The New Tribalism

First a preface. Over at Talk Polywell we are discussing the rise of libertarianism in America. Actually more of a rebirth. In that context a discussion of a certain commenter on the board, Diogenes, came up. I refer to him as “D”. He is an atheist who tries to sell Christianity to the benighted masses. Commenter Betruger opens a section of the discussion with.

So… Diogenes.

How do you explain how childishly easy it is to get to as respectable a moral livelihood as your pet fav Christianity, without as you put it being infected or otherwise fait-accompli’d into said fair livelihood by Christianity’s influence? A large part of it requires only to know oneself, as put by some guy from round where the original Diogenes made a name for himself, and recognizing that there is just no actual gain in others’ suffering and much gain in helping them be Good. Because, at this point in human evolution at least, we humans have the same Goodness at the heart of us all; even when it’s buried so deep under trauma, delusion, etc, as to be out of reach for today’s various methods of “therapy”.

And how is it impossible to be fair without religion if those monkeys do it? Would you say they are necessarily religious somehow, in their little monkey brains? If I wasn’t sitting next to the same kinda 21st century hardware as you are, to have this conversation, I swear I might wink my eyes and suspect I was arguing with some doctor of phrenology.
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You can do anything you want with laws except make Americans obey them.

My reply was:

I swear I might wink my eyes and suspect I was arguing with some doctor of phrenology.

Well in fact you are. If you have been following D as closely as I have you would know that he is not a believer (he has mentioned it around here). His premise is that it would be better for society (him obviously) if you were. And since he knows the tropes by heart he tries to convince you. In a word the man is a sham.

His theory is that without that vengeful god in your head you would be raping, robbing, murdering, and slamming smack. So he attempts to put it in your head even though it is absent from his.

Because of his strange belief he never examines how moral codes arose before Christianity (the Jews actually). As a student of Jewish history I can tell you that the Jews of antiquity borrowed heavily from the cultures they were immersed in with a few ideas of their own. They were particularly fond of Zoroastrian culture and adopted some religious memes from them.

From this one might deduce that certain features of morality are innate and require nothing to enforce them other than being human. The Founding of the US was in its own imperfect way an attempt to find that minimum set of laws everyone could adhere to – thus allowing people of a multitude of cultures to live together. In fact the Jews had come up with a similar idea milena ago with their concept of the Noahide laws. The Jews themselves were burdened with 613 laws (about which a body of common law developed). Non-Jews only had seven. I wrote some on Noahide laws here.

D is in fact more Islamic than American. i.e. without one culture we are doomed. This is in fact a prescription for conflict.

The libertarians are trying to get back to the original concept. “What minimum set of laws can a diversity of cultures operate under.” Jefferson got it:

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. -Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson is the chief hero of modern libertarians.