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Morality and the Code of Creation Part Two — 10 Comments

  1. Another well written and thought out post. I am astounded by the poem at the end especially the last 2 lines. It makes me wonder…

    What is this person we were destined to become?

    I think there is something very subtle that we may miss here though. Something that the entire story of Johnny and the song bird hinges on. That is the finality of the death of the song bird. Johnny has done something he can’t take back, he may feel bad about it, but what good is his empathy to the song bird?

    To demonstrate a little clearer what I am asking, I will relate a similar yet much more tragic story that happened this week in the next county over.

    A 9 year old boy named Connor went to play at the park with a couple of his friends. They were laughing and playing and having a good time. While at the park they met a 12 year old boy who asked if they would like to play with him. When they joined the 12 year old boy named Jamarion, he pulled out a kitchen knife that he had hidden in the sand and began stabbing 9 year old Connor in the back.

    Connor ran home where he collapsed and died. Jamarion ran to a nearby home and cried for help, saying he stabbed someone and needed to call 911, and that he wanted to die.

    We can see remorse and perhaps empathy in Jamarion’s behavoir after the fact, but the big question is this.

    What good is Jamarion’s remorse to Connor and his family? For that matter what good is Jamarion’s remorse to himself? He has not only taken a life, but ruined several lives including his own, by this random act of violence.

    A fact that he will have to live with for the rest of his life.

    I think this is certainly not the person Jamarion was destined to become, nor is dead at age 9 the person Connor was destined to become.

    I think we can agree that something here went terribly wrong. If this was an isolated story then we might, brush it off as a rare random thing, but the problem here is that things like this happen everyday.

    So we must face this head on. We must ask, how can this be made right? How, is it possible to redeem this? What hope do we have?

    I think that we would have to say that all things being equall Connor’s family would just like to have him back.

    And maybe….

    Jamarion would like to undo what he has done.

    The only way to make the world right here is to undo what has been done, to bring Connor back to his family. To give Jamarion a chance to look Connor in the eye and say I am sorry, please forgive me.

    I only know of one hope in the universe for that.

    • And here we have something about taught morality do we not?

      Johnny kills a Robin or a Bluejay, he learns and while his learning is no good to the bird, it is just a bird. Johnny learned you can’t take death back, death is final, it is the end.

      This other kid stabbed a child, this is a serious crime, he can’t take it back, his life and the lives of others are forever altered. He is not a psychopath, he feels remorse, yes but he is now a “violent criminal” and will be spending time in a “criminal justice system” that may make him a better criminal.

      We have here a tragedy with no good to come from it. Death doesn’t come in degrees, it is or it is not.

      This might be hard to hear, but Connor could have fallen from a tree, ran into a road and been hit by a truck or drown in a creek, and his death would be no less senseless, the only difference is there would be no one to be angry at or blame.

      And who do we blame here? A 12 year old boy? His parents?

      How can it be “made right”? It cannot be made right, it never will be made right, not ever, certainly not in this space time.

      We have also be led to believe that murder is the only thing like this. That most other crimes can be made right, some can’t ever. If I steal your stuff, yes I can pay restitution and repay my debt to you plus damages and unless you are just a vindictive ass at some point you have to say, you have been made whole.

      But when someone rapes a child, how is that ever “made right”?

      When someone shoots up another person home, how is this made right? The family will likely live in fear for years and have PTSD even if no one was hurt.

      When a nation conscripts a 18 year old boy, makes him kill others in a foreign land and live with it for his entire life, how is that made right?

      Christians want to believe God will make it right. Not going to happen. Sending someone to hell won’t fix it and giving the victim a perfect kingdom won’t either.

      The only way one can really deal with such things is to understand that there are rules to space time, period. For it to work, some must die, some must be ill, some must be well, etc. That there are consequences to doing wrong as WE set those consequences. That often those consequences are not about “making it right” but more about preventing occurrence.

