A Separate Peace

I remember having to read this book in the 9^th grade, I unlike everyone else loved it. When I came to a decision this Sunday as one of my best friends was preaching at church the title of the book came to my mind.

Well he was preaching instead of the regular pastor as he regularly does when the pastor cant for some reason. I for once wasn’t fighting sleep…lol I looked around and saw the resoluteness and sincerity in his face and then saw the bliss in the audience’s face and I came to this conclusion: I rather have the peace of faith than the constant consternation and upheaval in the quest for the “truth”.

It might be folly to some but I personally am tired of “searching”. Life was better when I did not question if there was a God and what religion did he endorse. Life was better when I was a Christian. People can spend their whole life searching and they still will not find. There might not even be a “truth” out there to find. We would have spent our whole lives searching for something that might not be there to be found.

I don’t know what is right, but right now I don’t care. I have long since come to see blind faith as folly; maybe it is folly but our lives as humans are in a perpetual state of folly. We are here on earth acting out a script we don’t know who the writer is and what their motive is. Our lives are so insignificant when we look at it. It is almost like there is no reason for our existence, maybe there isn’t but I rather act like I am important enough that someone took the time to plan my existence. Maybe this is when faith comes in, when you realize you will never know, you just have to believe in something that has all the answers. I came to find faith as a cop out, as someone giving up on rationality.

So I have made a “Separate Peace” with my quest for the “truth”. The “peace” is that I accept I will never know so I rather save myself the trouble of searching. So I officially give up.

Back to the book, I remember us laughing at the book and insinuating George and Finny were homosexual lovers. This brings me to my one quandary with “giving up”, and that is homosexuality. I believe they are born that way and I cannot understand why “God” will make people outcasts for the way he created them. That alone is stopping me for reaching a full “peace”. Every time I go down this route it always leads to me having to start my own religion that totally fits me.

I feel I might have gone too far on my quest that I cannot just “give up”. I have questioned too much. But I will try valiantly to give up. Lol. I might have to change my name to the Ex-Realist. lol

MORALITY IS NOT ALWAYS BLACK & WHITE

Happy New Year to all of you.
We have been slacking on this blog, but that has been as a result of everybody being busy.
Somepeople have been asking me how come I don't talk about religion as much as I used to. I took a Political Theory Class this past semester and during the course of the class my feelings about Morality changed a lot.

Morality is not as black or white as I seemed to believe. Nothing in life is as simple as some people make it out to be. Sometimes we make moral judgments on issues and become disturbed when others cannot see the logic or the morality in our arguments.
There was one issue that came up between I and my cousin that really highlighted the complexity surrounding us as Human Beings. I and my cousin went to Walmart and after we had finished purchasing our groceries, and put our stuff in the car, I wanted to leave the grocery cart in one of the cart thingys that we normally see at such stores. But my cousin insisted on returning the cart back inside Walmart and leaving it there, his rationale being that when he used to work at Costco, he use to hate when people would leave their carts lying around and he would have to go around to gather the whole carts and put them in a single file. So he sort of understood the 'pain' of the workers in Walmart tasked with getting back the carts and he wanted to help them out. On one hand, my cousin's sentiment can be appreciated. He wanted to do the right thing and help out the workers, he basically showed empathy for their situation. But then I pointed out to him the flaw in his sentiment, lets say everybody who goes to Walmart decided to start returning their carts back inside the store instead of leaving them strewn around, in no short time the people who get paid to gather those carts would be out of a job. Afterall, there would be no reason to pay somebody to gather up carts if customers did it themselves. So on one hand, in the Short Term what my cousin did could be viewed as the right thing to do, on another hand, in the long term what my cousin did if replicated by everyone else could be viewed as the wrong thing to do because it was basically putting people out of jobs.

Even the simplest thing as giving Aid to people who are poor may be in the short term viewed as morally right, but in the long term it may be viewed as morally wrong. Take for example aid to Africa, some people claim that it acts as more as a handicap for the African than as a helping hand. Morality is not always Black or White.

My point with this anecdote is to prove that Morality is not as black and white as somepeople make it out to be. Life in general is not simple, the choices we make are not always black and white. There is a whole lot of gray. And to tie this into the greater topic of religion, my point is that I realized that even though I might disagree on some people's religious views and the stance they take on issues. I need to approach such things as a learner not as somebody who believes that they have the right moral high ground to pursue an issue.
For example, I use to be anti-torture but after watching a whole lot of '24' and seeing the choices somepeople had to make concerning their loved ones. My views on torture started to change to the point where I am indecisive on what the right moral argument is for torture.

Human Beings as a whole are complex, from our politics to our social life. So when some doctrines or ideologies seek to explain everything away as if there is one simple guideline that applies to everybody. It befuddles me. Moreover, I wanted to ask a question to all my readers, do you guys think there should is a separation between a person's public life and personal life? Do you guys even believe such a thing exists? Is there a public life we live and a personal life we live? Take for example a politician, does he have a two lives? Or just one? Does he have a public life and a personal life? And if so, should they be separate? If say the politician is a Christian in his personal life, why should the teachings of his faith not dictate how he handles public matters?