The Buck Stops Here
Who's the Judge Here, Anyway?
We each must choose our Gods and prophets. We may choose Jesus and the Father, Allah and Muhammad, Mozart, Newton, or Yogi Berra. One may even choose a prophet one finds within oneself. In the end—if we have any freedom to choose—the buck stops with us.
We may wonder whether our choices are informed by an inner, transcendent sense of right and wrong. That is, are our decisions informed by anything more than our old friends nature and nurture? It may be impossible for us to ever answer this question rationally. Some things must be taken of faith. One may choose to place ones faith in materialism, spiritualism, or something else. In the end, it comes back to this: the buck stops here.
For me, it does not matter whether we are truly free in some abstract sense. True freedom seems all too similar to absolute randomness. I consider it more comforting to have faith that we possess good will. Perhaps we possess only a seed of good intent in our being, and perhaps that seed is susceptible to rot when neglected, but given the intense sense of meaning that we impose on reality, and the fact that things matter to us, it seems only obvious to me that this is where our faith ought to to be based: in our profound need to impose meaning on existence. We are fundamentally moral creatures. This is the transcendent aspect of our being.
Each individual is condemned to be judge (to paraphrase Sartre). It is by virtue of this that ones Gods are ones creations (a la Nietzsche), or at least ones vassals. This is not suggest that there is no common ground between our Gods. There may indeed be some common Deity at the heart of whatever common sense of truth we may share, but each person can only know his own.
Some people choose to forfeit their judicial faculty by selecting a prophet and then ceasing to think thenceforth. This is clearly a breach of responsibility. All belief systems are inhibitive, but those that demand the submission of the heart and mind are the essence of immorality.
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