Post-Religious Ethics

I don't believe in a God that intervenes in human affairs. To me, the massacres of the last hundred years pretty much prove the non-existence of such a God. Where was God when six million of his chosen people were massacred in the Holocaust? Where was God when 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed in Turkey? Where was God when 1.75 million people were killed in Cambodia under Pol Pot? When tens of millions starved to death or were executed in China under Mao Zedong, or in the U.S.S.R. under Josef Stalin? Where was God on 9/11, with both American Christians and Arab Muslims believing that He had justified their faith and way of life, and entitled them to kill the other? I can't imagine that a loving God would hold human life so cheap. If He takes the time to invest each person with a soul, and He believes that killing is wrong, why doesn't He bother to stop it when it happens?

So God does not intervene in atrocities. If an all-powerful and loving God existed, He would. Even if not on an individual scale, surely He would care about the deaths of millions of people. So if He does exist, then He chooses not to intervene on account of wanting people to play out their own particular realities, even if this freedom leads to tremendous evil. In which case, God is essentially irrelevant with respect to day-to-day earthly human affairs, as irrelevant as the light that comes from a distant star. You can note that starlight, study it, and ascribe to it all kinds of influences on human affairs, but really, is it somehow affecting life here on Earth? No. Peoples' *belief* in the power of that influence might affect the course of human events, but the influence itself is nearly nonexistent, and then it is the human capacity for belief that's really influencing events, not the thing which is believed. And that capacity for belief lends itself as readily to perpetrating culturally narcissistic genocide (My God can beat up your God! You are all infidels/pagans/heretics/a social virus!, etc.) as it does to preventing such horrors from occurring. Belief itself is neither good nor evil--like technology, it only serves to enable the good or evil that already exists within men. Alternately, you might think that the God is too weak to stop these events. I have been led to believe that the Christian God can do whatever he wants, so capability is not the issue. A third option might be that God allows these evils to happen with the intention of preventing greater evils down the road. In this scenario, God is like that Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, staving off catastrophe with stop-gap measures. All is a part of God's plan, and all is part of the greater good--even environmental devastation, the extinction of His species, and the murder of millions of people. And what kind of a God is that, then? A god who *could* stop these evils, but allows them to happen so...what? People learn to be good from evil? People swear to never again allow such things to afflict the Earth? As if. As if the Holocaust has put an end to all subsequent racial genocide. Hell, it hasn't even kept the Jews themselves from inflicting genocidal atrocities on their Palestinian neighbors. Maybe, on account of being the victims of genocide and repression, they have more entitlement to now perpetrate it on others. I don't think they do.

I encounter people who believe that it is not possible to be moral outside of faith. Maybe it's not--if you take morality as being the received values particular to a certain cultural group. If homosexuality is a sin, and I am a sinner if I see no real purpose in being intolerant of homosexuality, well then, I guess I'm not a moral person. However, I think it is entirely possible to be *ethical* outside of a faith tradition. Because, you see, here's the kicker: morality is specific to a group, passed down through tradition. Ethics are a rational attempt to create a code of conduct independent of any one tradition's say-so. Sometimes the two coincide; God says it's bad to lie (morality), and we can see the destructive power of lying in such things as the Enron or AIG scandals, so we know if we want society to function properly we shouldn't be lying to people all the time (ethics). Often times, these things do not coincide. The Bible tells me that I should not suffer a witch to live; I've got no personal investment in killing people who practice witchcraft, and I don't believe that killing them is of a benefit to society, and I think killing anybody for any reason is a bad fucking idea, because then who's to say that I don't deserve to be killed on somebody else's say-so, divinely inspired or politically justified or otherwise?

I guess what I'm saying is that I think it's entirely possible to be moral--or at least responsible, and conscientious, and compassionate--independent of any religion. Indeed, I have a harder time seeing how people can be moral--or responsible, or conscientious, or compassionate--*within* religion than without it. Because religious beliefs inhibit the individual from using his conscience to decide the rightness or wrongness of any particular course of action. Certainly there are religious people who have worked for great peace and charity in this world, and I'd never disavow that. But how easy is it to fall into the trap of thinking "Well, this is justified in the Bible, so it *must* be what God wants," even if the action is morally objectionable. Certainly the Bible is not a consistent guide for moral behavior. Take the story of Abraham and Isaac, for instance. It's one that's always given me trouble. God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham takes Isaac up to the mountain; Abraham ties Isaac up and puts him on a pile of kindling wood, and has his knife out to cut his son's throat when at the last second God intervenes and tells Abraham not to do it. God is pleased that Abraham has passed this test of faith, withholding nothing from Him, not even his own son. Elsewhere, of course, the Bible tells us "Thou shalt not kill." Some people take this to mean "Thou shalt not murder," whatever finicky little distinctions that people make between killing and murdering that somehow let good Christian soldiers off the hook, which seems like a lot of bollocks to me. But, at any rate, God says killing is wrong. And, certainly, any sane person would feel a very strong revulsion at the prospect of having to cut the throat of his son. A person's conscience, which we might otherwise assume is God's way of guiding us through life, would revolt at such an act. And yet God asks Abraham to do the wrongest thing that he possibly could, even though God Himself would be abhorred by this act in any other context and would expressly forbid it, except on this one occasion when he decides to contradict Himself? What kind of a guide for living is *that*?

