God's Will, Sin, Life Purpose:
We all have heard the question: "If God is good, why does He allow terrible things to happen to good people?" I mean really terrible horrendous ghastly things which are unbearable to think about. And everyone wonders, at some point, to varying degrees, what the hell is life really all about? I remember years ago, while in the hospital recovering from an operation, a minister lying paralyzed from a stroke unable to do anything but move his eyes, and congregation members telling him "God is not through with you yet, it is not your time to go". This was astounding to me---"God is not through with you yet!". What kind of God are these people worshipping? The implication of course was that whatever was happening to this guy, God was behind it, and calling the shots. I personally don't believe God was directly behind it at all, any more than God oks a little girl being raped, or is directly involved at all with Darfur, the Holocaust, the Vietnam massacre or any other horrible events in history.
Still, there is a God, as for every gift (life and the planet for the life) there must be a gift giver. The illogical mistake humans have made about God throughout history is to insist or assume God thinks like us, looks like us, and favors us as a species or as individual persons. The human conceived God is God the interventionist, or so it always goes. He is always some sort of KIND God only IF we, individually or collectively, pray to Him often enough from extravagant cathedrals of some sort, and believe in certain religious dogmas, all written by humans in ages long since passed. These kind of inherited faith based beliefs carry a double edged sword. While they may bring personal comfort (God is with me every step of the way) these beliefs inevitably bring persecution and even death to those who worship a God via dogma of a different Bible, or even different interpretations of the same Bible.
Faith based beliefs are inherent in human life simply because our intellectual capacities are limited. When anyone purports to 'speak' with God they are clearly illusionary in the most self pompous way. No existing exam indicates they have any special intellectual capacity. And of course nothing about their lives by any measure indicates they have any special protection from God's evolutionary laws. Whatever the evolutionary laws which have governed the billions of years old saga of life on this planet, these laws seem to apply to all living creatures. If God personally intercedes on anyone's behalf in this self driven process, it appears to be rare, if at all. Naturally, if one believes God controls every happening any contrary belief is poppycock.
Common sense dictates that if God wished to convey certain behavioral 'laws' specifically to humans he would do so in a way which was universal and clear as from whom the message was sent. There would not be different 'Bibles' written by different humans, and oddly enough all pretty much from the same era in human history, and all containing obvious modern absurdities. This method of distributing such 'laws' makes no sense and portrays God as some sort of inefficient, partisan mean spirited troublemaker. This in no way indicates there is no such thing as ethical behavior. Ethics appears to be universally inherent in the human species. I am not aware of any human society where basic understanding of right and wrong is not understood apart from mental derangement like psychopathy.
Ethical conflict always arises from competing drives. These conflicts are always self vs others. Much of it is materialistic in nature. I want a Corvette but clearly if I buy a less expensive car some of the starving people could be fed, some of the homeless sheltered, etc. We know we should share, but mostly we don't. We know we should be thinking of those with desperate needs but we don't---and thus 100 million people will starve to death in the next few years, the rich will continue to get richer, there will be more Darfur like situations, and people of 'difference' will be persecuted for their differences. The more normal it becomes to circle the wagons around some sort of 'family values' mentality, the less it becomes ethically necessary to be concerned about others. Taking care of yourself and your immediate genetic and social clan sets the parameters of your charitable and political nature. "God bless me, my family, my friends, my country and give me the strength to wage war on those heathens who are a threat to us---us who so faithfully are your servants." Therein lies the basis for the worst kind of conflicts. And conveniently, it is all wrapped in God's will. All the killing fields become justified, and clergy of every ilk will always be found among the troops spreading blessings to all those God supported soldiers on both sides. Whenever we behave like the worst of assholes we invariably drag God into it in order to give our actions some sort of respectability and divine purpose. It is a 'nasty' business but in God's name we do it. Maybe, some day, in the far distant future, evolution will have proceeded to the point where the killing fields will become just a part of evolutionary history. We have the knowledge now to look back on how life has evolved over billions of years, and we see the progression is ever upward in direction despite all kinds of plateaus, reversals, setbacks, dead ends, etc. God's evolutionary process is a good process.
It is in this process that we can see the brilliance of God's work. It is in this process we can see that all the 'disasters'---whether to a species or to particular individuals of any species---all these disasters are part of a process which evolves to ever more complex forms of life with new and advanced abilities. It is in this process which we can more clearly see the brilliance and goodness of God. It is this process which is God's will. It is this process which enables us to understand that God is not deciding who has sex with who and which egg unites with which sperm and all this other similar ilk which we spend so much time praying about. We don't drive the process, nor is God altering his own process because of our demands (prayers), and in the case of humans, God is not demanding much at all, He is just responsible for a process which has given us our innate abilities including ethics. We have been given an opportunity to live life as best we can, including our relationship and responsibilities to others. One could, I guess, conclude that therefore a life of selfish hedonism is ok, an ethical thing---survival of the fittest. One could, but it comes with a risk. Certain things humans cannot understand. First, is the future, and second is the consequence of unethical behavior. If understanding right from wrong is an inherent part of human nature, then this implies there is a consequence for wrong behavior. Otherwise right and wrong have little meaning. The consequences are not really knowable. It could be an afterlife, a return to life in a different form, or anything else not comprehendible to us. Doing wrong instead of right comes with an unknowable risk. In the field of ethics, not being able to know the consequences of unethical behavior, we all proceed at our own risk.
As far as judging ethical behavior, given all the variables inherent in the evolutionary process and amongst individual humans, we are crippled as judges. We are far better at knowing right from wrong than we are in judging the ethical behavior of others, at least in most situations. Out right cheating, murder, etc are simple enough some of the time, but the vast majority of human behavior occurs outside the ability of humans to accurately judge. The best we can do is create laws to prevent obvious unethical behaviors. Almost all of the raging religious furors are over issues far from logically clear. That is why faith based notions should never become the law of any land. Whether we like it or not, God's evolutionary laws reign in the end, never human faith based notions.
