Morality

One night while driving home from an AA meeting, the topic of which was "Our defects of character that cause us to drink", and a rabbit ran across the road in front of my truck. My schizophrenic room mate said "I wonder if bunnies have defects of character?".

I never knew when this guy was being completely child like in his view of the world, or asking a profound philosophical question. He at times had a shamanistic quality about him. It was one of the things I loved about the guy. He made me think, and question my "reality".

I told him "I don't know Zac. Maybe animals are born knowing what the universe expects from them, and they just do it?"

About a month later, I saw a movie at the local theater called "Kapac" (a phonetic spelling of the title, and it may be incorrect ). It was about a guy in a mental institution that said he was an alien from another galaxy. His doctor asked him a question of morality, and he said "Every sentient being in the universe knows right from wrong instictively".

It struck a cord with me. Humans are the only species that requires, or even has to think about the concept of morality. I imagine it is because our abilty to out smart our (possibley God given?) instincts to fulfill selfish goals, has created a way of living on this earth that is so far removed from the natural, that we have to make up rules to hold it together.

I believe that what is known as popular morallity are the rules required to keep this artificial (and experimental, in evolutionary terms) condition of "civilisation" from dying a natural death.

• There can be no theft, and we can not "covet" without the concept of posessions.
• There is no adultry where there is no concept of the contract of marriage (or posession).
• We can bear no false witness without language and abstract thought. We must "think up" a lie (a nonexistant reality), before we tell it.
• We can not help but honor our parents, if they are not away from us all day at their jobs building up stress to bring home, practicing "office politics" in an artificial world of competition, and missing the daily changes in us that remind them that we are of the same flesh and blood, and that we are"one".
• We can not murder without pre-meditation, meaning we must first cold bloodedly decide to kill, or be talked into it.
• We can not worship false Gods, without first inventing them, instead of accepting the miracle of this universe that we are a part of, as we experience it.

Perhaps what we need is to de-evolve to get back to a sustainable style of living? To become a society of hunters, gatherers, farmers, and herdsmen, as the rest of the animal kingdom does?

The birds and the bees practice agriculture by polinating the plants, and spreading the seeds. Ants practice agriculture by milking aphids. Herbavores fertilise there own food source, and Carnivores practice selective breeding, by weeding out the sick and the weak. Until the moment that their prey becomes a food source, they are allowed to live free.

All of this is "powered" by solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energies, without the need to build machines to do it. There is no need for an external set of rules to be policed (imperfectly, as we do) in all of the animal kingdom except for the kingdom of man, and compared to that of other life forms our "morality" is a failure.

Sure ants and bees build "citys". So do prairie dogs, etc. They are of 100% recyclable materials, and are only built to last for a generation, and when they fall, a few seasons pass, and the only sign they they existed is that the grass is greener there.