Darkness & Light: The Philosophical Path of an Eclectic Pagan

Letter XII: Morality

 My friends, I want to speak on the avenue of morality. For many years, I have concentrated much of my mental attention in the constant debate between Universal Morality versus Relative Morality. While I was a big proponent of Universal Morality, my journey has brought me to a newer understanding of what Relative Morality is exactly.

Much like St. Paul, I became what would be known as a villain to the corruptible and falsified mentality of relative morality. I proposed that it was a mentality that was self-defeating and that had no reasonable or logical grounds in which it stood. I determined that not only was it illogical in the philosophical landscape, but the evilness of the mentality would only lead to a dangerous path that would justify murder and other such horrific crimes. While my journey has taken me to different beliefs and understandings, I am beginning to see that the second part of my previous understanding is actually a misunderstood assumption on my part and not based on critical evidence that suffices that justification.

The idea of relative morality, one that states that any person can create their own moral compass, I began to realize why all of us create such a moral compass; even the religious institutions. There are many motivational factors that are included into the desire of certain moral conclusions. It would be difficult to speak of all the different motivational factors that come into play, but there are a few of them that take in a common thread within the people. I will attempt to draw out and explain what they might be.

The motivation that some of us have for creating our own moral compass is that we want something, and we believe that there must be a certain way or procedure to achieve it. Sort of like creating a fool-proof plan in which the rate of failure is low and the rate or speed of which it is achieved can be high. This was the birthing of the industrial age, where we created systems that increased efficiency, both in accuracy and time. Much similar to what I spoke about in my last letter, this is the drive to create robots and mechanical beings so that they can do the work with high efficiency with lesser amount of mistakes and have a faster processing time to do such tasks. We have such mentalities in our minds, so we create a moral compass for us to achieve these desired goals in a fast and efficient way.

Every religion that has ever existed, including Buddhism, has a "system" in place in which there is a goal and a set of rules or procedures in which to achieve this goal. If a person does not want to achieve this goal or maintain the rules of the system, then they are no longer considered part of the religion. However, for some religions, there is still hope for that person to be in the religion, as long as they return back into the system and do a better job following along with the system.

This is where most religious moral doctrines come from. It is a map of the system in which tells people what to do and what not to do so that they can focus on the goal that can be achieved if all these procedures and actions are made. However, since no religion can promise these goals, it is what ends up being called "hope". Sure, in many Christian sects, there is a "Once saved, always saved" theology, but yet they still pronounce that God is the lone decider of our judgement, so even if we pronounce Christ as our Lord and Savior, it is still subject to the Sovereign God above. Only GOD can pronounce a promise of heaven... not the religion itself.

What is heaven? Many Christians would pronounce that Heaven is where all torture and suffering is no more; that we can have everything we could ever want and that we spend eternity with our Great Lord of Above. There seems to be a small problem with this idea of heaven, however. If it is true that God loves all human beings, even if such a beloved human were to suffer forever torment in the pits of hell, would that not itself be torturous to God? Let's say, my dear friends, that the person that you love the most in your life, and you were to see them suffer the greatest human suffering ever conceived in mankind, would your heart not break from seeing such suffering from one that you love the greatest? What makes this love dynamic any different than how God feels when there is but a single person in hell? Imagine this intense torture pursuing you throughout the ends of time and beyond. Unimaginable, isn't it?