I personally dislike the word sin. It has been corrupted beyond repair. There is right and wrong and some sort of unknowable consequence for doing wrong rather than right. Then there is all this commotion about forgiving someone for their sins. It gets kind of silly starting with the notion that Christ had to be nailed to a cross in order for God to forgive our sins. What kind of God do people conceptualize? It is not only senseless, but soaked in violence and blood. "Okey Fido, you have sinned and disobeyed by jumping the fence and running all over the neighborhood. In order for me to forgive you my only son needs to be nailed to a cross and die. Don't you ever forget the sacrifice I have made to forgive you for your sins". This is stupid at that level and at any other level. The evolutionary process is not about forgiving anyone about anything. I can forgive myself and others who supported killing 2 million Vietnamese and 35,000 young Americans but it means nothing. Wrong cannot be made right. We can only cease doing wrong or choose more often to do right. Evolution is not an emotional soap opera. It is unfeeling methodical progress.
So then, if all the above were true, which may or may not be, how then do we view the purpose of our life? First, it is not "there but for the grace of God goes I". When we view the plight of people in refugee camps or the homeless on a street, God is not responsible for such particulars, only the laws which drive the system. God didn't cause you to get cancer, things like this are a part of the process. Only when we consider ourselves some sort of treasured part or end of the process can we start thinking God is watching over us as individuals. The evolutionary process is mostly good luck or bad luck. Each of us exist because one sperm and one egg happened to unite. That doesn't make us special, it makes us lucky. And from then on luck combined with our human ability to make intelligent individual choices seals our fate. Do we choose to work or be lazy; do we choose to do right or wrong; do we choose to marry Lily of the Valley or Honschnivel of the mountains, etc. But let us never overdo the choosing part. I may choose to marry the most beautiful, smartest, most charming girl in the land, but it ain't likely to happen. Our choices are always limited. Most animal species have little choices at all, their behavior is driven by chemicals, not conscious decisions. But we would do well to remember, that in evolutionary terms, we are not better than other species, and with time our own species will likely seem primitive. We know it makes little sense to compare apples and oranges but we do it all the time and even go so far as to arrogantly claim God instructed us to go forth, populate the earth and have dominion over all other plants and animals. Considering the nature of the evolutionary process, God is not rooting for anyone or any species. This is hard to accept because naturally we would like God to be our personal guide and friend.
So what then is our purpose in life? This would be like asking what was the purpose of the third reptile who wandered the earth? The evolutionary process has a purpose, a direction, but the components are more like random molecules proceeding according to the survival of the fittest. There is an awful lot of randomness to the evolutionary process and this randomness not only generates endless progress but individual tragedies. Humans can construct our own purposes in life; we do it endlessly as we strive for this or that, to be this or that and sustain ourselves with smart planning, perseverance, good luck, and hope. For the most part our purpose is self directed, self focused, and usually irrelevant to the evolutionary process itself. I may want to be one of the best chef's in the country and may even achieve that, but this personal achievement is just that---personal. Few people will ever be part of the big picture, not even a small footnote in the evolutionary process. But that doesn't have to matter---our individual purposes in life are what give our personal lives meaning. Just because I am having no major impact on the evolutionary process does not mean my life cannot have meaning. And what is meaningful to me may not be meaningful to another. The question is improperly worded. It is not what gives meaning to human life, but what gives meaning to each of our own lives? And that is the path we seek from birth onward, constricted only by the extent to which we do the right instead of the wrong ethically.
We care about our own lives, the process of evolution does not. What is, is. We have a hand dealt to us by the process----God didn't personally deal the cards, His created process did. With no such created process there is no life, as we know it, at all. So where is our right to bitch? We like to play games, not because we are guaranteed to win, but because we enjoy the opportunity and challenge of the game. If you no longer like playing the game, for whatever reason, you stop playing the game. In the game of life we may not have elected to play, but we do have the right to quit playing, for whatever reason. All this silly ass nonsense about how God decides when and how we die is self delusion at its most ridiculousness. How we live, how we eat, how we exercise, what kind of risks we take, where we live, and our genetic make-up are all factors that determine how and how soon we die. What is done to some people, in the name of God, during their dying process is abhorrent. If you did the same thing to a prisoner of war you would be convicted of administering torture. And we have the nerve to convince people that if they don't take the torture they will go to hell. Again, what kind of God do some people believe in?
For my own part, once I accept the evolutionary process as God's gift to all life on our planet, I can live contented with the opportunity given by the process, use the cards dealt me as effectively as I can, governed by the innate sense of right and wrong. Like everyone else selfish interests compete with right and wrong. Like everyone else I really don't know the consequences of doing wrong rather than right. But logic seems to dictate that if there is right and wrong, there must be consequences or I can't really then define the terms. There is a lot of random luck in the evolutionary process. How much of this luck any of us get varies. And I sense (which hardly makes it fact) that the noblest level of human existence is one in which those less lucky or fortunate are shared the material benefits of those whose cup runneth over. One can debate when one's cup runneth over, but most of us lucky ones realize we were just as happy when we had less as we are now with so much more. Happiness and contentedness, are, in the end, the goal of each of us. My cat Ms.Irridessa has little, but she purrs a lot. Go figure it, what the hell does she have to purr so much about? I think she needs a knuckle rub. Wouldn't it be neat if humans purred when contented? It would take all the guess work out of who is truly happy. I don't know though, if someone purred too much I think I would want to smash them. Then maybe I would purr. Life is a trip.
