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Saturday, April 11, 2015

Any religious doctrine can get in the way of doing good -- even the "law of love" or the Golden Rule.  There are times when war and prosecution and discrimination and lies and corruption are better than the opposite.  We need to be objective and realistic here and not sit on our moral high road justifying what we do and tut-tut-ing others.

For example I'm stopped for a minor traffic violation.  Came from being impatient and serves me right, but rather than go through all the paper work and disruption of my life that following the rules would entail, as well as causing the cop involved a lot of paper work and interfering with his continuing with his real job, we agree on a small bribe.  If I think I am innocent I will decline such a thing and I will get due process, but even then I may prefer otherwise.  In the meantime the cop gets a little more income (lord knows they aren't payed enough here) and society gets the benefit of traffic enforcement at lower cost.

For another example, I would far rather lie through my teeth than tell someone unable to handle the truth -- let us say they are going to die.  Most of us would rather know the truth, but there are exceptions and these are not hard to spot.  The classic problem posed by Socrates of whether we are obliged to return a weapon to someone who loaned it to us, the person having subsequently become deranged, comes to mind.

The thing is religion is really -- really -- irrelevant in all these matters.  Doing what is right is not a religious impulse, and determining right and not being mislead by our culture and our religion and our "conscience," but, instead, reasoning out what is right on the basis of doing the most good and the least harm (compassion and justice) as a practical matter is what we need.

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