@north,
north;144966 wrote:the survival of Humanity should be above any god , period
thoughts
I am so grateful for your post and for this thread.
This question implodes into a philosophical black hole. I think it is a quintessential expression of nihilism and morality. I hardly ever witnessed such a big question expressed in so few words.
It's something I have had in front of my eyes for such a long time, without noticing until now. I realize that it sounds contradictory, but I have not really a clear understanding about it - yet.
I feel the urge to reply, my guts push me to reply, and my guts are going to talk.
?Survival?...? Is that the ambition, ''our'' best ambition?
Survival of what? ?Humanity?... and what is that?
''Survival'', ''being'' are interesting
per se? Can this be an aim, a duty, a mission?
All possible gods should fade and disappear in front of ?survival of humanity?...
This is some moral value, isn't it? Because you don't say
mankind, you mean a set of values and beliefs that makes a chunk of meat and thoughts a man. Don't you? And this is something that IS - it'd be
our being - it's always been like it is and nothing can change it. Isn't it?
The only thing that I like in all the question marks above is that, at least, it would seem that you don't support the idea of something like
moral progress. But as for the rest,
I beg to differ.
Survival of humanity - survival at all costs, also by
killing god - sounds to my ears as the end of civilization and mankind.
First of all, Nature is certainly a mother, but it is also a killer - apparently oblivious of all the lives ended to create a new one.
More specifically, would mankind have become what it is today with such an ideal?
If self-preservation, and/or the preservation of the largest number of individuals, was the main drive of men, would there have been a History at all?
Less philosophically (maybe), there's a point where inputting misery in living is no longer acceptable, where further compromise would turn a man into something which is no longer a man, denying personality, thousand of years of evolution and history - and then survival is no longer decent, it is a shame rather than a bliss.
The Pilgrim Fathers risked their life and the life of their families. They had no obligation to do that, but their faith led them to found a nation - and what a nation. Jews accepted tens of centuries of isolation and persecutions - quite often they found themselves close to total annihilation - not to preserve their lives, but to preserve their identity.
These are the easy examples, Pilgrim Fathers and Jews meant no harm to anybody. But even when the maintain of what you want to be, instead of what you are, implies violence to your fellow men, that remains
morally acceptable to me.
Churchill did not surrender to the Germans, during the battle of England he refused to agree to a German proposal to let the conflicting armies to rescue pilots shot down over the channel - therefore assuming the likely death of British pilots too.
Frederick the Great of Prussia fought restlessly with a 20'000 men army against all the armies of the neighboring countries during the Seven Years' War. It was desperate, but he won. And he founded Germany (and Germans are a great nation too, of course).
If all this people had
survival of humanity as their leading value, would they have achieved what they did achieve?
(En passant, I would like to recall the immortal line of
the 3rd man: ?You know what the fellow said - in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.?)
(I can also anticipate the question: yes, the pilots that crashed the planes into the Twin Towers probably shared these thoughts).
If there's a definition of humanity to pick, that would be
struggling - struggling at the cost of the self, if necessary. Struggling to make a world - even a very private world, because in these times it's difficult to ask for more - that a man would feel and accept as own.
Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse... And if
survival or
humanity, whatever it might be, is lost in the process, well... that's not my main concern.
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