Hello friends, I wrote down some thoughts of how people use value systems, in case someone would be interested in reading and discussing them... :)

Since the dawn of time, when first protohumans climbed down from trees and started building a civilization, being unable to perceive the whole reality as it is, they started creating cognitive tools that would help them explore, simplify and interpret the surrounding world in a way necessary to at least survive and procreate.

And one of such tools, needed to orient oneself in the world, is a value system.

As David Hume pointed out, "you cannot derive an ought from an is", meaning you cannot come to a value judgement from a scientific observation.

Therefor any claims of "we do not need faith, as we have science!" are absurd. Science is a great tool for exploring the natural world, but it is completely unable to tell you how to use the results of this exploration. It can tell you how to split atoms, yet whether you should split them in a power plant or above an enemy city is a value judgment.

Usually, people are indoctrinated into those values systems by a religion, philosophy or culture in general. Sometimes people are able to construct their own systems. Afterwards confirmation bias kicks in and the adept starts seeing his value system as the one and only true, while competing systems are perceived as delusional.

Such bias clearly has its evolutionary advantages, as people sharing the same value system can act in unison and be victorious over those, who are unable to cooperate due to different value system.

So, while value systems are arbitrary, at times it might be beneficial to act as if they are not.

Usually, such value systems come down to answering the following three questions:

how did the universe come into being?

what is our relationship with the world? / what is our life goal? / how we should treat each other?

what happens after death?

It might be wise to evaluate those systems not from perspective of perceived truth (as none of them can be objectively proven to be true or false), but rather by their effect on the individual and the society in general.

For a value system to become viral, it usually needs to be at least loosely based in what is known as a "hero's journey" – hero feels a call to adventure, finds some supernatural guidance, fights the dragon, usually dies in some way, but then is reborn to guide his disciples to paradise.

It seems that whether this journey contains a supernatural being or not is just a "marketing gimmick". Therefor all those arguments between theists and atheists are futile, as instead of focusing on the values proposed by the given system, they focus whether the hero had his revelation after studying in a library or rather after inhaling a burning bush and supposedly communicating with a supernatural deity.

Author believes it is wise to pick a desired outcome on a dogmatic level (because I said so) and then pragmatically chose a value system that would most likely lead to the given outcome in a particular situation. In other words, pick the ends dogmatically, then choose the means pragmatically.

Any means are good, as long as they work in the current situation and are not counter-productive to the end goal. If one discovers that the given means do not work, he should reevaluate the situation and choose more appropriate means.

Unfortunately, most people do it vice versa – they link their self-worth with using some particular means, convince themselves that those means are the only true and will lead them to the best outcome possible, and then follow them blindly, without an exact end in mind. Even seeing that those means do are not working in the given situation, people often are unable to reconsider and keep pushing until the system crumbles on itself.