On Christianity and Its God
Man sins. God redeems man by sending a physical manifestation of himself to Earth to die a painful and gruesome death. Where’s the rationale?

Christians have locked themselves in their cozy little world, choosing to walk doggedly in the steps of a Jewish rebel whose message has been twisted by centuries of Church authorities playing petty power games.

It appears that the only incentive for Christians to be moral is some pay-off in heaven or payback in hell, whereas non-theists choose to be moral because they genuinely believe it is the right thing to do.

Christian fundamentalists are narrowminded bigots mindlessly following the warped message of a Jewish rebel on a stick who died 2000 years ago.

On Civilization
The first step in constructing a viable ethics is the recognition of truth, of how humans behave and the underlying psychology behind those actions. For so many centuries, starting from the rise of agriculture and civilization, human nature and pleasure has been savagely repressed, to be supplanted with a doleful yearning for the afterlife. It is high time we regained the spirit of humanity that coursed through the veins of our hunter-gathering ancestors twenty thousand years ago. It is time we shed these shackles.

Egalitarian democracy is not the exception, but overwhelmingly the rule, in primate societies. Our earliest ancestors up to the last hunter-gatherers were probably better models for the U.S. Constitution than any philosophical treatise by Locke. Only with the advent of agriculture, cities, and “civilization” (and its discontents) has society become hierarchical, cruelly unjust, and often exploitative.

On Epistemology
Despite the ultimate subjectivity of human perception, we should not lose sight of the reality that exists independent of whether humans perceive it or not. In other words, we may argue about how well the signifier corresponds to the signified, but we must not forget that the signified continues to exist regardless of what signifier we associate with it.

Human attempts at understanding render the world more psychologically hospitable. And the underlying axiom of productive philosophy, that the world indeed consists of problems rather than mysteries, is the most psychologically comforting idea of all.

       

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