Morality and Religion - Part IV

We are composite beings. We are frustrated. We are free. We are saved. We are sinners. We are spatial. We are temporal. We are timeless. We are mindful. We can speak of our separate attributes and characteristics. I can say, "I was tired today". In so doing, I speak of a state. I speak of a time. I speak of an action. And I speak of a person. It is that last identifier which befuddles all the previous distinctions.

I cannot open up your brain and find that part of you which is a person. Is the person in the brain? Is it in the mind? Is it the mind? The mind exists in active and inactive states. When I am unconscious my mind is altered. Is my person altered, too? It has been the task of philosophers to try and clear up these muddled concepts. Recently, it has become the norm within the science community and in philosophy as well to accept certain holistic axioms which represent complex organizations of smaller components. Without bogging down the argument, we can accept the "person" as a distinct whole without knowing, or being able to pinpoint, the causal relations the person has with the objective world. To state in another way, the person is like an emergent quality which arises due to a highly complex system. This quality is not linked to the system, nor dependent on it. It becomes independent and absolute, but it does remain correlative. An ant colony is typically the most popular example to cite of this approach. Every ant the makes up the colony has no idea of the colonies existence. The ant only knows its job, its function. But as every ant works the colony emerges. As such,right ants, or better ants do not guarantee a right or better colony. Each colony becomes its own thing according to its circumstances and environment. In a similar fashion the condition of our neurons do not determine the kind or type of person we will be. There is thus good reason to accept that the person exists as a whole unit.

What this means is that we cannot easily divide up our lives into religious, moral, family, and social obligations. In the end what ends up happening is some mashed up goo like creation that embodies our life. We can say its our moral obligation to obey the speed limit, but how does this work out when get off work from a long day and you know your wife is at home with the kids all day and they are terrorizing her and everyone is passing you, including every car that has some religious bumper sticker on it. Now I am one to advocate moral integrity, but at the same time we cannot fall into the trap of thinking that a moral norm is an absolute mandate that must be obeyed or we forfeit our right to exist. What about the mandate to care and provide for my family? To ensure that the mother of my children remain in good mental health? What about the mandate to conform socially? If everyone is allowed to speed should I be the one to ruin it for everyone? What about the mandate to be united to my religious kin? Should I scoff at their irreverence for the law, and hold myself in a higher position? Or should I join with them in solidarity taking their path to ensure that no matter the outcome the fact that we face it together is what is more important? All these questions reflect a moral system, but more importantly it shows how morality really exists as a conversation rather then as a demand on a persons life.

Now it just may so happen that the moral obligation to follow the speed limit overrides all these other counter-points, but this does not negate my argument, but only goes to demonstrate it. The fact of the matter is that for any given moral choice there is likely to be other moral conflicts, and the person as a whole has to experience not just the moral integrity of choosing right, but also the moral embarrassment of dishonoring one's self. What this means is that morality cannot be confined to a set of laws, norms, or systems. It is as living as we are, and as such must always be taken in context. This is not relativism. There must always be moral demands on a persons life, but morality is living, none the less. And we must experience morality rather then simply understand it. It is one thing not to kill, but it is another to grasp the sanctity of life.

In navigating the currents of morality there is something I would like to highlight, and that is that we cannot simply divide our life into simple segments or compartments. Religion will ultimately leak into morality and morality will spread into religion. This is a natural occurance and one that should not be avoided, but this reality does not delineate from the truth that we are morally autonomous. Religion and morality relate to one another and will converse together, but the conversation is ultimately between two seperate parts of our life, though we may experience them as conjoined.

And for this I think I have an explanation. I stated earlier that there is a difference between "not killing" and sanctity of life. On the surface a morality can simply be a set of rules to follow and when you follow those rules you are a good person, but as we saw earlier. Following rules always means breaking others in one way or another, and the cost can be dire. Especially if unforseen circumstances place us on the wrong side of the moral grey area.

Now you can go deeper in morality and find the principles that forge the rules into existence. The rule not to steal is forged under the principle of property rights and so forth. These principles are like lamp posts the lighten up the pathways we are supposed to be walking. So instead of following the signs (rules) we simply examine the light (principles). There is a shift in moral awareness at this point where a person takes upon himself the responsibility of examining the best course instead of simply following signs, but the problems remains the same. A principle does not secure that the right paths will be chosen. Many principles can be connected to a single rule, and so it can confuse the selection of which principles are the right ones anyways. One can easily get lost in a sea of competing principles that can all result in a myriad of available rules and norms. In this endless labyrinth of abstract principles it is all too easy to forget the real life impact of our choices and the inner world that exists within us. We can get "lost" at sea, tossed by the waves as though we were simply apart of the ocean. When this happens we are no different then the forces which we thought we were in control of.

Above all this, we have a moral center. This is the force of morality. The fount. The wellspring of where our moral drive comes from. Above the norms and principles of morality exists a land that is uncharted. This is typically considered to be meta-ethics. It is the primary source of morality. Some think it is life, others think it is unity, and still others might say, love. The idea at this point is that we can look for moral justification in the embodiment of such a pure motive. This center brings us back to our human experience and it takes us out of the rote obligations of normative ethics. The problem here is that it is almost impossible to ever significantly prove that such a center exists. Even if we can admit that there is a center, there would be no objective way to actually demonstrate it. We can blindly thrust forward, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but moral responsibility seeks to cling to something to hold unto.

What I bring us to is a distinction between what I would call moral content and moral intensity. The content of morality is largely what we experience in our moral life. It is the norms, the principles, and the selection of what we might call a moral center. But there is something else. There is an intensity to morality as well that in many ways shapes the honesty, passion, and integrity of our moral system. There is an energizing factor that invigorates the whole system. This intensity largely comes from the reality of a moral well spring.

Now I would claim that our moral autonomy makes the content of our morality up to a responsible evaluation on our part, but the intensity of our morality should not be thought to come from us, or from our own choice or creation. This wellspring should be thought of in religious, or symbolic terms. Religion calls us and pulls us toward morality and morality in turn is empty and meaningless without a narrative to guide it. Morality does not need religion to establish norms, but it calls out for a correlative mythos to be grounded. Just the same religion is not validated by specific morality, but it is responsive to moral awareness and virtue.

So in no way should we think of moral autonomy as being indifferent to religion, or as religion being indifferent to morality. The two compliment and urge each other on. I am driven to become a moral person because of Christianity, and I am driven to be morally pure and righteous, but I am only driven to these realities within the framework of honesty and responsibility. I own my moral direction and purpose, but I acquiesce to the intensity of my morality being involved in a dialectic and narrative of symbolism and even religious fervor. Religion may not be able to tell me what to do, but it just may be the only thing that can tell me why to do it.