Now that Mardi Gras has come and gone, those poor fools among us, me included, who still remember Sunday School lessons in lieu of Powerpoint outlines will acknowledge that Lent -- the buildup to the Easter, holiest day in the Christian year -- is now upon us. With that I'd like to take a column to discuss religion.
Over the past few years I've been at Dartmouth, and to a lesser degree during my four years at the Lawrenceville School, I've gradually lost any sort of devotion to organized religion. I can barely remember the Lord's Prayer. I haven't gone to confession in so long that the accumulated mass of my sin should qualify me, if heaven and hell exist, for the Platinum Elite, E-Z Pass, Next-Day Priority lane to eternal torment. No questions asked. Indeed, I only go to Mass when:
(a) It's Christmas
(b) It's Easter
(c) My devoted physician of a mother can sufficiently shame me into driving her to church so that she can shanghai me into helping her technically violate the Sabbath by driving her to the hospital so she can see all the patients she neglected while my family was having fun on Saturday.
Yep, my parents are great at passing on religion.
But I find that despite my lack of religion I am drawn to a particular moral code for organizing my life. It has no specific rules -- a good thing particularly in the dietary realm. Life isn't worth living if, depending on whose book you're reading, you can't eat cheeseburgers, beef, pork or shellfish or have to avoid meat on Fridays. None of that fasting, not working on Sunday or Saturday or praying five times a day. There's no pilgrimage to make to Jerusalem or Mecca which saves you tons on airfare. Apparently Mohammed didn't prophesize that Tuesdays through Thursdays during the fall would be the best times for people to get to Mecca. Did I mention no fasting? I did? Right. I'd like to reiterate that point. I never experienced anything particularly enlightening during the forty-day deprivation that Catholics call Lent. All I experienced was the shame of giving in to temptation earlier and earlier each year.
I call this religion "Karmism," but other names for it would be "Murphy's Commandments." It exists on, as Visiting Professor Graeme Garrard in Government 3 would term it, "low but firm ground." There's only one thing you need to do: do good things, especially for those in need, and even if it costs you in the short run. Bad things will inevitably happen to you and you're going to need others to do good things for you.
Most of us are already followers of this religion, which can coexist peacefully with other religions. I merely state that this is all the religion you need. Karmism doesn't make a normative judgment on any other faith except when that faith forces you to do bad things. In the absence of other religion you will have the essential religious spirit if you just do good things for others. Spiritualism isn't anything mental or metaphysical at all here -- it is grounded in earthly acts -- in the common experience of all people living on the earth and all their troubles and travails that could be solved by a simple prescription: Love your fellow man.
And before I start getting emails from philosophy majors whining about "good things" and "bad things," I'm going to state simply that we know what good intentions would be 99 percent of the time. Most of us have an inborn sensitivity to the starving, the poor, those without parking spaces and others who are in need of what you can provide. No religion can provide answers to the existence of people like Osama bin Laden and Hitler, and mine will not attempt to explain them either, only to realize that most of us are not like bin Laden -- most of us know what good is. By relying on personal discretion, my religion restores dignity to the common man instead of deferring to priests, cardinals, rabbis and imams some unique authority to judge and control others.
By taking as its only fact the inevitability of bad things, this religious belief requires little faith. Who are we to believe that some man 2000 years ago and thousands of miles away once walked on water, cured the blind and fed 3000 people with five fishes and two loaves of bread? More importantly, who are we to believe in a heavenly reckoning and why should we use that as a guide to actions?-- especially if we believe that we are no better than the protagonist from the Calvin and Hobbes comics, coldly calculating the benefits of certain pleasure from breaking the rules now and uncertain pleasure on a Christmas Day which might not come. The one true constant is human suffering that we all share and we all know that suffering is bad and the absence of suffering is good. Hence, it appears to be imperative that we alleviate others' suffering. We can't expect others to care about our suffering unless we care for theirs.
The theory of normative philosophy is so large that one naturally expects the solutions to be complex. They really aren't. Complex solutions reduce humanity to mere robot-ism. Simplicity in moral constructs allows man to really live, to live his life to the fullest extent of his considerable capabilities. Religion's unique ability to subordinate the rule of Man defeats our will and prevents us from taking real control of the world in which we live -- the physical one -- and stop kidding ourselves that prayer and self-discovery have intrinsic value. The only intrinsic value is the happiness of others as it relates to the future happiness of the Self.
