I’m making some significant changes here, and updating some broken plugins. That’s why things may occasionally look a little weird this week.

Note: this post is a long overdue in a series called Gray Areas, Law, Morals, and Faith part one here.

In fact my friend mis-characterized me a little bit. I, at least, never was nihilistic. I was just skeptical and (accordingly) uncertain about which ring to throw my proverbial hat into. (Proverbial hats are scarce, and I wanted to choose wisely.) It seemed that many of the causes of 19-year-olds past, had some pretty scary, evil sides. We were critical of certain things the government was doing, but also of the “opposite” position.

So anyway, I’ve recently started thinking about this phenomenon in light of my education in psychology and law, and trying to reconcile it with my faith and morals.

Psych

As people develop cognitively, they develop morally, too. Developmental theory generally holds that people develop through several stages throughout their lifespans. At first, as infants, we are utterly egocentric view. We don’t even know there are other people. Then, as we get older, we take on a might-makes-right, authoritarian view, in which adults are right because they are huge and physically impossible to override. Then, in adolescence, we become idealistic, we see principles of right and wrong, but we’re still pretty egocentric and very black-and-white about it. Finally, we (should) move into a more nuanced view of the world, and we start to shed the adolescent egocentricity.

At this point, I think there is a common oversimplification. People often use the metaphor of perceiving, “shades of gray,” as opposed to, “black-and-white.” A common error is to conclude that there is no wrong or right, another is to conclude that an action can be both wrong and right (differing only in their composition).

Morals

In fact, I believe that wrong is utterly wrong, and right is utterly, perfectly right. Good is purely and exclusively good. The error of thinking an act or belief can be neither right nor wrong, and the error of thinking that an act or belief can be the both right and wrong, come from two perceptual problems:

1. Not looking closely enough and
2. Having poor vision.

If you stand far enough away from an image comprised of black and white dots, you will see shades of gray. If you stand closer, but have blurry vision, you will see the same gray.

iPod wonders

A very activist, pacifist, anarchist punk friend of mine said, “You don’t have a lot of causes, do you.” He was right. At the time, I certainly didn’t. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about things, it was more that I wasn’t sure what was worthy of ardent support.

Depending on how you slice it, I was born at the end of Generation X, or the start of Generation Y. I have just been thinking about that in light of the way my Xers used to be branded: as nihilistic, as amoral. Supposedly we didn’t care about anything outside ourselves. The music supposedly supported it. But the music always sounded angry.

Read More

Testing to ensure that automatic cross-posting works. Edit… and it does. Edit 2… including HTML code and edits made after the initial post.