Questions To Ponder
I don't think one can attain a high level of contentment in life until one has thoroughly examined the meaning of life and what one values most. If we can just figure out on what basis we are to believe anything, and understand our own innate nature, then perhaps we can progress to a level of contentment. You cannot get GOOD ANSWERS if you do not ask the right questions. You cannot UNDERSTAND if you do not ask the right questions. Following are questions which I find worth thinking about.
How important is it for one to live an admirable life as well as live a life which is affluent? A lot of people live a good (affluent) life and we envy them. Others, like Lincoln, hardly led enviable lives, but certainly admirable lives. Can a purely enviable life be really a contented life? I have known many an affluent person who lives an apparent enviable life, but are upset, looking over their shoulder, agitated, and angry all of the time.
If one does the right thing for the wrong reason is this ethical? If you don't hit someone you dislike only because you don't want to be punished for it, is this really ethical behavior? If I do some good things only because I think maybe it will get me to Heaven am I really that good of a person? "If you don't shoot me I will give you a $1000 dollars." If you don't consequently shoot me what is ethical about your not shooting me? Put another way do you really want someone to be nice to you solely as a means to get to Heaven? Every person who is a disliked minority in some aspect of their lives know full well that many people are nice only on the surface, and given an opening, will find some sort of religious or otherwise justification to ensure you get the short end of the stick.
Is something right because God or the Pope or a Minister etc. says it is or does God or others approve an action because it is right? On what basis do we decide what is right? Do we examine the evidence? Do we just accept whatever inherited scripture says or the Pope says? If Popes over the years have committed every major crime known, then how can a Pope be truly any kind of mouthpiece for God? Is it wrong to believe anything based on insufficient evidence? Maybe, if it hurts others it must be wrong, since you have then hurt others based on beliefs which have insufficient evidence to support such beliefs.
Has religion produced more good than bad throughout history? Has there ever been a religion which has not committed massacres of common people? Maybe Buddhism. All religions, at one time or another, have oppressed certain groups of people. Slavery is an example. Are those who believed at the time slavery was right not to blame because of the time they lived in? Or should they have known better? What about groups of people still oppressed today? Are we to be condemned for this oppression, or if we are raised to believe it is ok to oppress certain groups does that make us a candidate for forgiveness? Probably not. I say probably not because we have little evidence to support such beliefs. You can't assault someone or kill someone or discriminate against someone because someone or some dogma simply states they are evil or whatever. Human behavior in the absence of reason is precisely wrong because there is no reason for the behavior. To simply justify your oppression of others by 'God wills it" is oxymoronic, self serving, and intellectually bankrupt.
How useful is blind obedience to inherited dogma if people who claim to believe the same dogma reach different conclusions? In terms of pure ethics what religious dogma adds any more ethical strength to issues than the Golden Rule? Any religious dogma which does not meet the Golden Rule is justifiable on what basis? What do rituals, ostentatious cathedrals, prayers, hymn singing, social events, etc have to do with ethics? None of it is necessarily wrong, but simply irrelevant to ethics.
Is ethics relative to culture? Is something really right in one culture and wrong in another? We mock Muslims who think they can get into Heaven by killing perceived enemies. If suicide bombing is the only tactic available to them they use that. We, on the other hand, push buttons to kill people and send soldiers into supposedly sovereign countries to kill those who our government perceives to be enemies. If our soldiers die in the process we have funerals and a minister or priest assures us, in one way or another, that they died for a noble cause and therefore will go to Heaven. Is there that much difference? One religion says kill in advance, and the other says, after the fact, that you did good and will therefore go to Heaven. There is never a shortage of priests of some sort to bless patriotic massacres by combatants on all sides. Some cultures kill and eat dogs, others kill and eat cattle, others think cows are sacred, etc. Whatever the correct moral stance, it must be derived via reason, not inherited dogma or culture.
Is it reasonable to believe God answers prayers? He certainly doesn't answer all prayers. Why would God, to save anyone or any group from horrific happenings, need to have our prayers before doing the right thing? Hume's questioning is still valid today: "Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is impotent. Is God able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is God both able and willing? Then God is evil." There has always been a lot of strange posturing throughout history in this respect. Some kind of 'thou shalt not kill' UNLESS GOD WILLS IT. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" UNLESS GOD WILLS OTHERWISE. It is hard to conceive of unethical behavior as something which becomes ethical if God wills it. The logic is bizarre. Why would God will unethical behavior?
