So I'm waiting out the writer's strike by catching up on all the TV shows I watch on DVD (bonus: no commercials). Given how little time I have to watch TV, this strike could go on forever and I'd still have shows to catch up on. I recently watched the "Mr. Eko" episode while watching Season 3 of Lost. When Eko was a kid, he refused to confess his sin of stealing food to feed his hungry brother. And, true to form, years later, he still refused to confess his sins. He concludes that he did the best that he could under the circumstances, as if that was enough to justify all the bad things he's done (and he did some pretty bad things).
I haven't trafficked anything illegal, or murdered anyone, and yet I have a very hard time accepting that doing the best we can is good enough. Looking around at people in the court system these days (Robert Pickton comes to mind) I can't help but think there's got to be some standards. I mean, you can't just brutally and coldly murder innocent people and say, "I did the best I could." Where do we draw a line in this sea of moral relativism? Or is that like trying to distinguish the peeing and non-peeing sections of a pool?
The difference between people like myself and Robert Pickton is intention. I always have the intention of doing the right thing, whereas he's a sociopath with no moral compass. I don't know if what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions is true. A Muslim colleague of mine describes asking for forgiveness as being the sincere intent not to do the sin again. It's the sincerity of the intent that counts, not whether or not we actually do the sin again. The problem with intent is that the only being that can judge the sincerity of our intent is thought by some to be a figment of the imagination. And for those people who do believe in this being, judgement comes only at the end of our lives. So where does that leave us? How do we as a society judge those whose intent we can never know?
Maybe the point is that we shouldn't be judging as much as we do. Maybe we shouldn't freak out about every little stupid thing that other people do and even more important, maybe we shouldn't freak out so much about every little stupid thing we do.
"I ask for no forgiveness, Father. For I have not sinned. I have only done what I needed to do to survive. A small boy once asked me if I was a bad man. If I could answer him now I would tell him that when I was a young boy I killed a man to save my brother's life. I am not sorry for this. I am proud of this. I did not ask for the life that I was given, but it was given nonetheless. And with it I did my best." Mr. Eko [Lost]
