Moral Compass

 Hey everyone!

So, what makes this blog different from so many others?  Not much.  I'm just a guy who has ideas that I think would change the world a little bit for the better.  They're not new ideas, they're not novel or even original.  My understanding of art is as a collective dialogue.  This means that there are no truly original stories or ideas out there, creativity is when someone innovates and combines existing ideas into something that hasn't been done recently, thus contributing their voice to the dialogue.  

I wanted to tell all of you why I even started this blog.  What did I have to say that would contribute favorably to the dialogue?  Well, it's a few things.  I think of it as a compass rose, like what's drawn on a map.  It helps me reduce my ideas to something navigable and translatable, something I can share with all of you.  

There are four cardinal directions on any compass rose, and mine is no different.  My North and South are my Values and my Philosophies.  Those are what I orient everything else by.  My East and West are Personal Improvement and Community Improvement.  The directions between that line up with northwest, southwest, northeast, and southeast, those are the things that make talking about that other stuff easier and fun.  The things that fall into this category are pop sci-fi, STEM, as in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, and the Arts.  I guess we could tie them together into STEAM.  

Let's first talk about Values.  The ones that help me think about this stuff are the ones that pretty much overlap between the cultures of SF and Christianity.  The first value that I think stands out as overlapping is Truth.  In Christianity, Jesus is the Truth.  Truth, as far as it pertains to proper understanding of one's place in respect to oneself, to God, and to others, can and will set one free.  With SF, Truth is something that may not be known, but it is knowable.  It is something that can at the very least be approximated using rationality and the scientific method.  Myth is how religion encapsulates Truth, telling us our place in the grander schemes of things.  Science is how rationality pursues Truth, encouraging us to figure out not just our own places, but the places of that which surrounds us.  

The next thing that stands out to me is Inclusion.  This has components of Compassion, of Diversity, of Advocacy.  The SF community was built out of ostracized individuals who found companionship outside of the traditional Western value system.  A kid grows up and is too fat, too skinny, disabled, not athletic, the wrong religion, the wrong color, too smart, too meek, too socially awkward, and they are pushed out of the cliques and groups that they were told made them valuable and worthwhile.  Jesus, also, touted just how much he cares about the downtrodden, the marginalized, the orphans and the widows, the refugees, and the poor.  The meek shall inherit the Earth and all that.  While the traditional Church may find its pride in championing the downtrodden and turning them into champions, changing the outcasts into their models of perfection, this is not how God has ever worked, this is not how Jesus works.  A lot of times, the SF community takes the time to celebrate that which makes us different from societal norms.  Well, Jesus does, too.  It'ts what part of being part of the Body of Christ is about: different strokes for different folks.  It's a little easier to remember Inclusion as Justice, of the Social variety.

Next on my list of values, or next cardinal direction on my second level compass rose, is Creativity.  This is huge.  While it's easy to be cynical, both true Christianity and SF culture both have humanistic undertones.  The Church would have you believe that Jesus died for you for no good reason, that you're not worth the blood he spilt on that cross.  Obviously, he disagreed, and when Jesus disagrees with someone, I tend to side with him against whomever it was that might do so.  One of the things that I find most instrumental for myself both in regards to Truth as well as Creativity is the idea that we are made in God's image.  Not Adam; humanity.  There is something about him that encapsulates male and female, young and old, logical and emotional.  He created the whole universe in a few days, and then made us in an image based on the creativity.  There are theologians who believe that God created us so that we could co-create with him.  Obviously, since he is God, he can create whole universes whole cloth, while we can really only modulate or change what is right in front of us.  The very first guy who was originally filled with the Holy Spirit was a craftsman, Bezalel, building beautiful things for God and His Tabernacle, his place of worship, his temporary house on earth.  Clearly, Creativity is a big deal for God.  For SF culture, too, we have to remember that SF itself is considered a cognitively estranged fiction.  Creativity is how we understand the world around us.  In some ways, it's how science itself works, what with formulating hypotheses and theories before testing them to see if they're false.  You have to come up with a model that explains your observations before you can come up with experiments to prove it false.  

Finally, my last major Value is Stewardship.  This has a broad range of applications.  The one that seems to jump out at me most right now is environmentalism, but it includes education, healthcare, and finances.  From a Christian perspective, God set us at the top of the terrestrial pyramid for a reason.  We were given the animals for companionship, we were given dominion over creation.  But it comes with expectations.  Even Jesus gave us the parable of the talents.  He showed that when people invest their assets, their efforts, and help them grow, he respects that.  From an SF perspective, humans find themselves at the top of the food chain, with thousands of species going extinct every year we're there.  We're messing up our planet, killing off the very living engine that sustains us.  We squander our creativity and the resources given us, choosing to grow fat on our wealth instead of saving our planet.  There are children who go to sleep starving, sustaining brain damage, dying malnourished, while America by itself could solve world hunger, not saying anything about anyone else.  We raise generations of children to live in prisons to make us even more money, rather than treating those kids and their minds as the valuable natural resources they are, investing into them so that we, as a society, may enjoy the fruits of that investment down the road.  There's so much more here, I can spend days writing about what good stewardship means.  

These are the major values that will guide my posts in the future.  There are other values that are dispersed through what I've already established, kind of like the other direction.  I'll bring those up more, later, too.  For now, this post is long enough, and I'd like to hear some feedback.