God Responsible?
When personal tragedies befall the best or worst of us in apparently a random manner, the question asked when the best of us are afflicted is "why would God allow this?" My assumption is that this bothers everyone, and is a very unsettling question. One answer, quite obvious, is that there may be no God. I dismiss this simply because where there is a gift, there must be a gift giver. Our universe is certainly some kind of gift. The next question is just beyond human pay grade. Where then did God come from? I mean wow, something at some point had to have come from nothing. Of course how can something come from nothing. Beats me.
I think most people believe God answers prayer. I don't unless it is a rare exception. If God could really stop some of the worst tragedies to some of the best among us and doesn't, then God is not compassionate or fair. If that is true it sure puts a huge dent in the concept of ethics. I mean the rest of us would, if we could, stop a little girl from being brutally raped and God won't? That is really a stretch. Would God really use inherited religion as the vehicle to guide us on a path to moral behavior and heaven? That also seems unfair and not compassionate since no one chooses their parents or place of birth.
Well, some might say, bad things happen because they then lead to a greater good down the road. But it is hard to see why letting a little girl get brutally raped can ever be explained as necessary for a greater good down the road. Try that argument in court! No, some things are just morally repulsive, cruel, and stand alone as totally unethical by any standard of ethics.
Logic then dictates God is unable to stop some of these tragedies. Therefore God is not ominipotent? I reckon humans are not really in any position to measure the omnipotence of God. Ethics may itself be a product of evolution and God's evolutionary laws. We humans create things which once created we lose control over---the device operates via the principles we used to create the device. You may control the whole process which created the gun, but once the bullet is fired it goes it own way, and if your aim was poor you may hit little Red Riding Hood instead of the bad guy. If the brakes on your car fail, then you can't stop. Things happen.
To me, then, I choose to perceive God as the creator of the evolutionary process and all the laws upon which the process operates. Evolution requires diversity, change and survival of the fittest. From the big picture evolution has been an amazing success. But the individual costs can be rough, unfair, and even cruel. A lot of the evolutionary process, from the individual standpoint of most species, is mindless. Ethics has been a late arrival on the evolutionary scene. Ethics did not arrive via inherited dogma, but through the laws of evolution. Human ethics is an inherent characteristic, inherited via genes, not via sectarian religious birth. The only inherent principle identifiable seems to be the Golden Rule. Everyone, everywhere understands that principle.
A car manufacturer would point out they just made the car, they are not responsible for how people drive. Of course everyone thinks cars are a good thing. No one says lets get rid of cars because some very unjust, cruel things happen to even the best of us because of cars. I doubt anyone would seriously suggest we get rid of the evolutionary process because some very unjust, cruel things happen to even the best of us.
The truth is that we don't really like our own lives being left up to chance. It is too unsettling. So we invent religious dogmas and pass them on from generation to generation, all of which reward us for good behavior---and that good behavior is defined as some sort of loyalty to our inherited religious dogma. Accept what you inherited or you are going to hell. Of course if often works in absurd ways----the mobster who never misses a mass, whole countries who can endorse mass murders of strangers in foreign lands, and for most it works by selective adherence to their inherited religious dogma. There is always some escape clause for unethical behavior---in all religions a person can always be forgiven by God and get to Heaven via repentance, if necessary by death bed recants or last rites or whatever. Most prefer their ethics cocooned in rituals, hymns, prayers, elaborate cathedrals, and heathens to target, chase down and kill or forcibly suppress. It is hard to relate ethics to some of religious activity. For too many people with inherited faith based beliefs, it is not enough they feel they are en route to Heaven, others---the targeted heathens-----must suffer.
Many people are less intent on making others suffer as they are ignoring the suffering of others. The Golden Rule is a momentous task for anyone. Sacrifices, difficult choices, learning to accept when enough is as good as a feast, and helping others in need outside your own family, neighborhood, religious, or national clan, these are tough standards to adhere to. What is modern day 'family values' but an assertion that you and your family count more than others. The Golden Rule doesn't really say "Do unto to, at least your own family, that which you would have others do unto you." That is more a definition of intolerance and selfishness.
The real kicker with ethical behavior, to me, is this. Is it ethical behavior if you only do the right thing if you will be rewarded? If you don't hit your brother I will give you $5 a week. I guess if I get run over and killed by a car then the poor brother is allowed to be hit. "Ok, ok, I'll give 10% to the church but I sure as hell better get to heaven." Ethics to a lot of people is some sort of bribery process, sort of like paying the mob for protection. Can ethics exist without a reward? How would humans react if God were to suddenly appear in the sky over the whole planet and announce that no one, in any religious sect, was going to go to any heaven because of ethical behavior? I don't know what the result would be.