So, given the inscrutability, cultural bias, the inaction of God with respect to mortal affairs, and the general ineffectuality of religious morality when it comes to preventing evil in the world (or, indeed, the collusion of religious morality in the perpetration of such evils), I don't see how I could possibly live my life in accordance with religious tenets. God might be the ultimate judge of the living and the dead, but I guess that's something I'll have to worry about after I'm dead, because I sure as Hell don't have any proof that His will is done here on Earth. I don't see that it's somehow better to listen to received dictates--which, again, are dependent on a person's cultural inheritance, much as every religion claims to have the ultimate truth about the universe--than it is to listen to my own conscience. That's not to say that my own conscience might not be wrong about things--it often is--but, frankly, I don't see how I'd be a better person if I were to spend my time scanning through the Bible, trying to find one consistent answer about how I should go about any given task. This is especially true when it comes to contemporary problems that were not issues in Biblical times. What does the Bible have to say about global warming? That we are the custodians of the Earth, after Adam and Eve, or that Earth is the Devil's portion and the End Times are just around the corner and we shouldn't give a crap about worldly things when we could be storing up treasures in Heaven? I go with the former rather than the latter, but you see there's no way of prioritizing this information and coming up with a solid solution.

I don't see that God strikes down sinners. I don't see that he really helps people to be good. I don't see that God operates in this world in any way that our own consciences and our own experiences, fallible and limited as they are, do not.

When you think about it, you really are free to do whatever you want. Either God doesn't care, or he's not going to stop you. You can murder all you like. Go ahead. You can have sex all you like, and it's extremely unlikely that He'll strike you down with lightning (or AIDS, which was seen as God's judgment against gays in the 80s; now AIDS is largely confined to the poorest countries in Africa and Southeast Asia while people in the developed world, gay or otherwise, are able to prevent or live with the disease--is that saying that AIDS is now God's judgment against poor people?). Go on, eat a double cheeseburger--God's not likely to strike you dead for gluttony. Of course, there are consequences for any of these actions. You eat cheeseburgers, you will have a heart attack and die. You have a lot of disaffected casual sex, even with a condom, and maybe you won't get an STD or end up unwanted pregnancies, but I'm pretty sure you'll develop all sorts of emotional problems in the long run (at least, I tell myself that when I get envious of men who seem to bag a lot of hot chicks). You kill people, the police will get you--or maybe they won't. What I'm saying is that the repercussions for these actions are human or biological in origin, not divine. Maybe there's some kind of divine judgment down the road after death, but we can't know it, ad there are certainly no end of different and mutually exclusive interpretations of just what that judgment (or non-judgment) will be, such that adhering to any one interpretation is a crapshoot. But until such point as that, not all evils will be punished, and not all good acts will be rewarded.

There is no effective or actual guiding principle to human action, aside from that which we create for ourselves, and that which is instinctual in us. We can say that "This is good" because it brings pleasure to people and benefits the individual or the group, and "This is bad" because it harms the individual or the group. And there will necessarily always be conflicts in the prioritization of how the interests of the individual interact with the interests of the group; the majority is not always right, and uninhibited freedom for the individual can result in some awful things, too. I think the sooner we realize this, and realize that God or the gods or whatever are content to let us fuck ourselves over good and proper without the need for any divine or demonic intervention, the better off we, as a species, will be.

I think we need to understand that there is nothing stopping you from pulling the trigger, save for your own conscience. Just as important, there's nothing putting your finger on the trigger in the first place, save for your own conscience.

We are truly and awfully free, much as we try to convince ourselves we're not. Much as we want to believe that we are relieved from the terrible responsibility of having to make our own decisions, insofar as I can tell, it's all a cheat and self-deceit. If anybody could convince me otherwise, I'd be glad of it.

The Will is Weak

I've been faltering quite a bit on my vegetarianism of late.

