Page 49 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
condemnation are moral commands that you need
not heed in your complete freedom. You can act as
if you’re the only person on earth, or as if you didn’t want to be on earth at all. It’s fine to choose not to choose. Or you can act as if life were an experiment and each choice merely an experimental variable, so that you need not experience as much guilt around bad choices. Of course you’ll still agonize over choices, but you’ll also realize that we’re going to make some perfectly gigantic bloopers as we blaze our trails through this uncharted freethinking wilderness.
Liberals also experience large amounts of Existential stress due to the great weight of civic responsibility that we feel. The weight of the stress sometimes causes us to slip into the possibly magical view that things are going to work out in the end — for civilization and for ourselves. It’s similar to what some liberals say: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
That belief is not theoretically different
from fundamentalist Christianity in terms of the supernatural, just without some of the cathedral bells and celestial whistles. It’s a last ditch “shadow” of God and thus needs rigorous examination. The best that can be scientifically said is that we hope the moral arc bends towards justice, or that our understanding of history suggests that life becomes more and more just for more and more people.
From the view of the fact that women, people of
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