Green Oasis

All morality is subjective and situational.

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to prove me wrong or to accept defeat. If you can produce one moral law which is absolutely true and show why it is, then I will accept defeat.

Let me dispense with one argument that I foresee. If you’re tempted to appeal to God’s authority to base your morality, please consider the following interpretation of the dialog between Socrates and Euthyphro:

I wish there was some moral absolute to cling to, but if there is one, I haven’t found it. Every moral framework is rooted in axioms which we choose just because they seem right to us. It’s a lot of work to make decisions for myself about what is and isn’t good. It also gets annoying when people assume that they are better than I am based on their arbitrary criteria. If you can show me the light, I’ll thank you for it.

Until I hear otherwise, I’ll assume that I’m right.

It was hot, unpleasant work in the middle of of a muggy upstate New York summer. My missionary companion and I had volunteered to help a family in the ward take down some old plaster. The plaster dust and real horsehair made the job even more unpleasant. The mother of the family introduced us to her daughter, a blue-eyed beauty just a few years older than we were.

I sensed instinctively that she had been one of the cool kids in high school. In all the strange circles I haunted in high school, I never got much respect from the cool kids. They relegated me to the periphery of social life. So when this woman was kind and friendly to me, it caught me off guard. It wasn’t long before I was smitten by her beauty and attention.

We learned that she had two sons and had been excommunicated from the Mormon church for giving birth to the first outside of marriage. She had wanted to remain a member of the church, but she found herself on the wrong end of a branch president who demanded too many details about her sexual experiences. Disgusted, she didn’t show up to her church court and the church leaders tried and excommunicated her in absentia. She had hard feelings because her father had maintained a temple recommend while sexually abusing his daughters. The inequity between the two situations pushed her farther from the church.

She became our project, to get her rebaptized.

We spent a lot of time with her and her family. We ate a lot of dinners there, mowed their huge back lawn, fixed problems with their house. I even bought the kids the Sonic and Knuckles expansion cartridge for their Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Genesis.

Things started to get a little weird after a couple of months. She and my companion sat next to each other on the couch one night, sharing a blanket. “It’s cold.” I wasn’t sure, but I thought they might be holding hands underneath the blanket. Then there was the time they accidentally watched a movie which showed a topless woman. “Oops!” Or how often we sat next to her in church with him next to her.

It became more and more obvious—even to me, Captain Oblivious—that there was something going on between them. This has to stop, I thought. It should have been me that she liked.

Jealously, I contacted my mission president and told him what I thought was happening. He reassigned my companion elsewhere, she was heartbroken, I got a new companion, and we were banned from the home that we had spent so much time in. That was how our six month companionship ended.

The mission president gave me a pat on the back for doing the right thing. He told me my companion had confessed to sneaking out in the middle of the night to meet with her and make out. My former companion later thanked me for getting him back on the straight and narrow. I felt like a punk. I didn’t turn informant because it was the right thing to do. I did it because I wanted to get my companion out of the way, to take revenge on him for stealing her away from me.

How often have I done the right thing simply because it is the right thing? As I look back on my life, the answer I come to is never. The reason I do things is because I want to do them. It only happens that most of the time what I want coincides with the moral thing to do, as it did in this story.

Even when I do something primarily because its right to do it, I am really motivated because I want to feel good about myself; I want to avoid a guilty conscience, or I can’t bear feeling empathy for the suffering of another. It all comes down to what I want, mostly irrespective of any moral law.

If God came down tomorrow and told everyone that he rescinded his moral law, that we could sin as much as we want with no consequence in heaven or hell, would human civilization descend into perdition? Would we break the hearts of our family by abandoning them? Would we take advantage of children and the mentally retarded? Would we kill babies for the fun of it? What sins would we commit that we aren’t committing already?

I can’t think of any.

I behave the way I do largely for reasons other than the moral law as taught in our houses of worship. I always have. Becoming an atheist has freed me from all religious constraints of heaven or hell, yet my behavior is mostly the same. I don’t cheat on my wife because I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t take advantage of people because I hate injustice. I don’t kill babies because that is repugnant to me.

I’m beginning to live my life according to the Law of Thelema: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law… Love is the law, love under will. I do what I want, like I always have. The only difference is that I am now unashamed of the actions that the pious would label as sin. I don’t sin more, just with a free conscience. My mental energies are now focused on real problems in my behavior, not petty stuff like drinking tea, or working on Sunday.

The moral law that I live didn’t come from above. I comes from within. It is the product of my true desires. I don’t need a fictitious deity to bully me into acting morally. It’s what I already want. You might want to give credit to God for creating me that way, for writing his law in my heart, but then he must also take the blame for all the sinning that I’ve done.

I prefer to take all the responsibility to myself.

I like the clearcut format of formal philosophical arguments like those I’ve been reading at Tractatus Blogico-Philosophicus. It appeals to the computer engineer in me. So I’ll try my hand at one that I thought up while sitting in the foyer during Sunday School yesterday.

1. God is infinite.
2. Human minds are finite.
3. Finite human minds cannot comprehend all of God. [From 1 and 2]
4. All human conceptions of God are incomplete and false. [From 3]
5. Worship is directed to the worshiper’s conception of God.
6. All believers worship a false concept of God. [From 4 and 5]
7. Biblical idolatry is the worship of false gods.
8. All human worship is idolatry. [From 6 and 7]

I think the weak point is (5) where another concept of worship could be offered. For my purposes, I could have ended the argument at (4), but I liked the flourish of showing all religious systems to be idolatry.

I’m not arguing that if an infinite God exists that worship is useless. Even though I don’t truly comprehend my wife, I still benefit greatly from our relationship. I imagine a believer would still benefit from religion if an infinite God exists.

What I would hope is that this thinking would combat the dangerous conviction that ones own concept of God is absolutely true. If God is infinite, then believers should have some humility because I’ve just shown that their conceptions of God are false, no matter which religion or tradition they adhere to. They should have some healthy doubt about the truth of their own beliefs.

Perhaps God’s commandment “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3) should be interpreted as a command to purge all false notions about God from our minds as much as humanly possible, to make our concept of God as close to the truth as possible. Then again, this command seems to be impossible to fulfill in practice if interpreted that way.