If God decides the future and controls the evolutionary process then what difference does it make what kind of ethics rules my behavior? What will be will be. If someone else decides the outcome of a game---not the players, then all the talk about effort, fair play, training, game plans, etc, are all a waste of time and have no meaning. Isn't "Thy will be done" kind of asinine? If you stand at the top of a cliff and say to a rock as you release it, "Thy will be done". Huh? Like as if the rock needs your permission to fall down. Let's suppose God is the creator of the evolutionary process, including all the laws which govern this process. Evolution is chance, diversity, and survival of the fittest. If God never intervenes in His created process, then God Himself doesn't know the outcome either. The only question is whether God ever intervenes. And that is unanswerable. God clearly does not always intervene and statistically it seems He/She hardly ever intervenes. If God will always make things come out right then it matters not at all what I do.
How do we know when we need reconsider our moral beliefs? Probably, when our moral beliefs start to line up to support our personal advantages in life, we ought to pause and think it through again. Those with the most advantages are more likely to win the game. Thus any system which ensures that certain teams will have better players, better coaches, better equipment, better training, better facilities, etc. will of course find those teams winning most of the games. But what would be ethical about such a system? Of course, ironically, all these advantages don't stop the winning team from claiming they 'earned' the victory. The game of life is much the same way. Those with the most advantages---genetically, inherited wealth-wise, and environmentally---are most likely to gain for themselves a comfortable affluent life. They are not likely to share too much of their material gains because "I earned it, let others be like me and earn it the old fashioned way---earn it!!!!" What a farce.
To the extent I have achieved some kind of 'good (affuent) life', chance, environment, and genetics get most of the credit. What part does free will play? One plays with the cards held in one's hand. Free will is of course important. But even more important are the cards dealt to you. Ethics, to a large degree, boils down to making the effort to level the playing field for those dealt poor cards. The purpose of ethics? Ethics is the road to contentment. Materialism, by itself, cannot generate any genuine contentment. Anyone who has ever been around and observed the wealthy or powerful can see this is obvious IF they lack real commitment to ethics (the Golden Rule).
Is there such a thing as moral luck? Two people get real angry at each other over this or that and a physical fight ensues. There are several possible consequences here which depend almost entirely on luck. One can win and no one gets seriously hurt. No one wins and no one gets seriously hurt, someone wins and someone gets seriously hurt, someone wins and both get seriously hurt, or someone falls during the fight, hits their head on something and is killed. The consequences for this moral luck are not minor. There may be no charges whatsoever, there may be assault charges, there may be attempted murder charges, there may be murder charges. No matter what the charges or lack of charges the intent was the same. Of course life is full of this. You may drive 90 miles an hour and kill no one, or maybe just cause a non lethal accident or you may cause a lethal accident. Was this action of driving 90 miles an hour an intent to murder? Probably not, but if someone is killed, a murder took place as a consequence. The examples here are endless. Of course there is moral luck. And intent is no easy activity to measure.
Is intent the sole measure of ethics? I give you a herb of some sort because I believe it will cure your illness, but you die from the herb. Aren't the ethics of this rather complex? We are now back to the belief in slavery as part of a culture.
Shouldn't you have known that your belief in the herb has no tested studies? On the other hand, anecdotal science is not always incorrect. Some herbs probably really do work, have just never been put through any scientific testing. The net result of all this doubt stuff demonstrates that personal or religious beliefs should never be the law of the land. Thomas Jefferson made this point over and over. Thus, in the herb example, if you present the herb as something you or some people believe in, the recipient has a choice to make. They understand the risk. It is similar to the question of who should be allowed to marry or to have an abortion. These are areas of belief. Making things like these a matter of law is unethical because individual rights trump individual beliefs. Because a belief is not made into a law does not reflect on the validity of the belief one way or the other. People should always be free to get others to believe as they do. But THAT SHOULD BE IT. Over time, truth eventually wins out. There are not too many people anymore who argue that slavery is ethical or denying women the vote is ethical etc. God's created evolutionary process works, it just takes millions of years. I wonder just how far this process can go and if it will ever end? Does God even know? And where did God come from anyway? It is always best to remember that what we don't know is more impressive than what we do know----except for you and I. And sometimes I wonder about you.
