If you were to believe there was no God. Or no God as the bible presents. How would you justify right and wrong?
I feel right and wrong can be shown through actions towards and considerations of others. That if what you do holds the well-being of others at the highest regard, then you are doing good. Doing right.
But how could you even jump to that conclusion if there is no ultimate since of right and wrong? No voice of authority from the heavenly realms?
I think it comes down to the innate feelings of every human being. Or at the very least the majority of the human beings.
Most human beings understand happiness. Understand joy. Understand love. Understand the need to be wanted. Understand the need to find fulfillment and satisfaction. And once you realize you want these things for yourself, you realize the best way to get them is to provide them for others. That when you are loving others, giving meaning to others, helping others, then you find fulfillment in return, that people provide all these things for you in return.
And so doing good, doing right, means helping everyone to meet their own base desires.
But perhaps one could argue that these desires come from society. From culture. That the way we are raised and taught are what develop these needs inside of us.
And so true definitions of good and bad, noble and just, come from what is taught to you. And so there is still no truth out there. Everything is still subjective.
And this is why countries can justify war. People can justify hurting other people. Killing other people. Destroying other people. Because their way of thinking does not align with our way of thinking. That their way of making everyone feel loved, wanted, needed, is different than our ways of making people feel valued. And so we keep on blowing each other up.
But i don't think this is true. Because as we become more and more globalized, while there are still wars and disagreements, for the most part these are small and petty. We realize that all people laugh, all people cry, all people belong to a family.
And so i think we can depend on human universals. And we can all come to a consensus of what is right and wrong. Because in the end we should all realize that what is best for ourselves is what is best for everyone else.
True selfishness comes through true altruism.
Haha.
1 comment:
I think that babies cry because something is "wrong." They want food, comfort, a change of diaper, etc. They don't feel good, or right, so they cry. I wonder if it's this age of post-modernism or the fact that whenever I didn't feel good as a child, things changed, and I felt better, meaning that my feelings trumps reality, or what I view as "reality."
I think about a man who jumps on a grenade to save his brothers in arms. We think that's the right thing to do. In fact newspapers and movies idolize such individuals.
If that man was a father, I wonder how long until his child would see that his heroic, late-father did what was right? When he moves past his adolescence what has changed in him to see it that way?
Maybe as we grow older, we do, in fact, realize that reality is bigger than we are. And those who over react, are stuck in the past, depressed, etc., are the ones who have a limited view of what's real.
I feel like up until the past couple of years my spirituality was like that. I view God in light of myself and in the context of what I know as grace and love. In fact, sometimes I still act guiltily or "broken-winged" after sinning, as if my sin has some how hindered God's love for me, or the effectiveness of the Spirit within. It's strange how the condemnation I felt was rooted in the limited view I had of God, and the sufficiency of His atonement. Weird!
Anyhow, I am semi-comatose and hope that I am somewhat responding to what you wrote in this post! That would be funny if I'm talking about a totally different topic.
Lnazizzez.
Post a Comment