In my own mind I envision God as the Creator of the Evolutionary Process. This process is not based on reward, but on advantage. Now the question becomes one of whether there is any advantage for someone to be ethical. Heaven may or may not exist. It is beyond human comprehension let alone prove it. So I leave that be as whatever is, is. But there may be an advantage to those who are ethical in their behavior to others. Limiting your Golden Rule to your own family or community or friends or country etc. is not ethics. It is selfishness---a sort of "I care about those who can be of use or value to me, period." So what advantage do those have who practice the Golden Rule toward all of human diversity? I think it is contentment. When I am around those who genuinely care about everyone and use their money, time, and political support for those less fortunate everywhere, I sense they have a contentment within themselves not found in those with more restrictive ethics. To favor your 'own kind' used in differing senses of 'kind' here, is to develop a disrespect or at best indifference to all the 'others'. It becomes necessary to justify why all these others are not within the realm of your concern. The manufactured justifications leave one with an attitude toward others which is in varying degrees critical, demeaning, antagonistic, etc. Whatever their unfortunate circumstances, IF THEY would only this or that, their lives would be better. These 'other' people then become an irritant. If they didn't exist it would be a better world. Keeping them in their 'deserved place' becomes the objective, not really helping them. History is full of attempting to keep certain people in their place.
When I listen to people attack those less fortunate in life as people living in their own deserved failures, I always kind of wish they had been born in the same circumstances with the same cards in their genetic hand----just to see how far in life they would go under the same circumstances. The evolutionary process never had a species with a developed sense of ethics prior to humans. For the first time in evolutionary history a species has considerable ability to lessen the unfairness on the less fortunate, to level the playing field a bit for them, to maximize justice and well being for all members of a species. Contentment is keeping to a minimum the necessity to say you are sorry for not helping others when you could.
For me, being around right wing religious nuts of any ilk is a depressing experience. These are angry, self centered, contentious people whose discontent with others can ruin anyone's peace of mind. They are always after this or that group of people. You can tell the others by that hunted look on their face. Persecution of these others, called 'heathens' is the stuff of which gives their lives meaning-----meaning, but not contentment. With these people all their problems are the fault of others, almost invariably minorities of some sort. The least powerful groups amongst us become the reason for all problems and if we can't get rid of them we can at least suppress, jail, or wall ourselves off from them. Punishment, coupled with out of sight, out of mind are the political solutions. Gays ruin the sanctity of marriage, hispanics are ruining the economy, blks are shiftless ignorant dregs on society etc. I wonder why the 'gay' impact is not used more in divorce proceedings? No matter, the proof is evident----the rise in gay rights has paralleled the rise in divorce rates. Take the current anger over immigration. What are the facts behind all this? First every nation has a right to protect their borders and expel illegal immigrants. But we have not exercised this right. There are no citizenship cards (if there were counterfit cards would be mass produced), employers have never been required to have workers prove citizenship, and borders have never been made secure. Now that we have a real problem, our tune changes. We have let all these people come in in droves, are happy to have them take minimum or less than minimum wage jobs. Now we realize, hey, these people are all over the place. I have made phone calls where I am told to speak English press 2. I mean, wow. At any rate there needs to be a crackdown. But justice demands all guilty parties pay a price. We encouraged these people to seek a better life for themselves and left them alone. Justice would dictate that those who have been here x number of years be provided a path to citizenship. That is our own penalty for allowing this situation to develop. Our borders should be made secure, employers should be required to have workers prove citizenship, and all new illegals deported. We have not exactly been innocent in the problem. We chose to let it slide. We looked the other way. We are co-conspirators.
On the bright side, ethics---like other aspects of evolution---seems to be improving. The abolishment of slavery, women's rights, children's rights, gay rights, animal rights, etc have improved with each century. The ticking time bomb is the inability of humans to enforce any kind of responsible reproduction. And for this the consequences are going to be brutal and already have become so in many parts of the planet. Under such circumstances The Golden Rule becomes inoperative. The evolutionary process will correct this problem for us, if necessary, but it will not be a pretty picture.
Thus to me, ethics does give one an advantage, an immediate advantage, and this is called contentment. We are going to die, that's the biggest downside of being born, and to the extent one can reach contentment with their life, the better their lives will have been. I don't think contentment, in the absence of an ethical attitude towards all other humans, species, and our natural resources, can be achieved to the fullest extent.
