Truth is not carved in stone. However. . . .

People worry that if there is no God in heaven,
threatening us with bubbling pools of sulpher,
that we will have no morals at all. Nonsense!

In the first place, such a pessimistic view of humankind
assumes that we really are a savage lot of beasts.
And while it is true that we do occasionally spawn a psychopath or a sociopath,
most people are just what we see when we look around: just what we are.

Would you be savagely mean if you could get away with it?
I think not. I think you would be, and I would be, just about what we are.
We grow up in communities that teach us to behave the way they do.

We become human beings in community.
Parents, and aunts and uncles and grandparents,
friends, and teachers, and people at work,
nudge us toward what most of them think is good.
They learned it the same way. So do our kids.

Adding a god who will punish you if you goof up
is just a way to emphasize how serious we think it is.
Every ethical system ever devised and taught
was still nothing more than the best we could think of.
To think that one version of the good and the true
was divine, and that it just happens to be the one you like,
is asking too much of credibility. Especially since
the claims to have god on your side looks a lot like
the floor of the old stock exchange, with people

holding up their hands and shouting for attention.

If there were a divine system of ethics,
it would not be carved on tablets of stone:
it would hang on a post office wall.

So, for the first time in your life,
read the stuff on the post office wall!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog