MORAL BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

Copyright © 2003 Victor Shane, All Rights Reserved

“You can’t fix something that’s broke on the basis of the same set of assumptions that made it broke in the first place¾you will just keep bouncing off the same walls and end up right back where you started.”

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

John 8:32

What is “right?” What is “wrong?” What is “moral?” What is “immoral?” What is “good?” What is “evil?” Is there an objective standard or measure? Why is there so much evil in the world? Why do men seek affirmation in evil? Why does evil tend to get selected more often than good? Why is good more difficult to attain than evil? Why should disorder be so easy and order so difficult? Why should war be so easy and peace so difficult?

Doubtless all sane men have good intentions. We all want to do good, but often end up doing the exact opposite. Here also we seem to be bouncing off boundary conditions. We make new year’s resolutions, for example. We say to ourselves, “I will repent. I will change course. I will give up that bad habit.” But shortly the bad habit returns and we are right back where we started. As the tentmaker laments:

Repentance! Repentance oft before I swore…

But... was I sober when I swore?

Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat

The Bible puts it more bluntly:

It has come to pass according to the true proverb:

“The dog returns to his own vomit, and the sow that

was washed to her wallowing in the mire.”

2 Peter 2:22

Let us strive for a holistic perspective, bearing in mind that our brains, neurons and nervous systems are made from the physics of this universe, existentially governed by the nature and orientation of the cosmos itself. As Scripture suggests:

For all that is in the world [<Gr. Kosmos], the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of God, but is of the world [<Gr. Kosmos].

1 John 2:16, emphasis added

The cosmos-derived desire of man seems to be in conflict with the Spirit-derived desire of man. Rav Shaul (St. Paul) explains the nature of this conflict in the rhetorical discourse found in his letter to the formative church in Rome:

I do not understand my own irrational nature. For I do not seem to be able to do what is good, but end up doing the very thing that I hate and know to be evil…. This tells me that it is not I myself that is oriented towards evil, but something within my flesh. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my physical constitution. I can will to do what is good and right, but I don’t seem to be able to carry it out. For I do not do the good that I want to do, but the evil that I do not want to do, that is what I end up doing. Now if I end up doing what I do not want to do, then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells in me. So then I find it to be a contradiction, that when I want to do good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the Law of God in my inmost spirit and mind, but I see in my [derivative] flesh a contrary principle at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the principle of sin internalized in my physical members.

Romans 7:15-23, emphasis added

Why is the natural (derivative) man unconsciously aroused by the spectacle of disorder? What principle is there in man that would drive him to seek affirmation in the popular spectacles of vice, immorality, crime, shootings, car crashes and exploding buildings shown on television and in the movies? Why are postmodern teenagers addicted to video games that glorify war, violence, killings and degradation? Why does the apostate media love to feed on disorder, immorality, nudity, pornography, perversion, murder and corruption? Whence the provenance of this love affair with disorder and degradation? Whence the caput nili of this carnival of sin and death?

Is there a rational, scientific explanation? Yes there is, and Book of Life reveals it. All of these disorders amount to nothing more than affirmations of the universal imperative of increasing entropy. The unconscious arousal, the vicarious satisfaction, the lust, the pleasure, the urge to merge, the mindless impulse, the injurious compulsion and the evil inclination all derive themselves from the statistical tendency to disorder internalized in flesh.

One cannot begin to talk about “morality” without assuming something about human nature, and one cannot assume something about human nature without understanding a thing or two about the nature of the cosmos itself. In Book of Life we obtain an understanding of human nature that is consistent with the movement of the cosmos. Book of Life describes the derivative, inverted and perverted orientation of man as a function of the nature of a cosmos oriented towards dissolution and death (maximum entropy). Book of Life provides Biblical guidelines for an epochal Exodus out of moral and ethical Babylon.

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