Ah, the mental clarity of a Monday morning! Ain't nothing like it.

So I decided to finally start up this blog after reading the Wired News article on The New Atheism. I found it extremely compelling and important.

I just use it as a useful reference to drag readers in here so we can all start at the same point. Let's just say that you don't have time to read the article. OK. Well it basically says that God doesn't exist. That's not the focus of the New Atheism but it is the basic tenet.

The issue that I want to explore here starts from this point. If God doesn't exist, then the idea of an external morality handed down from Heaven goes with him. But as we all know, humans do have morals and those humans that don't are called psychopathic, or at the very least, unbalanced.

I myself rejected God as an explanation around 10 years ago, but haven't been able to shake off my morality so easily. While at grad school last year I think I found a piece of the puzzle. After reading McLuhan, I agree with the concept that human morality is affected by media and tools and things that we create.

I'll illustrate with a simple example. If you had a single, well-made samurai sword, you could line up 10,000 people and methodically kill them, one by one. But I don't think you'd make it to the last guy. You'd have to watch each one die, and after about a couple of hundred, you'd probably break down mentally.

But if you're flying in an airplane and you look at a radar-scope and see a town at a certain co-ordinate, you can drop a bomb on 10,000 people and kill them quickly and all you see is a little blip disappear on the radar screen. Since you don't have to watch those people die, it's easier to kill them.

What I'm saying here is that the advancement of, in this case, military technology has changed the morals of the people who use that technology. I want to use this blog to explore how media and technology change the moral decisions that we make.