How should we live?

Our individual purpose^[1] is for each of us to live our lives to the limits of our potential within the bounds of our consciences. 

Together our collective purpose is to enable as many individuals as possible, born and as yet unborn, of current and future generations, to realise their potentials within their own consciences. 

How does having these ends help us?  How should we act and live to attain these ends? 

The answers depend on your world view and on what threats to the survival of hopeful humanity^[2] you recognise.  What is the nature of people^[3], and what is the nature of society^[4]?  Are there paths of least resistance, or default behavioural tendencies that individuals, groups, and societies will flow down unless we act consciously?  Are those default tendencies inimical to our purposes?  If we leave ourselves and the groups and societies around us to their own devices where are we likely to end up?  What is the natural state of our social garden^[5]? 

Our major faiths and belief systems recognise that without self-management we will all end up in a brutal daily struggle for mere survival.  Most regrettably that remains the lot of many humans today, but without our great faiths^[6] our situation would have been universally dismal. 

Our classical religious scriptures and the dogma that has evolved around them can be highly prescriptive on what we should and should not do – circumcise your boy children, don’t bury your girl babies alive, don’t eat pork, pray five times a day, don’t masturbate, don’t worship idols. 

In such detail, do we not lose sight of the big picture and of the broad guiding principles? 

Our great religions also travel with a great deal of divisive and exclusive baggage.  Emotion, prejudice and self-interest obscure their core truths.

In a world so radically different from that of the Ten Commandments^[7] and the times of Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Muhammad, what should our core values^[8] be?

Should we even speak of commandments when the individual is sovereign^[9]?  Perhaps we should speak merely of suggestions?