The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer
Celibacy – the double crime of the Catholic Church
September 9, 2018 Karmak Bagisbayev	2 Comments
Once again, a paedophilia scandal has shaken the world’s Catholic Church. And there is no doubt that celibacy is the main reason for this shameful phenomenon!
Celibacy or the vow of celibacy for Catholic priests became the mandate in the Western Church in the era of Pope Gregory I the Great (590-604 AD) and has remained in existence since then.
Like any tradition, the celibacy must have become established not simply for the sake of serving the God, but rather for reasons more profound and simple.
It is well known that the wealth of the Catholic Church heavily depends on the plentiful donations from its members. The father founders of the Catholic Church were clearly intelligent people who understood human nature and felt the Law of Gene Preservation intuitively. They understood that no power, no fear of God could be strong enough to stop priests from sneaking into the Church’s treasury if it provided a solution in providing for their children and grandchildren. The celibacy was established to avoid the risk of the ‘devotees’ succumbing to this temptation. As simple as that!
What is celibacy from the point of view of The Last Faith?
It is not just a sin, it is a true crime against human nature, a double crime against two fundamental principles of The Last Faith:
against the right of the individual to Gene Preservation
and against the right of the individual to Freedom of Choice
Neither God nor Christ could have come up with the idea of celibacy. Did God not instruct the people: ‘… be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth…‘?
The paedophilia among the Catholic priests is the perverted and shameful result of celibacy and abstinence from the “normal” sexual relationships.
The Vatican must repent and decide on the abolition of celibacy if it hopes to prevent the continuing diminishment of its authority!
Sadly, the Pope’s speech, recently delivered in Ireland, showed that this is a step His Eminence is not yet willing to take. As before, what he proposed was to treat the symptom but not the cause.
Christ made the ascent to Calvary for the sake of urgent reforms…
Martin Luther was forced to hide from the threat of death throughout Europe to continue the struggle for the Reformation…
What does Pope Francis have to lose? His rank, his papacy? Why is he afraid to face the root cause of the issue?
Karmak Bagisbayev, professor of mathematics, author of “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer”
P.S. Dear readers! The main objections to this article are that not all Catholic priests are paedophiles and that there are married Catholic priests who happen to be paedophiles. I absolutely agree with you!
Your objection could also apply to a well-known fact that on average married men live longer than bachelors since there are bachelors who live to 100 years and married men who die young.
But this article is all about statistical evidence!
Despite the fact that the percentage of paedophiles among Catholic priests is small, it is still significantly higher than the average figures among the non-clerical population.
How would you explain this statistic? The only reasonable explanation here is celibacy, which does not lead directly to paedophilia, but increases its probability due to voluntary suppression of the most basic and natural instinct.
The Last Faith
History, Politics, Society
The dark side of the Law of Gene Preservation: Populism and Propaganda
June 1, 2018 Alanbek	Leave a comment
A brief summary of the main ‘axioms’ in “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“:
Every living creature, including the human being, strives to preserve their genes. Gene Preservation is what underlies the ability of parents to sacrifice themselves (and others) for the sake of their children, the phenomenon of large families in developing countries as well as the phenomenon of smaller families in developed countries (more details are provided in the book).
A slightly smaller percentage of people exists, who successfully combine Gene Preservation and Freedom of Choice – working, raising their children and managing not to lose a “child’s” interest and curiosity about the world they live in. They are always interested in something new, they try to discover more about the world around them, and try to formulate and express their own understanding of the world. Some even manage to change it. What distinguishes people like this is a high level of erudition, an open mind and liberal views on life.
The percentage of people who live solely by Freedom Choice is negligible, and often they lead unenviable lives in terms of the revolutionary and marginal nature of their behaviour and attitudes (take for example the fate of Christ, fanatically calling people to have a compassion for their neighbours contrary to the dominant morality of the time). Yet it is these people who have significant influence on the development of human society, who conquer new horizons and make revolutionary discoveries, that change the lives of all human beings without exception (more details here).
If we look back over the history of human civilisation, we see an obvious tendency towards the growth of Freedom of Choice – slavery has been abolished, the feudal system has vanished into oblivion, information, cultural and geographical boundaries that used to separate people are being erased before our very eyes. The basic rights of the individual are recognised in most countries around the world. In general, people are displaying more tolerance and less aggression in comparison to previous generations (more details here).
The reason for this tendency is the fact that increased Freedom of Choice creates better conditions for Gene Preservation. This is why the majority of people support the achievements of human civilisation and prevent it from slipping back into the past (more details here).
So how do we explain temporary regressions and spikes in violence among the population such as that witnessed during the two world wars? How do we explain the emergence of Nazism in Germany and Communism in Russia? And quite recently, in a much more humanistic form, the election of Trump and the vote for Brexit?
The reason is, again, quite simple – in all the cataclysms listed above, people believed that they were improving conditions for the fulfilment of Gene Preservation:
Communism in Russia emerged as a fierce reaction to the terrible gap that existed between the ruling elites (including the Tsarist family and the Church) and the rest of the population in terms of basic rights and general well-being. Result: the burning of churches, the execution of the Tzar’s family, civil war.
Nazism emerged as a fierce reaction to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the economic slowdown on the backdrop of the Great Depression. Result: concentration camps and the Second World War.
Those people who voted for Trump and Brexit come mainly from economically disadvantaged areas, which emerged as a result of the post-industrial economy (limitation of the industrial sector, the growth and natural concentration of the services and information technology sectors in large megapolises). Result: nothing good is likely to come of it.
Why is it that in all the cases mentioned above, people actually ended up worsening conditions for Gene Preservation? Does this behaviour not contradict the fundamental law of all life?
