I fully believe that 95%+ of the people on earth aren’t fully conscience or self-aware. The ones that aren’t just follow the amoeba pattern of simple stimulus-response. You can see examples of this on this board and you may be one yourself. Look at famous politicians for obvious examples. The problem isn’t isolated to any particular sex, race, age, ethnicity, or even general intellectual aptitude.
I have met people that are fully self-aware in all of them but it is a subset of all populations as well. If you think it is a simple matter of not knowing someone well enough to judge them on this trait, that is not true. I have close family members and friends who are objectively intelligent but there is no evidence that their is anything behind the curtain. More than a few people have described me as an old soul (whatever that means) and we can recognize each other very quickly.
I think you might be one of them, because virtually every person who has made a reference to the human race and a trait within it has quoted some variation of “extremely high” expressed as 99% or 98% or 99.6478566% or somesuch. Apparently we’re all doing or have something apart from a miniscule minority, or no-one does. Given this isn’t really how the world works for most things I don’t think it’s any more likely when cited in opinions such as these.
Those aren’t any more transcendent standards that the law or your personal opinion are. In fact, there’s little difference at best; “the Bible says so” isn’t any more “transcendent” than “the law says so”; and if someone claims to be making moral judgments according to what “God” tells them, that’s just giving a fake stamp of divine approval to your whims.
[ul]
[li]There’s no evidence of any god or gods, and no agreement on what they supposedly want.[/li][li]Even if they do exist, we can’t communicate with them.[/li][li]Even if they did exist, just because they have an opinion on the morality of something doesn’t make it true.[/li][/ul]
If a god wants you to rape someone, does that make it a “transcendent” good? And if your answer is that <insert god name here> would never ask you to do such a thing; that’s just a way of admitting that what you are actually doing is just labeling your own particular moral code as divine.
I don’t want to ban religion, as faith can provide solace and community to many BUT:
> Any use of religious argument in political debate or public policy-making should be banned
> Religions should have to follow the same laws on equality and hate speech as everyone else, so sexist practises, such as banning women priests, or preaching homophobic ideas because of some vague sentence in an old book are illegal.
> Religion also no longer has any legal place in the marriage business. Marriages (SS and OS) are all civil matters, and religions may bless those unions if they wish to.
> Religious schools are banned
Also
> Parental rights are abolished. Parents only get to raise their kids as long as they do so responsibly. If they prove unfit, then professionals (special ‘child rearers’) are appointed to oversea the child and make the major decisions about that child’s future.
> All foreigners must take the British driving test before driving on UK soil.
> Healthy people on unemployment benefit must work five days a week either on community projects or at employment centres, applying for jobs, with time off for attending job interviews. Nobody gets paid for watching TV everyday.
> Children should have a ‘manners’ class throughout their schooling, teaching them how to be nice to old ladies, give up their bus seats to pregnant women and turn off their mobile phones in public places such as on buses and in restaurants.
> Healthy school dinners are compulsory. No sneaking out to buy a burger in your lunch hour.
> Rapists and domestic batterers get their dicks cut off and are branded on their foreheads
A couple… I don’t know how extreme they are, but what the hell.
I believe that capital gains should be tax-free for the first $50-75k of capital gains made. This prevents people from being taxed when they (for example) have to sell stocks to cover a period of unemployment/pay medical expenses/retire… while it doesn’t make a dent in Bill Gates’ or Goldman Sach’s tax bills.
In a world where computers increasingly do our thinking for us, I do not think the best “education path” (for want of a better word) for today’s children involves them learning a lot of math and science. The biggest, most marketable and in-demand job skill in the future won’t be technical in nature, it will be interpersonal: how well one relates to other people.