Why Bother Being Good?
We know what we should do, but why bother?
I bring another exciting section from How (Not) To Be Secular on exclusive humanism’s restlessness.
Warning: nerdy stuff ahead.
“The MMO (modern moral order) significantly ramps up our moral expectations; indeed, we’ve gone beyond the Smithian vision of self interest benefiting the whole. In a real sense, the MMO is a high calling to altruism and other-regard. However because of an inadequate appreciation for moral sources, modernity fixates on moral articulation-a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior that further and further delineate high moral expectations.”
PG 128
It reminds me of two things, one theological and the other political. There were two rules in the Garden of Eden: be fruitful and multiply, and don’t eat from that tree. Then, there were 10 on Mt. Sinai that quickly became 613 over 40 years. Malachi got it to 3, and Jesus brought it down to 2.
Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. And naturally, with human nature, the man Jesus told that to tried to make it more complicated by asking who his neighbor was.
On the political side, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights regulate the government, which has millions of pages regulating citizens.
“What’s wrong with such code fixation? Well, on the one hand, there are all kinds of epistemological limitations: no code can anticipate every vagary of circumstance; no one can adequately know how to apply codes to new situations; we’re not sure what to do when codes conflict; etc.”
PG 128
We have a law, but why bother? The Apostle Paul speaks on his struggles with it in Romans 7:21-23: “So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.”
Continuing in the book…
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