On taking truth and justice for granted

No picture can do justice to the original.

I don't watch television or read fiction anymore (unless I've needed to do so in order to teach my students), but the Game of Thrones universe plays with an interesting motif: "to break the wheel."  Daenerys was referring to a wheel of power through which the Iron Throne passed from Targaryen to Targaryen, connoting the wheel's crushing of resistance and of those found unfit to rule.

But I tend to interpret this metaphor a bit more broadly, as a representation of the political cycles of dominance and resistance.  My interpretation is inherent to Dany's; however, in the game of thrones, those resisting domination tend to do so only in order to dominate—themselves.

Therefore, I look toward a different breaking of the wheel, or at least toward a more exhaustively representative wheel to be broken.  If resistance is as cyclical as dominance, then the breaking of such a wheel would require an overcoming of both the resistors and the dominators or, in Freire's terms, of both the liberators and the oppressors—a transcendence, or at least a new wheel.

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For the minority who follow this blog consistently, this post could be considered a prequel to "It actually doesn't really matter if you're right."  The problem that I'm exploring predicates Edward Snowden's; stubbornness alone might seal our fate, even despite cowardice.

Snowden presumably broke, or at least exposed, the wheel of state mass surveillance in America.  "Presumably," because as I noted in that post, the status quo wasn't altered all that substantially even after the American public had hard evidence that their government was not to be trusted with their privacy or personal security.  The status quo spins on as the extremists among the governing and the governed continue to try to score points for themselves and their allies; the truth and justice among the relationships between both camps in America were merely adapted.

But those false senses of security and privacy that almost everyone outside of the NSA took for granted were challenged and, as a result, changed.  As with all other man-made constructs of the senses and reason, Snowden merely reminded us of their constructivism.  The truth of this perceived injustice merely altered people's senses of what can be "true" and "just."

In point of fact, our conceptions of truth and justice are artifacts, just like the words that we use to communicate them.  Ultimately, what we believe to be of most importance, even if it corresponds with the importances ascribed by the dominant authorities of our day—religious, political, or otherwise—exist as constructs.  Whether they're good or right doesn't allay their constructivity and therefore their ephemerality.

As a more-or-less life-long indiscriminate agnostic, I've been somewhat sensitive to this impermanency.  The Good and the right are only as good and as righteous as we will them to be.  Inherent goodness or rightness, (and inherence generally), is a dangerous proposition that should be consistently interrogated; as satisfying as it can be for one's world view, the ascription of inherent goodness or rightness to any value anticipates a harder fall when that construct's seams are exposed and sundered.

Moreover, if absolutely everyone you knew were in on an acclaimed lie, that claim would be indistinguishable from the truth.  I.e., if absolutely everyone you knew and trusted were lying to you, how would you know?  Their fallacious claim would be indistinguishable from the truth if your notion of truth were entangled in said claim.

Even fundamentality is constructed.  Our individualized/singular conceptions of the most fundamental elements or categories of our existences are culturally situated.  E.g., some would argue that biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry just applied physics, physics just applied mathematics, mathematics just applied epistemology, epistemology just applied ontology, ontology just applied epistemology, etc.

And not to break the divine wheel (or to reiterate its brokenness), but a classic case study of this trend remains worthy of the attention of the -structors: did God make humanity in His image, or did humanity make God in their image?  I tend to lean on the latter as an empiricist, but it's telling that even the most valued of values can be questioned, challenged, and imputed mortality.

Recently, I've been teaching my senior English students about Elie Wiesel's Night: the Nazis who coerced sonderkommandos to dig up the bodies of Hungarian Jews in Oświęcim in order to burn the evidence of their crimes also may have believed in their commitment to a construct of righteousness.  Trust our professional historians; many of the historical fascists were convinced that they were "right", and many were more than ready to die for the Nazi cause.  The fallaciousness and insecurity of their "rightness" could be identified and judged as false and deceitful only by those with other constructs.

It follows that, for humanity, fascism will always be right around the corner.  Not to beat the dead horse of the cliched cliché of George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and its endlessly compounded mimeses & parodies, but so long as truth and justice remain constructs of and by people, they will always be subject to erosion and potential destruction.