Apparently not! The answer to the apparent contradiction lies in the mass propaganda carried out by the populist supporters of Communism, Nazism, Trump and Brexit.
In every case, the propaganda model is exceptionally simple – it creates the image of an enemy (internal or external) that is supposedly threatening the ‘people’s’ capacity for Gene Preservation on the one hand and proposes a suggestion for a simple way of fighting the enemy on the other:
Communism: bourgeoisie, capitalists, imperialists and churchmen. Solution: power to the workers and peasants, dekulakization, repression and totalitarian atheism.
Nazism: the Jews, Communists, enemy countries in the First World War. Solution: Concentration camps, invasion of Europe and the Soviet Union.
Brexit: Immigrants from the European Union, money to the EU instead of local hospitals. Solution: Leave the European Union.
Trump: Mexicans, Muslims, bad trade deals made by corrupt Democrats. Solution: the wall on the border with Mexico, prohibition on the entry of residents of Muslim countries, trade war with the rest of the world.
Squashing the fundamental law of all life, populist propaganda-makers succeeded in drumming up blind rage, xenophobia and nationalism among most of the population, for whom Gene Preservation comprises the most important aspect of life.
Taking into account the fact that every individual is capable of sacrificing their own life for the sake of Gene Preservation, it is not surprising that we witness an animal savagery in the fight against ‘the enemies’ created by the propaganda machine.
Cruelty has nothing to do with nationality! It is fundamentally inherent in all living beings for the sake of Gene Preservation.
Communism and Nazism fell, having taken millions of lives and without delivering on its indubitably false promises. Trump still has a couple of years to go before the end of his first term and no heavenly manna has descended on America yet. Brexit will most likely be reversed, if not in the next couple of years, then during the next quarter, when the British will understand that Gene Preservation is easier and more profitable as part of the European Union.
Will propaganda bear fruit in the future? The answer is ‘always’. Since it appeals to the most basic instinct of all life, there is nothing anyone can do to change this.
The only hope is that the percentage of people with developed Freedom of Choice, who are capable of critically evaluating complex economic and political situations will increase. This should be facilitated by an increase in freedom of choice of information and a growth in access to the internet by all (more details here).
Only the future will show what new political fluctuations we can expect to encounter and whether we will manage to see them through with minimal losses…
Alanbek Yussupov, based on the model proposed by “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“
Family and Relationships, History, Human Morality
Medea and The Law of Gene Preservation
May 24, 2018 Karmak Bagisbayev	Leave a comment
We all remember as children reading the great tragedy of Medea by Euripides. In a terrible tragedy, as her husband plans to leave her for another woman, the heroine Medea kills their two young sons in a fit of jealousy in the final scene. What inexplicable, unimaginable power could drive a mother to murder her own children?
From the numerous examples cited at the beginning of “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer”, we know that in nature, any mother, either among humans or the animal world, will sacrifice her own life without a moment’s hesitation, in order to save her child, her young.
What could compel a mother to overcome this fundamental law of nature, the Law of Gene Preservation? Or might the law be fallible?
Literature gives us many examples too of how the madness of love and passion can inspire a lover both either to achieve the greatest feat or commit the gravest crime:
Andriy from Gogol’s novel Taras Bulba betrays his father, brother and brothers in arms for the sake of his Polish lover.
The young man from Gorky’s fairy tale, “The Heart of a Mother,” who is in love agrees to take his mother’s heart, essentially agreeing to her murder, at the whim of his beautiful beloved.
The murder of a competitor (male or female) in love triangles is also a common theme, although, more often than not, even today murders committed in a fit of jealousy involve the object of the murderer’s passions, as was the case with Jose who killed Carmen.
The Law of Gene Preservation cannot be traced in any of these examples, except for the example in which the mother tears out her own heart for the sake of her son’s ‘happiness’.
Yet to kill one’s own children as Medea did? Recalling how early on in the play, Medea kills her own brother in order to delay her pursuers, I could just have put Medea down to being psychologically inadequate and leave it at that. Yet to take such an approach would be to underestimate the complexity of the issue. I decided to route through my memory to see if I could come up with an example I had witnessed in real life. Then I remembered something…
When I was young I had a friend. He was a handsome man, good humoured, always joking around. He had a beautiful voice, played the guitar and was brilliant at telling a good story. He was the life and soul of any party or company of men or women, a fighter and a gambler; in other words, a smooth operator. Naturally, he enjoyed great success with the “weaker” sex and was very responsive to any manifestation of their feelings.
But one day, he met his one and only and with the fiery passion that burned between them, they married in just the second month after having met. A year passed and they had a son, who was the copy of his father. All this time, my friend loved his wife although perhaps not quite as passionately as before, and he adored his son but was unable to fight his own nature and continued secretly visiting his former girlfriends ‘in arms’ as well as our boys’ nights.
When his son was older and going to school, my friend openly and more frequently went out, often not returning home until morning. Things continued in this vein for a couple of years and then one day he called his friends and in a grave voice asked them to stop inviting him to friendly get-togethers. After insistent demands for him to explain why, he gave in and revealed that every time he disappeared from the house, his wife beat their son. We never saw him after that.
I do not know how his family life unfolded, but I heard that he brought up his son, gave him a good education and that his son later married. In other words, he brought him up until he could stand on his own two feet and fulfilled the Law of Gene Preservation.
I could not help comparing my friend’s wife with Medea. Thank God we live in different times according to different customs and values.
Readers of “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer” may remember that of all the conceivable and inconceivable questions posed in the Prologue, only one was left unanswered – the riddle of Love.
In saying that the foundations of the Law of Gene Preservation are to be found in Love, we only half answered the question. What we did not express is why Love is so selective, why a person in love can see no-one else in the entire second half of humanity except for the object of their love, their passion.
