Yuyutsu

You have some amusing views on life.
I would like you to consider for a moment your views on morality, since this article centres on the subject.

Some of your views I’ve discovered over time reading your posts. It intrigues me how you stay engaged with the mostly pragmatic OLO patrons.
Am I correct in believing you consider yourself to be a pragmatist, when your views are mostly at odds with the crowd?

A couple of points though: Reincarnation is one.

I’m intrigued in this since you are a firm believer in the rule of nature, but however, your divergences are confusing.
You appear to hold a less than firm grip on the physical body. This could be a good point of debate. It’s really a core demarcation between the physical and the metaphysical.
The recognition of the tenuous hold of the soul on life is a pretty recent acknowledgement, especially considering the millions of years of human evolution.

Freud splits the personality, (which contains the soul), into three elements known as the id, the ego, and the superego.
Your proposal seems opposed to that, in that these elements are transported at death, to be reconstituted through a metamorphic process in a metaphysical realm; and thus reconstructed, returned to earth to inhabit the living body of an earthly life form currently in existence.

Fit morality into all this for me if you will. My view as a pragmatist is that we have a need to redefine morality with its set views of the time, to help in the task of dealing with issues as gross as the current example of Laissez-faire abortion.

Dan

Dear Dan,

Thank you for raising this interesting topic of pragmatic morality.

Morality is not a fixed code, one size fits all, it manifests differently at the different stages of our spiritual evolution.

This is why my response to you could be different to my response to Banjo Paterson, yet different again to my response to the author.

As a general rule I would expect a higher moral standard from spiritual aspirants as they advance, but then one may reach a very advanced stage where one needs to drop morality altogether and step beyond it.

As the extreme example for stepping beyond morality, allow me to quote a biblical incidence:

"From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!”. He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys." [2 Kings 2:23-24]

So while this topic criticizes women who, generally due to some serious and troubling, practical and well-thought considerations rather than just out of a whim, decide to kill their unborn, here this powerful prophet kills 42 kids on a moment's notice, over a trifle and without any warning - likely wanted and loved kids who will be mourned by 42 families. Yes, these kids are childish and foolish but Elisha was an adult who must have understood that "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never break me"...

I will not be able to cover this vast topic, which I studied and contemplated for many years in just a few 350-word posts, but the key to morality is Hillel's golden rule:

THAT WHICH IS HATEFUL TO YOU, DO NOT DO UNTO YOUR FELLOW

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In that light, expecting a poor, single working-class woman not to abort is unrealistic.
Would she actually hate it if her mother stopped her from coming into this tough world and its poverty?
She would more likely instead thank her for that.

But gradually, as a woman is more educated, more well in life, more enjoying her life, she would more and more hate the idea of being made to miss it.
For her, since she would hate that done to herself, abortion would be an immoral sin.

But then, suppose her baby was found to have a crippling disability, then again that educated mother would have loved, not hated, to be aborted in the situation.
For her, abortion in those circumstances would not be immoral.

Then comes a woman who is well on her spiritual path and therefore understands, appreciates and internalizes the value that one can derive even from life as an invalid.
For her, abortion would be immoral and sinful even if the baby was to be deformed.

Finally, an enlightened woman who has realised God, indiscriminately loves whatever comes, knowing clearly and beyond doubt that everything is according to God's will, thus hates nothing.
No morality applies to her, no sin can taint her, just as no sin tainted Elisha when killing these 42 children.

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For the other issues you raised, you may like to start a new thread because the limit here of 4 posts per day would make responding to them impractical.

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Dear Yuyutsu,

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I hope everything went OK for you yesterday. You seemed a bit preoccupied.
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To my remark «I don't agree with your deterministic theory of human behaviour » you replied :

« Then you must assert that humans have some supernatural capabilities, that somehow they get exempt from nature's ordinary laws. Do you? »

No, Yuyutsu, I was referring to your statement that “everything is pre-programmed by nature”.

