The Overture

What's Important

(What matters)

(What I care about)

(What's God all about)

(What's life all about -- what's the universe all about)

(What's left after death? -- what goes on and on, even after everything else stops, and after we die -- insofar as anything might go on and on, or insofar as any of it matters?)

 ... whitespace, or drumroll, and the curtain rises ...
 

 

What's Important

Thought number 1: being a good person

In the beginning of these thoughts, which for me may have been (in vague form) when I was about 3 to 6 years old, what's important was partly about identity, partly about being loved (or, perhaps, being taken care of), and partly about being nice. Being nice is similar to the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, thoughtfully applied. Being nice, as I understood it, is probably a little different from the golden rule, but I don't know how to describe the difference.

For many millions of people, something else may be more important. For example, if they're starving, then they may be more interested in physical survival, but I've been lucky enough that I've never felt desperate about that.

I mentioned identity. Identity, as I have absorbed the notion since I was 4 or 5, all the way up to the present (I'm 58) usually has to do with the worth of the self as an individual. This form of identity is not the noblest, but it is natural in the society I grew up in. I tend to feel good or bad as I feel that my worth is good or bad. Believing I am a good person or not so good (nice or not, honorable or not), being either competent or incompetent, being gender-differentiated (that is, male or female, or having some kind of sexual identity), and accomplishing things, are probably the main parts of my identity. I mean, aside from relationships with other people.

A nobler form of identity, I suppose, would be a group identity or a spiritual connection with a god or with a great spirit.

"Spirit" and "spiritual" can mean "non-physical" and can mean "emotional". In this context, "emotional" is not just base, simple emotions but can include subtle or deep forms of satisfaction from being in the right endeavor for a long time, or whatever high form of existence one can appreciate. For me, "emotional" is usually an easier word to understand than "spiritual", and the way I use it, it means roughly the same thing. More simplistically, spiritual merely means anything beyond physical objects.

My concepts of what's important are partly a product of my heritage and environment.

I mentioned "being loved". My hard-working parents (now deceased) were "loving". What does that mean? I mean to say that they cared about us kids and tried to be good to us. Their good qualities are important to me now. I dare say, their good qualities or good acts may eventually become more important than the persons themselves.)

What came next

As I was growing up, there was church, in which heaven, hell, and God were mentioned. These were presented as very important things. For me they never fit together quite right. Either I didn't understand them, or they really weren't quite right. So finally, when I was 22 or 23, and in a transition part of my life anyway, I made an attempt to sort out for myself what I think is really important to me.

My attempt to think deeply may have been feeble or even poorly organized. In the end, maybe it doesn't matter whether it was very good thinking or not. It was and is plausible to me, and perhaps that's enough. Anyhow, to be organized about it, first I thought of the topic "what's important to me?" and then, as a way to be organized in my thinking, I began with the concept of a nothingness, which I call the Void.

I'm earnest about that Void. When I think of the Void, I am imagining a scenario. I imagine the scenario in which the entire universe: people, worlds, god or gods, atoms, and all, never existed and never will exist -- there would only be nothingness everywhere for all time. In my imagination, I can insert things into the Void and consider them, one at a time, without distractions, because there's nothing else in the Void at the time I am thinking about the thing.

Then I made a couple of further steps in my thinking:

I decided that the Void was Not Bad. It's Not Bad because there's nothing in it to be bad about.

Then I put a blob into the Void. (That is to say, I imagined that there was a blob in the Void.) The blob is a non-nothingness, and that's all it is. Whatever minimum quality it takes to be not nothing, that's what the blob is.

So far, so good. After this, the thinking begins to get fuzzier, because how would I choose what to think about next?

I've already mentioned "Not Bad", which is already a fuzzy concept. I had begun thinking about Good and Bad. I may have been influenced to think about them, because they had been mentioned in church (as Good and Evil, or God and the Devil, or righteousness and sinning). Church was supposedly important, and I wanted to think important thoughts, so there you go.

After putting a blob into the Void, I asked myself: Is this blob good or bad? Now you could say it's good, or you could say it's bad. I think that may be arbitrary; one might explain it either way. I was able to decide for myself that it's good. I'll explain that soon, after the next several short paragraphs, which are digressions.

Simply speaking, the Void is a nothingness, which has nothing in it to be good or bad about.

I also think about the Void as analogous to death.

Also, the blob is analogous to the entire Universe, including life and including God. (That's explained in the next paragraph.)

For me, it's quite simple to imagine that one blob evolving into the entire Universe, including life and including God. To me that seems plausible, though some people may not see it that way.

Even more elementally, for me it is at least as plausible that there _would_ be a speck of dirt, or a blob, as that there wouldn't be.

For me the blob (being the only non-nothing entity in the Void) is analogous to life. Life is something; death is the entrance to nothingness. We almost always prefer life over death. We prefer somethingness over complete nothingness. So I imagine the blob, being somethingness, is good, or at least neutral, rather than bad.