I imagine this second half of the riddle of Love to be like a dark matter that is capable of suppressing the Gene Preservation instinct and driving a person to commit the most horrific crimes possible in human nature; a dark matter, such as that which fills our Universe and continues to remain the cosmological mystery of our day.
Gene Preservation
The reason for this is simple: human beings do not carry out gene preservation via their parents, brothers and sisters. This is only possible via their own children.
Hence we reach the conclusion that blood is not always thicker than water! There can simply be any degree of affection for one’s parents, brothers and sisters (from a huge amount to none at all) which is developed via parenting and cohabitation over a long period of time.
The reason for the development of amicable relationships between brothers and sisters is also simple: it is a way for parents to maximise gene preservation. The closer children are when growing up, the greater the chance that they will preserve their own genes, and, by consequence, the genes of their parents. This is why the majority of parents try to create a warm atmosphere in the family, fostering friendship and mutual support between their children.
Despite expectations built on myth and literature, when children grow up living in separate homes, adult meetings between brothers and sisters are often unsuccessful. The same goes for meetings between biological parents and children brought up in children’s homes. There is a reason for the Kazakh saying that goes: ‘I didn’t see you being born, and I won’t cry when you die’.
In the majority of cases, the love that a person feels for their own children is ‘blind’ and limitless because it is based on gene preservation. This is why parents can love their children their entire lives without getting anything back, even if their children do not love them in return.
God in “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer” refers to the UNKNOWN. It is a convenient figure of speech, a literary technique.
There was a time when God began beyond the cave, when people had no idea how to explain thunder and lightning. Today, God has been ‘pushed’ by science to occupy a space behind the Big Bang and human consciousness.
We don’t yet know what existed before the zero moment, how a person thinks and how thoughts are born in the mind.
Neither do we know why man freezes dumbfounded before the ocean surf, why we stop in peace before the still surface of a morning lake, or why the soul hurts when it hears the sound of a crane’s cry in the sky … And so, we call it God. The unknown, albeit as yet unknown…
We will refer to the God of the churches, mosques and synagogues as ‘religious God’. The Last Faith has nothing to do with this God, who decides everything for everyone and everywhere works magic.
What is childfree all about – mutation or extreme Freedom of Choice?
In recent years, in some streams of Western media and throughout the world, articles have appeared that some conservative-minded segments of the population have found disturbing. The subject of these articles are the ‘childfree’, adults and often couples who voluntarily choose not to have children of their own.
The question instantly arises, “What kind of a phenomenon is this? Is it possible to deliberately suppress the Gene Preservation instinct inherent in all living nature?”
Statistics show that childfree adults are most common among highly educated, urban, successful, well-off and less religious portions of the population above the average childbearing age. Following the principles of The Last Faith, I would say that the ‘childfree’ are among those with higher than average levels of Freedom of Choice.
Without doubting the original statistics, I would be inclined to interpret them differently.
According to my personal observations, the majority of these people originally come from a relatively poor background, are aware of high standards in life and when they were younger, dreamt of being able to provide these standards of living to their own children in the future.
Devoting themselves entirely to the achievement of a successful career, they do not notice how quickly time passes and by the time they have achieved success after 45-50 years, they face the real threat of not having enough time left to bring their own children up until they are old enough to stand on their own two feet.
Moreover, by this age they are drained by the fear that having children will mean that they will lose the comforts of life to which they are now accustomed, i.e. they develop that well-known phenomenon: age-egoism.
Now they simply find themselves having to explain their situation and so they tell others that their decision not to have children is deliberate, i.e. that they are childfree.
In my opinion, the situation is in fact exactly the opposite, i.e. in their youth, these people experienced an over-inflated sense of responsibility for their future children. In other words, for the Law of Gene Preservation. Their claims that they are satisfied by relationships with their favourite pets, or at best, with their nieces and nephews, are not entirely convincing.
It brings to mind a story from many years ago published in the Russian ‘Literary Magazine’ about two students from the same university who were in love but then argued and split up over some trivial thing. To prove himself to his love, the young man devotes himself to science, in the end becoming a well-known scientist, academic, and winner of all kinds of awards. And then one day, once he had retired, he was walking through a square and came across an elderly lady, surrounded by a bunch of merry grandchildren and recognised that she was the girl he had loved in his former university days many years ago. They gave each other a hug, sat down and began to reminisce about the past. When it came to parting, the academician gave a sad sigh and said: “How gladly I would give up all my titles and rewards for all these charming little ones to be our grandchildren.”
Of course, among the childfree there are those genuine individuals who decided not to have children at a young age. There are even so-called ‘childhaters’.
Returning to the main question however: ‘what makes a person suppress their natural instinct, mutation or extreme Freedom of Choice?’, I am of the opinion that the question is something for geneticists. I am sure that genetic studies are already being carried out in this area, just as once studies were made of homosexuals.
Either way, the more conservatively minded portion of the population can rest assured – the childfree phenomenon by definition, cannot be passed on genetically.
Dreams from a Soviet childhood: “Klava”
In our fourth-year primary school class, there was a girl called Klava. I don’t remember her surname. She was quiet, inconspicuous and plain, short and poorly dressed all in grey. She did not take part in class games and never even jumped the skipping rope with other girls during school breaks.
She always got average marks and was her parents’ only daughter. Both her parents worked at the school, her father as the boiler man and her mother as a caretaker.
Klava was the only Orthodox believer in our class. She was the constant concern and headache of our teacher Faina Grigorevna, a woman who was as beautiful as she was clever and kind.
Once, our teacher went off sick for quite a while and so was replaced by the Head Teacher, who taught history and social science to the older classes. Naturally, I don’t remember her name.
