Whether we are fundamentally biological creatures is irrelevant to the discussion of our purpose on this earth. Our purpose, whether it comes from something innate or something constructed, can be conceived of in a way that makes life on earth meaningful and beautiful and purposeful and glorious. That purpose can either serve the good of all of the world, or it can be self-serving or group specific, without regard for the rest of civilization, life, or non-life that it co-exists with. We have a choice as to what kind of purpose we choose to accept for ourselves. If we accept that it is to exist solely for ourselves and some transcendent, elusive, ambiguous and spiteful deity, than we have chosen that path for our lives. We can choose to live for material things, to subscribe to the god-religion of capitalism and personal gain and selfishness in effort to acquire as much as we can in this life in terms of physical and monetary wealth, and then hoard it and pass it on to our offspring to continue the same sick, self-indulgent, pathetic and hollow existence of accumulation.
Or we can choose more. We can choose to feel. To embrace beauty and light and one another. We can choose to love. We can choose to expand that love beyond a single person or a small group of people and to embrace humanity, the world, the energy and beauty of the universe. We can choose to stop trying to control the earth and accept that we are a living, breathing, passing part of it. We can choose to exist for the hope and beauty and love that, whether biological or socially constructed, is undoubtedly present in the human psyche. We can choose to live for oneanother. To make it our responsibility that other people can experience these goods as well. To make it our purpose to foster all that is beautiful and wonderous and ensure that every member of humanity is able to feel these abstract goods in this life, that they do not needlessly suffer, that our fellow humans and our world are healthy and growing and able to exist in beauty and light and hope and harmony.
This is not idealism. This is logic. This is compassion. This is hope that a better world is possible. This is progress. This is humanism. This is love. This is a morality derived of all of the above. This is the purpose we can choose for ourselves. This is the morality we can choose to embrace. Morality is not the prohibition of swearing. It is not an obligatory church schedule. It is not out lawing gay people from marrying. It is the mechanism by which we may all live together and embrace our potential for beauty and love and happiness while minimizing our potential for destruction and pain and suffering. This is a simple logic. The things that uplift the human spirit are moral things. The things that embrace our potential for good and move us toward compassion and humanism and harmony with our earth are good and moral things. The things that degrade the human spirit and infest humanity with suffering, that further pain and misery and hatred and anger and death and destruction, that infect our natural world with toxins and waste and cut wounds so deep in the earth that they will likely destroy much of life, not to mention the capacity for human functioning: these things are wrong and immoral and detrimental to not only human life but to the fragile system that is our earth.
This is my morality. Take it or leave it, but I'll be damned if someone can explain to me how our government or our economic system is moral and good.
Unless we get our heads out of our asses and stop playing hands-off with morality and stop being all touchy-feely about cultural relativism and state sovereignty and personal beliefs, we are headed for a major crisis world wide. I am fully aware that it is going to take the Armageddon of the next century brought about by the extreme wounds we've caused this planet and our complete disregard for the well being of our fellow man to snap the western world out of it's self-idolizing Prozac-popping material-worship. Even then, with the fundamentalist religious ideologies that abound our populations, I am seriously concerned that we as a whole will fail to heed the blatant message our planet and the unbalanced order of civilization is trying to convey, and we'll instate something worse than we've already got now.
I wish I could make everyone see.
