A Theist Morality

Things didn't add up.

What people told me, what I read in the Bible, and what my body experienced in the world. Each worked against the other. These contradictions became more real to me than my professed beliefs.

I tried for years to stay in the church. To make myself believe. You can make yourself believe anything, if you can argue for any position, right? Apparently not. That assumption is similar enough to the ones that those who tick 'Christian' on a form often throw out. If there is no God (by which they mean, no God of Abraham), surely, that means you could do anything.

In an uncaring universe, what reason is there to be Good?

If there is no metaphysical stick and carrot to delineate right from wrong, why do right?

Conformists have a habit of repeating things, and assuming that if you repeat something with enough vigor, people will See The Truth. In a sense, this is true. Repetition is persuasive. However, it is not a reason. Anyone, after all, can repeat anything they want.

Except, except...except...EXCEPT, EXCEPT.

EXCEPT. EXCEPT. EXCEPT.

When there are enough exceptions, perhaps the rule isn't.

If you were an atheist and you asked for a weapon to use in this debate, I would hand you biological cooperation. Talk to a Christian long enough, and you will find that they think of animals as low, below, worthy of disgust.

Then why, you might ask, in this "sinful, flawed" world, do animals cooperate? Why do centipedes, notoriously aggressive and anti-social creatures, cooperate in some situations?

You see, you don't need a metaphysical carrot and stick. You just need...a carrot and stick. People who work together win. They won wars over people who didn't.

When I left Christianity, I was destitute in more ways than one. In reaction to the economic fall of my generous parents, I went in the other direction. I would maximize selfishness. Turns out, you don't need much to be satisfied when the world is low on beauty due to the decrease in energy that comes from losing. What others might call depression. Sooner or later I decided I wanted to live. Which led me to an appreciation of people. Which led me to an appreciation of life.

I opened my nostrils to a world full of beauty.

My body itself was a world of desperate yearning, of wants so big they seemed like they would eat the universe. And I believe they will.

Life will win.

In 2015, I had an alcoholic year. Not only had Obama ordered the death of Americans without trial two years before, but I had learned something about myself and the men I called brothers.

There a spider’s thread between who we were and what we would do when faced with the gaping maw of wants that sat at the bottom of our consciousness. Underneath all the words to abstract values like duty, honor, and freedom lay something else. Something hungry. Something ravenous. Something that would take, and never stop taking until something took it.

What stops me from being a murderer or a rapist? In the summer of 2015, well, naught else but the knowledge of long-term consequences.

So we drank every day. A lot.

Yet in this is the key to cooperation.

The awareness of time.

Long-term selfishness, after all, requires coalition.

And plotting like an LBJ or a cartoon villain is very, very tiring.

If you want to be lazy while maximizing long-term power…there happen to be several attractors, based on the environment we find ourselves in. Based on our bodies.

A lot of them look suspiciously like ancient definitions of being Good. Of being Virtuous.

Keep your word (because keeping stories straight is hard work!). Take for others (because you’ll need them one day). Share your kill (because as a creature born of collectives, you crave the joy of eating together).

It goes on like this.

Without metaphysics, with mere blood and bone and lightning and thunder and soil and rock and water, with mere physics, with mere history and biology and the vastness of your wants…

you are constrained.