When she learned there was a believer in the class, she was completely horrified. She shouted that while she was Head Teacher there would be no religion in our school. That same day, in place of the last lesson of the day, she announced a special ‘town hall’ meeting in which she called Klava to the blackboard and demanded that she publicly denounce God in front of the entire class.
Klava did not say a word and hung her head in shame. Seeing that the silent Klava was not going to respond and having exhausted all her cries and threats to expel Klava, the Head Teacher decided to switch to a gentler approach.
“There is no God! There just isn’t! I am not afraid of God! He can’t do anything with me, you see?” she continued calmly.
Klava remained silent.
Losing all patience, the Head Teacher finally went back to shouting.
Klava’s lower lip began to tremble furiously and several times she tried to speak, but all she could do was make strange sounds. There was an oppressive silence but right at that moment Nikolay, who shared a desk with Klava, grabbed hold of his stomach and fell to the floor with a terrible groan.
Leaving Klava by the blackboard, the Head Teacher came over to see what was wrong with Nikolay and sent someone for the doctor. Right at that moment, the class was saved by the bell, Nikolay made a sudden ‘recovery’ and everyone went their own way home.
Klava did not come to school the next day. Her parents did not come to work the next day either. The Head Teacher sent Nikolay and I to visit their tiny cottage on the outskirts of the town to summon the entire family to the school.
When we got there, the door was wide open. There was no-one inside and the house was empty. The neighbour said that the family of three had said a quick goodbye the evening before, loaded their things into a small truck and set off, who knows where, without saying anything to anyone.
And all humanity’s efforts on Earth over thousands of years have been directed towards increasing the value of human life, the right to Gene Preservation, Freedom of Choice, and the right to independently experience the world around them.
And the results are extraordinary! There is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, along with flights to the Moon, preparations for a flight to Mars, the creation of the Big Bang theory, explorations of the beginnings of the Universe, and much, much more.
And all this started with Humanity’s first uprising, the uprising of Adam and Eve, which we should herald as a great feat! We owe them a low bow and our eternal gratitude.
Incidentally, that is why it seems naive and ridiculous that certain earthly powers attempt to curb and suppress their citizens’ efforts to expand Freedom of Choice, because it was something even the Creator was unable to achieve.
Does Good always prevail in the end? The nature and future of Humanism.
A little munchkin
came to his father and asked,
‘What is good and what is bad?’
V. Mayakovsky
I heard on the news recently that American human rights organisations are accusing Donald Trump of inciting racism, xenophobia and discrimination in his speeches, and that Trump is strongly denying these accusations.
Then I began to wonder… why is Trump justifying himself? Why does not he openly declare that he supports such views? For America is a free country, where every individual has the right to hold their own opinion.
Why do politicians always defend themselves with claims that they have been misunderstood whenever they begin to reveal their unorthodox beliefs? Why did Hitler and Stalin initially present themselves as peace lovers? Then, only once they neared the peak of power in their countries, openly declare that certain people have the right to enact violence against others, from Aryan to non-Aryan in the former, and Communist to non-Communist in the latter?
When and why did widely (though not universally) accepted notions of Good and Evil emerge on Earth?
Why is it good to feed the hungry, save the drowning and protect the downtrodden, but evil to steal, rape and kill?
These are serious questions. It is no secret that members of the criminal world choose the opposite morality. Moreover, a small criminal world is nothing in light of the fact that almost entire nations could easily switch their beliefs to those of a criminal nature and devastate the lives of tens of millions, as we saw in the Communist Soviet Union and China as well as in Nazi Germany.
Could we see a repeat of Communism or Nazism in the world?
Why is it that people in ancient societies allowed cannibalism and human sacrifice to flourish, yet in today’s society we worry about the imminent disappearance of some rare animal?
In this article, we show that the advancement of human society towards humanism was brought about not by the mysterious forces within us (as Immanuel Kant would have us believe), nor by the influence of some divine being from above (take any religion), but on account of two very clear, simple reasons:
The expectation of an evil response to a show of evil.
In the long term, there is an obvious benefit to humanistic rather than aggressive relationships between individuals and human societies.
Unfortunately, this benefit only becomes obvious to the majority of people after the next man-made humanitarian crisis. In other words, the humanistic ethic always makes a positive step forward a posteriori.
We will also show that the driving force behind both these reasons is the Law of Gene Preservation, Freedom of Choice and Humandynamics (see “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“). We will demonstrate this using numerous examples.
For almost three million years, 99% of the duration of its existence, human life differed little from the life of other living creatures on Earth. That is, just like animals, humans lived motivated only by the Law of Gene Preservation. There is no need to speak of humanity having any kind of morality during this period.
But relatively recently, just a few tens of thousands of years ago, the first signs appeared that humankind had something resembling the expansion of the freedom of choice. Humanity began to domesticate useful wild animals and cultivate nutritional wild plants.
The nature of community life and shared livelihood must have facilitated the origin of the rudiments of morality. Yet it is unlikely that at that time this looked anything like what we call humanist ethics today.
It is hard to imagine a primitive father wearing a mammoth skin instructing his offspring, also in mammoth skins: “Do not hit the boy from the next-door cave. Don’t take his sweet bone from him! It’s bad, it’s not humanist.” Even these words are unlikely to have existed then.
I imagine the lesson of such a father to be more like this: “If you want to take something from another boy, then choose someone weaker than yourself. A stronger one will beat you. And don’t forget to look carefully to check that the boy’s father is not around and won’t come running up to you screaming and rip your head off. “
The father taught his child to behave as adults behaved. And if the father did ever teach his son to restrain his aggression, then it would only be for the purpose of protecting the child from retaliatory aggression. In the end, this would be because he was striving to preserve his genes in the best way possible.
