Enlightened Self-Interest

A common quesiton asked when considering a laissez-faire, non-interactive God is, how do we then know right from wrong?  Mustn't that come from God?

If we have inalienable, even inherent, rights, wouldn't the violation of those rights also be necessarily  inherent?  The biblical analogy of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is an excellent example, and in the process shows that the Bible does contain deep wisdom.  When they ate of its fruit, Adam and Eve became self aware, which meant they understood the impact their actions had on others.  We could then put ourselves in the shoes of others and understand how our own actions could cause pain, or pleasure in others.  It also made us aware of our nakedness because the deep intimacy of sexual bonding cannot be physically endured indefinitely--making our clothes part of the mate selection ritual, a barrier the removal of which indicates acceptance.

So then, is sex a subject for morality?  Yes and no.  First we need to determine what our inherent rights are to begin with, and  thus how they are violated--and to do that, we need to come up with what the objective of morality is.  Assuming we're on our own and morality is not coming down to us from God, that's very simple, Good Order.  99% of us (there's always that 1% who want to use anarchy and chaos to their advantage even though it usually puts them at greater risk) want and desire good order so that we can make the most of our lives in peace.  And the need of good order naturally leads us to the behavior we must observe amongst ourselves to achieve it.  So what rule(s) should be followed to achieve this good order?  It's incredibly simple, the Golden Rule is here stated as:

Morality is honoring the equal rights of all  to their life, liberty and property, to be free from violation through force or fraud.

That's it, that's all there is to it.  It covers all interactions between human (or sentients if we're ever faced with them from other worlds or from within our artificial intelligence).  And here the other shoe is dropped--morality does not and should not deal with individual codes of behavior.  For that we should apply the word "virtue" and use it strictly in that sense instead of melding them together, resulting in the "moral" confusion we've been experiencing since....the dawn of time.

Virtue is an individual code of behavior that is up to the individual to determine and follow, but is still subject to religious and other social pressures for non-mandatory conformity.  Immorality, on the other hand, is the only behavior that should be legislated and governed against.

Morality is so simple that it has only one cause, ego; and only one label under which ALL immorality (evil) can be placed, and that label is a legal/moral double standard.   When, we murder, rape, enslave or steal from others, we emote that our egos justify  putting our rights above those of our victims.  Again, morality is the equal rights of all.  We are not all created equal, but we all have equal rights, otherwise good order is impossible.

Even though this site is very much anti-Paul (some considering him to be the beast of Revelation), Truth can come from any source--babes or the devil himself.  In the following instance I think he gets it right.  For the biblically minded (who are certainly not dismissed out of hand, re: the Tree of Knowledge above), see Romans 2:14,  "Even Gentiles, who do not have God's written law, show that they know his law when they instinctively obey it, even without having heard it. 15 They demonstrate that God's law is written in their hearts, for their own conscience and thoughts either accuse them or tell them they are doing right."  NLT

....written in their hearts at the moment of self-awareness.  Truth must be accepted wherever it is found.

Finally, one can ask, what's to motivate us to follow this Golden Rule moral code?  That's where enlightened self-interest comes in, which is accepting the fact that we and our families are most important to us. that enlightened selfishness isn't bad.  Such morality promotes good order inherently, but we also increase that good order by the example we set in  following it.  Enlightened self-interest also compels us to risk ourselves to defend our own rights by defending the rights of others.  In other words we are morally obligated to help others whose rights are being violated if it is within our power--and it's almost always within our power to do something.  You defend your own rights by defending the rights of others.





Coming up next:  What if whatever is "outside" our natural universe is not supernatural, that is, where natural law and rationality don't exist.  Rather what if there is a reality of infinite dimensions which still follows a rational, natural law.  You could call it the hyper-natural, or ultra-rational or even the uber-rational, but let us dub it here as the:

Ethernatural

Job Serves a Summons on God

"There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name [was] Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil." Job 1:1

"Perfect"?   No authorship is claimed or implied, including God or Job.  It’s the first indication that Job is a parable.  Then later, the author has Job getting frustrated:

"If only someone would listen to me! Look, I will sign my name to my defense. Let the Almighty answer me. Let my accuser write out the charges against me." Job 31:35

But there are no charges, leaving Job with his frustration and his unanswered question, Why?

