First Doubts of Convictions

I yam what I yam, that's all I yam. Right? We're supposed to have our beliefs, think them, and be them. Can believing in something be a bad thing? I'm not talking about religion here (well, I am, but...well, I'm talking about everyone that believes in anything, even if that belief doesn't have to do with religion at all). How much conviction is too much?

I was in this staged reading of the play Doubt a few months back, which presents our convictions in a pretty harsh light. Depending on how you interpret it, being confident is either a godsend or a sin. The play presents a pretty sharp dichotomy between beliefs, but never tells you which one to believe. That's part of why it was so successful. You were forced to figure it out for yourself.

These days, it doesn't seem like we want to do that very much.

A few days ago (some of the people reading this were probably there), there was a bit of an explosion in my government class. Some people got yelled at, there was name calling, and at one point I thought there might be some eye-gouging coming on (or at least some quality disembowelment) but thankfully we stopped short of that. And all of this happened because someone (sorry, student teacher, I'm sure it was a pre-assigned lesson) decided to say that one simple little word that causes hordes of men to cry bloody tears of agony and feminist women to rise from their seats and begin burning the items that "reek of the patriarchy":

ABORTION.

Ok, I swear, this is a non-political post. Honestly, I'm not really sure what my view is on the issue, so I'm not even going to get into it. But my point is, people lost their minds over it. The anger built until it just exploded, and little flecks of personal morality were scattered all over the room.

I guess that's part of my point. Morality is a very personal thing. We take it from religion, from our family background, from our own rational thoughts, but it always comes down to what we decide (shut up, atheists, they have not been brainwashed). What we believe is right tends to be...well, what we believe. Almost never will you find someone who has exactly the same beliefs as you. And if you do, it is in your best interest to kill them, before your belief-clone becomes jealous of you and it attempts to take over your life.

And that's the problem with being a moral person--you're never going to be moral to anybody else. "Do the right thing" has no inherent meaning, because there is no real right thing. It's all subjective. You have to add something to it, like "by your parents" or "and don't murder that homeless man", although if your parents abused you or that homeless man stole your cookies, actions that are contrary to those statements could still be moral.

The point of the exercise was to highlight the difficulty of running for public office; there was no answer that would satisfy both sides of the political spectrum, and really there were thousands that would alienate both. But what happened was that the political minefield exploded in our classroom, and many were forced to cower in fear as conflicting beliefs were spread around the room like the feces of a monkey. (I exaggerate. Monkeys don't throw their feces that much. Or do they?)

Even if the room wasn't as bad as I'm making it out to be (cough, cough, it wasn't), we still found ourselves hating each other--even if it was temporarily--because we have had different experiences, lived different lives, learned different things, grown different beliefs. Instead of letting each other draw our own conclusions (or at least attempting to lead the person to that conclusion rationally), we jump at each other, lashing at actions or semantics of phrasing rather than thinking for ourselves. Well, that's dumb.

Can't we all just get along? Fighting is a sin, you know. (...I think).