unscriptured

Posted in unscriptured, by Toby T, Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 12:01 am.

When you look at species they tend to live in fairly standard ways. Lions live in small groups, as do many other species from cockroaches to whales to kangaroos. Birds are famous for living in flocks, fish for schools. Ants live in colonies, bees in hives. Bison in herds. Wolves and bears tend to be loners. But unlike these other species, people naturally seem to gravitate to an incredible variety of living situations.

There are people that spend most of their time alone. There are people that live with their spouse for the vast majority of their lives, some of them with small circles of friends, some with vast networks of friends, acquaintances and family. There are people that live together communally, some for economic reasons, some for religious reasons, some for experiments in new definitions of family, and doubtless some for reasons of which I have no idea. We band together in tribes. We group together in towns, cities, and nations, of various densities.

Are we just confused? Out of touch with our instincts? What?

So I discussed it with God. She told me that it came back to the issue of free will. If we had instincts so strong that we had to either follow them or exist in an eternal internal state of self-conflict, it wouldn’t really give us much in the way of free will.

But what about the compulsion for reproduction? The need to eat? The agony of loneliness that so many feel?

She told me that there have to be some rules. Without some constraints there couldn’t be free will any more than there could be if everything was constrained. Without some rules we could never tell the difference between an exercise of free will and just random movement.