Ah, Morals! A parable if you will.

from conan - Monday, December 18, 2006
accessed 1011 times

Ah, Morality! This age-old question has no universal answer or one that is likely to ever be reached. I have a few personal views on the subject, and though I make no claims to enlightenment on the subject, I think that the story I’m about to tell may lead to some very incendiary, colorful discussion.

Now, there has been an ongoing theme to debate religion vs. instinct when it comes to today’s moral code. I’m going to argue in favor of both here, and I’m not trying to say that both contribute, but that both are right and both are wrong.

Let’s imagine for a little bit, Oddman’s inhumane reality TV show. Several control groups vs. modern society. These groups would all have to be on level playing fields, i.e. same starting age, period of technology, etc. Now for my version of this, we’ll go to the obvious starting age of infancy, and in a prehistoric era where technology is a caveman’s dream. All groups will have the same number of male and female members. One group will have no moral guide and no religious guide; another will have a guide for both. Yet another group will have a moral leader without religious implications and our final study group will have a monotheistic themed spiritual/moral guru. It’s important to remember that we’re imaging an age where clothing and social acceptance are not at our current level of perception. Nudity is normal, manners are nonexistent, laws are unheard of, and leadership is a perception that can change on any given day by any sudden act of violence. Let the games begin!

So group one, the one with no moral or religious vanguard have reached pubescence and subsequent adolescence with little incident worth mention (remember, this all in our heads) and now the issue of sexuality has become a prevalent theme. Some will argue that if empathy is part of the human genetic code, morals as we see them today will simply follow ‘rational thought’ with logic and rationale. In this group, they don’t know that and hormones cause tempers and egos to flare up with dire consequences. Now if promiscuity were a perception we have today, then they would not consider it. Right? So the females in this group don’t see monogamy as an ethical dilemma. They sleep with whichever male they chose, whenever they chose, in front of whomever they chose. Now if empathy dictated action, jealousy would be controllable because the reaction one has to jealousy would eventually find a way to come back upon the culprit, and thus the jealous individual would find a way to curb his actions. I’m saying that in this group, that isn’t the case. The males in this collection of subjects begin to jostle and compete by overly aggressive demonstrations which culminate in the violent death of two of the males who then agree to share the four females so that they can both, in the vernacular, ‘get some’. The females decide that it’s up to them who sleeps with whom, which leads to the rape and murder of one of the females by a male who couldn’t cope with having a female tell him what to do which naturally caused the violent and subsequent methodical mutilation of the offending males genitalia by the group of surviving females and then the tentative ‘rule’ of the lone healthy male who is wary of the females potential damaging disapproval and the ensuing tension between man and women is so palpable that the women agree that they will allow the male to humiliate and harm the weakest of them so as to have a semblance of not only his fragile ‘manhood’ but the illusion he would maintain of being a stronger species than them. Ah, Morals! It is in this fashion that they continue to live for the remainder of our parable.

In our second cluster of primitive misfits, the one with a religious code to provide ethical direction. The teacher has left the cluster around the same age as our other group; the puberty and adolescence age. Again, hormones rage and sex questions dominate this small society’s actions. These subjects sacrifice an animal to their god of sexual awareness and try to determine the pecking order of who gets to sleep with whom, when. Confusion sets in when each member of the party interprets the resulting thunderstorm a different way and after a bout of unmitigated violence a group council convenes. They agree to assign one female to every male. One of the males discovers that he is attracted to the other males, not his female and tries to force himself on the object of his affection. His actions horrify the other males and two of the females. The other two females decide that they can cure him by having sex with each other. The entire party is present when they perform they ‘cleansing ritual’ and when the three straight males become aroused as they watch the same-sex acts of the two females it leads to anger and jealousy by the females whose sexual partners are aroused by the sexual performance. Religious conflicts abound from not only the issue of sexual parity, but also that of whether or not homosexuality is given provisions for under the testament of their religion. They decide to exclude the offending male from their society and the rest of them return to their assigned partners with the additional female taking the role of spiritual leader and matriarch, choosing to have her sexual needs satisfied by any one of the other males she chooses whenever she has the urge. The other females begrudgingly go along with this for the sake of the their community’s well being. The lone male survives on the outskirts of the society, sneaking in for articles he needs to maintain his life. He becomes a terror to the rest of them has his survival skills are honed beyond any of theirs as he is forced to go it alone without the support of the community. His sexual appetite unmitigated, he is spotted by members of the ‘faithful’ committing acts of bestiality, horrifying the others to seek a way to end his evil existence as they fear he his sent by their deity’s arch nemesis to destroy them all and turn them against each other. An elaborate plan is concocted which results in the capture of the loner, a religious themed trial, and a public execution for the religious offender. The fear of having their peers turn on them or accuse them of religious impurity forces each and every member to lead a life which adheres to each and every minute detail of the beliefs they imagine they must. It is, consequentially, a peaceful, moral, upright community with help and comfort for each and every member, as long as they all believe that if they stray from the path that their matriarch has laid out for them, they have no reason to fear reprisal, anger, or retaliation. As long as they adhere to the morals laid out for them, they will be safe. And so, they live the remainder of the experiment in fear, each one living an outwardly moral, happy and upright existence, yet each one fearing that they are not doing enough for their matriarch and her deity to warrant a permanent place in the afterlife.

