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Suggested Culture - Not Commandments |
The Church of Reality presents these good and bad personality traits not as commandment but as suggestions. We want to avoiding the misconception that they are confused with something like the "Ten Commandments" or the "Seven Deadly Sins". You are not expected to live up to each and every one of these and there is no judgment involved based on these suggestions.
We present a template rather than a set of rules.
The reason they are presented in the form of a template is to show what a good Realist might act like. These are things to teach your children so they have an idea of what good behavior is supposed to look like. It is also a public statement to the rest of the world about what kind of people we are and what our values are.
People of other religions are often concerned about Atheists because they are taught that without God that the concept of right and wrong goes away and society degenerates into a "survival of the fittest" style of evolution where humans evolve by killing off the weak. This fear has been fueled by authors like Ayn Rand who was correct about the existence of objective reality, but dead wrong when it came to extolling the virtues of selfishness and looking at altruism as welfare for the inferior.
Realists are neither Atheists or Objectivists. We have our own culture based on the positive pursuit of the understanding of reality as it really is. To that end we have determined that we explore reality collectively and that our religious pursuit of reality depends on a strong healthy society where humankind lives in peace and harmony. So it is therefo within our mission to have an idea of what that kind of society looks like.
We are also a strongly individualistic religion. We value personal freedom. Thus these suggestions are not to be construed as commandments. We are not here to tell you what to do and how to live your life. Nor will you be judged against these rules to determine where you are going to go in the "next life". However, we think it's safe to say that if you don't appreciate the value of curiosity in a religion that is pursuing the understanding of reality, you're probably in the wrong religion.
These values are not divinely inspired, nor are they considered to be a complete and perfect list. As with anything in the Church of Reality, they are subject to revision and improvement. So this list should be taken seriously, but not too seriously. The Church of Reality is a religion and one of the functions of a religion is to put forth a template to guide people in what is proper behavior. We have taken it a step further in that we try to give some reasoning as to how we came to this conclusion.
Our focus is on the positive side.
We also focus more heavily on what people should be doing rather that what they shouldn't be doing. If you spend your time doing the right thing, there isn't time to be doing the wrong thing. We focus on accomplishment rather than sins, improvement rather than perfection, healing rather than punishing, this life rather than a next life.
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