Authority and monotheism

I feel that belief in God or a supreme authority has been necessary in Western world. This comes from my contemplation over the state of judiciary in the US. While on one hand, I felt it is very powerful (which is good) on the other, I found that there is very little justification for their existence, that is presented by laws themselves.

Circumventing laws, overriding the very intent why laws were created, is so much rife everywhere. Laws and ethics are completely two different things. Laws can only reward and punish people; they really don't make sure that anything wrong does not happen, nor do they attempt to. Its left to people to think and introspect about their actions, the end goal being getting most rewards and least punishments. You don't have to obey laws to be good, nor is it ascertained that if you are good in your own way you are going to be rewarded - what matters is how you appear in the eyes of the supreme.

Its one thing to obey the laws and its another thing to think of not thinking of harming someone. So, the intent is seldom under check. You can harm anyone if you want, but still be righteous in the eyes of others if you could circumvent the law. You can even fool God by gifting and giving. Everywhere, your own conscience is never under check by the laws. Laws and ethics are completly disconnected, which is certainly not desirable.

As an example, even if you know that your organization is doing some wrong activity (which you feel is not ethical) you can't publish it or tell it to others, because you are bound by something like a non-disclosure agreement. Submitting to the authority becomes more important than your own conscience. Honesty is upgraded to an organizational level, and addressing to honesty at personal level becomes less important than the one at higher (organizational) level.

But this disconnection of law and ethics is a serious void! How is this filled? Why doesn't this system crumble? The answer is the belief in supreme. The act of submitting to authority in the hope that your conscience is right, is exactly what the concept of 'God' is. I think it was a trade-off between such a void and unstablities of a system with no central authority, which made West fall back to its Greek-roman culture, admitting a bit of paganism, and relieving a bit of seriousness about believing in God a very Christian way. Still authority or God is a very important concept in the Western world, something central to at least the judiciary I know about.

Submitting yourself to the universal authority, preferring duty over the desire, is something that Christianity has imparted to the Western culture. Hence the 'concept' of God is key to such systems. If the belief in God is relieved, people would take the liberty (quite literally) of connecting the ethics to laws themselves. Something of this sort did happen in the times of Renaissance, whence the ideals of freedom and liberty came from. Again, it won't have been possible without the Greek-roman influence.

Not surprisingly, the concept of a modern democracy is due to a thinker who was criticized for his atheistic perversions, who contention was that the order of this world is decentralized, inherent in the whole creation. The metaphysics of God is inside every mind, and hence we, as human being are able to make our own choices, unbound by our own conceptions of God.

Pessimism

I have repeatedly come to the conclusion that optimism is about a little bit of ignorance- not necessitated not inevitable, but a consciously chosen one. If you were really sure that you are going to succeed there would have been no need of that feeling what one calls optimism.

I can see that knowing too much about everything gives birth to pessimism and that it is inevitable: The real underlying problem is that you never actually know everything completely. You can only claim or believe that you know everything. The point where you think you've known everything, or realise that you know too much about everything, you see every thing as deterministic, doomed. Your own conclusions bear a lot of certainty, only in your mind. That is where pessimism begins from. Knowing too much, I think is highly likely to lead one into pessimism.

I can see that in my personal life as well. The people around me knowing very little about history, politics, philosophy are the happiest one, brimming with energy, and very much optimistic about life. Since they don't know, they don't predict, nor do they expect failure. Keeping on trying in hope of success is what an optimist does. Once you choose to think about the metaphysics of success and failure, you are bound to become at least a bit pessimistic...

I could go on talking about it, but thats all for now...