Any Way You Want It

Theism is the belief that there is a God. Agnosticism is unsure (forgive my digression, but it was my brother-in-law Kirby who told me one of my all-time favorites about the dyslexic agnostic who wasn’t sure there is a Dog). Atheism, of course, is the belief that there is no God. This all seems innocent enough until we broach the subject of morality. The definition for morality that has been developing in this blog is the degree to which creature and Creator are consciously connected; the degree to which sentient communion prevails. Since such a definition is dependent upon the existence of a higher or transcendent power, what becomes of morality if no such thing exists? This may seem a trivial pursuit until one stops to think about what an amoral paradigm looks like. Cynical criticism of a good girl/bad boy mentality that functions from the vantage of whether God is watching or not is justified, but such immature thought doesn’t really deal with what society and culture look like without any distinction between moral and immoral. Humanists have told me that they are moral because that is the correct way for humans to relate to one another and their environment, but they have not been able to explain to me how they have derived the notion of correctness. When morality is defined as putting the larger good first, then are we not talking about something that is greater than we are? If there is no creator, and creation is simply the sum of all the parts, what difference does it make how we treat ourselves or one another? Without a transcendent quality that is greater than the sum of the parts, there is really no reason to care about what means we employ to reach our inevitable end. Sound familiar?