Ultimately, if we aren't willing to defend these constructs when it matters, then they won't be able to defend us when their essential meanings and consequences are all that stand between us and annihilation.  There's a real threat in denying or ignoring the constructivity of truth and justice until it's too late—too late for them to assist in the defense of the truthful and the just.

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A bunch of my white friends and allies tell me to avoid quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly (particularly in UofT graduate student governance spaces), seemingly insinuating that believing and/or attesting that he was right and just can be some form of appropriation.  Nonsensical of course, but we live in the era of woke cancel culture.  

MLK stood for something that most of us do not.  Make no mistake, MLK was hated and maligned by many of his contemporaries, even as he continued to make extreme personal sacrifices for his cause, as was basically every other person in history whose commitment to a truth and to a justice challenged others' commitments to inferior constructs of both.  Needless to say, the proportions of melanin in your skin do not determine the truthfulness of your words or the content of your character; the fact that this fact can be construed as taboo speaks volumes about the constructs of our day.  To break such a wheel as eloquently and bravely as MLK is something to which anyone and everyone should aspire.

But for us, to break the next cycle of domination and resistance, we need constructs worth preserving.  For me, MLK's righteousness, justice, and truth are worth the effort.

And so for not the first—and almost certainly not the last—time, I'll give MLK the final word, a paraphrasing of the original: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

This world doesn't know what to do with its intelligence.

You keep using that word...

Ponderous parables for pivotal paraboles

Once upon a time, there was a human child who wanted to know the Good.  Being the insufferably inquisitive and rather philosophically minded youth they were, they figured that the problem wasn't so much identifying the Good, (there were already lots of suggested candidates), but rather determining a method by which to validate the Good.  Well, the kid did find a sort of litmus test, a rather radical one at that.

You see, this kid was raised Christian, and so they were already quite familiar with the traditional parables.  In fact, this kid would ultimately go on to endure most of their Confirmation before dropping out at the last moment.   This kid wondered whether they needed religion in order to live and be just, whether the Good was predicated on traditions and consensual wisdom, or whether it had any contingencies at all as alluded by some of its progenitors.

On the way home from elementary school one day, this kid was contemplating hell. You know.  The bad one.  Where one would burn.  Forever.  The kid was already skeptical of the existence of hell, especially since they had already studied how allegorizing hell became a tool of church compliance and coercion from the 15th to the 20th centuries historically and even earlier pre-historically.  As this kid approached the turn in the sidewalk that redirected to their home street, they stopped walking as their reflection shifted to a consideration of Jesus's divine sacrifice, especially the willingness to sacrifice mortal existence.  Within this space of reflection, this kid noted that a morality becomes transcendental in character, relative to Christian systems, the moment the agent has identified a conviction for which they would be willing to sacrifice beyond their mortal existence, assuming the verity of a transcendental existence.  Hell was conceived, or at the very least <used>, as a method of enforcing compliance to an alleged transcendental morality.  However, this threat and its invoked fear are consequential only when one's moral system is subject to and therefore determined (at least in part) by the threat of hell.  The moment you believe in a moral code self-righteously such that you would bear that code in any and all eternities in any and all transcendental existences, this coercive form of Christianity no longer has any power over you.  

Furthermore, this conviction that authentically survived an existential threat of eternal damnation likely comprises or can be characterized by the Good, if we're conceiving the Good as its progenitors did: as a universal, unchanging, and all-encompassing form.  For how could the substance of that imperative be naught but Good for someone to willingly suffer eternally?  If it did not comprise the sum total value of everything they believed and/or assumed to be right or good, would the willingness to suffer eternally be naught but insanity?

In the words that the kid used to articulate this insight at the time, the moment you become "willing to burn in hell for all eternity for what you believe", you become liberated from all preceding and subsequent moral systems.  It's a different kind of freedom.

Although this kid grew up to be relatively agnostic, exercising a reasonable measure of doubt with regards to any kind of afterlife, since that moment, that kid has been relatively fearless.