One eventually escapes suffering, by dying. So that's another point that tends to make me think that both the blob and the Void might be good or neutral, not bad. Everlasting suffering would be bad.

If the blob (and/or the Void) is "bad", then, since there are no distracting other influences in this primordial universe, all I have to do is redefine "good" and "bad" such that this situation is defined as "good" and its opposite is defined as "bad".

Additionally (but less philosophically and more fuzzily), I feel that God wouldn't be bad. If you want to leave God out of this discussion, just ignore this paragraph.

That's pretty much it. After thinking in this way, I decided for myself that The All Is Not Bad, which is now my creed or the basic thing that I believe.

Thought Number 2: The All Is Not Bad

"The All Is Not Bad" means that the sum total of the universe, including God if God exists, has a net value which is not bad.

Being said in such simple words, it probably doesn't sound smart. Even if it's neither smart nor correct, what it means is I have a very simple foundation for my belief system. I tried to reason it out, and to me the result seems at least as plausible as the alternatives I've seen. Some of the choices for what to think about are arbitrary.

If there's a supreme God, I believe It would allow this kind of belief system, without punishing it.

If the all-powerful supreme being is bad, then all bets are off. How would we behave in that situation? Our behavior might be governed by fear rather than by morals. But I really don't think that's how the universe works, and not how a supreme being works either. An earthly, human king might behave in a bad way, but a supreme being, God, would not behave in a bad way.

Morality, and Church

When I say "The All Is Not Bad", one of the things I am thinking about (but contrarily) is the concept of hell that I heard about in church when I was small. What I heard, or absorbed because I thought I heard it, is that if you're imperfect and don't ask God for forgiveness all the time and don't ask Jesus to be your personal savior, then you (along with the vast majority of people) will probably go to hell which is an everlasting torment for individuals, usually described as being burned in a fire, which is horrible enough to think about, but this is worse because it lasts forever, which is a really important word, so I'll say it again: FOREVER. That means, no escape. Ever. If that's not bad enough to curl your hair, I don't know what is. (Yet why aren't more people acting scared? Do they _really_ believe it?) I've concluded that God is not like that. Rather than a universe with an all-powerful God who punishes most individuals forever for bad things they did, or good things they failed to do, in a finite lifespan, I believe, oppositely, that there is a universe which is Not Bad, in net value.

Now, some people think that if one discards or rejects some part of the religious canon, such as the party-line version of Hell, then one's whole morality will go to pot. I think that an opposite statement would be closer to the truth. There are many thoughtful, ethical, moral people who are not just moral for the reason that they fear Hell (which they may or may not); rather, they are moral because they really think morally or ethically and they care about their fellow creatures, and _not_ because they think there's some reward or punishment that they're going to get if they behave in a certain way. And (in the opposite group) there are many people, who claim to be religious in some conventional way, who do horrible things in the world (or more commonly, support those who do horrible things in the world, or fail to be against that) and don't seem to have a clue about what's wrong about it. This happens now, but is easier to see if one looks back over history and sees when it happened in past centuries.

"The All Is Not Bad", and "Morality"

Contrary to that notion that one's whole morality will go to pot: There is not any contradiction between "The All Is Not Bad" and morality.

Thought Number 3

Thought number 1, for me, was the concept of "nice" or the golden rule, and other concepts I grew up with such as identity. Thought number 2 was The All Is Not Bad. (I also think that the Nonbadness of the All tends to distribute among its parts; however, I feel less sure about that than I do these other things.) Thought number 3 is something that I've vaguely recognized most of my adult life, but I was thinking a little more about it this morning. One way to say it is: interpersonal relationships are the big important thing of our lives.

This morning I was thinking: we die, and would like to somehow be something beyond just this little finite life-span, but even if we were to live forever, it still wouldn't be enough, without love, which is to say, interpersonal relationships, approximately. And, further, I was thinking this morning that the thing to do is to build a spirit which is somehow worthwhile. This spirit (somewhat similar to the Christian ideal, but probably without the religion) is characterized by loving people and, presumably, giving to them.

Living a long time is insignificant; and living well, with kindness or love or a good spirit, is significant.

Being an individual is relatively insignificant, but the good spirit is significant. Recall what I said above about my deceased parents: Their good qualities are important to me now, and may eventually become more important than the persons themselves.

By the way, spirits can be shared among physical bodies. (In "The Heaven It Expects To See" I described spirits as the main things and bodies as the less-significant things. Of course this idea has already been expressed by others, in Christianity for example.)

The individual human's physical death is actually insignificant, although of course we cannot help caring about it. We care about it because we have this physical life that we function in.

Tonight I phrase Thoughts 1, 2, and 3 like this:
1. Be a good person.
2. The All Is Not Bad.
3. Build a good spirit.

The End