
You may object, "That would be true if you were playing on the fear people have of not fitting in or of being thought to be bad by others. But you are only reminding the man or woman that they can do better and that is no aggression." It is still aggression for the person knows that they are doing wrong and you are patronisingly reminding them. Patronising is a form of violence, it attacks the dignity of the other person by implying your dignity is more important than theirs.
Assertiveness is a lower level of aggression. It is a hypocritical form of aggression for it pays homage to the ridiculous notion that you can hate what somebody did but not them. When we feel somebody has done something evil it is the character of the person that offends us. We see the PERSON as evil. Better outward aggression than that simmering poisonous fake alternative to aggression that is called assertiveness. Faked goodness is worse than outright evil.
Just because you act assertive, that does not mean you intend to be assertive. In the same way, just because you do somebody a favour that does not mean that you intend to do them good. Perhaps you are only trying to suck up to them to use them in bed. Back to assertive. You can be assertive while wanting to do it to make the bully or difficult person feel inferior. It is aggression disguised as assertiveness. The rules against aggression and which support assertiveness only look at outwards appearances.
When you respond to a bully with aggression you could argue that if you upset the bully then that is the bully's problem. You could say we are all responsible for our reactions. If you responded to a bully with assertion you could still upset the bully. You would be saying then that it was his or her problem. So you have to say the same in relation to aggression. Bullies have the same nasty attitude then as assertive people: "If they are hurt by what I do or say then tough shit!"
If aggression is bad for it can't work with a bully, then how is assertion going to work? If a bully bullies despite you bullying her or him back, then it is no solution at all to tell you to be assertive. Being nice or as nice as an assertive person can be is guaranteed to make it worse for bullies are cowards deep down. The assertive person is to tell the bully that he or she is hurting her or him. That is just what the bully wants to hear. The rules show no real concern about helping the victims of bullies. The rules just want them to bully themselves by practicing a silly and impractical philosophy. The rule-makers want the esteem and glory of making what look and sound like fabulous rules at the expense of the victims. Its similar to that great champion of the family, the Roman Catholic Church urging married couples to pass on AIDS rather than use condoms for condoms are detrimental to family cohesion and stability.
Survival of the fittest is the law. Aggression is necessary for survival.
She had a baby and she wasn't married. She is no better than a whore. She is a whore that sold herself for nothing!
This insults all women who sell themselves. What about the woman who sells herself once to get food for her baby? These words are insulting her and judging her.
If you believe that prostitution is always wrong and that a prostitute is a whore then it must be worse to give your body for nothing than to give it for money to survive on. Then you are entitled to call an unwed mum a whore even to her face for it is the truth. She might not like it but society approves of loads of things being said to people that they don't like. For example, what teenager wants to hear that his or her homework is very bad? Plus would it make sense for the woman not to be offended by, "You had sex and had a baby and you were not married," and offended by being called a whore when that means the same thing?
John is a great guy. But he is not the guy for me.
TRANSLATION: I am still saying that as far as I am concerned John isn't that great. He doesn't attract me. I am putting him down. If I think John is great but he is not the guy for me in the sense that he is too good for me then I am putting myself down. In another way, I am still putting John down because if I believe I should put myself down and demean myself for others then I cannot object if others follow my example. If there was a choice between John and somebody I like better dying who would I choose? How can I expect John to be comforted if I say to him, "John you are a great guy. We are not right for each other."
Joan hit you last month. You hit her back today. She deserved it but it was wrong and I deplore your action. Revenge is wrong".
Is it just the breaking of the rule not to take revenge that angers you or the hitting? A teacher does not reprimand children for breaking the rule that they must do their homework but for harming themselves and damaging themselves by not doing their homework.
You wouldn't be so mad at the mere breaking of a rule! If Joan deserved it and she undoubtedly did if she hit a person of her own free will then you can't be angry because she was hit back. Your outrage is just a sanctimonious picking on the person who hit her back. You feel and act as if she didn't deserve to be hit back and that that is what is making you angry. You are implying that she was right to hit the victim and the victim was wrong to hit her back.
"I wrote that textbook to help people and not for praise."
If you didn't write it for overt praise, you wrote it that people would have a good opinion of your work which is the same as them having a good opinion of you. You didn't write the textbook for the sake of writing the textbook. You wrote it to please people and so that they would praise it. You also wrote it to praise yourself. You wrote it for praise after all.