Joshua Roberts

One must have the intellectual courage to, once and for all; admit that there are no histories, that all history is merely a subjective and partial account. That even if we had a vast sensory array capable of sensing the entire planet in real time down to the molecular scale, that if we could pass that data into a relational system where it could be digested by software and rationalized by human users, even then we would have merely a More Accurate Historical Account and not, as we should very much like to have, a real History!

This is intellectual conscience itself, this is the key to the final door and it is, embodied, wisdom, for it is the love of knowledge itself.

To attack oneself and one’s own proofs, to never rest and to even invite attack from others that is the sign of a healthy and robust mind.

To acknowledge that even a point particle model of the entire universe in real time would only offer us a Model and that no matter how sophisticated that model may be, it is still an incomplete synthetic reference, to admit this! Such admission is the sign of our true future, a future where man comes back into harmony with nature, where technology is instrumentation and not a mere crutch for a hobbling civilization. For beware, though you climb to the greatest height, if you do so with such a crutch, when you arrive there and put that crutch away your stance may falter!

Science as instrumentation which allows the greatest instrument, Mankind, to play the music of the spheres, for the universe truly is a sort of fractal hologram and we are, all of us, inextricably bound up in this integral nature. Man as a tuning fork which may resonate the purpose of organic life, man as steward over organic life not the master, not the servant, but mankind as a key, mankind as an instrument on which the meter of the universe can be made sensible as a sort of living music.

Do People Become Atheists so They Can Act Immorally?

There are probably some people who do, but largely no, in fact most atheists start out religious because that’s how they were indoctrinated and gradually come to openly oppose religion after conducting analysis. In my own life I have spent nearly a decade making a comparative study of world religions, from the Elder Eddas to the Eleusinian Mysteries, I love the perspective of religion as astro-theology when it comes to judeo-christianity but the same thing applies to many other systems. Many of the earliest metaphysical systems that we might call pagan religions are closer almost to a quantum view of nature, in that they posit that there are “gods in all things” etc.

The problem here is that without morality one must stand on ethics, which is sufficient, but requires Other People to hold a person to a standard. Deity is more effective because it uses the Threat of repercussions after death (about which we have no experience and therefore it is terrifying) or within this own life via an omnipotent and omnipresent mind. We mustn’t forget however that morality is a perspective informed by a set of values which are human, they are not divine, and they are codified by humans. Thus the two approaches are identical! It is just that with the moralistic one there is an injected fear of divine reprisal to sweeten the pot and keep people from doing ill to one another or acting unjustly. But isn’t this also the source of a greater volatility within the morality system? All too often we have evidence of god being used as the justification for bloodshed!

I prefer ethics, without a concept of the divine, governed by a culture (which, as plato reminds us, is a difficult thing to produce and should be our primary concern) a culture which rigorously pursues the concept of justice.