Policy Bites: Voting with Megacultists?

How would Dr Long behave as a senator? After all, his stance on religious megacult influence in parliament and on policy is firm, as is his view that adults with imaginary omniscient friends are essentially and effectively mentally ill.

- He's kind to all megacult delusionals (kindness is the appropriate approach to the mentally ill)

- He will vote WITH megacultists on certain issues, including:

• Anti war (especially this) and certain proposals of https://warpowersreform.org.au

• Pro China trade and relations

• Anti warmongering

• Protections (fiscal and housing etc.) for our most vulnerable citizens (disabled, disadvantaged, elderly)

• Globalism

For those readers who feel that referring to megacultists, or adults with imaginary omniscient friends, as delusional is presumptuous and wrong, Dr Long refers you to the broad claims made about the natural state of any human being according to most theist megacult doctrines.

The state of unbelieving persons is always denigrated as lacking in spiritual, moral, social, and epistemic (wisdom etc.) content and value. This avails mischievous and maladroit social agents of many ways of manipulating and abusing the vulnerable, unlucky, under-resourced, and undereducated. Just because these megacults are very old and established, it does not follow that these universal derogatory characterisations of unbelievers are healthy, polite, decent, or wise.

Some of the same fideist doctrines and memetic narratives have more positive statements, but this inherent contradictoriness and duplicity is only an indication of their overall instability, unreliability, atavism, and harmfulness. Such memetic narratives are a throw back to uncivilised epochs, and are linked to cultural technologies that are not only outdated, but that humanities greatest thinkers and philosophers – dating back until at least the ancient Greeks - have often opposed as anti-social.

Dr Long rejects as pathological all doctrines that refer to people in their natural state as fallen and infected with some kind of metaphysical spiritual disease such as what theologians call sin, or that refers to unbelievers derogatorily as infidel, lost, or innately corrupt. Evolutionary psychology provides useful explanations of why people are competitive and can be aggressive or violent.

Scientific understanding of how the physical and psychological stresses of living in a society of evolved sentient beings avails us of great hope of helping ourselves to be more humane, and to overcome both physical and psychological pathologies. Nature can be cruel and harsh. Cruel, patriarchal, misogynist, bigoted, and innately derogatory megacult memetic narratives just make this worse, and – on balance - always have. Moreover, Dr Long rejects as sociopathic and pathological any doctrine which denigrates human wisdom and favours that of an imaginary, omniscient, MALE, omnipotent, violent and highly erratic (psychotic) being.

Scientistic humanism is what our societies need, not imaginary-godism.

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