After playing heroic roles in liberating us from the tyranny of European monarchies, Thomas Paine turned his revolutionary genius upon the moral tyranny of the Church, and published Age of Reason. Around the same time, Jeremy Bentham detailed a brilliant alternative foundation for our morality. It seemed we were at the dawn of a Golden Age.

But The Enlightenment stopped enlightening two centuries ago.

Age of Wisdumb exposes how ancient belief memes still infect modern society and what this means in terms of objective truth determination. The religious continue to propagate these lies in a cycle of abuse; its young victims bullied into believing the unbelievable and loving the unlovable, like Winston Smith in 1984. We cannot trust our heartfelt convictions or ethical assumptions. Good and evil are merely ‘dogmatism in disguise’. Once this masquerading authority is dismissed we can see with devastating clarity.

By extending the New Atheist dialogue into Utilitarianism, we abandon the theist’s supernatural objective morality in favor of a super natural moral objective. With ‘right’ and ‘rights’ as outputs but never inputs, our calculus hints at a Liberal Manifesto to create a more progressive, caring, and rewarding society. Perhaps then we can put a heart in a heartless world, a soul in a soulless condition, and we won’t need Marx’s opium.

Roland Johnson

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