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A word has been frequently floating in and out of my reflections as of late: "subsumption."  It seems that every action, resistance, and aspiration to significance supports or is eventually constitutive of a subsumption, a subsuming of the intents and character of the action, resistance, or aspiration into a more general category—notably, in democracies a category generally acquiescing of what people call the "middle class".  Historically, people called this latter process gentrification; i.e. the process of changing the nature of actions and contexts such that they further satisfy the gentry, the traditional middle and upper classes (think "gentlemen" and "gentlewomen").  

I've often attributed this trend to tribalistic exigencies and the dominant classes' exclusive rights to delineate the parameters of signification.  Self-identifying groups of people are naturally inclined to defend and further their common interests.  The middle class emerges as the bulk of the normal distribution of their collective needs and subsequent demands.  Notably, this collective reserves control over signification: the identification, renewal, and creation of significance.  For evidence of this control, look no further than the burgeoning demands and sequitur supplies of popularized formulaic T.V. shows and movies.  Especially in democracies, this dominant group generally dictates which meanings have the most power.

Subsumption, then, presents the means by which the middle class renews its power.  As both the product and producer of subsumptions, the middle class regulates meaning-making and the power (read: significance) of meanings.

I've commented on this Blog before about the cyclical nature of dominance and resistance, especially how both sets of aspirations eventually normalize; i.e., that the status quo/societal homeostasis necessitates their constant renewal.  These days, I would characterize these Sisyphean (r)evolutions as yet other forms of subsumption.

Why does this happen?

Simply, they're engaged in the classical pursuit of meaning and purpose.

On my own permutation of this quest, I infrequently engage in the following thought experiment: if we're trying to identify the most meaningful and significant values—the usual source of purpose—and actions, then start from the opposite.  What is the most meaningless thing a person can believe or do?  I usually turn to expressions like "all tautologies are tautologies."  But even the categorization of expressions of A = A has meaning and significance, especially since the meaningfulness of other expressions of relations hinges on the alleged meaninglessness of simpler expressions.  Maybe it's the void?  It's telling that vacuousness draws from the same etymology as "vacuum."

Or, maybe it's more useful to consider meaninglessness according to its (in)significance.  However, this merely politicizes the question of meaning by evaluating meaning according to its power, as what does "significance" signify?

Logically, if the most meaningless choices, values, and actions were dichotomized, then the most meaningful choices, values, and actions could be characterized as the most exhaustive, unique, and powerful.

Yet, in the endless pursuit of purpose and meaning, a staggering proportion of people find themselves "settling down to start families."  Inhabiting the aforementioned logic of this post, this domestication follows from a subsumption of intents and purposes under a set of generalizable traditions.  But I remain perplexed as to the following: is it not suspect that so many individuals' pursuits of purpose and meaning have been resolved in starting families?  That after millenia of human development, the consistent stopgap for the problem of living with meaning is to furnish the next generation of people who will undoubtedly have the same problem?

Potential vacuousness notwithstanding, even monogamy raises the specter of a failure of the imagination to do something with one's intelligence before or after the status quo.  "Welp, I have run out of ideas.  Might as well chase tail."  

I realize that the more nihilist-leaning among my readers might counter with the axiomatic assumption that existence has only the meaning that we ascribe to it; i.e., there is no guarantee to any inherent purpose or meaning in anything.  But can we not do better?  

Especially when faced with an existential threat?

Obviously the species needs to reproduce itself at some point, but there's a threshold after which existence is merely existed for the sake of existence.

What does it mean to succeed in the midst of global turmoil?  Does it mean the same to you now as it did in September, 2019?

People tend to define success in numbers.  Equity, valuations, and margins.  There are people who I've encountered that I pity every day because the system is so absolutely rigged against them.  I have yet to encounter a "successful" company or personality cult that doesn't have at least 1-2 bodies mortaring its foundations.  I promised myself in the earliest days of my social justice and peace studies course work that I would never slit a single throat, metaphorically or otherwise, to get ahead; I'm increasingly convinced that many of my classmates didn't share that conviction.  The global pandemic just aggravates these moral and integrous discrepancies.

This world doesn't know what to do with its intelligence.  Our public schooling systems in Ontario are about to crumble wholesale because our administrations, among the ministry, school boards, and unions lack the organizational and creative capacity to imagine and to implement a new vision of schooling necessitated by one of the greatest threats of our lifetimes.  Smarts won't save us; they might give us a better way to mitigate the effects and infectivity of this virus, but this is just one relatively benign pathogen.  I predicted at about the age of 16 that antibiotic resistance alone could bring this world to its knees; you don't need to search too deeply into Google to ascertain with relative certainty that this is only the beginning.  

