The Little Engine That Couldn’t

[mortismandrake]

Originally published at morosophos. You can comment here or there.

Isn’t it a little ironic how in religion class, the place where I’m allegedly fine-tuning my moral development and finding peace within the “peace of Christ,” the wild stress of the new and revised sophisticated, bureaucratic service project is sending my mental stability into the ravenous flames of hell?
Things to get done:

1. Figure out what the hell I’m going to be doing to be doing for a service project.
2. Have service proposal be denied.
3. Get kicked out of my group for the project.
4. Start my own group, revise project.
5. Start project.
6. Log the project hours.
7. Lose the log.
8. Find the log.
9. Burn the log.
10. Author new log.
11. Write the paper.

Mr. Downey is a little off, besides. He said he doesn’t believe in atheists, his justification being that any service rendered, which any person inevitably does at some point in his or her life, is an essential part of (Catholic) faith, which cannot be separated from the service. It’s a bunch of crap, and I was about to tell him I didn’t believe in Christians, when I thought better about it in regards to grade-preservation, and shut ye olde mouth. His argument doesn’t even make any sense. If good deeds are inseparable from Catholic faith, then no good deeds could have been performed until Catholicism. He links the two, giving them an exclusive relation, so would an act of Charity before, say, 32 AD not be charity? When two people from completely different spheres of belief coincidentally do something similar, such as an act of charity, the situation doesn’t dictate they must have the same beliefs. Almost nothing can be determined at all from the face-value of the deed anyways, because you have to take a look at the motives. For instance, the no one can deny the heaven-hell idea has a great impact on Christians. Country roads are littered with “HELL IS REAL” signs and images of the ten commandments. Hence, whereas a Christian might perhaps perform something nice because he or she is afraid of damnation, atheists may do them for the sake of having them done.

Another terrible tendancy I’ve noticed thus far in the class is to label things in absolutes of good and evil. Catholicism tries desperately to mask its still medieval views on sin with concepts such as intrinsic and extrinsic sins, but the absolutes still thrive. The fact of the matter is, good and evil do not exist by themselves. Good and evil are terms trying to describe the outcomes of human action, which is essentially neither good nor evil. Humans are not born essentially good, as the Church would say, and then led into “original sin,” or the human nature to sin. Isn’t that idea paradoxical? Humans are essentially selfish, which can be seen readily in infancy. Toddlers and little children grab at things out of curiosity, learning about the world in general and their own responses to the world. As a child finally recognises its own existence, it can begin to associate various attributes to itself, namely dominion. The children get extremely territorial, but parents don’t worry about their children because they know they’ll grow out of it.-Wrong. People don’t grow out of, they grow on top of. Selfishness gets masked and obscured by other things such as superficial morals, which nine times out of ten a given person may follow, but at other times, the basic instinct for self-service takes over, creating “sin.” The hidden selfishness is like the trunk of a tree. When the tree just sprouts, you can see the stem very easily because there’s nothing blocking your view. Allowing thirty or so years to elapse, the tree has fully grown and has shot-off branches and leaves, perhaps so many that the trunk is completely covered from sight by the leaves. Just because one can’t see the trunk any longer doesn’t mean the trunk is gone, that would be silly. The trunk is still there, just obscured, like the human selfishness.

Ah, Latin.

They burst upon the sea, the west and south winds
In one accord stirred all things from their resting places, and the winds of Africa,
Thick with storms, and they rolled the vast waves to shore.
The cry of men and the creaking of ropes followed.
The clouds suddenly snatched both the sky and day
out of the Trojans’ eyes; a dark night lay upon the sea.
They thunder at the pole, and the aether flashed with thick fires,
And all threatens imminent death for those men.
Immediately Aeneas’ arms were laxed by the cold:
He moaned, and stretching the palms of his two hands towards the stars,
in such a voice he called: “O both three and four times fortunate,
those who were granted to perish before the faces of their fathers under the high walls of Troy!…”

- The Aeneid, lines 84-96a