The choice between a universe filled with Supreme Presence and a universe filled with blank matter is impossible to mediate - people make their stands, take their own positions, scorn the others, or become frustrated with the others' refusal to see - but you can't demand someone see your side, and you can't even defend your own choice with complete certainty. Being filled with light, being filled with intellectual certainty - none of those mental states are permanent, and none of them by definition are separate from biochemical processes. They happen in the brain and the brain can just as easily be seen as a chemical machine or a receiver for divine transmission.
The scam is that biochemistry is a human-controllable phenomenon, therefore because it's human-controllable it's indefinite, variable, subjective.
The "spiritual" view is there is a unique identity using the brain, with sole responsibility for the decisions the brain makes, or more accurately that the identity using the brain makes. The soul, the self.
So we have these two separate schools right at the start. Because the morality, and the human response to the morality of the choices, is entirely different. Human responsibility for human action on the one hand, and a universe in which there are agencies beyond our knowing operating in our lives on the other. There is a third view.
I've had trouble all my life accommodating to the trope that everyone chooses their actions, always, or that the consequences of their actions, which can be overwhelming and impossible to alter, proceed from choices. The idea being that always choice is first, and we live our lives in a kind of house made from our personal choices. Whether it's a mansion or it's on fire, it's ours, we built it with decision.
This is impossible to attach to children of course, so the law distinguishes crimes committed by children from those of adults. Though the blood-hunger of the public which is increasingly no more than an audience for spectacle and a herd of wealth-generating cattle, makes the execution of children into an exercise of justice, at least in some areas.
Like wealth, the benefits of moral superiority tend to justify themselves - people who prosper look kindly on the way things are, people who suffer are not so quick to go along. Just as the wealthy tend to think of themselves as deserving their money, while the poor also think of themselves as deserving, deserving more than they presently have.
It's the same with moral cleanliness, or the lack of pathology enjoyed by some, they're the ones who, when they believe in a powerful deity, think of that deity as bestowing earthly rewards on the good. Their goodness being mostly a result of their not having done anything bad. Having a sense of entitlement to material wealth makes it easier to ignore the needs of the less fortunate. Having a God who's in charge of who gets what means we don't have to be.
The flaw is obvious to anyone with experience of the gutters of society, though there are people in positions of authority with intimate contact among the misfortunate who strengthen their sense of moral election by that contact rather than confront the inequality of punishment and reward the human world dispenses. The prison guard is obviously morally superior to those he guards, at least on the face of it. The alternative is compassion and the blurred lines of distinction between the bad and the good, as opposed to between right and wrong.
Someone whose mind and, especially, heart is open to the experience, will see quickly that there's a parallel to natural disaster in the lives of those at the bottom of society. Swept away. Shipwrecked. Burned alive. Traumatized beyond healing.
In the real world, the natural world, cause means nothing, just as intent means nothing, if you slip at the edge of a cliff and go over, or if you fall because you're drunk, or if you're thrown, the biology is about the body and the way it lands and what it lands on.
People's lives are like that - in a motion so slow it's invisible. Some children take in poison that works on them invisibly, and that poison comes out of them later in ways that the dogma of personal responsibility demands they be accountable for. My point is not that there is no choice, but there is a choicelessness at the extremes of the scale, that it goes unacknowledged and that that creates needless intense suffering that benefits no one.
The laws we have are like field dressings, medical treatment given in the heat and confusion of battle; but at the same time they can be like the streets of childhood - they can seem to be a permanent part of the world - until you grow up enough and everything changes and you see how temporary the pavement and even the names of the streets and the houses themselves were and are.
The laws make exception, or at least are supposed to make exception, for the severely retarded, for the clinically insane. There are even states of mind and conscience that normal people can get into that are mitigating. A "crime of passion", a jealous rage; someone who kills a family on the highway in an accident, even when it's negligently caused, is not treated the same as someone who kills a family in their home for no cause at all but the thrill of killing and breaking taboo.
These extreme examples, after the initial causes have receded, can be used as teaching devices and elevation-by-contrast for those higher up the ladders of privilege.
We don't have agreement among ourselves about these things, so that the enforcement and even the legislation of governing codes becomes a kind of gang war, between competing and incompatible views of the universe.
The idea of punishing a dead man for a crime he committed when alive seems absurd. The idea of a dead man's soul being punished less so, unless you choose not to believe in the existence of souls separate from the body. The idea of a dead soul, a brutalized and numb heart, or a heart lacking the biochemical balance that presents the human landscape in moral terms, being as accountable as a willfully uncaring one is too hard to parse, and at these gray junctures the law begins its egalitarian impartiality - it treats us all the same, unless mitigating circumstances can be proved. Or it's supposed to. It doesn't, though.
At the bottom of all this is that initial choice - to see the universe as divinely crafted and directed, or not. One side being led to compassion and understanding, the other to utilitarian necessity, but both requiring the acceptance of personal responsibility to justify the privileges enjoyed by their respective elect; and thus the argument of free will, the necessity of free will in a morally ordered universe, so that the dominant group's hands aren't bound, so that it can remove individuals that impede its function, so that it can enjoy its material prosperity with an easy conscience. They are profoundly separate and incompatible ways of looking at the world and the world within which the world is, but they are easily in agreement in most people's practice, about the essential rightness of the way things are, for those who benefit the most from the way things are.
So the question of cause must be ignored or trivialized, or capped with an airtight explanation by those in superior positions, both in authority and in moral stature.
Yet at the same time those whose lives are torn apart by what I'm describing need desperately to have that moral cause made clear and humanely understood. This conflict is at the heart of what I'm trying to explain here. That the people most in need of the truth are at the bottom of society morally and usually economically as well, makes that tension dynamically one-sided. And it means that even when it's wrong the majority view, the prevailing idea, is carried forward and enforced as truth; because the lives of the powerful depend on it, not because it's a moral truth that can't be ignored.

put here 7:09 PM

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