Index 
Idea of "Other" Morality Souls Epistemology
Note to Bellah: (never sent) So, Bellah, here we are. We know of things we don’t know, some of them perhaps we can’t know. But we can imagine both. We think the imaginings true if “they feel right” referred by some as “correspondence” (materialists), “coherence” (idealists) or just “common sense” (most people). But, ISTMRN we passed beyond mere “correspondence” of our imaginings with the “truth” or “reality” and now find comfort in “coherence” among our imaginings, devoid of reference to correspondence (String theory). I think one of the imaginings we often seek coherence with is immortality. From pantheist’s, “We are all one, so are atoms flow from one form to another” to heaven and hell, good and evil of Zoroaster, something of “us” lives on. Even for some aborigines (as smart as us but about different things) are “just reborn”. This imagining has appeal. It seems we would all, perhaps suicide practitioners included, like this thing we call “life” to go on, at least if we so chose, at least for more than my “allotted” time. I have been taught that Christianity arose from human suffering, and a promise of the end of suffering, free life for saints and sinners alike. Perhaps the Christian hope merely built upon an available, perhaps ill-defined Jewish concept of an “afterlife” and only accentuated the “suffering free”. Either way, life goes on and we are SAVED! Oops. CAN be saved if the stars and/or our behavior line up just right. Guides are available under “Authority” in the yellow pages (the reference dates me). Could it be? “Could they know something secret? Something hidden? That they might reveal to me? If I am “good”? I sure want that extra life, especially if it is pain free. And if I believe hard enough, and clap loud enough, "Tinkerbell will fly again.” So here we are Mr. Bellah. But what if this is all there is? Can “spirituality” deny or ignore immortality and its servants authority and morality? By these very words, of course, so what is there left? Everything as before – ME – the center of the universe. Me, unique beyond dispute, so a unique set of: gods or God himself, herself or itself; unique thoughts; unique feelings; unique perception of “red”; (I am slightly red-green color blind) unique ever changing arrangement of atoms; all beyond dispute. But "I" don’t want to die!! So there must be something beyond me. Something greater than me, greater than us all, that will NOT LET this thing called death be mine: I think this idea of immortality is the greatest and saddest hoax we play on ourselves. Perhaps God cursed us with the thought of immortality when he kicked us out of the garden. Not that the garden was (is) “pleasant”. That actually only occurs outside the garden. “Pleasant” distracts us from enjoying this “gift” (from where or what, I have no idea, well a few maybe) of awareness, self-awareness, “Me” awareness. The quest and hope spawn morality for judging the content of our ticket of passage to the “beyond”. Every action becomes subject to judgement, even every thought such as “lust for a woman” (Matthew 5-7, SOTM) is subject to judgement (though the contrarian in me interprets Christ’s message differently than most Christians, in that each of us is the “son of man” perhaps even women. So the “lust” thing is that if you condemn it in another, look in yourself instead; “if you find it there and disapprove, then cut it out, cast it out of yourself, because all or most men “lust” for women. But if you can’t or won’t cast it off, then don’t judge others for lusting. "Judge not lest you be judged.” After we left the garden, it seems, EVERYTHING is viewed as somewhere along one or more scales of good and bad, the gradients representing “better” and “worse”. “D-thinking” as you labeled it, compels by duty (Kant) that Sisyphus endure his labor of pushing the rock up the hill of “goodness”. “Goodness knows” there are lots of hills to challenge our commitment to immortality. But even as I weary again of writing, you know you don’t have to push that rock of sin, then you’re free to traipse all over the hills.  The difference in awareness, whatever that is, between the stupidest dumb and deaf human and the smartest Brahmin is lost in the noise on the scale that can distinguish “awareness” between a human and a dog, the “smartest”, most social animals I know other than humans (I hear chimps dolphins and ever ravens might be “smarter”, but I don’t really know any of them personally, though I have “met” them all, ravens in the wild and the zoo). |