Morality
We are not meant to live forever. It was not Divine Providence that proclaimed humans mortal. The natural world established that truth. As with all living things, we are subject to conception, gestation, birth, aging, and death. It is what we do while we are alive that offers the possibility of immortality. To a degree.
The idea of immortality manifests in the way people of the future view our deeds. But the idea of it does not last forever. The memories of some of the great lives from centuries past, ones that we revere or revile, will one day end. It is only our own deeds and misdeeds that will outlive us. The greatest and the worst.
Only one thing is certain. If, in these short lives of ours, we do something that future generations ponder we will not be aware of the impacts. The adage “you can’t take it with you” is true. Good or bad, the result of our deeds, our successes, our failures is for the future to judge and deal with.
But what has become of the morality of leaving only good for the future? We no longer put out our campfires and make sure they are out before we leave the forest. We now set fire to the forest and walk away. We leave the spreading fires for our sons and daughters to deal with. Yet we have not taught them how to fight fires. And we continue to diminish the capacity and livelihoods of those we have hired to teach our youth. And now the next generation is ill-equipped to deal with the roar of the fires we have set. Those fires being our combined misguided and ugly treatment of each other and the planet.
For reasons that elude me, we no longer do what our parents taught us: clean up your own mess. We leave it to the next guy. And the next, and the next, and the next. Our selfish mortal comfort is the only goal. What happened before and what will happen after is something no one seems to care about.
The long and short is we need to fix our morality first. And we don’t need a religion or politician to try and lead us to moral behavior. Those institutions and people have failed. We need only our own hearts, minds, and, in the United States, a few pieces of paper written by the great, yet flawed, men who came before us. We must come to this conclusion. And do so before the deeds of our Founding Fathers succumb to the fire.