We've survived this long because we've adapted.  The most maladaptive systems will degrade and degenerate as we're witnessing on the daily.  Classists hate change, yet I'm not calling for a "Marxist (r)evolution."  Our systems, starting with our schools, need to refocus and reconstitute their operations in accordance with their long-standing mandates.  

And this stuff aerosols.  For the love of reason, don't pack elementary school students into enclosed spaces with no exit or contingency plan.

I worry that the problem is less about whether we have the collective intellect to survive this, than about whether we have the moral convictions and courage to think laterally and take risks.

Otherwise, private industry is going to take over every failing public system; it was already happening among pre-college schooling in Ontario; this crisis has been an invitation for private schools (especially those structured and equipped for online learning) and for privatized health care to build and to consolidate empires in Canada.  My own school is restructuring in anticipation that publicly schooled students could fall behind their private and home schooled peers by almost a year as of September, 2021.  Theodore Sizer is/would be churning in his grave.

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"Civilization" is a derivative Anglicization of its root, "cīvis", a rough Latin equivalent to our current word "citizen."  It's legal definition succeeds its essential and primordial meaning of "city-dweller".  Citizen-ship, or the rights and responsibilities inherent to constituting a city, implies higher duties than simply participating in the governance and perpetuity of the polis; thriving usually requires more of us than surviving.  We can still thrive under these conditions, as we should; but we need to commit to this end.  I know it's hard.  My own commitment wavered after March, partly due to my experiences with the bad faith of certain members of the graduate student community of UofT.

But we cannot give up.  Doomscrolling is a deontological necessity, in moderation of course.  Our appreciations for and exhaustive grasping of the significance and consequence of the Good and the right depend in part on our lucidity of the darkness.

This world cannot abide the unwillingness to speak the honest, good faith truth of our experiences, courageously in adversity.  Wisdom cannot be wasted on the wise unwilling or too dispassionate to act Justly when we're on the brink.

The Fight at the End of the Tunnel: A Tale of Three Teloi

One of my many sources of inspiration

As I near the end of my yearly New Year's gaming staycation that follows my time with family and friends and get back into zero-sum work mode, I am lead to once again reflect on why I will re-invest myself into that lifestyle.  The last three years, I've spent the transition after Christmas into the New Year gaming as much as I can to get it out of my system while most people are partying and vacationing.

I began writing this blog post before the holidays as a reflection on some of my conversations with some of my closest friends and allies.  One of these allies is a professor with whom I confide with about some of the most topical issues globally.  When discussing the most recent tax bill in the United States which promises to negate the legacies of about half of the 20th century presidents while emboldening the historically deplorable, this professor concluded the discussion by insisting that "it will get worse."

As teachers, we both have the responsibilities to foster hope and the precedents for innovation for the future among our pupils.  However, the realities of our day require a degree and type of vigilance that has little historical precedent (with the possible exceptions of the contextual contingencies of the World Wars).  Furthermore, as I insisted in confidence with another friend and ally, we can't shelter these kids from these circumstances forever (although we'd prefer to).

Most educators seem to teach as though there's some sort of light at the end of the tunnel of institutionalized education, whether in new innovations for addressing old problems, new(er) mental models for conceptualizing existing systems, and/or in some sort of well-paying, secure job.  As a student of history, I'm inclined to argue that this may have been true of 1950s-60s (and even into the 1980s) but that this perspective would now plainly underestimate the gravity of modern circumstances.  Trump was elected, climate change is happening before our eyes, and we're at the greatest risk of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I could include an extended laundry list of issues that keep me up at night, but I'd admonish that you use your imagination.  

I'm inclined to challenge the assumption that we hold any privilege to certainty of any sort of utopian telos in or through education considering our collective situation.  Moreover, true humility lay in one of the first principles of existential philosophy: that our existences could be completely meaningless.  Naturally, a cognizance of this possibility has been the precursor of existential crises globally (mine included).  By extension, there's no means to certainty that there's a definitive light at the end of the educational tunnel in spite of adamant pursuit of education (Please note that I argue this as a practicing professional teacher who's taught across disciplines and as a full-time PhD student in the field of education; I don't make that claim lightly).