What exactly is free will? We understand the importance of genes and environment. If I were born and raised in the Gaza strip with different parents just about everything about me would be different, physically and mentally. It is pretty absurd then for me to say that I, with a capital I, earned my affluent and pleasant lifestyle, including my ethics. How much of it did I really earn? Luck, chance, and diversity are seeped in the evolutionary process. Yet, all of us know how many times in life we personally made decisions which impacted greatly on our lives. Who one marries, what kind of career one pursues, the kind of friends one has, etc. are not minor decisions. We do have free will to a substantial degree---or maybe this is true more for some than others. Perhaps in the right environment free will exists to a greater degree. Some unlucky kid born in one of our own urban Drug War Zone ghettoes has far less opportunities to invoke their own free will on their destiny. They are, from the start, and without relief, often deprived of emotional, social, and intellectual opportunities. Fear, distrust, and anger reign as the emotional state. No one much seems to care about them and they in turn often decide they don't care about others then either. Pleasure is then derived from hurting others and even more pleasure if hurting others can be done in packs. Family becomes gangs. And gangs essentially know others don't give a shit about them and they don't give a shit about others. They have a unique kind of freedom---NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. Now add the obvious importance of the formative years to anyone's emotional, intellectual, and physical development and we begin to see how free will in an urban or rural ghetto often ends up stunted, PERMANENTLY.
No one who has ever had serious sustained contact with the truly environmentally disadvantaged cannot but be impressed with the permanent damage done by such an environment. No society which allows such environments to continue to exist or even worsen can be labeled an ethical society. Blaming the victims is hardly an honest or logical response. When someone views their own success as a personal achievement available to these 'others' and feel all these low lifers have to do is earn their blessings like he/she did----well I have this intense wish to see them be raised in the same environment, with the same heredity and see how far they would go in life. Free will is most important when the cards in competing hands are somewhat similar. When the playing fields are level, free will can make the difference between losers and winners. The ethical charge to any society, under any political or religious system, is to make the playing fields as level as possible. Even then, one's own blessings should be shared with the less blessed. Where the Golden Rule prevails the amount of happiness for the greatest numbers will be achieved. And on a personal basis, those with the greatest tolerance for diversity and support for those in need are exactly the people in any society with the greatest contentment. The conservative right of any religion or political system are always the angriest ones in their society. When they talk you can feel the intensity of their dislike for diversity, hear the shrillness of their voice, see the anger all over their face, and they are always the ones who want to make their own beliefs the law of the land, who support every war, who see military or police actions as the solution to every problem, and who blame minorities for the failure of the majority to have made life better in society. It is always those 'damn' others, invariably some sort of minority, who has ruined life for the good people like themselves---even if, by any objective measure, they themselves are at the pinnacle of their own described 'good life'. Where is their contentment for the good life they claimed they 'earned'? Rush Limbaugh and others like him will be unhappy campers in life no matter how many millions they earn or how many mansions they own, or how many expensive delicacies they ingest. When one's ethics is right, contentment follows. Heaven may or may not be in the cards, but the reward of ethical behavior is bestowed in the form of contentment right here on earth.
In the absence of thinking about and resolving in your own mind the larger questions about life and your own place in it, you become simply a pawn of heredity, circumstance, and luck----reacting emotionally to an endless series of events and hurdles erupting daily without yourself having mastered the proper ethical response to life's travails. Without the proper ethical perspective no one can roll with the punches, take the hits, find contentment in justice or tolerance of diversity. Without confronting the larger questions of life God's created evolutionary process cannot be appreciated or remotely understood. Without such understanding contentment is elusive and fleeting as one becomes an emotional reactor to the mechanisms embedded in the evolutionary process. We are part of the process, what is---IS, and we make the most of it for ourselves and our fellow travelers, as best we can, as often as we can, with a thankfulness for the chance of individual contentment. To some degree contentment is a state of mind, dependent on others and our own ability to appreciate and do justice to all we meet along the way. Circling the wagons wrapped in family, religious, or patriotic "values" seeds discontentment of an insidious and endless nature. Happiness in such a state is limited to periods of brief spurts.