Outwardly, I've been a vegetarian for about two years. Inwardly, it is as if those two years haven't been but a second, in that my taste for meat has never gone extinct. If anything, after going for weeks without eating meat, I get this keen hunger for flesh and blood. I lust after meat, much as I might lust after a woman. It's ghoulish, I know, but most Americans are getting their fix for flesh on a daily basis. Mine gets temporarily beaten into submission, only to come back stronger than ever.

Some vegetarians develop an aversion to meat, or else they become vegetarians because of that aversion. Why can't I have this aversion? I want it. I really, really do. But no matter how much I tell myself that I don't want to eat meat, the smell of chicken or steak on the grill drives me a little crazy.

It's not like I'm not getting enough protein. I eat almonds and beans and peanut butter and cheese and meat substitutes. A lot of meat substitutes. Too many meat substitutes; they're laden with sodium, and I hear bad things about excessive consumption of soy. But my point is that this isn't a need thing (I don't think), it's a taste thing.

My inhibitions against vegetables break down. I experiment more with the leafy stuff in the produce section that used to scare me. I eat more greens. I accept the necessity of eating avocados, even though they still don't taste like much to me unless they're in guacamole with excessive amounts of salt and garlic, and then it's not really the avocados I'm tasting, is it? I eat exotic mushrooms--mushrooms are great because they *aren't really vegetables*. Fungi aren't plants; they're more like animals that don't move, and you can taste it in their flesh. Thank god for mushrooms. I go to the farmer's market and buy all kinds of Asian vegetables like giant radishes and purple carrots. But this variety of new foods to which I am now amenable is not sufficient replacement for meat.

Being a vegetarian would be a lot easier if it were not for polish sausage. And bratwurst. And pepperoni. And mutton chops. And fried chicken. And chicken strips. And teriyaki chicken. And teriyaki beef. And Korean ribs. And ham. And bacon. And bacon cheeseburgers. And roast duck. And smoked salmon. And beef jerky. And calamari fritti. And carnitas. There are not replacements for these things in a vegetarian diet. It's possible to find vegetarian versions of a few of these foods, but the pretend meat is never convincing. It might be alright in its own right, but it would never fool anybody who had any experience with the genuine article. If I have a jones on for fried chicken, let me tell you, Morningstar Chik'n Tenders are better than nothing, but they certainly don't ever quite satisfy. Sometimes I can find vegetarian specialty restaurants or markets that sell usually overpriced but often quite excellent pretend meat. I don't feel like I'm cheating myself or punishing myself when I eat the teriyaki chicken kabobs from Mother's Market; but I can't have them every day, and I don't know where a good vegetarian market is around here in S.D., anywho.

The real essence of the problem is this: I love the taste of meat. I am quite confident that I always will. This taste was strongly inculcated in me as a child--my parents rarely, if ever, served more than a garnish of non-potato vegetables with any meal, and most of the time left me to scrounge for myself in the kitchen with few, if any, available vegetables. My mother had a thing for canned vegetables--canned peas, canned corn, canned beets, canned potatoes, canned mushrooms--but I found such fare disgusting, and do to this day. Meat or pastries or very unhealthy dairy products were usually the default foods in my home. I'm still struggling to uninculcate the overstrong tendencies towards these foods in myself.

I love the taste of meat, but I don't allow myself to have it. Some small part of this self-denial is a concession to health--lord knows I don't need to be consuming large quantities of cholesterol and saturated fat. Nobody does. Some small part of this self-denial is on account of animal cruelty. This isn't a major issue for me. I don't think animals have any special right to life. I don't think of animals as friends, or as having a human-like intelligence. I acknowledge that animals can feel pain, but insofar as I know that pain and fear involved in industrial-scale slaughtering techniques is relatively brief. Whether the animals suffer in as a result of confinement and overcrowding or the mutilations they incur as part and parcel of contemporary industrial meat-raising techniques, I cannot know. It's hard enough for humans to gauge pain in other humans; I have no idea what goes on in the mind of a chicken, and I don't think that Peta does, either.

No, the real reason I deny myself meat is because I want to protect the planet. I don't give a rat's ass about cows and chickens, but I do care about biodiversity and the wild species that are compromised as a result of industrial agriculture. I like wild animals; I think of them as "real" in a way that domesticated animals are not. I want civilization to last out my lifetime and the lifetimes of my hypothetical grandchildren. And I don't see that happening unless there are major changes to the way we get our protein in this country.

