I cannot, in all conscience, believe in any higher being, causal principle or end purpose, teleology if you will.
No guiding principle shaping the world or its beings, no redemption from sin or misdeeds.
The
concept of love, caring, extends as a human concept from the
fundamental groupings of mate and family that, with society’s increasing
complexity, was extended to include interdependent groups, then tribes,
then cultures, then nations, then groups of nations adhering to common
codified mores, those having arisen in the ‘spiritual’ sphere (if one
may call it that) from the shaman, through cults, to priest and
religions, in parallel to, in the physical sphere, head of family,
chief, law-giver, ruler, king (where the ruling concept is still
quasi-religious) to national leaders (increasingly divorced from their
god-given rights to secular ascendancy, through force of arms, then
wealth) as presidents, prime ministers, dictators, oligarchs, and
supra-national business heads, etc..
The
corollary of inclusion, as I described before, was exclusion by dint of
curse, excommunication, imprisonment, torture and death, either
individual or, en masse, as conquest followed by coerced inclusion or
its threatened opposite, or annihilation, pogrom, genocide, usually in
the name of a God, but, secularly speaking, for the purity of the
(chosen) race.
In
the face of the undeniably ‘evil demi-urge’ deeply ingrained in man to
remove all threat to one’s (group) survival, it is the challenge of
every man to overcome that base instinct to conquer, subjugate or
destroy, and sublimate those powerful negative desires into their
opposite, first respecting (the right of others to live), then caring
and ultimately loving that ‘Other’, stranger, foreigner, infidel...
Exclusion,
or the ‘selfish’ principle derives from the need to ensure survival of
the family unit and one’s personal ‘future’ in the shape of one’s
offspring. It is the desire for ‘eternity’ through this. Extended to
societies it is manifest in architecture, music, song and poetry
defining a culture that its adherents hope ‘to God’ will survive their
transient mortality.
There
will never become a time when man will become ‘good’ - his inalienable
fate is to struggle for the good in the certain knowledge that his
struggle will at times, in personal life and through history, prove
futile in the endless cycle of the rise and fall of civilizations,
races, and even species, including humans.
It is that determination to work and even self-sacrifice
for the benefit of his fellows and humanity that defines courage and
fortitude, though a strong caveat comes in the form of ‘certitude’ that
‘right’, as he sees it, must be ‘absolute’.
When
his definition of ‘right’, and ‘good’ proves not be the ‘righteous’
from another man’s point of view, how does the virtuous man conduct
himself in the face of denial?
Does he seek to persuade, proselytize, impose? If so,the endless cycle begins again, from virtuous intent to evil deed.
