Ben,
As I see it, you are someone on the inside of the culture, looking out and I'm someone on the outside of the culture looking in.
Yes I do read your articles and no, I don't directly respond to your questions and issues. Not necessarily to be oblique, but to try to give it a different perspective. I've stated my view on ethics previously, that we tend to have cultural models focused on leading us to the ideal good, but that good isn't aspirational, it's an elemental binary, with bad. The ideal good would be like the ideal yes, or the ideal on.
So ethics and morality are a social framework that is not fundamental, but evolutionary.
Yes, there is a lot of social media, of all sorts, but I tend to see it as expressionist. It works better to just flow through it, than get totally lost in the details. Smell the flowers and steer around the poison ivy and sticker bushes.
As for religion, As I keep pointing out, a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The fact we are aware, than the myriad details of which we are aware.
Which combined with my point about time, pretty much makes everything sacred, even if lots of it is singularly unpleasent.
As for honesty and deceit, it's all information to be sorted. I've spent my life around horses, which can be pleasant, mean, crazy, dangerous, sneaky, afraid, etc and it is up to me to read their characters and respond accordingly. I don't get particularly emotional about it, as that clouds my perspective. Light versus heat. Similarly if I sense people are unpleasent, or dishonest, I tend to avoid getting myself frustrated or angry, I just use it as information as to how to deal with them.
The point about absolute and infinite is more something I've been playing around in my head since I was a teenager, as the parameters of logic, so when the the topic of the "truth" comes up, I try to stretch out just what is being discussed. Is the general premise some ideal of integrity and honesty? Cold hard facts of life? Nuggets of insight and wisdom?
To me, the truth is contextual. The node in the network giving rise to it. Otherwise, in the void, there is no truth, as there is no falsehood.
Yet people tend to equate this with relativism, so it becomes a difficult subject, as the common understanding of relativism is that there is no standards, so everything is valid, ie, meaningless.
Which is the opposite of what I see, that everything has meaning to its context. Node in its network.
Those nuggets of insight are meaningless, if they are just shouted into the void. There has to be another for whom the meaning is valid. Context.
Cheers.