Naturally, tribal chiefs and later czars and kings, along with the aristocracy, enjoyed enormous privileges. This gave them incomparable advantages (material and otherwise) in the task of preserving their own genes in comparison with the rest of the population mass.
It is totally understandable that they should have educated the tribes and peoples subordinate to them in a morality that enshrined those privileges, and that they should create and instil myths about the divine right of kings calling others to serve their interests without a murmur of objection.
This kind of hierarchical community has reached the present day with similar myths enshrined in the constitutions of some countries. Even in the recent past, advantages in the matter of gene preservation existed in the “right of the first night” in feudal societies and may still very likely exist in isolated primitive tribes in the jungles of the Amazon.
The existing right of polygamy among wealthy citizens in Muslim countries also secures this advantage.
It seems to me that if it were not for the problem of the human resource, tribal chiefs in ancient times would have ensured themselves the sole right of reproduction, as dominant males do in the animal world.
Why is it that today we increasingly hear calls for tolerance towards all society’s minority groups, at least towards those that are not a threat to others?
Why are all these changes taking place in human society moving in one and the same direction? From a racial society to a non-racial society, from a class system to a classless system, from gender inequality to gender equality, from intolerance to tolerance?
What mechanism is the driving force behind these changes and where does this mechanism find its energy?
We all know that primitive tribes still exist, which openly profess the ideology of war. But whereas Sparta, the first fascist state known to us in history, did this openly, the Communist Soviet Union led by Stalin, and Nazi Germany led by Hitler, armed with aggressive ideologies, demagogically presented themselves as peace-loving states and sought far-fetched grounds for their aggressive actions.
And whereas until very recently by historical standards, prior to the onset of the twentieth century, women enjoyed a lower social status than men in the US and the majority of developed European countries, today even Islamic countries are, one by one, legally consolidating gender equality in their constitutions. That said, full gender equality has not yet been achieved in any country in the world.
There were open outbreaks of racism in the United States right up into the 1960s, and yet today, just half a century later, it is the United States that places such high demands on public observance of racial political correctness.
There are fewer and fewer states in the world remaining where class division is legitimate and where kings and aristocrats are endowed with legal privileges.
So what is happening on the planet? And why is it happening
Surely men the world over haven’t suddenly become so wise and mellow that they simply decided to give women equal rights
Could it be that the white people of America and South Africa suddenly became so wise and mellow that they decided to give black citizens equal rights?
Surely the aristocracy did not voluntarily give up their privileges?
In order to answer these questions, we must return to the example of the stone age father and son mentioned earlier in this article.
In bringing up his son, the father emphasises the fact that any aggression will always be answered by aggression and not only in the case of murder. Any infringement, inflicted pain or insult evoked a thirst for revenge and often turned into a bloody feud that lasted for many generations. All subsequent human history is witness to this fact.
Of course, no one has ever voluntarily renounced their privileges and advantages. And it is only the confidence that resides in every oppressed person that they have been given exactly the same right to Gene Preservation as anyone else, that has lifted up humanity and given the oppressed the strength to engage in the fiercest of struggles for this right and all the natural rights to life that result from it – their own and that of their children; the right to provide them with housing, food and health, together with all the social rights of today’s world.
Any oppression, any infringement of this most natural human right necessarily evokes a reciprocal reaction.
It was not that men gave women equal rights. It was that women fought a long, hard, exhausting battle to win these rights, subjecting themselves to cruel acts of persecution and even imprisonment. The feminist movements and the suffragettes who have shaken the Western world in recent centuries are a perfect illustration of this.
It was not that the metropolises granted independence to the peoples of their colonies in Asia and Africa. It was the insurgent peoples, who won the right to dignified Gene Preservation in the terrible anti-colonial wars of the 20th century, sacrificing at the altar of freedom millions of lives of their best representatives.
Never have the hereditary, ruling, aristocratic classes voluntarily refused their privileged rights to an unequal portion of income generated from labour in society as a whole. The abolition of privilege has always resulted from bloody revolution. World history is witness to this fact.
The abolition of slavery in the USA and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa were no gift from white citizens to their fellow black citizens. Change would have been impossible without the desperate, ferocious, sacrificial struggle of the black population for equal rights.
At some point, the simple truth dawned on Man, that you cannot safely preserve your genes by means of oppressing others. Human beings began to understand that we must look for other ways to preserve our genes, without forcibly denying this opportunity to others.
In this process, the deciding role was played by Freedom of Choice, something endowed exclusively to human beings. It is specifically Freedom of Choice, the force which enabled ancient man to domesticate animals, master agriculture and exchange goods with neighbours, that brought about the understanding that in the long run, the absence of oppression secures a more reliable means of feeding oneself and preserving one’s genes than denying the same to one’s neighbour, and this means is particularly reliable if one’s neighbour understands this also.
Here we turn again to the ancient world. Time passed. The vital necessity, which today we call globalisation, forced people to unite into ever more sizeable communities, motivated by the need for collective hunting methods and collective protection of land boundaries.
With the shared living space of large communities, strict containment of aggression became a requirement and so now parents began to teach their children the skills necessary for this type of cohabitation without referring to the other party’s possible response.
Gradually, the original reasons for the former style of upbringing were forgotten and the teaching of tolerance, at least in relation to members of one’s own tribe, became mandatory.
This is how the first humanist skills were born. Later, this type of education was called humanistic, and those who professed it unconditionally, humanists.
Today, humanism is consolidated in society in the form of Human Rights and countries with governments built on the priority of human rights, are referred to as human rights states. No-one would argue that these countries primarily include Europe and North America, where not only human rights are respected but animal rights as well.
Has it always been this way? No!
In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Europeans began a series of colonial acquisitions, which in fact began with the crusades of the eleventh to the fifteenth century. These colonial acquisitions were marked by a particular cruelty formerly unknown to Man, and the mass genocide of native peoples which, according to various estimates, led to the annihilation of hundreds of millions of the indigenous peoples of Asia, Africa and America.
