We all stray from that simple goal. We have been duped, tricked into believing that we can, by force of will, be good people. We have been led to believe, regardless of religious background to believe that being persons of faith and adhering to the rules of our faith that we will be good, even holy, people. It is a lie, accidental certainly, ignorant, probably, but a lie none the less. We struggle day after day, year after year, and at best have deeply qualified success. It is, essentially, a task we are set to fail.
A good portion of religious literature from the past as well as our own times has addressed this problem. It has sought to explain that we have a ‘sinful nature’ that we are prone to evil, that we must do battle with the devil.
The lie, in essence is this: follow a certain moral code and by effort, perhaps with the help of the divine, we will become good people. Fail to follow the code, and we will not be good people. We might even become bad.
The truth is this: Goodness and badness are mere decorations, side effects of a life lived in accord with the divine.
Religion, to its great shame, provides us with moral direction. It lays out for us what is right and what is wrong. By itself, this is not a particularly bad thing. We set our moral compass by points laid out by religion on the map of life. These points are comforting, like lighthouses on a dark sea. We trust this light in the darkness because we have been told that they lead away from danger and toward the goodness that we desire. They are, however, false comforts. Each moral decision that we make alters our path, and importantly, the path of those around us. We may never know what a word or act will manifest in the lives around us, and in our own lives. The shame in moral direction is that it leads to a false sense of reality, gets reduced and redacted to its most simplistic terms, and then is reapplied as ‘mot juste’ to justify our interaction with others, ourselves and the divine.
There are two levels we must look at when seeing the reasons for outcomes in our lives. The first is the proximal result: the immediate or nearly immediate outcome. The second is the distal result: a result that may appear to be wholly disconnected from the original act. The proximal is related to its cause directly. The distal is seemingly unrelated to its cause, and its origins are far more uncertain. The proximal is causal, the distal appears acausal. The proximal is observable, the distal is metaphysical.
