Spiritualism - Lesson #13

Spiritualism - Lesson #13
I agree that to some extent human beings do create their own morality the product of culture, upbringing and prejudice etc. For example while one person might see a particular situation as upright and wholesome another might view it as denigrating or even wicked. People are different and living in a changing, opinionated world. We don't all agree on everything. But God, or whatever we choose to call him, is changeless and not subject to these peculiarities of nature. God is never childish (or spiteful) developing as a child might eventually growing up into a reformed character. The moral outlook discussed in this lesson is one of relativism i.e. whatever society decides at any given moment is the accepted morality of the time. But it can never be right to kill. I (me) have no right whatsoever to decide who lives and who dies as if all that's at stake is the rearranging of energy. Conscience tells me that is wrong and I submit that most cultures, if not all, would agree that killing for the sake of it cannot be right. Morality is eternal as God is eternal. This is the conclusion Kant came to. Kant rejected metaphysical knowledge as far as the world or our inner being are concerned. Reason alone serves this purpose so releasing us from the useless bondage to speculation which only leads to conflict of opinion.
Reason, being independent of experience a priory, gives us solid moral guidance which I understand to mean "conscience" (the divine voice within). From this it follows that morality is independent of us and not subservient to sensory pleasures or gratification. This means we are not free to do as we like as if all we're doing is rearranging the furniture in a house that doesn't exist. Pantheism and monism are the offshoots of this way of thinking. For Kant an action has a moral value if it issues from a good will motivated purely out of respect for duty and the moral law. According to him the independence of morality gives us choice i.e. free will.
People often point to the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and the violence contained there. I would make several observations about this. First it is never good idea for a modern society to look back on an ancient one judging it according to modern standards. If we were to get into a spaceship and travel back five thousand years to the Fertile Crescent the society we would happen upon would be alien to our own so that we would not feel at home there. Nations fought on-another in hand to hand combat. It was a vicious world in which it was either kill or be killed. A powerful empire might swoop down on a smaller nation exiling its population to foreign climes as a way of keeping control e.g. the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Empires. This was the environment into which the fledgling nation of Israel began its life. God was not barbaric far from it he was loving and protective. For example when in Egypt God saw the plight of His people, heard their cries and came down to deliver them from the Egyptians who were oppressing them. He then led them across a vast desert, through hostile lands delivering them to a land he had set aside for them – a land surrounded by warring nations. It was important, therefore, that Israel remained unified and untarnished by outside influences if it was to preserve its faith and status ad God's chosen people. The problem was that, as a new nation in a new land, Israel was subject to many outside influences which threatened to overwhelm it. This is why the covenant was established between them and God. It served as a kind of manifesto under which Israel lived out its unique relationship to God – as a light to other nations. The problem was that Israel couldn't keep its side of the bargain and frequently fell into apostasy. This is when the trouble really started but even then God did not abandon his people but raised up "deliverers" to get them out the mess.
In the context of a violent and hostile world the God of the Israelites was an enlightened God who made sure widows and resident aliens were provided for; a God who established cities of refuge for criminals to escape to (to save themselves); God who did not advocate a scorched earth policy in war as surrounding nations did; and who commanded an "eye for an eye" ensuring revenge was proportional rather than unbounded (i.e. only one eye and no more) which was unheard of in those days. And when God did exact judgement upon his people restoration always followed – the book of Hosea is a case in point here. God was a grown up God dealing with an immature and fickle people.
The book of Job comes from the Wisdom section of the Hebrew scriptures which encompasses: Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Psalms and the Wisdom of Solomon. These books were used for teaching the next generation of leaders in society. Pupils might sit at a master's feet and be taught there. There is little religious content in these books and Job, for example, addresses a particular problem: "why do bad things happen to good people?" Proverbs taught the opposite to this but the reality is quite different e.g. thieves get away with their spoils while good people may lose homes and incomes. If people create their own morality this shouldn't happen; of course it shouldn't. We're told that Job was an upright man so the world he had been "consciously creating" should have reflected this but it didn't. And neither could it. Yet Job's protagonists couldn't see this. They were locked into the accepted way of thinking that if things go wrong for you it must be your fault – or the fault of someone close to you. But we know this didn't apply to Job which is why he protested his innocence. So, did God cause his suffering? No! There are at least two reasons why a loving, generous and creative God would not do this. First, Job was not just a righteous man he was a controlling man. For not only did he perform his own sacrifices he got up early to offer sacrifices on behalf of his family in case they had forgotten to do it themselves. Now, no-one can have that many plates in the air at the same time without eventually collapsing with a nervous breakdown. And this is what happened to Job. And the symptoms of a nervous breakdown are all there: despondency, collapse; skin eruption, tears, loss of interest and so on. Job became a sick man who could see no way out of his misery. So, this is very much a human story. Second, Kant abstracted from Job's experience according to his philosophical model i.e. by taking some object and stripping away the sensory qualities to arrive at a non-sensory core knowable a priory. In Job we have a person richly filled with sensory pleasures and worldly satisfactions who is stripped down to nothing leaving a moral core that remains intact. Yet even though Job ends up in a heap on the floor with nothing he still has his moral consciousness and retains his faith in God. Why? If moral awareness requires us to postulate God's existence then a purified moral awareness stripped down of worldly happiness would produce a correspondingly intense belief in God. And this is what one often finds in people who are caught up in suffering. Their calmness, acceptance and dignity can be so inspirational it produces a reaction of admiration within others who are taken "elsewhere in their thinking" beyond their immediate situation of ceaseless struggle to strive and "own." Well, once he sees the Almighty face to face he realises how little he really knew. Job thought he knew everything and was prepared to give God a piece of his mind, but in God's presence all that melted away. God was/is moral and Job saw that clearly. From that he found enlightenment and from that restoration.

Rog

20th March 2016