a 'night, mother moment
May. 21st, 2007 01:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theladyroseMy mother and I were having a conversation yesterday on our way back from the supermarket about albino alligators.
She asked me if I thought nature was cruel for cursing such beautiful creatures with extreme fragility.
Nature is neither moral nor immoral, I told her. It just is.
I mean no disrespect towards nature; I merely believe it is a fallacy to impose our own moral beliefs on something that's been around far longer than any of us. I'd like to believe in a higher power of some sort - whether it's actually God or fate or the universe, I don't know, and I doubt I'll ever know for certain in this lifetime. I don't have any particularly good reason for this belief, which I find problematic. That's my one personal issue with religious faith - I have to find a rational reason, something with its own justifiable internal logic.
It is my firm belief, though, that we have to look to people to solve our problems. If we don't trust each other enough to work together for the common good and out of genuine respect for each other, then we're sentencing ourselves to destruction. Perhaps there's a higher power that guides our actions with or without our knowledge, but we can't just expect that this force will miraculously fix everything for us. Secular humanism is the closest I get to a formal belief system, but it's possible that I will find religion or religion will find me. Improbable, I think, but not impossible.
Despite the freaky coincidences and strange patterns I find within my own life, to a certain degree I have to believe that there is a certain amount of randomness in the universe. I don't want to think that there is some higher reason for my dad's neurological disease or my mother's cardiovascular defect or Cathy's constellation of mental illness other than the arbitrary misarrangement of genes, the infinitely subtle effects of environment on biology and the transmutations of character from interactions with others. In my personal world, true faith is as incomprehensible as a black hole - in theory a comprehendable and coldly rational concept, but the reality is foreign and overwhelming.
On a fairly unrelated note, I wish I sent this in to Postsecret.
She asked me if I thought nature was cruel for cursing such beautiful creatures with extreme fragility.
Nature is neither moral nor immoral, I told her. It just is.
I mean no disrespect towards nature; I merely believe it is a fallacy to impose our own moral beliefs on something that's been around far longer than any of us. I'd like to believe in a higher power of some sort - whether it's actually God or fate or the universe, I don't know, and I doubt I'll ever know for certain in this lifetime. I don't have any particularly good reason for this belief, which I find problematic. That's my one personal issue with religious faith - I have to find a rational reason, something with its own justifiable internal logic.
It is my firm belief, though, that we have to look to people to solve our problems. If we don't trust each other enough to work together for the common good and out of genuine respect for each other, then we're sentencing ourselves to destruction. Perhaps there's a higher power that guides our actions with or without our knowledge, but we can't just expect that this force will miraculously fix everything for us. Secular humanism is the closest I get to a formal belief system, but it's possible that I will find religion or religion will find me. Improbable, I think, but not impossible.
Despite the freaky coincidences and strange patterns I find within my own life, to a certain degree I have to believe that there is a certain amount of randomness in the universe. I don't want to think that there is some higher reason for my dad's neurological disease or my mother's cardiovascular defect or Cathy's constellation of mental illness other than the arbitrary misarrangement of genes, the infinitely subtle effects of environment on biology and the transmutations of character from interactions with others. In my personal world, true faith is as incomprehensible as a black hole - in theory a comprehendable and coldly rational concept, but the reality is foreign and overwhelming.
On a fairly unrelated note, I wish I sent this in to Postsecret.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 01:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 02:03 pm (UTC)With regards to albino alligators in particular, they are not cursed, but rather a fluke and there is no reason to ascribe any cruelty to their existence. Rather than considering only the fragility of the organism, I would think instead that they are a testament to the diversity found in nature that such a beautiful accident could have occured People often find spiritual fulfillment from a Spinozan/Einsteinian "God," which I simply see as a way of viewing the world without necessarily anthropomorphizing the universe.
Remember... skepticism does not mean fatalism.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-21 11:47 pm (UTC)That's exactly what Oscar Wilde said about art and literature. No book is moral. No book is immoral. Personally, I think albino animals are still beautiful, if only because they are so rare.