I have been thinking...ouch
The "moral void' and spiritual desert' that hijacked my own innate conscience'ness during my time at RSE (Seven Years) still haunts me to this day.
How could I have allowed this happen? given the very reason I joined RSE was to develop my consciousness into a perfect union and flowering of spiritually and science, God realised... leave no footprints! not the least for eradicating deceptions, divisions and disease that plague mankind.
RSE Brainwashing? Absolutely.. but there are many dark facets of that brain-dirtying' to bring to light and cleanout!..
As time passes more and more revelations about JZ Knight and RSE will surface, this " freight train' will be a catastrophic for many RSE students.
And that is the heartbreaking disgrace of JZ Knight and her RSE cohorts to have added their name to the list of despotic individuals and destructive organizations that plague humankind while deceiving the trust and courage of those willing to go out on a limb to make the world a better place.
So here is some food for thought on this subject that I hope will bring some understanding...
The Moral Void - Less Wrong
by Eliezer_Yudkowsky.
David.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky website link..The Moral Void - Less Wrong
In 1966, the Israeli psychologist Georges Tamarin presented, to 1,066 schoolchildren ages 8-14, the Biblical story of Joshua's battle in Jericho:
"Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword... And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD."
After being presented with the Joshua story, the children were asked:
"Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?"
66% of the children approved, 8% partially disapproved, and 26% totally disapproved of Joshua's actions.
A control group of 168 children was presented with an isomorphic story about "General Lin" and a "Chinese Kingdom 3,000 years ago". 7% of this group approved, 18% partially disapproved, and 75% completely disapproved of General Lin.
"What a horrible thing it is, teaching religion to children," you say, "giving them an off-switch for their morality that can be flipped just by saying the word 'God'." Indeed one of the saddest aspects of the whole religious fiasco is just how little it takes to flip people's moral off-switches. As Hobbes once said, "I don't know what's worse, the fact that everyone's got a price, or the fact that their price is so low." You can give people a book, and tell them God wrote it, and that's enough to switch off their moralities; God doesn't even have to tell them in person.
But are you sure you don't have a similar off-switch yourself? They flip so easily—you might not even notice it happening.
If you do happen to think that there is a source of morality beyond human beings... and I hear from quite a lot of people who are happy to rhapsodize on how Their-Favorite-Morality is built into the very fabric of the universe... then what if that morality tells you to kill people?
If you believe that there is any kind of stone tablet in the fabric of the universe, in the nature of reality, in the structure of logic—anywhere you care to put it—then what if you get a chance to read that stone tablet, and it turns out to say "Pain Is Good"? What then?
Maybe you should hope that morality isn't written into the structure of the universe. What if the structure of the universe says to do something horrible?
And if an external objective morality does say that the universe should occupy some horrifying state... let's not even ask what you're going to do about that. No, instead I ask: What would you have wished for the external objective morality to be instead? What's the best news you could have gotten, reading that stone tablet?
Go ahead. Indulge your fantasy. Would you want the stone tablet to say people should die of old age, or that people should live as long as they wanted? If you could write the stone tablet yourself, what would it say?
Maybe you should just do that?
I mean... if an external objective morality tells you to kill people, why should you even listen?
There is a courage that goes beyond even an atheist sacrificing their life and their hope of immortality. It is the courage of a theist who goes against what they believe to be the Will of God, choosing eternal damnation and defying even morality in order to rescue a slave, or speak out against hell, or kill a murderer... You don't get a chance to reveal that virtue without making fundamental mistakes about how the universe works, so it is not something to which a rationalist should aspire. But it warms my heart that humans are capable of it.
I have previously spoken of how, to achieve rationality, it is necessary to have some purpose so desperately important to you as to be more important than "rationality", so that you will not choose "rationality" over success.
To learn the Way, you must be able to unlearn the Way; so you must be able to give up the Way; so there must be something dearer to you than the Way. This is so in questions of truth, and in questions of strategy, and also in questions of morality.
The "moral void" of which this post is titled, is not the terrifying abyss of utter meaningless. Which for a bottomless pit is surprisingly shallow; what are you supposed to do about it besides wearing black makeup?
No. The void I'm talking about is a virtue which is nameless.
The Moral Void - Less Wrong
http://lesswrong.com/lw/rr/the_moral_void/
http://yudkowsky.net/
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