Pagan morality

[iambiguous]

ETHICS AND COMMUNITY
Principles of Moral Thought and Action
From the RELIGION LIBRARY site: Paganism

Here is a list of “Nine Noble Virtues” as used by some Norse Pagans:

Courage - the ability to face both the joys and the challenges of life fearlessly;
Truth - honesty and integrity in one’s words as well as one’s actions;
Honor - strength of character as reflected in one’s behavior and trustworthiness;
Fidelity - loyalty and faithfulness to family, tribal, and spiritual commitments;
Discipline - consistency in effort toward reaching one’s goals;
Hospitality - kindness to strangers, travelers, and those who are in need;
Industriousness - willingness to work hard toward excellence in productivity;
Self-Reliance - pride in the ability to care for one’s own needs;
Perseverance - refusal to admit defeat or to let obstacles thwart one’s efforts.

On the other hand, without reference to a particular context and to moral narratives pertaining to one or another set of behaviors aimed at sustaining one or another community standard regarding one or another situation in which conflicting goods might exist, this is basically the equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt be truthful, courageous, honorable, etc., to that which the community itself has embraced as the most reasonable and virtuous interactions within the community itself.

Each and every community down through the ages historically and across the globe culturally then able to sustain their own “standards” content in the belief that their own reflects either the One True Path or [at least] the “best of all possible worlds”.

On the other hand…

As is the case of the Wiccan Rede, the culturally specific values of various Pagan traditions are not universally accepted - not even within a specific cultural tradition.

Though, again, how is that not just like all the rest of us with our own historical, cultural and personal experiences shaping and molding our own existential value judgments. Only with Pagans there is this “spiritual” element. Not linked to a particular God, perhaps, but still something that can be embraced as the equivalent of an “intrinsic self” that basically allows you to rationalize anything that you happen to believe “here and now”. Each Pagan with his or her own “spiritual Self” predicated entirely on his or her own personal experiences with nature itself.

Many Pagans consider environmental stewardship and care for the earth to be a central tenet of their religious ethics. Such an emphasis arises less out of traditional maxims or virtues and more out of the widespread contemporary recognition that humanity needs to redefine our relationship with the earth. Consequently, some Pagans feel inspired to engage in personal environmental activities (recycling, organic gardening, using green energy and reusable items like cloth grocery bags), participate in environmental advocacy groups (from national organizations like the Sierra Club to regional and local associations devoted to conservation work), and engage in political action on behalf of environmental causes. Others within the larger Pagan community may choose not to engage in such activity, either because they do not consider it spiritually necessary or because they do not see a necessary connection between Pagan spirituality and environmental activism. For example, they may prefer to engage in spiritual or magical efforts on behalf of nature, rather than emphasizing social or political action.

Spiritual and magical efforts. That must have the fossil fuel industry quaking in their boots.

But, again, the most crucial factor being that in whatever way you choose to confront the climate change debate as a Pagan, you are able to intertwine and then embed your own personal agenda into this spiritual Self that enables you to at least be comforted that your efforts are in sync with something that transcends your own infinitesimally insignificant existence. You are part of an overarching “soulful” Reality that for some puts them “at one” with the universe – the Goddess! – itself.

Thus, from my frame of mind, it always revolves basically around what you are able to “think up” that least disturbs you about the, at times, grim realities of world that we live in.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

[Meno2 (Meno_)]

The thing is a priority has to link convention to pagan morality

The question of how comes in

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Like all behaviours morality evolved because it offered an advantage.
Species adopting a cooperative survival and reproductive strategy would greatly benefit if they also evolved the traits that made these strategies more efficient and effective.

This is easy…only brainwashed prejudiced minds fail to grasp it.
The real mystery is why do birds call out warning when this exposes them to predation.
Many species call out warning vocalizations when a predator is perceived, even those that do not practice cooperative survival strategies but do practice cooperative reproductive strategies.

Herding, schooling, flocking offers advantages to individuals, the mass of uniform individuals create confusing in predators - they are unable to focus on one target.
But what of solitary species?
Why do some solitary birds call out distress warning, drawing attention upon themselves?

Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that it must offer a greater advantage in the longer in, because a multitude of eyes is better than two.
Species that evolved this innate reaction must have multiplied their survivability when other species reciprocated.
A multitude of calls create the same confusion in a predator.

---

Uniform thinking in humans offers a similar advantage.

[Costard]

Evolution is only a theory and over large timescales seems to give rise to absurdities. Consider the dinosaurs - who were the apex predators for 165 million years - mostly wiped out by a large rock in just a few years (and not just the dinosaurs, over 75% of all living species were wiped out with them). Suddenly, those who are the most fit, the apex, are removed making way for those less fit to proliferate. An evolutionist can only respond that the dinosaurs (and all the other species that went extinct) were not fit enough to survive the radical change in the environment, hence those that survived were the most fit. The most fit suddenly become the least fit and vice versa… nature up ends. But scientists believe that life rebounded after only a few years of the impact of Chixilub (https://www.science.org/content/article/life-rebounded-just-years-after-dinosaur-killing-asteroid-struck), which means that an event that lasted only a few years out of the entire history of life on Earth, 3 years out of 3.7 billion years (which in percentage terms is for all intents and purposes zero! (@0.000000008%)) had a vast and everlasting effect on how the world appears to us today.

