17.How norms are formed, and how we stop forming them!

The idea of time is that of progression towards something better. Norms are what the current society consider to be the right things. However I am sure on many things common sense was the reason we did or did not do some actions. Indeed there was a time that fathers had to be the one to sleep with their daughters first before marriage and yes there was a time that if you first born was a female it had to be buried alive however those norm are long gone ( I hope that is ). Why? I believe as times passes our norms only becomes better as out ethics changes and more and more people come into existence who dare to challenge the system and seek for a change, seek and strive for something better, like Socrates who opposed the God of Olympus and the ideology if his time. Sure he was murdered by the very society he strive to change for but we all saw how one main change the entire realm of philosophy and how people no longer bow down to Zeus (however come to thing of it we mostly bow to some other more sophisticated form of him, but this sophistication is also a sign of searching for something better, some God better than Zeus in this case!)
Slowly and painfully norms change. And this is done by the power of common sense t. Now you may ask what is common sense? Common sense is the very same thing that force the abolishing of the old disgusting norms of the past. It is in fact true that not all acts that are against the norm of the society are correct acts, like the act of paedophilia, and infact the person who believes in that has the right to argue so, however is it not hard to prove that man if one wants. It is this force that I call common sense.
I agree that normality is society related, and in different cultures different things are considered to be normal while in some other societies it is not. The mutual nature of a common norms suggest that one group could be wrong and it is therefore needed to be investigated. Howe we can investigate and decided is a different topic of its own and I rather not talk about it here.
However going back to the original topic and its relevance to current topic religion authority in general have been given far more power than they truly deserve. Laws also tend to give more fair treatment towards one religious bodies, and sometimes towards people of one religion than other! The existence of such unfair treatment always scares me. It scares me how a religious authority has the right to order the assassination of an author just for writing a book, it also scares me to know one Man in a white suit living in luxury, representing the spirit of a poor carpenter, has the power to hide his child molester workers, and provide them protection and dare to blame the wrong doing of his crew upon people who have nothing to do with it and still get away with it.
It also scares me how we always remain quiet on issues that bother us, just because we do not want to be rude towards ideas that we disagree with, and in many cases we could be very much wrong, yet the fact that we still remain quiet means we can never know if it was us who was wrong or it was the other person, or in terms of norm the society itself. A society with people who are in fear of being proven wrong or in fear of offending people. Such attitudes will leads to a society that is not going to go anywhere in terms of perfecting its values. A society that eventually remains ignorant and indifferent towards the things that makes us human, a society where debates and chat about life is replace with alcohol, partying and acting like tomorrow will never come. A society where we slowly cares less to have an opinion of our own and doing dialogues with others are just wrong, like the current American Foreign policies.
As Hypatia of Alexandria said, "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."