Midnight Locke

Man, I'm really getting old. Just past midnight and my eyes are barely able to keep themselves open.

So the weekend has arrived once again. Hurrah!

The past week has been a mixed bag. Lots of work was done, and I also made some headway in AI: The Somnium Files. I've also read some more books, including John Locke's Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration.

I would like to talk a little about Locke's work here, even as my mind slows down from the lateness and the exertions of the day.

Locke presents an interesting thesis with respect to ``Toleration'' which I find to be resonant with my own personal thoughts that can be summarised simply as a proverb:

What is good for the goose, is good for the gander.

Our behaviours in the cosmopolitan society need to take into account that we share living space with others who may not believe in the same things that we do. We know through our belief that they are wrong, but it is not our place to force them to conform to our beliefs, just as they know through their belief that we are wrong, and that it is not their place to force us to conform to their beliefs.

``MT, how can both of your beliefs can be simultaneously right and wrong?''

It's a belief---it's experiential, and deeply personal. It's an axiom within our own system of reasoning, something that is truthful on its own, a tautology. A base case in the inductive reasoning that we are wont to make. There are ways to test the extent of the truth of the belief, but eventually we run out of derived truths (i.e. theorems) and reach a set of statements that can only be described as belief.

We will only know who's wrong at the end. And it is not the end just yet.

Anyway, Locke's work here spends quite a bit of time talking about the role in which the civil government plays. And he quite rightly summarises it as being about the protection of one's possessions and property. Mind you, this is circal 17th century, nearly 70 years before the founding of the United States of America. This means that the possessions and properties being covered are that of the material and physical ones.

He states then that the civil government maintains and upholds laws that preserve the right of [material] property that people can hold, and has no jurisdiction over aspects involving the spiritual. Similarly, systems that deal with the spiritual have no jurisdiction over aspects of the material, especially since much of such doctrine either has nothing to say about it, or says something that makes sense for the time, but is of net harm to society in the now.

Locke's work spans 200 pages or so; any form of summary I can contrive will necessarily be insufficient and incomplete. But the point to be made here is that if we choose to live as a community, then the rules/laws that we as a community set ought to be even-handed for all the members of the community. Moreover, such rules/laws should strengthen one's freedom of choice, as opposed to strengthening coercion of the tyranny of the majority.

Reading all that just made me feel sad when I looked at the world today. Morality and ethics are considered liabilities, and the less that they can be bothered with, the better the overall outcome. All these just for the accruing of wealth and power in the fallen world. No wonder Scripture points out that it is impossible to serve both God and Mammon---one inevitably has to make the choice as no amount of finagling can change the fact that these two contraindicate each other.

Other than those observations, there is no other new point that I have not made before that I want to be making here---I just found it interesting that someone some three hundred years ago have made similar observations and statements as me so far in the future relative to him.

But let's divert away from civil government and go back to more godly matters---the overpowering sense of the ego trumping over doing what is pleasing to God.

There are many things that God declares as sin. Sadly, almost all of human behaviour is sinful in nature. And no, I'm not even thinking about the ``big sins'' that most people associate with immediately when ``sin'' is heard---I mean the ``tolerable sins'' in the sense of what Jerry Bridges wrote in Respectable Sins: Confronting the Sins We Tolerate. There is no one who has told a lie (white or otherwise), there is no one who hasn't forgiven someone, and there is definitely no one who doesn't give in to anger at some point. All these are sins---they seem tolerable and ``all natural'', but they are still sins nonetheless in the eyes of God.

``Who said that all these things are sins? This is human nature! It's normal variation of human behaviour!''

And that is why everyone of us needs a saviour to intercede on our behalf with God to forgive us our sins. The ``who'' here is God---God is perfect, God is ``good'' defined. But we have our own ego, our own free will. We defy God by trying to seek our own self-justification and self-identity away from God.

That whole self-identity and self-justification is the start of the long way down the path of sin among all the contentious issues that many modern-day Christians claim controversy over. We self-justify because we believe that we are more enlightened than those who came before us, and that our technological prowess can even defy God's power as well. Our hubris in medical technology has kept alive way more people that could be au naturale, and our development in information sciences allow us to collate, process, and promulgate data/knowledge in ways that seemingly beat that of the Bible, the earthly representation of the inspired Word of God. We rely heavily on our empiricism to prove many factual observations that seemingly mock and challenge God, and most show no respect to the Almighty.

With so much power, it is of little wonder that Man thinks of his own identity as being of paramount importance as compared to that of God---such pride is a great cause for much sin. And even among those who claim to be Christians, their arguments to justify the sinful actions that they take are no different from the biblical Pharisees' actions.

So what point am I making here?

Nothing more than just a small reminder to always take a few steps back to look at the bigger picture to understand things for what they are as opposed to getting some serious tunnel vision from parrotting the latest sound bite.

And with that, I'm spent and need to crash out before I burn out.

Till the next update.