The third group, the monotheistic one, has (obviously) reached the same time of their young lives. When they have questions regarding sex and sexual partners, they gather together to pore over the pages of their religious book to try and decipher how they are to act. When one male decides that the holy pages tell them that a man is the head of his household he tries to control the females and make them his sexual slaves. One male agrees and begins to ardently pursue his sexual aggressions, quoting passages of the sacred text to try to ease the female’s apprehensions. The other males don’t like the idea of one controlling the rest of them. So they decide that their deity is a female and that they should worship their female counterparts and so begin their own religious faction. The females’ split up to join both sides and so begins a long, ongoing struggle for spiritual supremacy and ultimate salvation. Both sides try and convince members of the other faction that their way is the only way to salvation, both sides slowly changing their doctrines and rituals to be more unlike the other and both sides damning the other to eternal damnation. Both factions begin to plan ways to end the others’ erring by any means necessary. A bloodbath eventually ensues, killing all but one male and one female. As fate would have it, they are from opposing religious viewpoints. Both have a physical urge to seek the other out, but both are too proud to concede any points to their opponent. They become entangled in a lengthy debate about their deity each becoming more animated as they become more angry. Eventually they pounce on each other and have arduous, passionate sex, after which they both decide that their religious viewpoints are completely bogus and they only adhered to them in an attempt to appear more righteous than their fellows while both secretly abhorring what they were practicing and preaching. They both abandon their religious views and live happy, atheistic lives for the remainder of the experiment.

The fourth group has been told that their actions will have dire consequences on their fellow humans and are therefore directly responsible for their own safety and security, because whatever they do, will come back upon them. One female decides that she is genetically superior, and therefore above her fellow humans. She begins to mutilate and terrorize the other females while preying on the males with her sex appeal to avoid any societal repercussions. She becomes the self-appointed head honcho and starts to set policy for the troop and decides on guidelines with no benefit for anyone, save herself. The mutilated females try and recruit the males’ assistance to help and overthrow the effeminate autocrat. Three agree to help in exchange for sexual favors while one aligns himself with the fair chieftain and tells her of the insubordinates’ brewing revolution. When the battle ensues, the rioting revolutionaries kill their oppressors but not before they lose two of their females, and one male. The two surviving males have been taught that polygamous relationships are immoral and so have to decide who gets the right to copulate with the lone surviving female. They decide, after long deliberation, that it’s in the best interests of everyone’s happiness if the female decides. She ponders her decision very carefully and finally comes to the conclusion that to be fair to both, she’d give them both a shot. She lays out a long and rigorous physical competition with the winner to have her companionship for as long as they don’t bore of each other. As they had no religious obligation to be faithful to each other for the remainder of their lives, the lone male would be able to wait and see how they worked out and still have the potential for sexual relations further in life. The loser, his rational and integrity induced thought process completely occupied by hormonal rage ignores his morally trained acumen and brazenly murdered his virile colleague. Unfortunately, in his rage-induced stupor, he realized that he had violated the trust he had hoped to forge with the solitary female. Now, deranged and depressed, he becomes obsessed with finding absolution for his heinous crimes. He wanders around their environment without eating or drinking until, in a delirium, he believes to have seen a bright light with a booming voice which gives him instructions on how to redeem his unholy soul. The now ‘enlightened’ humanoid individual races back to the object of his affection to share with her his discovery of religion, and inner self. She, being of a rational mind, openly mocks his newfound spirituality and ‘religion’ saying quite rightly that he has lost his mind. He cannot control his indignation and in what he would later justify as a righteous fit of holy anger, he strikes her down dead. He lives the remainder of his time on the show as a wandering hermit, searching for absolution and forgiveness.



Ok, so this parable, or series of parables, didn’t really say too much. I was clearly hypothesizing what I would consider to be a possibility in these completely random scenarios. Clearly, I used sex as the central issue for the conflict in these nifty little allegories. I did this because I guess it seems to me that would be one of the more instigative characteristics of a fledgling group of young adolescents in a controlled environment. I guess I was trying to make the point of futility in this debate, as well as the potential for every side of every argument to play out somehow without external influence due to coincidental circumstances surrounding the youths. I don’t know of the validity of these tales, if any, but either way I thought that the presentation of them in this manner would inspire some sort of recognition of futility in the issue of religion’s hand in moral conduct. These stories were written by me, someone who was raised in a cult where our morals were decided for us by a demented old man, his religious whore of a wife, and a whole slew of brown-nosing, scared, disturbed, mentally unstable, horny, perverted, misguided people, so clearly I’m biased as to the way I interpret my own imaginative tales of insane scenarios regarding the topics of religion and morals. But, whatever…enjoy!