Religion
Alright so this little bit of philosophical wondering started with a conversation at lunch or should I say argument. I was sitting at lunch with my good friends Goliath and Cane (names changed) talking about the dreams we had the night before and Goliath asks, "What if this were all a dream and we haven't woken up yet?" To which Cane responds, "Doesn't matter." Goliath applauds him on his answer because he says such questions have no definite answer. Now I'm sitting there knowing I shouldn't say what I was thinking because I didn't give my friends biblical names for nothing but I open my mouth and say, "it's like asking what is life after death." Well immediately I get told that that question and all such questions do have definite answers. For the rest of the lunch shift it was explained to me that I had turned my heart from God, was not enlightened to the Truth, and was most likely going to Hell. These conclusions were made in the kindest possible tone of condemnation and was supported by such hard core evidence as, "Other people have had religious experiences (that can't be proven by the way)," "God's voice told me to look around and I found my lost wallet under a tambourine (not even touching on the presence of a tambourine maybe your unconscious mind remembered the spot and you got the urge to look around)," and "I have had healing and have seen the face of the Holy Ghost. God has spoken to me and if you had only experienced what I have you would have no doubt that this is the Truth.(Well if I had medical experiments performed on me by aliens I would probably believe in those too, Roswellians certainly do)."
Now my friends could believe that cockroaches were going to land on Saturn and push it off course so that it will collide with Mercury and cause burning bits of that planet to come and set the earth on fire and so will come Judgment Day, and I wouldn't care and would probably love them for their strange ideas as long as they didn't put those ideas forward as the ultimate Truth and that anyone who didn't know this truth was a poor soul doomed to wonder forever lost, which is the feeling I got from Goliath and Cain. My problem with them was that they had turned their brains off. They had come up with one way to describe the world and didn't entertain any others. If a man came up to you on the street and asked you to carry a package that was full of chocolate to his brother across town, as an intelligent human being you would question his story, you might find that the package really did contain chocolate but you would find that out by looking, not by blindly accepting it.
One of the things that was said to me that pissed me off the most was that I was told I had to be looking for God to find him. My spirituality has virtually ping ponged in the last four years. Anyone who seriously looks at the world around them will find things that challenge and sometimes destroy their beliefs and you must mourn those beliefs as the loss of self that they were and then you have to pick yourself up and continue looking. I know my friend Goliath had been looking but it seems that everything he found confirmed what he already knew. You begin with a theory and then set out to disprove it not prove it. The evidence should be what you look at, not what you want to see.
Ok only now are we going to go onto the next step. This truth that Goliath spoke of seemed to be the truth of what was right. I mean aren't the two normally equated in our minds, if it is the truth than it is right. So Goliath claimed to have knowledge of what is right and what is wrong. In fact anyone who prescribes to a religion claims to know what is right and what is wrong. How many of the religious-right in this country fight against what they think is wrong. So let me translate this into language that has resonance with Christians. Contemporary Christians and other members of other religions claim to posses the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now anyone who has read Genesis should have gotten chills up their spine.
So according to the book of Genesis man was freely given the Tree of Life but was forbidden the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and it was said that if we ate of it we would surely die. The snake convinced Eve to taste the fruit and kicked out of paradise we were. Well the Bible should not be taken literally but it has those parts of it that are absolutely beautiful, ready made metaphors.
So why is it dangerous to think you know what is right and wrong? Because then you will feel obligated as a decent human being to set the wrong to rights. All sorts of atrocities have been committed in the name of righteousness. I think humanity has done a great job of showing why the fruit should not be eaten. Not only have we been kicked out of paradise, we have almost destroyed it and ourselves right along with it. Every parent is the snake whispering corruption into the innocent ears of the children and so our curse continues to be passed down through the generations. Maybe God should not have been so harsh on the snake, since it seems to have done and continues to do its work in innocence.
So why does the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil so tempting for human beings? Because it offers security. If you know what is right then how can you ever step wrong? It seems that in our deepest souls we all just want to be taken care of. Maybe this desire for security our sentience by its very nature robs us of is the fatal flaw in all of intelligent creature. Unfortunately we don't have anyone to compare ourselves to.
So now my wonderings got really crazy. I started thinking of how a life form could evolve that contained a flaw that would cause it to eventually kill itself. I looked at the planet I live on and a thought came to me. What if the entire universe ran by Darwinian laws? What if planets had to create species that destroyed themselves before they destroyed the planet? Such and ability would be essential to planets and every planet that was not like this would have died and not lived on to be sucked back into their stars, imploded and formed into new stars and planets. And the idea is as big as you want it. Only universes that created galaxies that created stars that created planets that created self defeating species survive today.
But you know what...It doesn't matter, at least the astronomy part doesn't. With this crazy thought I figured I had left the realm of ethics and went back to sweeping the floor.