What is universal to all humans is not reason or religions, not beliefs or ideas about morality, God, or the hereafter, or anything else. What is universal to all humans, of every time and place, are emotions. Indeed, emotions even connect us to nearly all other species of life in the world.
What is universal to all humans, in other words, is our happiness and our sadness, our surprise and our disgust, our fear and our anger. Yet while these emotions are universal to all, what triggers each and every one of them is different for every single person. Or simply put, emotions are objective realities for everyone, at least on some level, while "reason" assigns emotional values that are purely subjective to each individual.
The different narratives we tell ourselves and "believe," the stories we often cling to for our sense of meaning and identity, teach us what emotional values we should assign to different ideas, and great philosophies are then created to support why those ideas deserve only those values. And all of this is done for always the very same reason: to save us, and mostly from ourselves.
But even though our emotions are universal experiences, the values we give those experiences are always purely subjective. Even pain can be considered to be a very "good" thing, depending on why or where.
While slavery has seemed both natural and entirely moral to one culture, for example, it has seemed entirely reprehensible and immoral to another. And often what determines the values we give such ideas or practices, is our different religions, be they theistic, economic, political, and even scientific.
These various religions then all seek to convince us - with each relying on the others to support their claims - that the purely "subjective" associations they then make between our emotions and our ideas, are as "objectively" real as the emotions they are based on. But they are not.
This is why so many people think their emotional reaction to something is the surest proof that they are only reacting to the objective nature of that thing, even though the value of the emotion being relied upon to make this judgement - whether it's positive or negative - is always arbitrarily associated with that idea or behavior by the culture one is born into.
This is why the only universal natural law, and the only basis for any system of morality, is never God or religion, since both are simply justifications for assigning purely subjective values to "ideas" (which only allows people to surrender the moral responsibility for their own "beliefs" and behaviors to an imaginary "higher cause" or "power").
No, the only universal natural law and basis for any system of morality can only come from that which is the most universal to all human beings, in every time and place, and perhaps even to all other species of life there is. And that basis is not reason, religion, or any of our ideas. It is emotion, which is the basis of all empathy, captured in that universal principle found in every age across the globe of "do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
What is universal to all humans, in other words, is our happiness and our sadness, our surprise and our disgust, our fear and our anger. Yet while these emotions are universal to all, what triggers each and every one of them is different for every single person. Or simply put, emotions are objective realities for everyone, at least on some level, while "reason" assigns emotional values that are purely subjective to each individual.
The different narratives we tell ourselves and "believe," the stories we often cling to for our sense of meaning and identity, teach us what emotional values we should assign to different ideas, and great philosophies are then created to support why those ideas deserve only those values. And all of this is done for always the very same reason: to save us, and mostly from ourselves.
But even though our emotions are universal experiences, the values we give those experiences are always purely subjective. Even pain can be considered to be a very "good" thing, depending on why or where.
While slavery has seemed both natural and entirely moral to one culture, for example, it has seemed entirely reprehensible and immoral to another. And often what determines the values we give such ideas or practices, is our different religions, be they theistic, economic, political, and even scientific.
These various religions then all seek to convince us - with each relying on the others to support their claims - that the purely "subjective" associations they then make between our emotions and our ideas, are as "objectively" real as the emotions they are based on. But they are not.
This is why so many people think their emotional reaction to something is the surest proof that they are only reacting to the objective nature of that thing, even though the value of the emotion being relied upon to make this judgement - whether it's positive or negative - is always arbitrarily associated with that idea or behavior by the culture one is born into.
This is why the only universal natural law, and the only basis for any system of morality, is never God or religion, since both are simply justifications for assigning purely subjective values to "ideas" (which only allows people to surrender the moral responsibility for their own "beliefs" and behaviors to an imaginary "higher cause" or "power").
No, the only universal natural law and basis for any system of morality can only come from that which is the most universal to all human beings, in every time and place, and perhaps even to all other species of life there is. And that basis is not reason, religion, or any of our ideas. It is emotion, which is the basis of all empathy, captured in that universal principle found in every age across the globe of "do unto others as you would have others do unto you."
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