Everyone should periodically conduct a survey of their belief system, touching at least all the major elements of importance to human society. At a minimum, it makes for good mental exercise and gives you a benchmark of where you are today so that in the future you can see how your beliefs have changed (or not) over time.

I’ m going to put my major beliefs online for others to see and encourage my family members to do the same. I’m not one to conceal my beliefs so this isn’t a big step for me. I will also include my reasoning for each belief so I can reexamine that reasoning in the future and so others can examine my beliefs and reasoning and see if it moves them to change their own.

Below are some of the major topics I will include in this series on my beliefs.

- I am absolutely pro-life. I will detail what that means, but briefly it includes being against abortion, against capital punishment, and for alternatives to imprisonment for most offenses.

- I am pro order, but not absolutely. Order is necessary for a stable and productive society but has to be balanced against the need for liberty.

- I am pro liberty, but not absolutely. Liberty has to be balanced against the need for order and restricted sufficient to fulfill the requirements of life.

- I am for a strong military, but again not absolutely. A strong military is a necessity in modern life. There may someday come a time when a military is no longer needed but it will not come in my lifetime and probably not in my children’s lifetime. In the meantime, we must defend those who cannot defend themselves and we must defend our own values and way of life from those who try to destroy it.

- I am for drug legalization, at least for cannabis products, and for alternatives to imprisonment for all non-violent drug offenders.

- I am for world engagement. The idea that we can act as we wish within our borders without regard for the outside world was never valid and its invalidity is clearer now than ever. We can no longer act as if the US is an island separate from the world. We are inextricably tied to the rest of the world. Events of the last ten years (e.g. 9/11/01 and the 2008-2009 financial crisis) have made that crystal clear.

- We are interdependent with all that exists and we are particularly interdependent with other life. We are both morally and logically responsible for the welfare of our fellow humans and to some extent for the non-human life on earth.

- I am pro animal welfare. This follows from both our interdependence and our moral responsibility to minimize suffering.

- I am pro nature preservation, conservation, or whatever word you want to use. We need to return our planet to a wilderness state similar to that of the early 20th century or earlier.

- I am pro diversity. Diversity isn’t just a politically correct catchword. Diverse people bring widely varying worldviews and experience to the table and this can be instrumental in solving problems both interpersonal and technical.

- I am pro arts. The arts are important in defining our culture and in giving meaning and fulfillment to our lives in general.

- I am against fundamentalist religion of any form.

- I am both pro traditional family and pro alternate family. We should structure society so that at least one parent in couples with minor children can elect to remain at home to care for the family, without endangering the family’s economic health. One man and one woman (both educated and mature) seems to me to be ordained by nature as the ideal parenting couple, but we live in a real world and given the evidence that two women or two men can raise healthy and happy children who go on to become good (successful) adults, it is illogical and mean-spirited to deny these couples a chance to raise children. The determining factor in deciding whether a couple is fit to raise children should be based on whether the parents are able to consider the best long-term interests of the child aside from their own beliefs and interests.

- I am pro love – universal love – not love bound by blood, common beliefs, geography, or species.

- I am against fear in general. Fear served a critical purpose in our distant past and serves a minor purpose today, but we have surpassed the need for fear and it is now holding us back far more than it helps us. Fear is the single force keeping us from advancing to a new age of almost universal compassion and understanding. Hate arises from fear. You must first fear something in order to hate it. The Hatriots, Tea Partiers, etc. are prime examples of this fact. They fear change in general, but most of all they fear the coming of a new world where being white and born in the United States doesn’t guarantee a privileged status among the peoples of the world, where other nations are approaching equality in power and status with the U.S. and other races are approaching equality in numbers, status and opportunity with the white man.

- I believe we should offer guaranteed work to every citizen as a cornerstone of our democracy. I have a sister in law with moderate severity Down Syndrome and she works, so there is a suitable job for almost everyone. All these jobs should be required to pay a living wage, enough to afford you a good life if you use your money wisely. I’ll get into more detail on this at a later date. Some will ask “What about the welfare queens, the unwilling people of all stripes?” There will have to be training with real rewards and consequences but the price of not pursuing this path is even higher, to our economy and our humanity.

- I am a secular humanist. I follow no religion and consider religion a pre-rational human trait that once served a purpose but now holds humanity back. My life stance is based on reason and experience, from which I derive my ethics and my life goals of making the world a little better for all life, human and otherwise.

- I am a social liberal and an economic moderate. Specifically, I work to free man from his suffering through education and science in the long term, and I work to change our society and its laws to better reflect justice and compassion in the short term. Capitalism has a place in human affairs but it must be balanced by government regulation to curb its inherent immoral tendencies. My goal is to help create a society where all have enough for their needs, to include not only the basics for survival but high quality public education and health care, to ensure that all have a chance at a good life. All life, human and non-human, will benefit from the improvement of human society. All forms of behavior that don’t actively harm society should be permitted. Specifically, racism and religion based condemnations of sexuality, morality, etc. should be prohibited.