      When a mother of such a child as Connor finds some peace in this, they often say, “I want to prevent this from happening to someone else”. They are now working in the world of the possible with a sense of purpose. Sadly many say, “I want to prevent this from happening to anyone else”. Such are in the world of the impossible.

      What I believe is HERE and NOW these things matter, they matter a lot. And we must do out best to prevent what we can and deal with that which we fail to prevent.

      However, in the grand scheme it doesn’t matter. The souls of Connor and Jamarion are immortal, nothing can truly harm them unless they give their permission to be harmed in the eternal.

      • Those are some good points. You are right, some or even most of these things can never be made right in this current space/time.

        My hope is not that an evil thing would be made good, but that all evil will be undone.

        Which leads into my next question. Which is a question Christians are asked a lot by Atheists. It is a valid question, that anyone who believes in a creator of all things must answer….

        If God exists, and God created all things, what kind of God created a world in which evil exists?

        Both the evil things done by man, and more importantly natural evil, like the boy drowning in the river you mentioned above. Or people being killed or having losses due to natural disasters.

        • The question assumes that God did all the creating in this Space/Time, he didn’t. We are co creators, we are co creating each and every day. We have a much to do with the creation of “earth” beyond the base biomes as God in fact we likely have MORE.

          As to why pain and suffering. If you don’t believe in an eternal life, this is hard to answer. If you do, if you believe the soul is immortal and free (if it chooses to be) of all suffering after what we call phyical life, it is easy to answer.

          Why do you die in a video game? Why is it hard? Why not just make a game where everyone wins all the time, no one dies, there are no bad guys, only good guys. Your character moves though screen after screen of beauty and love and abundance and never suffers, dies, finds a blocked passage, etc.

          The truth? As Ricard Bach said, “we are the otters of the universe, we can’t be harmed and we never die”.

          Space/Time is our creation as co creators with God. We have pain and suffering because frankly we need it at this point in our journey of discovery.

          I know you will say what if all believed this, would there not be harm, mayhem and murder everywhere and would not people just say it doesn’t matter? The answer is NO, we would not.

          Find me a person that believes what I just said, and there are many of us. Then show me one of those who harms other people.

          Acceptance of violence and pain in this place is not the same as wishing it upon another. I have yet to find a single person that comprehends that we are truly immortal beings, that we are truly co-creators with God, that we truly are here for the purpose of education and entertainment that doesn’t also have the non aggression principle as part of their moral code. Even if they don’t know the term, “non aggression principle” they are living it, that is how you know what is real.

          Christianity and all “revealed religions” require something to be true that is not. They require that hate is real. The people that wrote your bible tried to explain it with symbology but you didn’t listen.

          John 1:5 “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not”

          John is a book of gnostic wisdom, a story with a code, not a story to be read literally.

          There is no darkness, there is only the absence of light. Aaron there is no hatred, only the absence of love.

          Why do people who comprehend the light do no harm to another? Because they are selfish in the most positive way that is why.

          If all I have told you is true and I believe it is, then part of why you do no harm, is that there is nothing to be truly gained from doing so.

          When one both loves life for the gift that it is, yet no longer fears eventual death for the continuum that it represents, then one is truly alive.

          The transformation is radical. You know who I am unlike most here so you know my background. You don’t know that at one time I would cold cock a guy in a bar over an argument and feel good about whipping his ass. You don’t know that at one time I craved fighting in a ring or on a street, neither mattered. I always stood up for the weak, I did that out of morality. I also was quick to use it as an excuse to put another person on their ass.

          Today I could only harm a person when and if I had no other choice. Break in my home on a dark night, threaten my wife’s safety and you die. But get in my face, challenge me to a fight and if there is anyway I will walk away.

          Why, I know there is nothing to be gained from conflict, I know there is nothing to be gained from causing a person pain, zero.

          So why will I still shoot a person if they want to harm another? Because even though this life is but an illusion, even though it is temporary, it is a gift and it is precious.

  2. This may come as a surprise to you, but I agree with your first 2 paragraphs. Because we have free will means we cannot help but shape the world that we live in. Just like the butterfly effect or chaos theory.

