Secular Morality

All human culture and moral awareness comes as inspiration from God. This is why religion is such an important source of these things, because in their ordinary lives, human beings are normally so distant from having an awareness and feeling of God's power, they are dependant upon other people to pass on the contact from those human beings chosen by God to bear witness to great revelations, i.e. the Messengers of God, written about in the Bible, the Quran, and other scriptures.

When God bestows a grace upon human beings, in starts of in their souls, then into their finer nafs, their feelings and desires, and lastly it materialises in their more worldly cognition, their thinking mind. This is necessary if the guidance is to be acted upon. The inspiration, provided by God, must be actualised into a set of processes in order to influence and benefit the material world and humans who live within it.

Morality, as a code of good behaviour, the right way for human beings to live so that their activity is of benefit to their fellow creatures and not harmful, is immensely important for the success and vitality of our society and civilisation. However, the age in which religious authorities could use political power to enforce their dogma as law, is over. It is really gone and dusted. So we are left with the problem, how do we get this inspiration we so badly need, from the fine to the course, from the soul, to secular, the material world?

We need to convert the divine inspiration into secular morality. We require that material awareness of right and wrong, based not on superstition, not on religious dogma, but upon the hard and fast material 'truths' people really believe in. First and foremost is the scientific method. This is the set of academic practises, of replicability, falsifiability, peer review which intelligent and educated people hold up as the strongest source of knowledge about the world. But as well as this, and more influential in common discourse, are the institutions of conventional wisdom, and most of all, traditional common sense which people who have not have not had excessive education hold in highest regard.

The fight to define secular morality takes place through what is referred to as the "Culture Wars". These wars are waged by politicians, businesses, and social activists. But what examples do I have of secular morality, as it is currently established? Take the stigmatisation of smoking. Many people feel morally obliged to stigmatise smokers, criticise them in public, and campaign groups, in collaboration with the government, buy advertising space to show adverts humiliating smokers with descriptions of how smoking causes not only sickness and death, but also erectile dysfunction.

The antagonism towards smoking is justified by scientific evidence that it causes sickness, after smoking a lot of cigarettes for a long period of time. But more than this, it is based upon conventional wisdom, a set of myths and beliefs, that smokers are unattractive, that smoking is uniquely harmful and dangerous, that tobacco salesmen are pure evil. Whilst the scientific evidence is created by the social institutions of academia, this conventional wisdom is based upon a different social institution, the media. The people most influenced by it are the middle classes who are not educated enough to interpret scientific evidence, and so instead trust in second hand interpretations to judge the moral rightness and wrongness of the habit.

What the anti-smoking lobby has failed to penetrate is the their basis, traditional common sense. Ordinary people, with little education, cannot really relate anti-smoking arguments to their ordinary lives. Because the harms are so distant, and other problems so close, the emphasis which campaigners place upon giving upon smoking do not chime with common sense. Common sense tells us that the things that hurt us the most are the nasty things which other people do to us, in terms of crime and relationship break down. Hence people at the bottom of the socio-economic spectrum, who rely most upon common sense, and not science nor conventional wisdom as a source of their secular morality, are the least likely to give up smoking.

Often campaigners today, social activists, seeking to establish a new moral position in society, actively reject the term "morality". They wish to portray their arguments and beliefs as absolute, objective truth. This is especially the case when they are campaigning for an issue which religious groups are also widely known to promote.

Take anti-AIDS campaigners in Africa promoting the ABC method to prevent infections. A is for Abstinence, B is for Be faithful, C is for use a Condom. The doctors says are totally clear, we are not saying this because of religion, because religious dogma says casual sex is a sin. We are telling you to abstain from sex except in a faithful relationship because that is what medical science says is necessary to stop you dying from a horrible disease.

However, you do not influence peoples behaviour through raw scientific facts - these facts must be digested and converted into morality, a belief in right and wrong behaviour which people can act upon in their lives. The ABC method is very powerful because it chimes very strongly with common sense. Traditional common sense says that to avoid a sex disease you should avoid dirty sex, or at least keep your bodily fluids separate with a condom. So ordinary people in low socio-economic classes have responded very well to the ABC method of HIV prevention.

However, conventional wisdom is another matter. The ABC was slow in getting of the ground because the conventional wisdom of secular middle classes who dominate the media is that casual sex is good and empowering. Even when both science and common sense are against them, they battle on regardless to promote their pro-casual sex ideology.

Another battle for the soul of secular morality is within pornography and feminism. Anti-porn feminists like Object determinedly try to keep themselves separate from anti-porn religious groups. Their language of argument is that porn objectifies women and promotes a culture of sexual abuse and violence. This chimes strongly with traditional common sense, but against runs head on into conflict with conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom says that pornography, like casual sex, is good and empowering, which is the established faith of the middle class media institutions, driven by the commercial incentive because they depend so much on using sex to sell their products. They do not want to believe that what they are doing is wrong.

So the battle rage in the third sector, academia, to establish a scientific basis for supporting or opposing the concept secular morality of objectification, through determining that pornography encourages sexual abuse and domestic violence. Of course it does. However, academia and the scientific method aren't actually scientific in the true sense. Real science, objective truth, comes from God, through the human soul. But those who hate truth will manipulate and distort it and through their intelligence can often easily fool the academic classes. Yet God is far more powerful than they are, so eventually the truth will out, and academia will side with common sense, and the vested commercial interests of the media classes will be over powered and conventional wisdom changed. Until then, the culture wars will continue, fighting for the soul of secular morality.