ANOTHER LOOK

To further develop the argument of Chapter 2 and address additional objections to it, I am going to introduce a thought experiment in this chapter that will play an important role in subsequent chapters. Suppose we have organized a retreat at some remote mountain site – say a monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas (for symbolic value) – inviting people from all over the world representing different cultures, religions, points of view about values and forms of life. The attendees are given the collective task of coming to some kind of understanding before the retreat is over about which point of view or form of life is the right one – or which are the right ones, should there be more than one (where “points of view” are understood as in Chapters 1 and 2, and “ways or forms of life” are understood as plans for living implied by different points of view).

To make matters as difficult and realistic as possible, let us add to the mix of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist and other religious believers at this retreat, a sampling of non-believers who think all the religious views are misguided, as well as agnostics and persons representing various secular ideologies, positivists (who believe that only science provides objective knowledge or reliable evidence), secular humanists, social Darwinists, Marxists, Aryan supremacists, Satanists, new age channelers, Nietzschean elitists, postmodernist relativists and numerous others – the learned and the unlearned, the wise and the foolish.