Something Moral

In my general wanderings of religious and spiritual thoughts, I ought to say to say something about Morals / behaviour. You can tell that I am not convinced. I think that this is a topic that someone else suggested. It certainly was not on my original list, which must say something about me and my views.

It has often been suggested that one reason why “Religion is a good thing” is that it makes people behave better. Apart from religion-based civil wars, this is probably true, although I am not sure how I like the idea of a “deception-based” code of behaviour. “If you don’t clean your teeth tonight, they will fall out in the morning”, may be effective as a way of enforcing bedtime discipline in the short term, but has long-term effects on credibility.

But we like rules. This might be a particularly English thing. We sometimes pretend we don’t, but faced with a social problem (e.g. litter or dogs chasing swans), there are calls for rules. We don’t necessarily like keeping to them, and there is a great deal of special pleading: “Those don’t apply to me in these circumstances” and motoring seems to bring out the “special pleading” in the English.

Leaving all that aside, when it comes to morals, I am not on very good ground. Although, I am not a serial criminal, fraudster or otherwise serially dishonest, I cannot point to a string of good deeds, or even individual ones for that matter, and say that I did these. Having made that personal disclaimer (i.e. do as I say, not as I do), we can get on with the subject.

The whole things starts, I suppose, with the Ten Commandments. Hands up, those of you who can recite all ten. All Ten. (Add an additional 10 points, if you get the order correct). Hands down – not many of you then.

Apart from the Ten Commandments, and a lot of instructions on how to build temples and arks and which food could be eaten or not eaten, we do not get a lot of specific help from the Old Testament on these points.

This is not entirely true. Leviticus, the third book in the Bible (click here) has a large amount of ritual and ceremonial law, which does not seem very relevant today. However, some moral laws are embedded in here (although how you determine which is ceremonial and which is moral is not always as clear as you might think).

However, a general theme emerges in the Old Testament of what it means to obey God and follow Him in a practical way. As this only appears from time to time, you have to pay attention.  A blog from March earlier this year, [click here] describes some of behaviour that God requires from us, and these are very general “Love Mercy, not Sacrifice”. (A bit like “Drive Safely”, as opposed to “Do not drive faster than 30 mph”)

The Book of Proverbs (somewhere is the middle of the Bible, just after the Psalms) [click here] gives a huge amount of specific moral advice in the form of what is wise and sensible, rather than as a set of rules. It sets out these pieces of advice in the form of “Actions” and “Consequences”, with consequences being of both the earthly and eternal varieties (but mainly earthly).

But the New Testament is more specific. The New Testament gives us plenty of instructions on these points, for example on the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 [click here]. For example, we are to give to him who begs; we must not think bad things about someone else; we must love our enemies.

On the other hand, later there is the statement that we should love our neighbour as ourselves, followed immediately by the famous parable of “the Good Samaritan”. This is fairly general and it is left to us how to interpret this, but it seems a pretty high target to me.

Then of course, there is Jesus’ encounter with the young rich man, who wished to obtain eternal life and was told to sell all he had, to give the money to the poor and follow Jesus. (Mark 10.17)  [clickhere]

These are daunting statements and if not daunting, then at least puzzling– well, at least I find them puzzling. What are we to make of them? We do our best to wriggle out of taking this literally. (We are in trouble if we do take them literally, but we wrestle with the English tendency to take rules literally, before finding a reason why they do not apply to us – see above)

Then, the letters of the Apostles contain large numbers of moral rules. For example, the Book of James [click for link] reads in parts is fairly angry tirade against breaches of moral rules and he warns of the punishment to come, especially against Bankers (well, sort of against Bankers).

As a final and completely disconnected point, there are some community “rules”, which are made for our own individual and joint benefit. Preserving Sunday as a “Day of Rest” is for our individual and Man’s overall benefit. We have made it into a “Day of Shopping”, although this does not appear to have brought down fire from heaven, at least not yet (or has it?)

A blog with no conclusion, I’m afraid.

Something about Eternal Life – Core Belief Number 11

I suppose that no set of religious beliefs would be complete without some thoughts on what happens in the hereafter. What happens when we die? In that respect, this becomes Core Belief number 11.

Earlier this year, Martin Mosse challenged me to describe my views on “What’s it all about?” So far I have made two attempts to start it. At the second attempt, I made more headway, but it is still definitely “Work-in-Progress”, but let me have a third attempt.

I guess that the starting point has to be that I believe that something happens when we die. It is not all over. To expand this statement, we continue in some form, although what that form is, is a matter of considerable debate, even in the inner workings of Grumpy’s brother’s mind.

If there were no after-life, then almost every prophet and writer in both the Old and New Testaments would be wrong on this point, in which case we can throw the Bible away and start looking for inspiration on the back of Cornflakes packets. The prophets and writers all indicate some form of after-life.

Secondly, this after-life involves seeing God in some way. I do not know what this means exactly, and I cannot imagine what form or shape God takes. But I’ll leave this statement as it is, with all its ambiguities and unknowns.

Thirdly, this after-life involves some form of comprehension of “What it has all been about” (to misquote Martin Mosse), a moment when it all seems so obvious and when we recognise that that much or most of what we believed beforehand will seem to be ridiculous.  

Fourthly, I believe that the Earth as we know it will not play any part in our after-life. Whether the earth and universe etc. will carry on or not or the whole universe closed down as having served its purpose, I don’t know. But it was only context in the first place. (It does seem such a profligate waste, doesn’t it.)

On this point though, the evidence from the Bible leaves me reeling in terms of possibilities. I will not try to justify this particular belief from the Bible, as there are other views, probably all equally supportable from the Bible. So I will stick with my personal preconceptions and prejudices.

Of course, the question that preoccupies us is what happens to us. We only rarely ask the question of what does God get out of all this? Why did He do all this, because the answer to what happens in the here-after is bound up in God’s objectives in all this. This is really a puzzle.

Does God’s work really finish what this world is over? 13 billion years (or whatever the latest figure is) to get to this point, 50,000 years of man and that’s it? ….and then eternity, which seems to me like a very long time, even compared with 13 billion years.

Perhaps, we are not really meant to know just yet what it is all about.