where good comes from

So there we are at the dawn of civilization, brainy great apes who took a long time to raise their children and who had acquired spoken language, and just in the last five thousand years developed written language, and agriculture and cities and now some people didn't have to toil all day so they sat around thinking and they developed moral codes out of that nice feeling you get when you help people out.  The religions of Sumeria and Egypt went pretty much along the line of do whatever the gods (through their spokesmen, the priests) tell you to do.  They weren't too interested in your behavior to your fellow man.

The Jews, according to Karen Armstrong, were the first to incorporate morality in the sense of the golden rule and the ten commandments, but this was limited to fellow Jews, you could treat Goyim however you wanted, a tradition the Christians continued until just recently.

Maybe it was with the ten commandments that sin first reared its ugly head (I expect Beagles to set me straight on this).  So now it wasn't enough to be nice to each other, you had to not commit sin. The Jews were a prudish people and an inordinate amount of sin focuses around having sex too freely, and much of that is still around today.  When we speak of a good girl we don't mean that she gives bums a buck.

Now we have thick books of ethical philosophies, which have their differences but generally agree on the same thing, mainly altruism.  An odd thing is even after all this logical exposition we go to the heart to determine if something is right or wrong.

Kant was a big believer in honesty.  If men were honest with each other the world would be a better place.  He maintains if a killer comes for your brother you can't lie and say he is not home because the life of your brother is a mere bagatelle compared to the greater good to be had if we are all always honest with each other.  This gives people pause about Kant.

So there we are good dwells in the hearts of men, a DNA code that dispenses dopamine, and maybe in the deeds that good impels, but that's it.  It is a transient thing among transient people.


Beagles says he was not a Randian he only read a couple books, that sounds like the crack head saying he only smokes little rocks.  And Atlas Shrugged that is the biggest rock of them all, pages and pages of philosophical discussion between comic book action.  We the Living was peculiar in that it didn't have a happy ending and even more so in that the big commie guy is a good guy.  This puts him in bad stead with his commie buddies and he also meets a bad end, but he is almost like a grey character in a book of black and white.  Those collectivists brrrr.

It is kind of a cult, if you google around you will find that there are all sorts of splinter groups who hate each other.  Alan Greenspan was an objective in his youth and I believe clear into when he was deciding economic policy.


Did either of the dawgs catch the Sally Yates hearings?  Hot stuff if you are a political junkie.