    Any small seemingly insignificant decision we make can have exponential effect on events, in the future. A relevant example would be the current crisis in Iraq. It is very possible that the decision that the United States made to go to war within 10 or so years ago, had a direct impact on the fact that people are being massacred in that country as we speak.

    But you could just as easily lay the blame on the mastermind of 9-11 which caused our country to become vengeful and ready for war.

    On a more personal level though, the decisions we make as individuals can have a profound effect on the future and potentially millions of other people. If you had enough knowledge you could probably trace cause and effect of the ISIS crisis back to some seemingly random event like… maybe Bin Ladens father beat him too much as a boy, or his mother abandoned him.

    It could go back beyond that to the beginning of time itself, a series of events that all worked together to finally in the end resulted in the terrible events like are happening in Iraq or the terrible results of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane.

    I think this is where we have to conclude that there must be some other hand at work here. Some other influence on history. If God created the “base biomes” and there was evil in the world before humans came into being, than there must be a creator of that evil that is not God. But is contrary to his nature.

    Some other free agents that have more power to influence creation than humans do….

    This or these free agents infected creation and made cruelty, pain, suffering, and natural evil possible in an otherwise good world.

    Here is a video from an Open Theist, that explains this another way. I lean heavily toward the ideas of Open Theism.

    http://youtu.be/G7gXkCMROdU?list=PL5DE81A0650DFEA93

    On your next point, I guess this would be where you and I would not agree. You see suffering as a necessary part of our journey. I don’t. I think that we can experience everything we would possibly need without suffering, or evil.

    I can think of many examples of this.

    Anytime you pick up a book, or explore the world around you, you are gaining experience without suffering or evil. In fact I would go as far to say that everything we experience that has no evil or suffering attached to it are the only experiences we truly learn from.

    If there is evil attached to an experience than we only get a twisted sense of understanding that often has to be undone to truly advance. Otherwise there would be no need for the profession of psychiatrists or counselors of any kind.

    When an evil happens such as the horrible crime of child abuse, there is really nothing of benefit to be learned. However there is a whole lot that needs to be undone.

    If you say that we can learn anything of value through the experience, that cannot be learned by any other means, than you must be saying that, in a way, that suffering that the child experienced is a good thing. If that is the case than what good is a distinction between good and evil, or a sense of morality in the first place?

    I would even go so far as to say that this world has gone so far the wrong way, it has been corrupted so much toward evil and darkness that when good comes to the world, the world does not recognize it.

    Which is the true meaning of John 1:5. If you read the rest of the chapter you see that in the context of the text.

    So with all this evil that infected the earth, what could be done to bring the earth back to the good creation that it was meant to be?

    What is it that chases away the darkness?

    You eluded to the impotence of darkness. You are right, it isn’t in fact a real thing. A little bit of light and it is gone.

    So if light represents good and darkness evil, then all we need is the source of goodness and light to enter the world. Like a light in the darkness, the light overcomes the darkness. Which you can read about in the gospel of John that you quoted.

  3. St. Paul tells us that our faith would be in vain if Jesus did not rise from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:14).

    As C.S. Lewis says, if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, He would have been either a liar or a lunatic.

  4. Ok, my comment is going to be much shorter. I’m not gonna try to top what you’ve already said, I just have a simple question I really want to hear some thoughts on. Why is Johnny or the psychopath broken in the first place?

  5. I just discovered this site yesterday, and I am so glad I did. I am a “recovering christian” and every post speaks to me, as I am now a Deist who is learning much more about deism from your posts.

  6. I’m reading this blog for the first time in July 2015. I grew up in a Christian home and from the age of 13, I struggled with many aspects of Christianity. In my mid and late twenties, I’ve gone back and forth among Deism and Christian Deism. Reading this, I would most likely identify myself as a Modern Deist. The ideas presented in this blog make more sense than any ideology I have ever encountered. A lot of the conclusions you have made I have also made even before discovering this website. I really hope you pick up blogging again because I love reading and reflecting on what you write.

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