It should be noted that these shocking figures had little impact on European consciousness despite, weak, lonely protests from the voices of European humanists.
Only two world wars later, in which the Europeans themselves lost millions of lives, and after the bloody wars of independence waged by the colonial peoples, that the voice of the humanists sounded loud enough to reach the level of national governments and newly formed international organisations.
But it was neither the losses of the anti-colonial wars, nor the massive anti-war protests which undoubtedly raised the bar of humanism to unprecedented heights, that played the decisive role in metropolitan countries freeing their colonies.
The truly decisive role in this process was played by the unprecedented development of technology and resultant, buoyant economic growth brought about in part by the high levels of Freedom of Choice achieved by this time in Western countries.
Finally, Western rulers realised that it was much more beneficial to develop science, technology and competition, thereby supporting advanced economic development, than to constantly deal with problems of uprisings in the colonies, as well as mass anti-war and anti-colonial protests at home.
They realised that it was much more beneficial to produce high-tech goods that could be sold to third world countries, than to live with the constant risks associated with plundering their resources.
Incidentally, as a point in case, the colonies were freed strictly in the order of the level of Freedom of Choice existing in the corresponding metropoles. The French colonies were the first to be liberated, and the last were the Portuguese.
The level of violence in the world has significantly decreased.
When we say, “more beneficial” here, we should clarify that what we mean by this is “more beneficial for the majority”, but not for everyone.
Historically, the majority has always prevailed because, in the end, it was the stronger and not because someone persuaded us that this was ‘fair’.
In the end, the ‘majority principle’ was consolidated in the notion of democracy. But let’s not forget that for all the democratic reforms, there are still segments of the population who are losing their privileges and are therefore worse off as a result of these reforms. This is the essence of democracy.
But life does not stand still. The rapidly growing economic gap between rich countries and their former colonies on the one hand and the inevitable accelerated process of globalisation on the other, is presenting a new challenge for Western society.
The first signal of this challenge can be seen in the huge streams of refugees coming to Europe, the United States and Canada from the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
If in the forthcoming decades, the West together with China, Japan, Australia and South Korea do not take urgent measures to reduce the terrible gap between rich and poor countries, we will soon find that there is no-one for the West to sell their goods to, and the stream of refugees, constantly increasing due to both the internet and the modern transport system will lead to a general economic collapse.
Perhaps now we can explain what is humanism as suggested in the title of this article… Let’s break our explanation into three parts:
Sadly, the answer is no! A long history of human beings destroying other human beings is proof enough of this fact. Moreover, as far as modern science can tell, all peoples experienced phases of human sacrifice and even cannibalism in the early stages of development, so what innate humanist ethics can one possibly speak of? In other words, all our humanist traditions are the result of a many-thousand-year long process of evolution, which developed progressively through a process of trial and error.
Can we hope that the humanist traditions so hard won have become instilled in us and taken root?
Sadly, the answer is again, no! Any tradition, including humanistic traditions, can disappear in the blink of an eye when external factors are intent on destroying them. In the twentieth century, the peoples of Russia, Germany and China, all with a sufficiently developed history of human civilisation easily accepted the destruction of hundreds of millions of people in the world including their own citizens once they came under the influence of the teachings of Communism and Nazism. In addition, we have seen humanitarian disasters in Cambodia and Rwanda, where these countries destroyed between a quarter and a third of their own population. In other words, humanist ethics, like any other set of ethics, is nothing more than a conditioned reflex to external circumstances.
Does all this mean that there is no hope for a humanistic future?
Fortunately, no! We observe a distinct growth in the number of people with humanist principles who govern human and international relations, despite periodic deviations from these principles.
It appears that Humanism actually serves as a beneficial foundation for a society in which the main human instincts: Gene Preservation and Freedom of Choice can be most effectively realised (see “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“).
A society that values gender equality turns out to be more beneficial than a society that discriminates against women. It is enough to compare these societies to the Islamic countries, and see the huge streams of refugees, ignoring Islamic principles relating to women, fleeing the Muslim countries of Asia and Africa trying to gain entry to the countries of the Western world! Those who have children dream of bringing them up in a safe, free world. And those who don’t already have children dream of the same being possible in the future. Gender equality came to the Western world not only because women struggled to win equal rights, but because men realised that a society built on the principles of equality would be more stable and prosperous.
America abolished slavery not only because the blacks fought for their rights, but also as a result of the fact that the bulk of white Americans came to realise that a society without racism is more productive and safer for everyone, i.e. more beneficial than a society that practices racial segregation. Of course, change was eventually brought about to some degree by the enlightening speeches and demands of the humanists.
Corruption, that has wholly taken over the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, with a few exceptions, serves the interests of an absolute minority, usually a powerful minority, and is witness to the low level of Freedom of Choice existing in these countries. In democracies with a sufficiently high level of Freedom of Choice, thanks to the free press and the control exerted by civil society, it is possible to keep corruption within rigid limits, despite the natural inclination and willingness of most people to take part in corruption, however sad it might be to acknowledge this fact. And again, this serves the interests of the majority.
In the twentieth century, a number of fundamental reforms were carried out in Western capitalist countries, aimed at significantly raising living standards among hired workers. These included the shortening of the working day, minimum wage guarantees, pensions, all sorts of social security, stimulation of employees ‘interest in the growth of their companies’ profits via share sales and numerous other measures. The laws corresponding to these reforms were adopted not as a result of the humanistic mood of the ruling capitalist class, but as a result of strikes by wage workers, fears of bloody Communist revolutions like those that took place in Russia in 1917, fear of the difficulties of raising children in an unstable country, i.e. fear for Gene Preservation.
