Cascode substitutions

Is that not essentially the standard Christian world view? You go to hell if you are a non-believer/sinner, go to heaven if you are a believer and repent your sins?

that goes for most religions

you could take the dark view that most religions are preoccupied with getting life over with, breaking as few rules as possible, so you can die and go to a much better place

-Lasse

Including the Lord of the Flies society. The book ends in primitivism, but had the story continued, there would rapidly have been either complete dispersion and death, or renewed order and cooperation, though probably at a lower level than the society the boys were born into.

There are bats who will share a meal, but won't share with other bats that have a record of not sharing. That is, they keep score individually, using a scale of fairness.

Morality is a social construct, but the idea of fairness arises naturally, even for bats. "Did I receive as much food previously as those I'm sharing with now?" requires only a single variable of storage (an IIR filtered "proportion").

Morality draws increasingly fine distinctions ("with whom should I share?") that require counting and scoring things that are not directly linked to physical evidence. One tribal society in New Guinea had evolved a morality which placed treachery as their highest ideal - as long as the treachery involved a member of the tribe down the river. They referred to their cannibalistic game of befriending someone before eating them as "fattening with friendship for the slaughter". Needless to say the missionaries were bemused at their intense admiration for Judas! He was their true hero of the story. (Read the story in "Peace Child").

The point is that the universality of the concept of fairness should not be used to support the idea of universal morals. Morals are based in social pragmatism, nothing more.

Clifford Heath.

From the other side of the Pacific, that looks like a dominant American trait, rather than a human one. I'm sure there are societies which are even more polarized, but none so large and powerful.

How else could you explain Trump's popularity?

It's just simplism, primitivism, to see everything in black and white. Maturity is when you start to see issues in more than one dimension.

All institutions are intrinsically coercive. It's why institutions are formed. Someone realizes that one of their ideas is not universally held, and that threatens their security, their self-belief, their view of truth. So they enlist others who support them and create barriers and divisions between "them" and "us", and an institution is born. Come join our club, all you have to do is believe in *X*, and you can be one of us, protected by the group from the very uncertainty of the idea that unites us.

The distinction between religions and other institutions is that religions play the "eternity" card. Join us or your immortal soul is under threat, you'll suffer *forever*! It's such a weak card of course, because it's so apparent that we die, we rot, we are temporary. Because this card is so weak, it requires the most strenuous support, the most creative fantasies, the deepest self-deceptions. It leads to the greatest perversities and injustice.

And that pretty-much explains the world in which we find ourselves.

Clifford Heath

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at least some of what we have is a universal innate quality of humans.

But art tends to depicts the artist's idea of what constitutes an essential truth. Compare and contrast Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and George O rwell's "1984". George Orwell wrote his book in 1948, and William Golding w rote "Lord of the Flies" in 1954, and both are pretty pessimistic.

Dante's world view included purgatory, where you went to get persuaded to r epent of your sins. The local theologians of his time were in the habit of selling services of absolution for the dead, so that the living relatives c ould buy the dead out of purgatory into heaven.

Luther was quite rude about that, but then Calvinists believed in predestin ation, which made sincere repentance something that had been programmed int o the sinner at birth (not that Luther was a Calvinist).

I always thought that was for babies or some such. Those who had never had an *opportunity* to Believe. But apparently not according to wiki

"Only those who die in the state of grace but have not in life reached a sufficient level of holiness can be in Purgatory, and therefore no one in Purgatory will remain forever in that state or go to hell"

And here I thought it was in Colorado.