As I indicated in my previous post, my understanding is that there are what we call “laws of nature” and “natural laws”. The two are quite different from each other. The former are of a scientific nature (e.g., the law of gravity), which, as you say, “affect matter”, and the latter are of a philosophic nature : a system of right or justice held to be common to all humans and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society (so-called "positive law").

Despite the extraordinary progress we have made over the past 5 to 7 million years since we broke away from our common ancestor with the chimpanzees, it continues to remain almost impossible for us to contravene the (scientific) “laws of nature”. A typical example that comes to mind where we have succeeded in doing so was in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin contravened nature’s law of gravity and travelled to the moon and back in NASA’s Apollo 11 spacecraft.

I think we can safely say that that was just the beginning and that we will eventually succeed in making it possible for the general public to travel to the moon and elsewhere in the cosmos (to planet Mars, for example).

It is, of course, not so difficult to contravene the (purely philosophic) “natural laws” which do not exert physical constraint. The respect of “natural laws” depends essentially on the control exercised by our conscience. But, in addition, as I indicated in my previous post, society also sanctions the non-respect of human rights that it considers to be deriving from so-called “natural laws”.

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So, in conclusion, Yuyutsu, to sum-up, I consider that even if, as you say, “everything is pre-programmed by nature”, we have developed the possibility to contravene nature’s programming (“laws of nature” and “natural laws”), and exercise our own free will to an ever-increasing degree as time goes by, generation after generation, millennium after millennium, and will, no doubt, endeavour to continue to do so for the rest of our existence.
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Then you ask :

« But what has any of these facts to do with "we"?

« We just happen to identify with a human, we figuratively "dwell" in its body, but our freedom does not imply the freedom of that human »
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In my view, Yuyutsu, these facts have everything to do with “we”, and “we” alone.

As much as I would like to agree with you that « we just happen to identify with a human, we figuratively "dwell" in its body … », I see no reason to believe that we are anything other than our body.

I see us human beings simply as biological creations of nature that have attained the highest degree of evolution and complexity of all existing forms of life on earth to date.

That, to me, is quite awesome.

But, as I indicated above, I don’t think we have reached the end of the production line yet – far from it. We are still very much a “work-in-progress”. Who knows what mother nature has in store for us in terms of our future evolution ? She may well decide that a soul would be nice to top it all off, the icing on the cake as it were !

If ever that happened to be the case, Yuyutsu, I’m sure you would not be the only one to rejoice …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-2amTBPYX0&ab_channel=CMajorGlobal

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Dear Banjo,

I am dumbfounded by your suggestion that by flying to the moon people broke the law of gravity. The law of gravity states that physical bodies mutually exert a certain pulling force, but does not preclude the possibility of other forces in the opposite direction neutralising this force, which is just what the Apollo rockets did.

Suppose Apollo was flying to the moon without any rockets, or suppose it flew faster than the speed of light, that would have breached the laws of physics (but of course that wasn't the case).

Similarly, doing evil, hurting others, by itself is not against the moral laws of spirit: only doing so without, sooner or later, suffering the unpleasant consequences, that would constitute a breach of the laws of spirit.

I do not understand what you mean by "laws of a philosophical nature": are you suggesting the existence of some natural laws that only apply in the presence of people who love to think, not otherwise?

Your subjective experience of having free-will is just that, a subjective experience. Do not confuse it with the objective operation of your brain that is bound by the laws of nature.

«I see us human beings simply as biological creations of nature that have attained the highest degree...»

That correctly describes human beings, but not yourself.

To equate yourself with a body (human or otherwise) is absurd:

Our body has completely changed during our lifetime, it once was a single cell (which by now is long gone), then a baby, a child, a youth, an adult, an elderly - which of these is "you"?

Or suppose you accidentally lose a limb: are you what remains of your body, or are you that limb?
Or suppose you receive a prosthesis or other technological bodily enhancements (perhaps even brain enhancements): does "you" now include these devices as well?
Or suppose your brain was transplanted into a different body, are you now your old or your new body?

I could go on and on with more examples to demonstrate that absurdity.