Altruism seems to be summed up by love your neighbour as yourself
Is it possible to love others as yourself?
All agree these days with the foundational premise of psychology and psychiatry that you can only love others in so far as you love yourself. You know how you make others unhappy if you are unhappy for unhappiness is contagious. You know you cannot learn to make others happy if you are unhappy. This is not what love your neighbour as yourself infers or is about. If I love others to the amount I love myself, then it follows I love myself the most because it is x amount of love I am giving myself and the same amount is broken up among others. Each individual gets a piece. I don't love each individual as myself. So I am not equalising myself and my neighbour but contradicting the commandment.
Another break with the commandment is that I decide for myself what I think and feel love to be. So if I love another, it is my own creation I am doing it with. I am honouring myself more than them for it is my creation.
The commandment opposes our experience that the premise of psychology and psychiatry is true so it is an evil commandment and a trick that is meant to pull you down to the gutter as you gibber about love and think you are full of love. The commandment seeks to break your mental health under the authority of God. Without the commandment, God would seem less attractive so it is vital for atheists to pull down the commandment and make its shame visible before the world.
If you only love others as far as you love yourself then it is good to love
yourself. To agree with this is to say that it is because you make yourself
happy that you are able to make others happy so by making others happy you are
just being happy yourself and it is not really about them but about you. So with
this you are being selfish but in a nice way. In bad selfishness you still love
yourself but others suffer for it. Altruism does not exist and anybody that says
it does is saying what they know is not true.
Can an altruist really believe in the commandment, love your neighbour as
yourself?
Altruism denies that love is making other people happy but says that love is
making other people unselfish and having them doing things without them being
motivated by the desire for happiness. If altruism were making other people
happy then it would mean that you should enjoy helping others and do it because
you enjoy it. You can’t say you do it partly because you enjoy it and partly
because it is sacrifice for you will immediately see how bizarre that sounds. An
enjoyable sacrifice is a contradiction. The more you enjoy the sacrifice the
better on this altruist logic so how could it be a sacrifice anymore when you
enjoy making it so much? A person who likes pain cannot sacrifice even though he
or she appears to suffer for others. You are not so sure that you would make the
sacrifice without the enjoyment so this “sacrifice” would really be a subtle
manifestation of selfism. If altruism is enjoying sacrifice then it is a sin or
an act of wrongdoing to make a sacrifice you do not enjoy at all. But then this
wouldn't be altruism any more. Altruism says selflessness is in doing good
regardless of how much you abhor doing it. This consideration shows that
altruism is totally anti-happiness.
Altruists do not love themselves very much. The commandment tells us to love
one another as much as we love ourselves. Altruism is therefore dangerous. All
it cares about is motives and not consequences. It cares about people’s motives
and not them.
How does forgiveness relate to altruism?
Forgiveness is a duty in altruism for doing good to others would mean nothing
without it.
To do good to somebody you believe should be punished would be immoral and
not altruism and it would be selfish of the person to accept. Forgiveness is
saying that you will not want to punish what ought to be punished because you
want a fresh start made. But this means you are trusting a person you cannot
trust and so degrades you. If you should be degraded then happiness is a sin. If
you deny free will or the power to be altruistic, you don’t believe in
forgiveness for there is nothing to forgive but you will have all the benefits
of forgiving and the good feelings and will not trust until you see the
evidence. It is better not to believe in altruism at all. The one who says it is
despite this, is degrading the self again.
To tell anybody it is their duty to forgive is worst form of emotional
bullying. It is up to them. Jesus and his malignant religion said that anybody
who doesn’t forgive will not be forgiven by God themselves and so will go to
Hell to burn forever.
Anybody that does wrong does not deserve to be forgiven. They cannot deserve
to be forgiven either for to forgive a person who has earned it is not
forgiveness. Forgiveness is a free gift. But altruism, religion and absolutism
say that it is a duty to forgive. This is incoherent. Perhaps it is a duty to
yourself to forgive for you have faults and are better off forgiving? But that
would not be real forgiveness for you have to forgive for the other person’s
sake. It is refusing to love that person. Forgiveness says then that it is a sin
to pay any attention to justice. If justice is wrong then people do not matter.
Altruism just cares about altruism as law.
Superogation is the notion that there are good acts that are your duty and
there are other ones that are not. For example, it is your duty to feed your
child but it is not your duty to give a little of your money to feed a beggar's
child on the street. The idea of forgiveness then not being a duty implies that
the evil doctrine of supererogation is true so altruism implies the same if it
accepts that kind of forgiveness. Supererogation denies that what is moral is
what is best so it implies that there is no morality. It says you can do better
than your duty and the better is not part of your duty. Altruism cannot accept
supererogation for altruism insists on doing the best for others which
eliminates the concept. In altruism, it is always your duty to be selfless and
the more selfless you are the better. Altruism is incoherent for forgiveness
cannot be both a duty and not a duty at the one time. Altruism is incoherent for
it demands superogation to be true while implying that superogation is wrong!
The altruist forgives the person who raped and murdered his daughter. It is
easier for him to forgive when it was not him that this happened to which makes
it hard to see anything selfless in it. Forgiveness is the bedrock of altruism
in the sense that it is better to do good to a person you have nothing against
than one you do for then the good is more genuine and complete. But forgiveness
is a mask for selfishness which is easily seen when the Christian Church calls
for pardon for clerical child molesters.
Is selfishness just doing things for yourself at the expense of the rights of
other people?
No for you can be selfish in a way that harms nobody else and which benefits
them which is the kind of selfishness many Humanists advocate. The only way to
tell the difference between a selfish act and a non-selfish one is to look at
the motive. But all our actions including our so-called altruistic ones have the
same motive, to fulfil some need in the person committing the actions.
Altruism is selfish for it smears the selfish.
To set out to stop selfishness in others is futile for nobody knows if they
really make any headway at all and only the person who acts and makes the
decision can judge themselves to be selfish.
Those who condemn selfishness don’t care about the self anyway so one wonders how they can say that selfishness is wrong.
What is backdoor altruism?
Backdoor altruism is the philosophy that you must love or value your neighbour as yourself. I call it this because it is really altruism in a more sinister guise. It condemns altruism for it sees a system that tells you to let others walk all over you as evil for what you should be doing is thinking of yourself together with others. You treat yourself as you treat another. It is a compromise between altruism and egoism. The altruism it despises is smuggled back in the backdoor.
If altruism is ever right it is always right. You can’t say you should help an ingrate and then say you should not give away your last bar of chocolate. When there is no rational proof that one is right and the other wrong it is because the two are both right. Altruism is a principle as is egoism and that means that it is something that should always be done when it is right.
Christians and egoism
Christian morality is a heap of absurdities, guesses and above all
contradictions. In the world, you have all those different moral systems. None
of them add up and result only in defensiveness and bigotry and hypocrisy.
Ethical egoism (our view that it is good to do things only because you want to)
is opposed because it supposedly makes people immoral. In fact, it is the best
of a bad lot. When that is the case, how could it matter if we assume
psychological egoism is true? If we have to guess that we are altruistic, that
we are egotistic, that we are egoistic or that we are a mix then why not guess
egoism?