But very quickly everyone was convinced that humanistically reformed capitalism was more beneficial for almost all members of society and produced an unprecedented increase in labour productivity, general welfare, and therefore the best conditions for the realisation of Gene Preservation.
World society will continue to become more humanistic in nature as a requirement of the most fundamental human instincts: Gene Preservation and Freedom of Choice (see “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“).
Since humanism is essentially one of the facets of Freedom of Choice, according to the Law of Humandynamics (see “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“), it will grow along with it.
Our most important conclusion is that a society structured on humanistic principles is more beneficial for the majority than any other type of society model.
The question arises, “Why should we even consider a society built on the principle of the will of the majority to be fair? After all, the minority loses out, doesn’t it?” Indeed it does! Yet in a democratic society, Human Rights remain unshakable and inviolable. This is the guarantee of stability in a democratic state.
In connection to the question posed above: “When does a nation gain immunity from being susceptible to a totalitarian ideology?”, We can now propose the following answer: “Only when that nation has long-term experience of democracy, lasting at least several generations.”
Russia, China and Germany, who became victims of Communist and Nazi ideologies in the first half of the twentieth century, did not have this experience. German democracy which began with the Weimar Republic lasted for less than one generation, while Russia and China to this day have no true experience of a real democracy. Let’s take Italy as an example of a country that does have this experience. Under Mussolini, fascism became the ruling ideology even earlier than in Germany, although it did not succeed in taking root as a national idea.
There is not a single nation in the world that can guarantee to be exempt from the possibility of a totalitarian ideology being adopted by state power. The possibility of a new communist or fascist regime emerging somewhere in the world still exists and yet the probability of this happening becomes smaller and smaller as time goes by, and the surety of this is the Law of Humandynamics (see “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“).
Nonetheless, the ‘good’ has to be continually instilled in us as a cultural value and we must recognise that ‘evil’ can spread of its own accord like a garden weed.
As the reality of history shows, humanist ethics can never prevent the occurrence of a social catastrophe. As we have said before, the awareness of these ethics always develops a posteriori.
If this is the case, do we, in fact, need a humanist ethic at all?
Yes! Without a shadow of a doubt!
Humanist ethics save us from repeating the same catastrophes again and again and in this way, we acquire experience. Humanity is, in fact, becoming more humanistic. “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer” cites numerous examples, which we won’t repeat here, of unprecedented expansion of Freedom of Choice particularly around the middle of the previous century, and by connection, a growth in humanism.
Here, in short, we will simply answer the question as to why the public rhetoric of politicians has changed over time. The culture of war, through which all nations have passed from antiquity (remember Sparta!) up until the middle of the last century, is today considered taboo among politicians. At least, they will not admit to supporting the culture of war openly. We no longer hear delusional ideas from the mouths of politicians concerning the superiority of one race over another, or of one class over another, as was the case in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, relatively recently in South Africa, and even earlier in the US before the adoption of desegregation laws. No less delirious ideas that used to divide society on the principle of “blue blood” into patricians and plebeians have long sunk into oblivion. We no longer hear politicians openly expressing sexist views.
Just because we don’t hear them, does not mean that they do not exist. They do still exist and always will do!
We conclude this article with a very recent example of how a new element of humanistic ethics is being created before our very eyes in the form of condemning sexual harassment.
So far, only the USA has been prepared to condemn this phenomenon openly and categorically. In France, a group of actresses led by Catherine Deneuve have expressed their concern that the fight against harassment has been excessive, although from the very beginning it has been quite obvious that what is being addressed is the unacceptable harassment of women by men. Almost immediately after the confident statement of the famous director Andrei Konchalovsky that one would never see a similar reaction to harassment in Russia, three brave Russian journalists began an uncompromising struggle against the harassment of a State Duma deputy.
Given that everything in the twenty-first century is happening at such huge speed, we can confidently say that within just a few years, the Western world will have done with the problem of harassment.
P.S. Those interested in a proof of the conclusions above can refer to an enlightening lecture by Professor Steven Pinker who presents various statistics showing a constant decline in violence and rise in tolerance since the ancient times despite the wide-spread myth that “the world used to be a better place”.
The most in-depth research shows that there is no spiritual or intellectual difference between a statistically average child born in a primitive tribe in the Amazon Jungle and an average child born in the centre of contemporary London. Similarly, there is no such difference between a child of the present day and a child of say, one hundred years ago. Judging from the methodical observations of teachers of that time, junior schoolchildren solve the same mathematical tasks today just as well or as poorly as their peers of a century ago. There is every reason to believe that no significant change has taken place in this regard over the past thousand years.
In order to understand more fully why humanity’s sense of moral ethic develops, we must first look at the cases in which it is compromised and the influencing factors that bring that change to bear.
It is a well-known fact that when a small group of people finds themselves in the wild, isolated from the rest of the world as the consequence of a shipwreck or other disaster, the moral virtues to which they have adhered throughout their previous life up to this moment are almost instantly swept aside. The individual’s entire expression of Freedom of Choice is directed exclusively towards securing the survival of self and family, if they are still together, in other words, towards Gene Preservation. In cases of extreme hunger, people will not only steal food from one another, they will go as far as to commit murder or an act of cannibalism. There are numerous accounts of such cases, in literature and particularly in documentary sources.
Lord of the Flies, the wonderful, allegorical novel by the English writer and Nobel Prize Winner William Golding comes to mind. With horrifying realism, the writer tells the story of how a group of teenage children end up on an uninhabitable island after a plane crash and how the relationships of a primitive community form and develop among the group based only on the privilege of force and how, eventually, they divide themselves up into tribes who hunt and kill the members of other tribes.