I'd remind the reader of one of the main ideas in astronomy: the Earth is a nigh impossible anomaly comprising a combination of factors conducive to the sufficient development of life into sentient beings.  As articulated by many authors and scholars before this writing, we are nearly negligible in the grand scheme of the observable universe.  Given our relative insignificance, it's a rare degree of arrogance to believe that the universe and/or its potential creator(s) care(s) about us.

No, we need to work with what's in front of us or else sociopaths and their sycophants will incorporate us into the front matter of their own narratives.

We can exercise a degree of free will, albeit heavily contextualized and coerced.  In my consistent reflections and discussions, I've narrowed our options into three general paths conducive to three different final ends (teloi) of education.  These options available to those who know enough to be responsible to those of the future represent three distinct responses to the question that I find myself asking recurrently, "to what end?"

1) Somewhere on the spectrum between exile and willful ignorance

In my experience, most of the people who bear the responsibility of knowledge of the potential consequences for posterity simply choose to ignore these very real threats to themselves and even to their own friends and families.  Others choose a self-imposed exile to try to put as much distance between themselves and the rest of human "civilization."  The remainder of those of this category of teloi fall somewhere on that spectrum, varying in degree of deliberate segregation and willful denial.  Who can blame them?  Well, I don't, but the people who will suffer through our legacies might.

2) Suicide/excessive drug addiction

Some people cannot accept reality for what it is.  Never forget that "O Captain! My Captain!", who played numerous roles as exceptional mentors and teachers, ended his own life battling with depression.  Suicide is one of the final consequences of our malaise.  I hear its echoes in social media and among my own graduate student communities in the gallows humour that keeps us sane.  I am faced with these questions myself, but, to this day, I still perceive it as the ultimate act of selfishness for someone in this position.  Which brings me to the logical option of

3) Fight

We all have parts in this narrative, and so we all have parts in how it ends.  Much of my re-investment in my daily commitment to service lay in my awareness of the reality that if the people with this knowledge have the capacity to choose not to fight, then all of us could choose not to do what needs to be done.  An existential philosopher might argue, needlessly fatalistically, that it could already be over.  I am simply unwilling to entertain that possibility.

And back to marking essays...

It actually doesn't really matter if you're right.

This post has been months in the making.  I've wanted to say this for a long while, but I didn't have the words... or the time.

As you probably know, the world's not doing so hot.  And worse yet, very few of us are attempting to do anything about it, let alone care.

The ones who care are searching for better ideas.  The ones who act are trying to foster better habits.

Both are seeking and attempting to realize solutions.

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What if I told you that there's a significant chance that there is no "solution"?  No paradigm to shift to; no golden idea that will transform society; and no be-all end-all way to solve our problems?

These words are not those of a pessimistic fatalist.  Recently I've become tentatively confident that one could have all of the currently knowable knowledge in our world and still go through his/her entire life without making a positive impact on society.  This reality is less a reflection of the potential qualities and quantities of knowledge than of the day-to-day maintenance and function of the human race.  Our collective condition is such that one person could have an idea that could solve all of the world's problems and yet this person could forever live in a world full of problems.

I was lucky.  I stumbled upon the Meta-discourse at a relatively young age.  I'm speaking of the values discourse: the discourse that overshadows, informs, and shapes all other discourses; the first and last discourse of importance. I've often questioned whether my knowledge has been a blessing or a curse.  However, to this day, I continue to maintain that knowledge in of itself is neither good or evil; that the value of knowledge depends on what one does with it.

It's funny.  Knowledge of the highest discourse is actually meaningless given the parameters of planet Earth.  Even if one had an idea as to how every human decision is made, this knowledge in of itself is valueless.

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Exhibit Edward Snowden, our new modern middle-class hero.  He opened our eyes in ways that few have in our generation.  He gave us hard evidence that our governments in the West are not to be trusted and that our supposed representatives have a systemic distrust of the public they supposedly serve.  And yet here we are, almost years later living ostensibly the same lives we were living almost years before.  What really changed in the day-to-day habits of the masses?  The people who already distrusted our governments gleefully confirmed their biases, and the people of faith have yet to demand hard concessions.

