Introduction

Morality

Morality means our customs, our ways of behaving, especially as they impact on the creation of a life in a community.

Morality is shaped by values, what we consider good things to pay attention to and to move towards. It is also shaped by our beliefs about how the world works.

Zartians think that modern people, especially in Europe, are suffering from a lack of good morality. Our behaviour is wrong, we are not doing what we should be doing. This is leading to a decline in the good working of our society. With this decline comes a deterioration in the quality of life for many of us, and for those who are paying attention the future looks even worse, with nightmare scenarios seemingly becoming more plausible.

What can be done?

Traditionally people gained their morality from the religious teaching they received. However in modern Europe our traditional religion of Christianity is taken less and less seriously. For whatever reason many people feel that it isn't relevant to modern life.

Our contention is that Christianity really is not the best possible religion for us, and that it is necessary to change to something different.

We believe that there is something wrong with the very roots of Christianity, and that therefore it is not possible to reform it sufficiently for modern purposes. In other words because the very foundations of Christianity are imperfect, in our view, anything built upon them will be less strong than it could be.

Instead we look elsewhere for the roots of our new system. We find this in the work of an Iranian philosopher known as Zoroaster.

Zoroaster, who most likely lived about a thousand years before Jesus, developed ideas about good and evil, which have been preserved through history. His ideas have impacted traditions including Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, but his original work is still relevant to us today.

From the beginning Zoroaster's ideas were blended with the pre-existing popular religion of his time. This had a similarity to the early Vedic religion of India, and indeed to the pre-Christian religions of Europe.

Over the years since his time a great tradition has built up. This is a valuable resource for us. However it is not self-evident that we can rely solely on past masters for everything. Zartians believe we need to do some work today to refresh the Zoroastrian tradition and adapt it to modern purposes.

So Zartianism is a neo-Zoroastrianism. It takes a similar approach to the first Zoroastrians of building a system on the twin strands of Irano-European popular religion and the work of individual philosophers starting with Zoroaster. However it brings fresh eyes to this task and ends up with something somewhat different to what other more traditional Zoroastrians are used to.
January 4026 ZHE