Does not believing a God exists, inherently lead to the secular leftist environments we see in San Francisco, New York, throughout East Asia, and virtually all of Europe? Here is a fun little intellectual exercise, a Theory of Everything(TOE) on why this basic assumption about life, tends to lead to the Leftist environments around the world. Feel free to share objections and critiques.
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If there is no God, then there is no afterlife, and personal happiness becomes the greatest focus on the individual level. On the societal level, we have to be our own messiah's(since another savior/deity isn't coming anyways), and save ourselves by making heaven on earth, in the only life where we'll ever get to enjoy a heaven, where all people get along, there's no disease or warfare, basic safety nets are in place, the poor are fed, and we can all do whatever makes us happy.
But one person's version of heaven may be another person's hell, so we need to run behavior against a secular barometer of ethics: Is it Safe, is it Healthy, and do all participants involved Consent. Guns aren't safe, tabacco isn't healthy, and animals don't consent to sex with humans, so all of these things are bad, unless we can prove differently. If you can't help addictive behaviors that are unhealthy, such as drug addiction(other then cigarettes), then do those drugs in places where your drug use and habit doesn't effect others. This barometer of ethics combines with core social values of Equality, Secularism, Multiculturalism, Pacifism, Feminism, etc. to create a heaven we can all share, one where most people's personal happiness can be achieved in the one life they have to live.
This is why most secular societies also don't reproduce(in terms of total fertility rate). Because children often get in the way of you enjoy adult playgrounds such as San Francisco and London and Hong Kong. They get in the way of you having multiple sexual partners a year, or from going out late every night with your friends, or from backpacking across SE Asia or Latin America, or from being involved 100% in a passion or hobby that you enjoy. You have aberrations of course, there are leftist socialist cultures who have at-replacement rate fertility, but a lot of those are often thanks to newly-arrived non-secular immigrants who come from cultures that have high birth rates.
The non-belief in a God bringing focus to the importance of this lifetime, and the kind of heaven we'd like it to be, also requires a large state, in order to create the necessary framework for all of this to play out in, to regulate morality so that individual's fun doesn't come at the expense of one another, and provide the services that allow us to abandon individual responsibilities/obligations, apart from supporting the state with our taxes.
But centralizing power invites so many abuses, so we have to incapacitate the state, from being violent, by permeating every function of government with the value of pacifism. The state can't kill or physically harm. It can't put citizens to death. Cops shouldn't carry weapons because of the likelihood for their using these arms. Judges lenient in their sentencing because prison time eats up the time you have to enjoy yourself. No involvement in foreign wars. Pacifism, guiding state policy, has no intellectual basis, and is just a social construct; it is because it has to be, in order to allow for the kind of world we want to make for ourselves in this one life we have to live.
This curbs the threat that the state poses to its citizenry, allowing the state to grow even larger and be more involved in greater facets of life. But it doesn't solve the funding issue that helps it grow, and allows it to sustain itself over the long term, especially since secular societies are too busy enjoying their one life to live by not breeding. So we have to bring in immigrants to breed on their behalf, to create the future taxpayer of tomorrow who will support the system that will take care of us when we retire early(or at least, early enough to enjoy our one life to live). Not only is lax-immigration policies a must, but allowing our future taxpayer-creators a comfortable environment to live in, we must have a multicultural setting to make them feel more at home. Their jarring ways will eventually evaporate over the long term, wherein they will see the beauty of our secular ways and convert over to it.
So there. Heaven on earth. Big government, pacifism, multiculturalism, early retirement, secular ethics, death penalty, gun ownership, anti-smoking, liberal sexual standards, unarmed police, not reproducing children, immigration, non-interventionist foreign policy, I managed to weave it all in there lol, which was fun. Like all of life, everything we do is built atop what are already a mountain of assumptions, and I think that getting to fundamental core assumptions at the root of it all, helps us to understand why people do what they do, and from what premises about the world they reason from. The absence of a God doesn't necessarily have to lead to any or all of the following conclusions, there are obviously other values at play that create the kind of frameworks that the Godless tend to build. Feel free to critique, as I'm only 28 and don't know everything but please don't take it too seriously. It's just an intellectual exercise for fun.
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22 Aug 2015, 10:08 pm