Snowden demonstrated a reality of democracy that ironically few care to acknowledge.  You could walk into a crowded town square containing the majority of a society with a gold tablet handed to you from the highest God telling everyone how they should live their lives differently with the greatest wisdom, and almost no one would change their day-to-day routine.  If one cannot market that understanding, sell it to the masses comprehensibly, and institutionalize it for future generations, then that knowledge in of itself has no value to the future of humanity.

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In fact, it actually doesn't really matter if you're right.

This is my problem with some of the people who continue to look for that gold tablet, the so-called whistle blowers.  Practically speaking, these martyred actions change almost nothing  In fact, they will likely change less and less the more bureaucratized and institutionalized society becomes.

That's not to say that the situation is hopeless.  We just need to accept the situation for what it is, and use the resources at our disposal.  Particularly, we need to target structures.  And first and foremost, we need to stay practical.

I continuously hear my friends and colleagues demanding for better ideas.  But many of the ideas have been here all along.  "An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man."

People need to make better use of existing good ideas.

We need less armchair humanists and more people carefully leading on the front lines.  We need less concern for new ideas and greater execution of ideas that have been around for millenia.  We need less people concerned with being right and more people concerned with making us right.

Bertrand Russell

(originally published March 20, 2012)
I've often contemplated changing my Religious Views from "All comparative religion courses should be renamed Agnosticism" to "read Bertrand Russell."  In hindsight, the statements are essentially the same, and equally illustrative of my personal (spiritual?) beliefs.

I'm guilty of a kind of hero worship of Russell, for many of the same reasons as some of my intellectual god fathers, [anonymous] included.

Russell's legacy with regards to religious, if I were a reductionist, was simply to inject some mathematician's/historian's rationality into the discussion of religion and belief.  Arguably, that's all I do in my Social Justice and Peace Studies seminars these days.

Russell, if one briefly consults his Wikipedia page, "was a prominent anti-war activist; he championed free trade and anti-imperialism[6][7] and went to prison for his pacifism during World War I.[8] Later, he campaigned against Adolf Hitler, then criticised Stalinist totalitarianism, attacked the United States of America's involvement in the Vietnam War, and was an outspoken proponent of nuclear disarmament.[9] One of his last acts was to issue a statement which condemned Israeli aggression in the Middle East.[10]"  If I didn't know any better, he sounds just like your average Catholic Social Justice and Peace Studies student, minus his stance on free-trade - which was a response to his times.

Russell demonstrated something I find profound, that one does not need to know or not know the existence of a God, Gods, or a creator in order to understand or recognize the inherent dignity of all life. There's this weird causation that some fundamentalist Christians harbour that we'll suddenly start eating babies if we don't have faith in God's existence.

Let me say this, without any caveats or "but"s.  Morality is not subject to God;  God is subject to morality.  This is how we have different kinds of Gods interpreted from the same book(s).

Nietzsche championed this idea, but it's worth repeating: you don't need belief in order to have morals, and further, those without belief have a greater onus in justifying their morality.  Believe me, I struggle every moment of every day to justify my morality, and you can be damn sure I have no idea whether or not God(s) exist(s).  It's one thing to follow a set of principles, it's another to put them together from scratch.

Here's one advantage agnostics will always have over the faithful/submissive.  At the end of the day, our values will be more universal, because we questioned them every step of the way.

Rationalist Morals: The Deets

(originally posted Oct. 29, 2011)
Since the beginning of time, essays have started with this phrase.
This essay will elaborate on the "rationalist morals" introduced in my most recent note "Agnosticism: A basis for Rationalist Morals."

One of that essay's arguments will serve as the introduction for this essay.

"Agnostics have the potential to have the strongest and purest morals.  To a degree, Agnostic morals are scientific, as they are based entirely on evidence.  They're "objective" in the methodological interpretation of the word: subject to change based on experience.  More importantly, they're almost completely transferable between people(s), because in general we share the same experiences in the same ways."
The introduction presents four theses; I'll elaborate each one in turn.

