Salvation

Being a not-so-devout Catholic, I am familiar nonetheless with a few of the tenets of the Christian faith. Love thy God. Love thy neighbor. Turn the other cheek. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Despite the thousands of religious observances, this is really the core of the Christian faith. Do these things, we are told, and we will attain the rewards of Heaven. Fail, and we will burn in Hell.

I do not care much for reward-based systems. Part of that is a skepticism ingrained in public schools, where the reward rarely had anything to do with behavior invovled. Bullys were rewarded for having their way; the bullied were punished if they dared to lift a hand to fight back. Those who expended exorbitant amounts of effort maybe succeeded, but many who barely bothered to try passed with flying colors. I'm not saying I have any idea of how to fix that, or if it should be fixed. But the end result is that the rewards given in the system do not motivate me very much. In schools, particularly the University of Wyoming, what motivates me is a love of learning and a desire to know, not necessarily the grades I receive, the degree I'll earn, or the job I'll hypothetically get later on.

The doing good and making others happy should be the reward of doing good, not the promise of eternal rewards. Otherwise, we can justify our own selfishness, our own unwillingness to act, by claiming "we are damaging our immortal souls" by doing what needs to be done.

One of the classic ethical questions is the following: Suppose there is some maniac who has captured you and tells you either to kill one innocent person or he'll kill a thousand innocent people. Some will say to refuse to kill, for then it will be the manic killing, not you. Some will argue that you should kill the one innocent, for then only one dies, instead of a thousand. There is no good answer here. Either you kill the one, and are guilty of killing one innocent person (and furthermore acceding to the demands of a terrorist) or you refuse, and you have doomed a thousand people. So which is it?

In the War on Terror, we are facing a very similar issue. None of these are: which is the moral path? Instead, which is the path that is least wrong? Because, just as in the ethical dilemma above, there is no true moral way out. Either we refuse to fight the terrorists, and doom thousands to their brutal methods, or we fight the terrorists, and doom thousands of soldiers and civilians to violent death.

Some argue that not fighting is taking the moral high ground. This is because we are not dirtying ourselves, and thus being rewarded with approbation of the other nations in the world as well as saving our souls for Heaven. But would we really achieve Heaven by refusing to do what needs to be done to ensure the safety of millions of people?