The Law of Gravity

Ever notice that we want cause-and-effect to work for us when we make good decisions but we want a reprieve from Heaven when we don't?

Damn, we hate anything that resembles karma.  We want a world where gravity keeps things together and organized as it does in our own, but doesn't allow you to get hurt.

Hell, many of would prefer a world where nature balances out resources without creatures consuming each other.  Natural forces that create without natural forces that destroy.

This is only being human, I'm afraid.  It isn't, of itself, ignorance. It's an intuition that resists being born on a game preserve, merely staving off the inevitable long enough to produce more meat products like ourselves.  We would like the special care that a child deserves to get from his/her parent to pervade our lives, and emanate from all parts of the universe.  And maybe this, the experience of such a sense of care, is something that can only be achieved through spirituality and religious intuition.  The intuition is (hopefully) nurtured by a family that truly loves us and celebrates our existence.

We watch nature shows because the Circle of Life seems majestic and beautiful when viewed from outside, from Above, as it were.  Viewed as though we were not some of the artful bits of protoplasm getting churned through the amazing machine.  We don't watch these shows with a sort of "snuff porn" perversion.  We watch with a taste of the mystical, an entheogen that will allow us to hear the jungle as the shaman does, though in a way that is made palatable to our Western rationalism.

Nature seems to not suffer fools.  So the most appealing idea of heaven on earth to many, naturally,  is a material world in which we are fully protected against both caprice and our own mistakes.  This is so much more appealing than an internal process of prayer and introspection to adjust ourselves to harsh realities.  But does the same impulse to rid reality of harshness lend itself to rejecting reality?  Is it a propensity toward dishonesty?

It is understandable to desire the universe to be governed by laws that are both efficient and comprehensible and yet somehow fulfill the Hippocratic oath to "do no harm."  But is the desire self-serving and immature?  It seems that fanciful laws such as these might embody a universe with free will essentially squeezed out, with no room left over for good or evil, with only a tame world left over, governed by "nice" laws.