People like to justify doing something they know is wrong to accomplish something that they think is right.
It’s true that there are higher truths and mundane truths.
Sometimes we might think it’s okay to break a law in order to live up to our moral ideals. We’re willing, in some circumstances, to pay the price of breaking the law.
Often, this comes up when people decide to use violence against their opponents.
Yet violence will beget violence.
In the Hebrew Bible, God told the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites. They refused. In my opinion, they did the right thing. Judaism has a history of encouraging argument with God, and disobedience.
For example, God teased Adam and Eve, using reverse psychology (Don’t eat that apple!!), to get them to “Eat THE Apple.” It wasn’t until Eve disobeyed that she became a human exercising choice. Free will is a different story. But without a real option to make some choices, we are like most other animals, usually acting out of our genetic programming. Wasn’t God sick of watching a play with everything predetermined? Giving humans a higher level of choice spiced things up.
Anyway, which was worse? Eve feeding the apple to Adam? Or Cain killing Abel?
Even if we don’t have a clear answer, the direct message of the Cain killing Abel story is that killing another person in anger is bad. Maybe the point of God’s command to exterminate the Canaanites was for us to realize that it would be better to make friends. Which happened at some point. Why else were the prophets always ranting about not marrying them?
The consequences of the descendants of the Biblical Israelites choosing to try to obey God after a 3000 year delay are plain to see, for anyone with a sense of the phrase “cause and effect.” It’s very sad. It’s very painful. It’s very shameful. It’s impossible to find words to adequately describe the growing horror.
Rene Girard, in his book “Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,” explains that the whole point of almost all of human culture, as hidden in many myths from around the world, is to contain the intermittent violence that inevitably erupts whenever humans live together. Girard points out that NO “SIDE” will ever acknowledge that “We started it.” Billy Joel riffed on this theme in his famous
Maybe God changed “his” mind in the intervening series of eternities. There are multiple instructions in the Bible where humans are instructed to love their neighbors and enemies, and to be kind to the stranger.
The problem is that kindness requires contemplation. Because expressing kindness to one person may require different actions that would befit someone else. We need skill and desire to be kind. We need to be willing to put in the time.
Above clipart from https://clipart-library.com/clipart/cause-and-effect-clipart_34.html
Note that most complicated things in the world do not result from the “simple cause and effect” that kids are taught in school. The truth is closer to the Buddhist idea of “dependent arising.” The rain does not, by itself,” cause a rainbow. Other conditions are required to see a rainbow. MANY other conditions must be met.
I’d like to acknowledge Daniel Aliya for bringing up to me the idea that the means determine the ends. I see this as a great truth, probably greater than the other “great truth,” more commonly spoken, that the ends justify the means. See Aldous Huxley on this idea.