The thing is that this kind of tragedy is quite likely to take place, not only among children, whose sense of morality is not yet consolidated, but among entire nations in the context of conditions of military, economic or political crises, and not only in conditions of extreme survival.
In the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, the world witnessed two global catastrophes: firstly, the coming to power of the Communists in Russia, and secondly, the Nazis in Germany fifteen years later (subsequently in China and Cambodia).
How did the Communists and Nazis manage to control the souls and minds of millions of people and force them to reject so rapidly the humanistic moral ethics that had developed over centuries (including the Christian commandment ‘thou shall not kill)? How is it that millions of people not only agreed to the mass murder of millions of innocent people but actively participated in the act?
One has to acknowledge that people not only feared for their own lives and the lives of those close to them, huge masses accepted a new cannibalistic morality!
What did the Communists and Nazis use to lure and entice millions of their followers?
The answer is easy to find when one considers the conclusions set out in “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer”. As the book explains, man (like any other living being) lives first and foremost for the sake of preserving his or her genes on Earth. Secondly, human beings (and only human beings) live constantly striving to expand their personal levels of Freedom of Choice. Of course, the extent of this striving may differ between any two individuals, as much as the earth differs from the sky.
Both the Communists and the Nazis played on promises to fully satisfy all conditions essential for the realisation of the primitive instinct for gene preservation, i.e. the promise to feed everyone until they were full, to provide everyone with adequate housing, and generally, to create a high material standard of living in all areas of life.
At the same time, they made no attempt to hide that this state of affairs would be achieved via plunder, suppression and, if necessary, the physical annihilation of the non-proletariat on the one hand and the non-Arian race on the other. People followed the Nazis and Communists because the horizons they promised were so tempting and, it would seem, so easily achievable that the existing humanistic moral principles were not enough to support the population in withstanding the introduction of a new misanthropical morality.
Yet, neither Lenin nor Hitler, nor their ideologists ever mentioned the natural right of man to Freedom of Choice and its associated Human Rights. Moreover, they made public warnings that anyone who failed to comply with their ideology would be destroyed.
Nonetheless, people followed their line. True only to the Law of Gene Preservation and the satisfaction of the flesh, people forgot and betrayed God’s second law, the Law of Freedom of Choice, turning their backs on the moral principles of the past. The link in time was broken! And finally, the peoples of the countries in question paid for it dearly in a manner known to all.
Those who believe that all these events are in the past and that humanity’s humanistic morality is strong enough never to allow such events to be repeated are fatally mistaken. Alas! Sacrificing Freedom of Choice and encroaching on the freedom of others will inevitably lead to the tragic mistakes of the past being sorely repeated.
And so we can only draw the sorry but honest conclusion that the true nature of human beings does not improve with time. And yet, thanks be to God, it does not worsen either. It remains unchanged.
That leads us to the question of how the Law of Humandynamics actually works. Who among serious observers of historical change would argue that morals in the world today are largely much more relaxed than they were yesterday, just as yesterday they were more relaxed than they were the day before that? Why does this happen?
This tendency emerges because every new generation begins not from a point of zero but from the point at which the previous generation left off in the battle to expand Freedom of Choice. This is the reason why levels of Freedom of Choice increase in human society and it is for this reason only that the Law of Humandynamics functions. Even though this law is guaranteed to work across relatively large periods of time, we cannot assume that it works consistently.
As we can see from the above, wars, revolutions and other disasters lead to relatively powerful fluctuations in the working of the Law, albeit tiny changes on a historical scale, when the link in time is broken and when the entire achievement of society’s morality is jolted far back into the past. The fundamental difference between the world of man and the animal world is that human beings are capable of transmitting an entire history of labour skills and morality from one generation to another. Animals, on the other hand, are incapable of doing this.
The life of each and every one of us, together with the rest of our own generation represents a single point on the Arrow of Time. Nobody wants a fluctuation to occur in their own lifetime and so, there is no cause for complacency. Virtuous morals are always very fragile. In just two to three months, television propaganda alone was enough to evoke hatred in one people towards another brotherly people transforming them into a mortal enemy (i.e. Russia’s occupation of Ukraine).
Whereas, we may be unable to influence the entirety of the Arrow of Time, either its future or its past, we are capable of bringing influence to bear in a subtle way on the point at which we currently find ourselves.
This brings us to our final question. Why is it that Human Beings strive to expand Freedom of Choice, driving the workings of the Law of Humandynamics? Could it be that there is someone above who takes care of us in this manner, nudging us further towards humanism? If only that were the case!
Man’s striving to expand Freedom of Choice was described in “The Last Faith: a book by an atheist believer“ as an independent ‘physical’ law, confirmed by the endless number of observations.
And among the many consequences of this law, there is one key consequence: without doubt, growth in Freedom of Choice facilitates an increased guarantee of Gene Preservation. This means that the Law of Gene Preservation, in turn, will push human beings towards an expansion of Freedom of Choice, towards democracy and towards an expression of humanism. It’s like Yin and Yang…
This explains the endless stream of refugees from the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, who risk their lives en route, striving to gain entry to the Western world.
I call to mind how in the 1990s an elderly friend of mine, a retired colonel of the Soviet Army took the decision to emigrate to the United States. I asked if he was not afraid at his age to face the challenges associated with having to adapt to a totally foreign world, to which he replied that he was well aware of the insurmountable psychological difficulties that awaited him and his wife in America, but that he was doing it for the sake of their children and grandchildren. That is the Law of Gene Preservation at work!
Might one fear the possibility that the peoples of the third world will one day turn away from Democracy, ceasing to find it attractive? One can say with confidence that this will never happen whilst the countries of the democratic world provide their people with the best conditions necessary to realise the most fundamental human needs, Gene Preservation and Freedom of Choice.