If nature can be inverted so spectacularly and irreversibly in the blink of an eye arguing about the minutaie of evolutionary change that occured since then seems absurd.

It seems almost reasonable to call it an act of God.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Evola

The ritual and sacral element was the foundation of the authority of both the higher castes and of the father in the ancient patrician family. In Western Aryan societies such as Greece and Rome, the pater familiae originally enjoyed a status similar to that of the priest-king. The term pater was synonymous with the king (hence the words rex, αναξ, βασιλευς); it conveyed the idea of spiritual authority as well as that of power and majestic dignity. According to some views with which I totally concur, the state is an application on a larger scale of the same principle that in the beginning constituted a patrician family. Therefore the pater, though he was the military leader and the lord of justice of his relatives and slaves, in primis et ante omnia was the person entrusted with performing those traditional rites and sacrifices proper to every family, the rites and sacrifices that constituted its nonhuman legacy.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Voegelin

The sensualist epistemology has no bearing on the internal dimensions of human existence in which are placed the dynamic relations between pleasures, pains, passions, good and evil. In spite of the terminology of sensations which seems to anchor the world of morals firmly in experiences of the external world, the actual analysis throws us back into an atmosphere of internal balances and tensions. We do not know of any good and evil in itself, but only call good and evil that which we associate with pleasures and pains. But there is somehow an objective good and evil which has its peculiar character of causing in us pleasure and pain. Is there, after all, a pre-stabilized harmony between objective good and evil and subjective pleasure and pain? Locke’s Essay, as we have seen, does not offer an answer to the question; Locke never elaborated a philosophy of human existence, although he came near the problem through his concept of the “constitution of the mind.” This, question, left open by Locke, is the question which occupies the French moralistes of the eighteenth century. What Vauvenargues takes up the Lockean categories of sensation and reflection, he narrows the meaning of sensation to the meaning of an impression that comes through the senses, and then discards it as uninteresting; and he makes reflection the organ by which we penetrate the structure of human existence. From “the experience of our being” we derive the ideas of “grandeur, pleasure, power”; from the experience of “the imperfection of our being” we derive the ideas of “smallness, subjection, misery” – “voila toutes nos passion.” Pleasure and pain are no longer irreducible, simple ideas; they refer to something more fundamental in the constitution of the mind: beyond pleasure and pain (and, incidentally, beyond good and evil) lies tire experience of being, with its precarious balance of power and subjection, of perfection and imperfection, of existence under the threat of annihilation. The shift away from Locke reveals its meaning as the attempt to penetrate beyond pleasure and pain to the foundations of being and to rebuild a philosophy of morals within the framework of a philosophy of existence. The Preoccupation with a genetic construction of the moral universe reveals its meaning as the attempt to find the existential foundation of morals at a time when the traditional Christian and humanistic foundations had broken down.
[size=80][From Enlightenment to Revolution] [/size]

Morality, and its ethical amendments, find their source in simple biological functions - pain/pleasure - and the probability for either.

Moral behaviours evolved - were naturally selected - because they offered an advantage to those individuals that practiced them…and became innate.
These moral behaviours are not exclusive to homo sapiens, but humans encoded them, and subsequently added to them ethical amendments, due to their success, extending and broadening their applications.
Mosaic Laws were the first documented ethical rules, even if these were broadly practiced across the world, and were part of unspoken rules of conduct, and the Golden Rule, facilitating the development and stability of complex socioeconomic systems.
These ethical codes of conduct are currently going through further amendments to deal with multicultural, multiracial, social systems, and a variety of emerging sexual and psychological byproducts of genetic mutations - caused by unregulated and unculled reproduction.

[iambiguous]

Yo, Maia! You’re up!!

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Many of those who deny morality seek absolution for something they’ve done, or intend to do.
From what I know of human nature such people don’t feel ashamed for what they’ve done to another but what they’ve done to themselves. The other is simply the one who holds them accountable, continuously reminding them, denying them the relief of forgetting their past choices, based on bad judgments calls, resulting in terrible, for them, consequences.
Left to their own devices they would easily fail to recall, or twist events in such a way as to release them from most, if not all, responsibility, but the other will not allow them to forget nor to spin their way out of their guilt, relative to a shared standard of conduct. It is this shared standard they now nullify hoping to accomplish their objective.
Without a shared standard of conduct – evolved to ensure the common welfare – they imagine they can reduce the consequences to nonsense.
Would it surprise us if such people also deny free-will? Would it not, in fact, complete the picture?

