I recently watched Wonder Woman 84. It was not a great movie. It was not even really a good movie, even though Gal Gadot is clearly one of the most beautiful women on the planet.
But it got me thinking. The gist of it was a wish granting stone that always took something from the person whose wish was granted. As Chris Pine’s character put it, “The Monkey Hand”, which was not explained, but clearly refers to the monkey traps used in Asia where a fruit or other delectable is placed in a bottle attached to a rope. The monkey can get its hand into the jar, but cannot get the fruit out with a clenched fist. Rather than let go, many monkeys wind up passively captured. I have mentioned this metaphor before.
This wishing stone, though, always caused the destruction in short order of civilizations where it began circulating and granting.
Here is what I would like to suggest: the equivalent in human history is the discovery that God does not punish sin directly. It is the discovery that sacred laws can be violated with impunity. The Holy of Holies is an empty room. It is the realization that, as I think Ivan Karamozov said, that “if God is dead, then all is permitted.”
It is the discovery of moral relativism.
Here is the thing: most of the specific beliefs of most religions have always been false. Prayer has no reliable direct effect, even if in some cases it does seem to do something. But lightning does not strike down the sinner.
This is an important truth, and one that creates a lot of freedom, but it comes with a cost as well: social order, and individual sense of place and purpose. On the one hand you can do what you like, but on the other everything has lost its context and meaning and purpose.
And I would argue that what is also lost is a deep connection with the Universe that is quite real, and which even fictitious specific religious beliefs–God in many forms–facilitate, as a sort of accidental truth, or incomplete truth.
I have suggested in the past and will suggest again that I think moral relativism should be a hidden truth in all societies, and perhaps has been. No person incapable of foreseeing on their own merits the consequences of their actions on themselves and others should be taught this. Perhaps it should be saved for those over the age of 40.
And obviously I have written extensively about Goodness as enlightened–which is to say rational and even scientific–self interest. What I am saying is that most societies are conditioned to think exclusively in terms of rewards and punishments, and most people do what they do because they fear pain in this life and the next.
Now, evil may well be punished in the next life, in that the evil doer can only see evil, and so will be surrounded by evil in a universe of their own creation; but evil is clearly not reliably punished in this world. Hillary Clinton will most likely die of old age or a some illness of age. This is the point I am making.
Deployed generally, this knowledge acts in immature people–and most everyone on this planet is spiritually immature–as a corrosive and toxin.
Does that mean it is good to scare people with fairy tales? Yes, I think it is. But the BETTER approach is figuring out ways for societies to mature, to grow, to build wisdom, to embody wisdom, and to gradually free themselves from chains of delusion through earned knowledge.
Long term, the only people who benefit from scary fairy tales are tyrants, and I think it is tyrants who have run a great many Churches the world over for most of recorded history, and certainly the Christian Church.