A comment from yesterday’s
blog on navigating good and evil made me think about different shades of right
and wrong. So if I sneak a cookie from
the cookie jar is it a light grey crime but if I take a nickel from the
emergency fund does it become dark grey?
What is a white lie and when is it getting murky and beige?
Last night I was pondering
religion and I had a thought “I’m not afraid to meet my Maker” and then took
the thought deeper. If we have been
raised to believe in God but as we get older we decide that religion isn’t for
us, how far astray can we go before we are “lost”? Every religion has its own take on that
answer but I wanted to look at it from my own personal perspective. For those who are deeply religious there
really is no middle ground between white and black; there is no beige, grey or
any other colour; either you believe or you don’t, period. I thought about what the Universe would feel
upon my death, if at the last moment I said “I believe” and I looked deeply at
the answer – nothing.
I don’t like to tell people
what to believe and certainly I do not feel that I have any answers, much less
the right answer when it comes to God, religion, or beliefs. I think our world is complex but at the same
time it is very simple. It is made up of
human beings and the greatest Right in the world is to live by the Golden Rule
given out by Jesus Christ “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. In other words, don’t do harm to anyone.
This morning I was watching “To
the Contrary” and one of the topics was campus rape and for once all the women
around the table were of one accord; they felt that there should be no statute
of limitations on rape. As one of the
women most aptly explained it is a life altering crime that can take years to
overcome (if indeed it can every really be overcome). Gloria Steinem spoke about “humanizing
masculinity” just as feminism was humanized which I thought was a very good way
of saying how men can change. Statistics
are not available on whether the crime has escalated in recent years because
for decades rape has seldom been reported but no one knows what that percentage
could be.
Which brings me to the final
comment – just because Bill Cosby has been a well loved personality and is now
an old man, do we give him a pass if indeed he is guilty of the acts all these
women are now reporting?
