The reasoning theists, atheists, liberals, libertarians, & conservatives of Secular Bible Study, First Minneapolis Circle of Reason, Circle of Ijtihad, & Winnipeg Circle of Reason join Interbelief Conversation Café for our 310th Plurationalist (Interbelief Reasoning) Dialogue by Zoom, “Why Do We Seem Incapable of Preventing Evil?"
“Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward…” – 1 Peter 2:18
Then came [a woman of Canaan] and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me. But he answered and said, “It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs…” – Matthew 15: 25-26
“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” – Ephesians 5:22
The Bible instructs the enslaved to obey their slavers, even those who are cruel to them, which will please the Lord as they would be acting like Jesus. The Bible also reveals the racial and religious prejudices of, if not Jesus himself, then the disciples whom he sought to instruct by his own actions, and the actions he elicited from other followers. The Bible standardized the submission of women to their husbands, and the supreme authority by the latter. But in modern society we consider all of the above forms of coerced human submission to be evil. What made our religious scriptures incapable of preventing evil, or even of suggesting it be prevented, by its own teachings?
The Stoic philosopher, Musonius, recommended that the enslaved and the free, the Greek citizens and their foreign visitors, and both men and women, all be allowed equally to learn philosophy. Yet from the time of Socrates onward, women were barred from even entering the grounds of the Athenian gymnasia where the legendary philosophical discussions occurred. In modern times, most business was done between exclusively male CEOs -- on golf courses that banned blacks and women. What forces us to roll out the red carpet only for our movers and shakers, and then rope ourselves off from them, so that we hoi polloi have to stand behind the ropes, merely gazing toward those who muse on all our fates?
The libertarian philosopher, Ayn Rand, said, “The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.” Yet self-proclaimed libertarians even today sanction the repeal of environmental regulations that prevent or punish the initiation of force against others by companies polluting our water and air; the payment of non-living wages and inadequate medical care or health insurance for their employees; and the false advertising of poor-quality products, justifying it all as “Buyer beware!” What makes us, and our U.S. government, rule that it’s illegal for corporate CEOs to provide a living wage and increase product quality, if it reduces the profit of C-Corporation shareholders? Why did we instead have to settle for allowing a new kind of company, the “Public Benefit” B-Corporation, whose CEOs would finally be legally-allowed to also consider its employees’ and customer’s welfare? (And why is incorporating as a B-Corp anathema to those same hard-charging libertarian entrepreneurs?)
The Buddha was the first writer known to have urged the prohibition of slavery and of the buying & selling of people, recounting the rejoicing and happy thoughts of one freed from enslavement, “Before I was a slave, not my own master, subject to another, unable to go where I wanted. But now I am my own master, not subject to another, free, emancipated, able to go where I want.” Yet for the next 1,800 years, no country in Asia outlawed slavery. And today, another of the Buddha’s absolute prohibitions, that against murder, is being practiced -- even by Myanmar’s Buddhist monks, against a Myanmar religious minority, Rohingya Muslims, after the Buddhist majority government stripped them of their Myanmar citizenship. What makes even Buddhist priests practice murder?
The rules of Logic were initially codified in Aristotle’s De Sophisticis Elenchis, as a means to permit future generations to review and vet their own assertions, and thereby to detect which are manifestly false or irrelevant, and thereby willfully evil. But in this latest century, many of our political leaders have reverted to practicing an even more ancient Greek tactic than Logic -- to elicit or, rather, to deceptively and emotionally coerce, change in others: They have resurrected the use of Sophistry. What makes us susceptible to deluding both ourselves and others?
Beginning soon after the rebirth of “rationalism” as a philosophical movement in the 17th and 18th centuries, the practice of rationalism became socially conflated with specific and exclusionary worldviews. This included adopting the self-description of being exclusively “rational” by proponents of such worldviews as naturalism, atheism, anti-theism (which even today remains a strong assertion, in the form of secular humanist associations’ modern exclusion of progressive “religious humanist” chapters), and libertarianism (whose proponents claim the mantel of “reasoning” over progressive atheists, and vice-versa). Today, rationalism as a practice is even presumed to be amoral, and thus compatible with philosophies as evil as Machiavellianism, wherein logic and reason, once divorced from any objective moral code, are used to devise even more coercive and torturous forms of mental control over others – from the religious or political dogma, indoctrination, fire-and-brimstone, and love-bombing of past generations, to the modern use of profit-driven “rage-bait” algorithms on Facebook and YouTube. What makes us give sway to calculatingly induce others' fear and rage, so we can treat them as dogs?
And what can, someday, prevent all of us – our species, Homo sapiens -- from becoming nothing more than Homo lupus, a pack of human wolves?
At 7-9 pm CDT Mo 4/20/26 by Zoom we'll reasoningly share our diverse or even disparate worldviews on why we flail against the dark floodwaters that rise within the human mind. Our reasoning dialogue’s agreements of open-mindedness, acceptance, curiosity, discovery, sincerity, brevity, & confidentiality should meanwhile (for two hours, at least) help us sandbag any stray leaks!
