A while back I saw this excerpt from the book "
Shantaram" on my sister's blog, which really resonated with me. I won't bother pasting the excerpt here again, but there were two key points it made, which I shall delve into here. The first was the concept of God as the Ultimately Complex being - and the idea that we are all attempting to move towards this complexity, towards order. It also went on to describe good and evil as being forces that either help us progress towards this complexity, or move us away from it. This seemed to me to be very synergistic with something in my last post - about evil not being an existent being in itself, but rather just the absence of good. As a part-thermodynamicist, it also lent me an interesting insight into the concept of entropy. Normally we think of things naturally moving from a state of order to disorder - the entropy of any system, left to itself, will increase. So naturally speaking, we should be moving towards disorder - except (and here's where i throw in my two cents), maybe, for free will? If I just chose to do nothing, and just BE, I'd slowly wither away, die, and my material constituents would be blown away by the wind - however, I
choose to do something about my life, exercise my free will - and so I gain complexity. The relative degree of this gain depends on my particular choice of thought and activity - I can choose indolence, sloth or materialistic voyeurisms, and so gain not very much (at least in spiritual complexity), or I can choose to align myself with the rays of the spiritual sunlight, and really make progress.
The other point the excerpt made was quite a surprise, as its something I've always believed is a very strong metric for testing the ethical quality of any action - and I've been told at times that it doesn't work. The idea is to basically extrapolate any potential action to a situation where everyone is indulging in it - and then seeing where that would lead us. So, for example, killing is bad because if everyone killed each other, we'd all be dead. There are also subtler levels to this - where its not just a question of how it harms society, but how, as the excerpt says, it leads us towards or away from that ultimate complexity. For example, stealing is bad because, if everyone stole from each other, society would still probably survive, but it would lead us all away from that complexity. Not having inter-religious harmony is bad because if everyone remained antagonistic to people of other faiths, we'd forever remain divided into groups, and never attain greater levels of complexity. Evaluated from this standpoint, a lot of ethical questions seem to instantly evaporate into nothingness.
It does work, doesn't it?!!
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