1)  "Agnostics have the potential to have the strongest morals."
Every belief system has different sources of moral strength.  For Christians, it's faith.  For Islamists, it's submission.  For Jews, it's the word/study.
However, for Agnostics, the source of moral strength is will.  Why "will?"  Well, most beliefs and creeds incorporate will into their moral strength.  For example, for some denominations of Christianity, will is central because of the importance of having a "free will" to merit theology.
Although most beliefs and creeds share will as a component of their moral strength, Agnosticism is the only system of thought that I have encountered where moral strength is almost entirely determined by strength of will.
Agnostics have the potential to have the strongest morals because of the nature of will.  Will is the only ability that we all share that has no substantive limits; the presence and use of will is rational; the use of will, such as Nietzsche's will to power, is intrinsic to the human being; finally, human beings had will long before they had faith, submission, or the word.  Will is innate.
In sum, as something all human beings share from birth with no substantive limits, will presents an opportunity to have stronger morals.  (Edit: in hindsight, this argument is actually relatively weak as there's arguably no substantive limits to faith or submission either.)

2) "Agnostics have the potential to have the purest morals."
I must state from the outset that when I talk of purity, I'm referring to degree of logic, reasoning, and consistency.
As stated in my previous note on this topic, Agnosticism is founded upon reason.  Reason is one of, if not, the best method(s) of knowing available to humanity.  Most other beliefs and creeds rely on "weaker" methods of knowing, such as revelation or authority.  (Ironically, the two former methods or knowing are often interrelated) These methods of knowing: revelation and authority, share the same problem with theism and atheism --- they are incredible by definition.
Not only are theist/atheist morals sometimes illogical and unreasonable, they also tend to be inconsistent, at least relative to rationalist morals.  There are many examples of this - just look at the Bible - see Bertrand Russel's 'Why I am not a Christian'/go google "inconsistencies in the Bible."  In addition to their logic, reasoning, and consistency, rationalist morals draw their purity largely from their simplicity.  They are derived from basic reason based on basic experiences --- there are no complex/farfetched external variables such as faith or submission etc.  Rationalist morals are Occam's Razor'ed morals.
In sum,  rationalist morals are based on the most rational and simplest methods of knowing, and as such, have the potential to be the purest.

3)  "To a degree, Agnostic morals are scientific, as they are based entirely on evidence.  They're 'objective' in the methodological interpretation of the word: subject to change based on experience."
"3)" was essentially covered in the previous paragraph - so I'm going to leave it for now.
***Edit*** Yeah I think I'm actually going to address this.
I'd argue that rationalist morals are exclusively empirical.  They essentially avoid the metaphysical as much as possible, with the possible exception of human feeling.  (The question as to whether or not emotion serves as a metaphysical exception is based on whether or not one thinks emotional affection rational.)
As a product of empiricism, rational morals have high transferability between peoples as almost all our cognitions are based on empirical evidence.  Also, rational morals gain credibility from their positivist roots - which, importantly, include objectivity: the susceptibility to change opinion, perspective, or argument based on new evidence.   This objectivity presents an enormous advantage over the many beliefs and creeds that remain dogmatically static, such as many sects of Islam.  A rationalist morality only becomes static (i.e. absolute) when it reaches full development, which would essentially require every possible experience ever.

4)  "They're almost completely transferable between people(s), because in general we share the same experiences in the same ways."
Of all my points so far, this is undoubtedly the most important.
Allow me to illustrate.  There is, as of yet, only one universal language shared by all peoples, at all times, in all places.  I'm speaking of course of mathematics.  It's no coincidence that mathematics and rationalist morals are almost universally applicable to and by all peoples.  They are both founded upon the same Occam's Razor'ed principles: those of reason, logic, and experience.  Rationalist morals present another universal language, or at least an excellent contender for a universal language.  I realize the latter argument could be used for any other language such as English etc., however, there is an important distinction between the language of mathematics and most other languages.  Most  languages have cultural overtones and values that distort and vary their meaning from person to person and group to group.  However, mathematics/reason/logic are largely neutral and impartial.  Culture doesn't/shouldn't get in the way of rationalist morals.
In sum, rationalist morals are almost completely transferable between people(s), because they're founded on shared experiences and cognition.