 Job is perhaps the most enigmatic book in the Bible.  Some also claim that it's the most deistic book in the Bible, but I think it was written as an apologetic for revealed Judaism in answer to that very question religious leaders most often hear, Why?

Revealed religions, by that very act of revelation, are unable to consider the possibility that God must not interact; and it isn't that God can't, it's that God MUST not—in order to preserve our free will.  Consider The Book of Life.  If there were such a book where our names are written from the foundation of the world, then we were all either damned or saved from the beginning. What, then, would be the point or meaning of our mortal lives--for God or ourselves?  Why would a supernatural God go to all that trouble to create this 13 billion year old natural universe, and put us through all these trials and tribulations if our fates were pre-ordained?  The Book of Life can only be a human forgery.

To make a very long story short, Job refuses the advice of friends and his wife to curse God, choosing instead to sue God, forcing God to make an appearance. Job's evidence is many oaths as to his perfection as a human. God does make an appearance in a whirlwind, but instead of answering Job, God sarcastically asks:  “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell [Me], if you have understanding."....Job 38:1 & 4  (The arrogance here can be nothing more than priestly intimidation in place of providing an answer.)

IOW, the author is having God say, “who are you, any of you, to ask that question of ME?”  The author, as anyone who’s advocating for the existence of an interactive, personal God, has no answer.  But there is an obvious answer—free will, so that the choices we make are truly our own, but that necessitates God’s non-intervention.  [i]That's the why of it.[/i]

This is clearly a human parable, which is further accentuated by the fact that not only is Job's wealth and status replaced, but he gets a new set of children, like so much chattel.  Although Job doesn't get the answer he was suing for, his being wronged is supposedly righted.  It's tantamount to a divine admission of guilt.

God?  Guilty???  What’s really going on here!

The author, attempting to answer Job’s question (actually accusation), fails miserably; and in an attempt to cover it up, he sweeps his non-answer under the rug by obscuring it under endless chapters of involved dialogue.  When one finally comes upon “God’s answer”, it’s very anti-climactic and intuitively unsatisfying.  But the author had to do something.  Like every other believer in a revealed, interactive God, he believed that God must interact with us and if nothing else tell us what is moral, but in fact, we already know (see below).  IOW, the whole assumption, the whole premise is wrong. God does not, cannot, and must not intervene....ever—not even to let us know that “He” exists.  Revealed religions over the millennia have felt the need to try to answer the Why?, because it is asked so often, but whatever answer they come up with, it always negates free will and rings hollow.

Even with the seemingly senseless death of an innocent child, God's non-interference is a monument to “It's” commitment to our free will, and a prime indication of its importance; the exercise of which is the purpose for the universe itself.  At least, when we grieve, it need not be compounded by that question.

God, therefore, must remain hidden.  We can never come close to knowing that “It” exists and that is insured by there being no actual evidence (other than human hearsay) whether God exists or doesn't.

What we have with Job is a priest or religious leader who continually has people coming to him asking Why? Why do bad things happen to those who are good, and good things to those who are bad.  I prayed but my faith that can move mountains did nothing. What is God doing?  Why doesn’t He do something? It's a very fair question, otherwise why should they be praying to and worshiping God, can they believe that God is good, or that "It" even exists? It's a question we're raising even more loudly today.

But suffering and injustice still happen with God watching.  Yes they do, and beyond explaining the reason for it, our free will, we must remember that this is but our threescore and ten against the backdrop of eternity.

So God, if He exists, must not even so much as answer Job's question. The answer is there and has been there imbedded in our psyches ever since the Garden of Eden parable where Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and became self-aware.  Thus, instead of Adam saying "Adam want Eve", he declared, "I want You."  Self-awareness also means that we inherently know what is moral because we can put ourselves in another’s situation.  And, unlike the animals, our awareness condemns us to possess the knowledge that we will eventually die.