I was writing this entry last week and got lazy about finishing it; my renewed interest comes with a special article in this month's NatGeo. It reminds me how it takes five pounds of corn to produce one pound of pork or ten pounds of corn to make one pound of beef, not to mention the exorbitant amounts of water and fossil fuels used to produce meat and then there are the tons of pig or cow shit to deal with afterwards which often end up getting dumped into rivers and causing lethal algae blooms or leaching into groundwater or causing some other nasty pollution problem. And, see, this is why I don't let myself eat meat anymore. Because with populations continuing to increase around the world but resources already being stretched to their limits, there's no way we can continue on with our current lifestyle into perpetuity. Scientists have been busting their asses to increase the efficiency of food production with things like growth hormones and factory-style mass production of animals to be slaughtered, and there may be breakthroughs yet to be found that will solve some of these problems, but in the end there is no possible way that the American diet can be sustained beyond the next generation, any more than can the current American consumption and combustion of gasoline. And if we can't increase efficiency, then the only other alternative is to put new land into production, which causes habitat loss, which is then the greatest threat to biodiversity on our planet. You see how it's all connected? And you see why, much as I really really want that ham and cheese sandwich, I ask for the Veggie Heaven instead. Veggie Heaven. As if.

It's not that the production of plant foods isn't fraught with problems in itself. You've got your dependence of petro-chemical based fertilizers, your use of carcinogenic pesticides that love to leach into groundwater or remain as residue on food, your problems with mono-cultural single crop farms that only necessitate the use of more fertilizers and pesticides, your soil degradation issues that come with exhaustive and super-intensive farming techniques. You know when they slash and burn down the rainforest in Brazil? They plant soybeans in the ashes. Yeah. But, of course, all of these problems are intensified by the consumption of meat. Maybe farming practices are pretty sucky at present, but if you recall that something like...damn, I can't find the actual percentage right now, but it's about 75%...something like 75% of the grain produced in this country goes for animal feed rather than human food, you realize how it is that the consumption of meat exponentially aggravates all those other extant problems with produce farming practices, because a large majority (whatever the exact number) of what we make is not going directly to meet human needs, but is instead being given to animals who are then killed to satisfy human wants. Meat is a luxury that our country, and our planet, cannot afford.

None of these issues apply to fish, of course. Fish are just out there in the ocean; nobody's spending fossil fuels and grain to make them grow. Instead, we are just overharvesting our seas such that world fish stocks have fallen about 80% in the past fifty years, turning the once-abundant ocean into a vast wet desert. And that's no good, either. A large amount of the fish that get caught turn into chicken feed, besides, and so that introduces layers of inefficiency again.

I know I'm not doing an extensive analysis here. That's not the point. The point is that others have done the research and the analysis, and I can find no reason to dispute these facts. I really believe it's important to take this information into account; I believe it's important to live a responsible lifestyle that doesn't threaten the continued survival of the last remaining wild places on earth, and potentially human civilization as we know it. The way we are living now will not abide. The disasters of climate change, hovering over our current fragile and over-extended food production system like vultures. Either we will change before we encounter the imminent catastrophes that come with overconsumption, or those catastrophes will come and force us to change, or those catastrophes will wipe us out. I'm just trying to get a head start on the future.

But it all seems so abstract sometimes. Knowing that these problems are global in scale and endemic in our culture seems so damn impersonal. If my resolve does crumble and I order a cheeseburger, does some polar bear drift past on a shrinking ice floe, howling its pain and starvation as a result of my own poor choices? No. No such polar bear appears. I can't see the results of my own successes in reducing my carbon footprint, or my own failures. The impact of my actions on the environment remain terribly far away, and terribly small. It's only when millions of people convince themselves that their actions are insignificant and choose not to pay attention to the repercussions of their lifestyle choices that there is a serious problem. And, at best, I can just say that I am one person who is opting to be conscious and conscientious when there are many millions more who do not care. Those catastrophes aren't depending on my own personal collusion or resistance to occur.

But just because everybody else is doing something doesn't make it right. And just because everybody else is doing something wrong doesn't mean that I am excused from doing right as I see it. And right for me means minimizing the damage I do to the planet. And so that means salivating at the smell of my neighbors grilling sausage on the grill and then going to eat my sauteed greens. And probably accepting that I am fallible, and not feeling guilty when my resolve does fail, and so get discouraged from doing anything at all.

I just wish the wanting would go away. But it never does, does it? Perhaps this whole life thing isn't actually about getting what you want, but learning how to accept that your wants will always outstrip your capacity to satisfy them, justifiably or otherwise, and to keep those wants in submission. A rather unhappy thing to contemplate, but I wonder if it isn't true.