That is not such a silly question as you might think. If the ONLY wish of EVERYONE was for all things to come right, then I am absolutely certain that we would enter a golden age. It requires ABSOLUTE SURRENDER to the common good. This does not mean making the other person good, but on making oneself good. Politics is about making other people good, and religion is about making oneself good (but as we all know, religion has a habit of wandering into politics). Richard Dawkins is wrong to attack religion as the source of all evil. He should be attacking the wandering of religion into politics as the true cause.
Of course, zombie motivation pivots on 'getting what one wants' regardless of the common good. One cannot blame zombies for this. It is the essential mechanical tropism which has pulled, apparently by magic, good bodies out of the primal sludge. We call it evolution.
From a zombie point of view, consciousness has absolutely no useful purpose. It simply interferes with normal, selfish, zombie functioning.
Yet we who know existence also know this: without consciousness, the whole physical universe might just as well not be there.
What would be the use of a multifarious, complex, orderly universe, held like a hologram in the midst of infinite space and infinite time, if nobody knew it existed?
Now consciousness is in the picture, we need no longer be chained to the slavery of mechanical selfishness. Using our beam of consciousness, we can illuminate matter and chisel our local chunk of inchoate stone into a beautiful sculpture that comes alive.
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Hi John,
Just a clarification question: how do we make ourselves good? And how do we know what good is? I ask because I'm not sure anyone consciously tries to be evil; and yet our efforts to make ourselves good appear to have failed given history and Jesus' verdict on the Pharisees in Mark 7.
Nathan
Welcome back, Nathan. I think consciousness brings with it an inner compass, so that we know spontaneously how we can serve the bigger picture. Obviously ritual handwashing and religious dietary rules pale into insignificance when compared to what a person thinks, says and does. I notice Jesus's list of things that make a person unclean include malice, envy and slander (the word 'devil' is derived from 'diabolos', Greek for 'slanderer'). Slander is what comes out of a person's mouth as opposed to what goes into it (food!) I think some people do try to be evil, actually (this being the significance of Milton's Satan saying 'evil be thou my good'). They believe that the world and 'other people' deserve to have evil done to them because they see the whole pack as responsible for their own unhappiness. The Christian drive to end the relentless continuum of tit for tat (revenge that might not even be directed at the source, but something or someone conceived as related to it) is a step towards our goal.
Thanks John - helpful clarification. I typed a long response here but it appears to have vanished somewhere :)
My point is that the ability to do good appears in Scripture to be conditioned on a change of heart (from which naturally springs evil, as Jesus says). That change of heart in Scripture appears to result in love for, and obedience to, Jesus Christ (see Ezekiel 36:26-27 and John 14:15-17). In other words, the kind of life you're describing seems to me to be intimately tied up with submission to Jesus Christ.
But in the (brief!) chats we've had, it seems you're happy to say that consciousness can be achieved outside of Jesus. Have I understood you rightly?
Thanks John!
Nathan
The mystical Christ is the logos, the interface between God and man, existing before the earthly life of Jesus and discoverable by people who have never heard anything about Christianity. Jesus wanted to defuse the tension between doctrines and religions. He, although the founder of our religion, actually himself practised a different religion throughout his earthly life (the passover, etc). The story of the Good Samaritan shows that practical help to others is much more important than religious doctrine. "Why callest thou me good? There is none good save my Father in heaven". Also, "My father's house has many mansions." I don't believe, as the Jehovah's Witnesses do, that the name of God is so crucially important. Jesus, after all, at the crucifixion calls him 'Eloi'. Different languages have different names for the same thing. What you are saying, Nathan, seems to come dangerously close to claiming that a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist can't be good: that makes new enemies and takes us into the downward political spiral of trying to reform others, eventually by force. Jesus was concerned with ending the relentless procession of tit for tat (love your enemies, turn the other cheek - not because of fear but as a way of defusing the conflict). The Inquisition was a travesty of everything he taught, and we don't want another one of those.
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