The Word of God

Thomas Paine was a revered American Hero of the Revolution.  His Common Sense and American Crisis series inspired the people and soldiers during that period to understand what they were working and fighting for, and to persevere through the enormous hardships they faced.  If he had stopped there with his political publications, he would certainly be remembered today as one of the major founders of the United States of America—the name he coined for it.

But in 1794, facing the guillotine in Paris, he wrote Part 1 of The Age of Reason, which was to relegate him to the status of a footnote in our history.  His open advocacy of deism, a belief in a non-interfering God held by many of his fellow founding patriots, albeit with greater discretion, earned him the vilification of his ecumenical foes who hounded him even to his deathbed, where they demanded that he recant his deism and accept Christianity.  His philosophical contributions are only now coming out of the dark ages of American History where even the likes of Theodore Roosevelt called him “a dirty little atheist”.  Wider recognition of his contributions in this area is long overdue, and as will be shown, they reveal a framework for an even more detailed vision of reasoned reality and spirituality.

The Truth contained in Paine’s thoughts on philosophy and religion recorded in The Age of Reason continues in spite of a long period of its being relegated to the shadows, and slowly gathers momentum through the vastly increased capacity for freedom of discussion and exchange of ideas provided by the modern information age. While his are certainly not the last words on reasoned philosophy, nor is such a claim made here, his courageous social leap ahead of his time speaks to us in the modern world as few have, before or since.

Rarely is the expression of one’s concept of religion more timelessly profound or majestic than this quote from The Age of Reason:

“It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a Word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh an universal language.... It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this Word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God.”

                                                         —Thomas Paine

This is not only the best definition ever for the Word of God, it is at the same time a preamble to a Grand Unified Theory of Truth. Anything we believe about God/Truth must be consistent with this one simple paragraph. What are its implications? That there are no supernatural events, there is no revelation other than the natural universe itself, no prophesy; and prayer can only be a simple appreciation for the free will His universe bestows on us in the hope that we will find the strength to pursue the light of Truth (God) with an honest soul.

The purpose here is to take Paine’s conception of the Word of God, and presume to extend the concept one step further—That Truth is God, wherever that Truth leads and whatever it turns out to be.

Truth is God and God is Truth in both the figurative and literal sense. If there is a sentient, all powerful master of the universe, pursuing Truth will lead us in "His" direction along that fascinating road of infinite length. If "He" does not exist, the motivation to follow the road still does, since the pursuit of Truth (knowledge, justice, love, beauty) remains as the only path to genuine fulfillment. We worship this God, Truth, by its pursuit and are rewarded by that fulfillment—here and after(?)life.

Truth as God is the religion/philosophy that you know is correct because you've made Truth itself the pinnacle, the steeple of your religion.  God is a word for the ultimate, unequivocal reality—a definition indistinguishable from Truth. Wherever Truth leads, there too must be God, be that a spiritual, omnipotent being or not.

Why?

Why?  That's the question we learn to pester our parents with, because they can never give an answer that doesn't draw another "Why?", until they resort to the "because I say so" be all, end all, this discussion of over answer.  It's the question that expresses the angst we all feel at times when bad things happen to good people and vice versa.  "Why her?", "Why him?", "Why me?", "Why now?"  I'm sure it was even asked when pristine victims were sacrificed to volcanoes.

The author of the biblical Book Of Job gives the divine equivalent of the parental "because I say so":  "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" Job 38:4,7  This passage was used as a prologue in the movie, The Tree of Life, about a family grappling with the death of one of their children.  So is that all we get, are we so insignificant and unimportant.   Or might there be an answer after all.

Revealed religion ultimately must resort to such an answer, because there can be no rational explanation for us, or Job, that could come from a revealed, personal, interactive God.   But, if God exists, there is an answer to the question, albeit a hard one that we must deduce for ourselves:  Free Will.  God must not interfere because to do so would undermine the gift of free will that God created the natural, rational universe to provide for us.  Can we make our hard moral choices and have them be our own if God is looking over our shoulder.  It appears that God has gone to a lot of trouble to put a barrier between us, a barrier of 13+ billion years and a Big Bang; and to place us (have us evolve naturally) on a natural, rational stage (the universe), in which to make rational moral choices.  God must not violate God' own laissez faire Prime Directive of non-interference without destroying our free will which is established for both God's and our benefit.

