Beige or Grey

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?