20120911 (J)
Journal: September 11, 2012
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20200814                                Morality                                Science (Origins of Life)

Selfishness as Sin: Selfishness as sin? Or is the sin believing selfishness is a sin? We are ALL selfish, ala my senior HS English thesis. We eat, we breath, we live, and do much if not anything to preserve our life. And we KNOW that. We may not know WHAT we will do in situations that threaten our lives, but we know we will do something, if we can, if no more than pray. We are selfish. Even altruism is wanting for ourselves knowledge or hope for something, i.e. someone or something else’s good. We are selfish. It’s in the fire of life and is shared by sinner, saint, dog, spider, and I suspect tree.

Many value systems classify selfishness as bad, saying “community first”. If people believe it, they act so as to deflect attention from the sin by over sacrificing to demonstrate their goodness by helping “others” all in selfish hope of redemption by God or friends. So we leave our closet and pray with loud speakers from the rooftops, “SAVE OTHERS: save them from death, save them from suffering, save them from disease, see how loving, kind, and “unselfish” I am. PLEASE like me. People opposed to abortion seem to be implying, wrongly ISTMRN, a mere expression of “SAVE OTHERS”.

Another approach might be to accept I am selfish to the core, if not for me alone then for my “kind” whose benefits benefit me also as a member of the set of “my kind”. That selfishness “gift we cannot refuse” from the god of life, especially animal life that lives by killing other life. Perhaps we would do better do respect rather than deny the selfish impulse. That’s not to say selfishness alone reigns our decisions. Community concerns (a form of selfishness) are also given (or just “are” from some perspectives) as perhaps some pure altruism, though I’ve yet to be convinced. By classifying selfishness as social undesirable we create conditions ripe for compensatory over-denial, hence, over “helping” throwing the result out of harmony as modern music is.

Fire in the Ocean: For Mark, a refinement of life is only a “self-perpetuating chemical reaction”: Life ISTMRN is a series of semi-permeable membranes surround the “fire in the ocean”, i.e. the extraction of energy from heat engines (T > ambient, mostly from sunlight) to excite electrons of carbon and hydrogen so they can co-exist in molecules that store that energy. The other half of life extracts that stored electron energy to build semi-permeable membranes as protective shells around the fire (for most plants around the energy extraction (capture?) sites as well (chloroplasts).

Both energy generation and capture sites are deeply nested inside semi-permeable membranes around mitochondria. Humans include clothing, automobiles, houses, and religion (or other “community organizing” ideas) as semi-permeable membranes to protect the “fire in the ocean”. Morality seems to be a tenet ideas systems, “letting in” those who protect us; “excluding, ostracizing those who might harm us” often falsely conceived, ISTMRN, but well intentioned.