So when tragedy strikes or good fortune comes, we will still grieve or celebrate, but knowing the reason God won't interfere, we needn't be tortured with the question why.

A common question that usually comes up is, "Can an omnipotent God put something outside God's own control?"  Wouldn't that be a limitation on God's omnipotence if God couldn't?  There doesn't appear to be anything else God couldn't do in an instant.  God could create an infinite host of angels to sing God's praises, but they would ultimately be nothing but an extension of God, thus God singing praises to God's own self.  He could have created the universe 100 years ago or 6000 years ago with all indications that the universe had come to be13 billion years ago, and  with memories of our past, but that would have been a lie--the one thing that God cannot be or do.  God is Truth and Truth is God.  We, with our unfettered free will, are the only possible source of a lie in or out of the universe.  All other life is innocent.  We are the only ones with fully developed self-awareness, therefore capable of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  We're the only ones who can put ourselves in the place or situation of another.

So if God is not personal or interactive, does that mean God doesn't want our love, or worship?  No, but  not even knowing if God exists we can't express it directly, and in fact we must use a proxy.  But what proxy would not be equivalent to idolatry?  Only one thing, Truth, the moral pursuit of which is what we should be about--whether God exists or not.

It's a hard thing to accept but the only difference between a deist, laissez-faire God and atheism, is hope--and, concerning the existence God, those are the only two reasonable choices.  All else is hearsay evidence for the irrational and supernatural in this totally natural universe, which has been so since its beginning.

Why is free will so important to us and God?  This profound quote has stood the test of  time:

"If you love something, set it free.  If it comes back to you, it's yours.  If it doesn't, it never was."--Richard Bach, Johnathan Livingston Seagull.

If Truth is God, what is Truth.

What is your ultimate ideal?  Is it love, power, fame, knowledge, courage, loyalty, wealth, lust, justice, art, beauty?  Even the positive examples can become a detriment if they overwhelm and consume us as an obsession.  Any one of them can  become your god, your driving principle, your ultimate ideal.  And what if there is a God, where does "It" fit in?

This site is dedicated to the proposition that the ultimate ideal, our overall driving pursuit, should beTruth, wherever that leads.  It may eventually lead us to a Cosmic Creator or it may not, but with Truth as the ultimate goal, if we can define it well enough, we'll be on one of many correct paths and moving in the right direction. 

I believe Truth has (at least) four aspects, knowledge, justice, love and beauty--moving from pure objective Truth to pure subjective Truth.  Yes, they both exist, at the ends of the figurative spectrum, innto which they blend in the middle.  Knowledge deals, through science, with universal natural law.  Beauty deals, through art, with individual imagination and creativity.  Justice is the objective determination of what is moral, and the subjective determination of the proper legal punishment within a society for immoral behavior.  Love is (or should be) a commitment to support the well being of another, driven and supported by any number of emotions, the strongest of which are familial bonds and physical attraction.

So which is primal, reason or emotion?  The answer is neither and both, they are a team.  I use the analogy of a car.  The driver is reason at the controls, and the emotions are the motivating force or engine.  Without proper control of the emotions, the car careens out of control and into the ditch.  Without the engine, the car goes nowhere.  To paraphrase Einstein, emotion (faith) without reason is blind, and reason with out emotion is dead.  Perhaps there is something to that trite but profoundly simple yin/yang symbol after all.

So, is there a God, a big Kahuna spirit being in the sky that the pursuit of Truth will lead us toward, but probably to which we'll probably never arrive?  The answer is on the far side of Creation.  We've acquired a lot of knowledge about the natural universe on this side of the Big Bang, but we don't have the first  bit of evidence for what preceded it or caused it.  God with a capital "G" is a 50/50 proposition.  I personally believe that God created it that way for a reason, a reason we'll get into next; which has to do with THE question that no revealed religion can answer--"Why?"