Well, now that I've described the criteria and skeleton of rationalist morals, I thought I'd end this note by fleshing out one - one of the most basic and universal "Do on to others as you would have done to you."  The Golden Rule.  Almost every belief and creed shares it, in some form.
Why is the Golden Rule a rationalist moral?
The answer lies in the reasoning for the rule: empathy.  Empathy, or the presence of empathy, is one of the most fundamental rationalist morals - that of understanding, or the ability to understand, a person's feelings and values, and how they affect them.  The Golden Rule is a direct projection of empathy, i.e., don't do things to other people that would make you feel bad if they were done to you.  Thus, the rationalist moral in this instance, is not the projected Golden Rule, but empathy. Without empathy, there is no logical reason to follow the Golden Rule.

I'll create another note outlining some other key rationalist morals later --- I still have to finish researching for that essay I mentioned in the last note.

P.S.
(Here's a hint for finding rationalist morals - they're usually the morals that almost every belief and creed share.)

Agnosticism: A basis for rationalist morals

(originally published Oct. 22, 2011)
I'm currently researching for an essay and as you can tell, I'm doing a bad job.
In this short essay I intend to rehabilitate the perception of Agnostics, the only "denomination" of which I'd claim to be a member.  (A hefty task to say the least)

What is agnosticism?
Well, Wikipedia currently thinks Agnosticism "is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable."
In other words, they're not sure God(s) exist(s).
Thus, if I had to pinpoint the key defining factor that causes someone to be an agnostic, it would be their perspective of the "leap of faith," because, in general, a leap faith is the main requirement for someone to be sure about the existence or non-existence of (a) God(s).

What is a leap of faith?
Well, Wikipedia currently thinks a leap of faith "is the act of believing in or accepting something intangible or unprovable, or without empirical evidence."
In other words, knowing something beyond experience.

As stated, a person's perspective of the "leap of faith" is the key defining factor that causes someone to be an agnostic because a leap of faith is required for someone to be (a)theist.  A leap of faith is required to "know" that God exists," but, importantly, a leap of faith is also required to "know" that God does not exist.
What's often misunderstood or taken for granted, is that atheism can be just as irrational as theism, because atheism bears the same burden of evidence as theism.

As you can probably tell, I think that Agnosticism is "rational."  I stress the rationality of Agnosticism because of the irrationality of the leap of faith: of knowing something without empirical evidence.

And here's the meat of my argument:
In discussions with some of my faithful companions, both theist and atheist, (but especially with the theist ones), I often get accused of having "weaker" morals.  That since I have no faith, I am essentially a moral nihilist by default.
I assure you, the reality is quite the opposite.
As a "belief" based entirely on rationality, I'd argue that Agnostics have the potential to have the strongest and purest morals.  To a degree, Agnostic morals are scientific, as they are based entirely on evidence.  They're "objective" in the methodological interpretation of the word: subject to change based on experience.  More importantly, they're almost completely transferable between people(s), because in general we share the same experiences in the same ways.
As I tend to cite Socrates at least once in every Facebook note, I'm clearly not breaking the tradition now.  Socrates, if he lived today, would undoubtedly have been an (if not "the") uber-agnostic.  As cited in my last note, he was most famous for claiming that he "knew nothing."  In sum, Socrates, and Agnosticism for that matter, are testaments to the reality that often the wisest, most intelligent and rational thing a person can say is "I don't know."

I must stress, I respect theists and atheists.  Who knows - maybe they're right.  My problem with their belief(s) is methodological, not substantial.  I happen to harbour many monotheistic values myself, but for very different reasons.  (Which I'll discuss later in another note)
However, one must remember, irrationality is irrational.  It doesn't matter if entire belief system is rational AFTER the irrational leap of faith;  it still rests on an irrational premise.  Theism and atheism are practically identical to knowing that this is all just a dream. Wake up.

P.S.
(I won't lie, atheists tend to have rationalist morals, they just tend to neglect the fact that they're also making an irrational leap of faith.)
(Also, arguably, Agnosticism still requires a leap of faith: a leap of faith that your sensations are real.  But that's a philosophical/metaphysical flying spaghetti monster that I wouldn't touch with a 30 foot pole.)