Hi, WSW24.
I hope that the reply from Jumped Up Chimpanzee was helpful for you. Personally, I think that post is the best explanation I've seen yet for the "morality / sin" dilemma that everyone faces, regardless whether they've been raised in Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology, or Hinduism or Buddhism or Santaria or even with no specific religious upbringing at all -- it's just part of the overall human condition.
It seems as though lots of people have trouble understanding the nature of the dance between selfish and selfless, between the free will of an individual and the constraints of a group, between the narrow-mindedness of a clique and the diversity of a complex, interdependent society.
WSW24 writes:
I am still not sure if my troubles with this are true or not.
If you draw the conclusion that God is imaginary, that people make up statements about God as a means of projecting the things they are trying (but often failing) to understand, then it all starts to make a lot more sense.
Obviously there's a lot about the human condition that any one individual will have a hard time understanding. If the individual decides that there must be some external deity that accounts for it all, this does not lead the individual to actually understand things any better, and anything the person says about this deity will tend to reflect the imperfection of his or her own general understanding.
Even when referring to some "standard" text, such as the bible or koran or vedas or whatever, any one person's understanding of the text will be as imperfect as that of the person who first wrote the text. Everyone makes mistakes and everyone has their own point of view, and authors of "holy books" are no exception, their own claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
Obviously, imperfection affects the non-religious as well as the religious, but there is an important difference: the non-religious are willing and often eager to learn what their mistakes are, and to correct them. They'll revise explanations that were written years ago when new evidence shows a problem with the existing text, and they'll try to be careful about understanding the limitations of their current explanations.
So the point is to use your brain, use observation, try to know your own limitations, and try to understand the limitations of others. You can actually do a pretty decent job of it without positing anything at all about any sort of deity. It's all just a matter of living; if you think there should be more to it than that, go ahead and make something up to suit your perceived need -- but don't let that get in the way of actually trying to understand things as they really are.
autotelic adj. (of an entity or event) having within itself the purpose of its existence or happening.
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