John helps me seemingly without any benefit to himself.
SUGGESTION 1 - he is being altruistic ie selfless.
SUGGESTION 2 - he is seeking something out of it unknown to me ie egoism.
What if the me is God?
I must now ask if religious devotion is egoism that hides its true face?
We need some way to help us see.
The hypothetical shows what is inside us, what we think. It is not a mere thought experiment. It is a good test for what is really inside of us. Are we really as principled and caring as we wish people to think? Impossible moral scenarios show what we really think of ourselves, animals, other people and morality. They show it best. By living in the real world and moralising and so on, we have a level of cover. What we really are is not necessarily plain. We hide behind our alleged altruism and our sense of justice and so on. We may bring in ideas of God and praying as if there is not enough hiding going on as it is.
The trolley dilemma is a good test. Not only can it happen, but even if it could not, it still reveals us to ourselves
It goes as follows.
Do you push one person onto a track to derail the trolley that you know will agonisingly kill a hundred if allowed to proceed? The person will die so it is one life against many.
Part of the dilemma is how we feel, "One life matters as much as many. It is not for us to weigh." That cannot be proven so it is about feelings more than anything. It is too serious to be so dependent on a feeling.
To commit a necessary evil, is attempting to curtail an evil. If we try to control evil, we do not convince for evil by definition does not tolerate being controlled. And to quarantine it is to say, "We are okay with evil as long as we put that wall around it." We have evil inside of us.
The trolley dilemma doesn’t just ask who you’d save—it exposes how little we really value life itself. And the quality of life of other people. Many who say they value life would force you to live in misery. For example, they will deny you painkillers that will shorten your life no matter how much you scream.
We say one life is as precious as a hundred. But we are sacrificing many for one. We are saying that the quality of the lost lives does not matter. Our concern for the one life is thin. It is moral posturing rather than real concern. Religion says the pushing is murder.
We are treating the person we push as means to an end. To think of people that way, is denying what they are. It calls them mere things.
Either way, despite the good results, you exhibit cruelty. It is a fact that we do routinely fight evil with evil. Human nature does not really oppose harm and malice but only the forms that it does not like at any particular time.
The problem also uncovers a universal hypocrisy: when we claim “we don’t play God,” we’re really just choosing which version of God suits our values. In that moment, we’re not obeying any divine law but placing ourselves on the throne, deciding who lives or dies based on our own preferences.
In reality, life is one big, messy trolley problem. Our so-called morality is often just the desperate act of wanting to believe we’re good, rather than truly being good.
The trolley problem uncovers us. It is proof of mild psychological egoism. The human being only acts if on some level there is perceived to be a personal benefit. Moral satisfaction is one such benefit. You want to approve of yourself and for maybe God to approve. By the way, if we are like that we are like that. Why do we have to make it worse by saying we do things for God and not ourselves, because we love him?
Please note that if morality is unclear in big issues and nobody can help us with that then is it morality? Isn't morality supposed to be practical? If we are trying to conjure morality into existence, we are looking for a psychological benefit. We cannot claim to be selfless or altruists. We are egoists.
I am firmly in the Hobbes and Nietzsche camp! We all are, only we need to see it.
What we have found, shows that we should not rush to applaud:
Prayers.
People joining the priesthood or some other religious caste.
Popes.
Saviours who rise from the dead - supposedly.
Spells.
Theologians.
Prolife believers.
Those who proclaim holy books to be from God.
These are distractions from the real God, oneself. They are good covers.
Do not play along. It is especially terrible when the holy book is riddled with divinely-instigated violence. When somebody is said to go on a cross to do the dirty work of atonement for you. When you are forgiven, in an instant by God as if the harm you did does not count. And when the religion you are in has done more bloodletting than some alternative. When you ignore how there is a lot of sin and disobedience in your religious society, despite it saying it offers prayers and sacraments to help treat the bad side of people. When if the doctrine of going to Hell forever could make sense, the one saying it is true could be saying it out of mere glee. When a faith tells you to put God in your baby by getting it baptised to help it grow up to be good and godly.
Is what we have learned relevant to our scepticism, to our sensing that no miracle or paranormal event is convincing?
Yes. God doing a healing for say Ann, making her cancer vanish, instead of feeding starving children in Africa is not a good example for the likes of us. We are creatures that favour some at the expense of others.
We may like him for being this bad role model for it makes us feel less bad about our own problematic behaviour.
Or it may be more than that. It may be literally because we are glad to see the neglect. Perhaps we think because we know Ann and like her that she matters if the children do not.
Anyway, there are many healing reports like that going about. None of them is likely to be a real miracle especially when the religious say, "God has used an exceptional method to help and is doing it to let us know he is with us and that we must turn in love to him and each other." We are more interested in the sense of magic, the wonder, the buzz, than in how the children are still starving. Maybe it is better to say we want something for our spirit, we are spiritual consumers. Whatever that means, it is concerning. We spend money on running to apparition sites for that matters more than feeding the victims who needed a miracle and didn't get one.
A decent God should worry if we focus on Mary's apparition at Lourdes, when he supposedly sent Jesus' mother there to campaign for the rosary instead of for the starving in Africa. Whether he was right or wrong is not the point, right now. We should think she should have spoken out. We should think she should have went to Africa to make the crops grow. Her not doing it should surely mean we should be doing it instead of going to her shrine. So what did God send her for when it led to a shrine? None of it adds up.
We already have wonders in nature so we are going about looking for religious and spiritual ones. For example, countless centuries ago, viruses were captured by organisms. They became mitochondria. Mitochondria work very independently and energise each cell in your body. They show signs of rudimentary consciousness. Just grow up. Most of our ancestors in the caves did not carry on like us. They had plenty of wonders without religion. At some stage there was no evidence of spiritual interest at all. There is a problem with our perspective. Religion capitalises on our poor sense of focus, on our immature priorities It is unwise to run after spiritual thrills and narratives.