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

To be a heathen is to be ethnic. Ignoring ethnic traditions is pure subversion.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Shame requires objectivity - the mental ability to perceive oneself and other, from a htird-person perspective.
Schopenhauer defined ‘genius’ using a similar description, as will-less knowing: to know with no personal will corrupting what is known.
Empathy, void of sympathy/antipathy, is true empathy.

Trapped in subjectivity, seeking relief in intersubjectivity, is a description of retardation.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uBbmuvW-Kc[/youtube]
The example of social etiquette, which is socially determined.
I place this on the ethical side - in the gene/meme dynamic.

My use of the term ‘moral’ is in reference to social rules that evolve not due to culture but to natural consequences.

For example:
intergroup violence - developing into laws against murder, rape, etc. - is not relative to culture, since all cultures all societies - including animal societies - prohibit intergroup violence.
Why?
Because this decreases group cohesion, effect group health and reduces group competitiveness.
The advantages of cooperative survival strategies are severely reduced or completely negated by intergroup violence.

So, good/bad concerning intergroup violence has nothing to do with god, or culture, but on the consequences.
Nature, therefore, naturally selected traits that enhanced the advantages of cooperative strategies.
These became innate and were eventually encoded as moral laws.
Now, due to chaos and the mutations that occurring reproduction, mutations may arise that may contradict these innate communal traits.
Especially when populations explode, as in modern times, and mutations are compounding, since sheltering is preventing natural processes from purging them form a populations gene-pool.

We know these natural inhibitors to individual behaviours - which is what morals are - by other names…like altruism, compassion, tolerant, reciprocal, kind, etc…all of them referring to a moral code of behaviour.
We see them across species, so they cannot be cultural nor manmade, and we see them across cultures, so they must be necessary, not requiring a god.
They are necessary because without them cooperative reproductive and survival strategies are impossible.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

@Heidegger

History teaches us that the nomads did not become what they are because of the bleakness of the desert and the steppes, but that they have even left numerous wastelands behind them that had been fertile and cultivated land when they arrived, and that men rooted in the soil have been able to create for themselves a native land, even in the wilderness.

From their sojourns into the deserts of the real, they emerged reborn through their divine hosts, like Jesus after rejecting Satan’s temptations, appropriating and reducing to sand what had been built of hard stone, before leaving to find new stone castles to erode, leaving behind them dunes shifting in the wind.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Facts dont care about your feelings. I would argue it doesn’t matter if mythologies are useful, bc if they are not true then you can’t just decide to believe something bc it would be neat if it was true, and we know we can get along perfectly well without them.
Abraham’s one-god’s utility is as an “all seeing”, all-knowing, authoritarian, no man can escape because it only exists in his mind - and speaks to him as his inner voice, his conscience.

This inner voice can become innate when the moral behaviour is ingrained in an individual; naturally selected as part of his species social nature.
An individual innately knows what is good or bad, or what is socially acceptable and what is not, because it contradicts the group’s welfare or their shared ideals.

The issue is how to deal with random mutations that arise, producing a corruption of this genetically innate feeling.

Behaviours are good or bad relative to an objective.
All value judgments are triangulations.

Moral behaviour evolved with survival being its objective - survival through cooperative strategies.
Ethics developed as amendment of the previous, which expanded or adjusted them to adapt them to changing circumstances, such as larger group sizes.
What is immoral; or unethical is whatever behaviour contradicts group cohesion, or a group’s objectives.

Ethical rules against homosexuality, for example, ensure that whatever sexual dysfunctions may arise, due to mutational loads, that these behaviours will not spread because they challenge group cohesion and its long-term self-preservation.
Having said that, homosexuality, transexuality - any sexual unfit mutation - may increase when a population is having a severe impact on its environment. A sort of natural corrective, that inhibits a group continuing propagation.
But this will decrease a group’s competitive edge, relative to other groups.

These sexual mutations have a demographic impact that may prove to be the end of a group that cannot maintain its human resources.

On display is modern man’s growing nihilism…partly due to Empire Collapse.
When empires collapse it is experienced as an ‘end of the world’.
Individuals born and raised under its beliefs and lifestyles begin to feel alienated from what has proven to be imperfect.
Such individuals begin to question everything, even what they once considered self-evident, and reasonable.
Some begin to doubt their own judgments, or their own senses, having lost all confidence in themselves.
All that they held to be certain has proven to be wrong, or imperfect, so what is there to be certain of, other than uncertainty itself?

This is when superstitions, like Abrahamism, flourish.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

A dagger sheath with Swastikas unearthed from Tillya Tepe (Persian: طلاتپه) which means Golden Hill. The hoard found there is often known as the Bactrian gold.

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

“Spirit alone does not make noble. Rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit. What then is required? Blood.”

[Lorikeet (Satyr)]

Pagan revivalism in Latvia. This is beautiful.
All Europe needs is this American Judeo-Puritan, liberal postmodern shadow to be pushed back, allowing those slumbering ancient seeds to revive and break through the uniform crust it has created.