Recently I was surfing through a web page full of interesting quotes about right and wrong. Some were profound. Others somewhat less so, but worthy nonetheless. And then I came across this one:
“True religion is to do what is right in the eyes of the Lord.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita
This gave me pause for thought.
So I looked at this quote and thought about its meaning — its deepest meaning — its “chewed right down to the bone” meaning. And I’m still thinking about it, but here’s what I’ve thought so far.
Let us suppose (temporarily) that the sentence is both true and wise. What can we conclude from this assumption? We can immediately deduce that since there are many Lords (pick your favorite, keeping in mind that others may consider you an infidel worthy only of being killed if you choose the wrong one), then there are many “true religions” — at least one for each Lord. And then there are all those “false” religions to consider…
But we can go further than this — since religion is “to do what is right in the eyes of the Lord”, we can infer that there are at least as many true religions as there are people who claim to know what is right in the eyes of whatever Lord they choose.
That’s a lot of true religions, and they can’t all be right. But — they could all be wrong.
One of the things I find so objectionable about this sentence is that it attempts to bind the notions of truth and religion (considered as good things) to an arbitrary and as-yet-undefined notion of what is “right in the eyes of the Lord.” This is a level of indirection (or perhaps deliberate misdirection) that should not stand up under scrutiny. It simply begs the question of who decides what is right, and who the heck is this “Lord” guy, anyway?
In the end, all we can conclude from this quote is that it says “It is what it is” or “It’s your thing — do what you wanna do” or “Different strokes for different folks” or any one of a number of other vacuous expressions.
And yet … somehow … there is something about that statement that resonates with me. Perhaps it’s the notion that there’s some basis, somewhere, somehow, for moral behavior.
It’s hard to imagine someone wanting to prevent someone else from being kind to a stranger. Yet it is easy for almost anyone to imagine someone being cruel to a stranger. We know that people do this — criminals are in the news every day, and those of us not already hardened and calloused by exposure are disgusted and repelled by such behavior.
I suspect there is something innate within (most of) us that recoils from gratuitous cruelty, as well as from theft and murder and rape — something that cries out to us “This is wrong!” And we search for some means of justifying that position. For some, the answer is religion. For others, however, the very justification for such heinous acts is simply a different religion.
For the supporters of ISIS, what is right in the eyes of the Lord is to murder, rape and torture those who have a different opinion of salvation, and their justification is provided by the same quote that started this article. Because what they do is right in the eyes of the Lord, theirs is a true religion, just like the ones that condemn such acts. They can’t both be ‘true’ — how are we to decide?
To a scientist like Robert Sapolsky of Stanford, much of our behavior can be explained biologically through evolution. I am drawn to this approach, yet still not sure that it can explain everything. Isn’t there some objective truth “out there” that we as sentient beings can recognize and reason about? Or is it all just physics and chemistry and biology and survival of the fittest?
The moral of my story? Don’t mine for gold in dim-lit web pages? I don’t know; after all, I did find some interesting and thought-provoking quotes.
The Saint