12 Rules for Life (Full) ENGLISH

things—even that we need them. That’s human nature. We share the
experience of hunger, loneliness, thirst, sexual desire, aggression, fear and
pain. Such things are elements of Being—primordial, axiomatic elements of
Being. But we must sort and organize these primordial desires, because the
world is a complex and obstinately real place. We can’t just get the one
particular thing we especially just want now, along with everything else we
usually want, because our desires can produce conflict with our other desires,
as well as with other people, and with the world. Thus, we must become
conscious of our desires, and articulate them, and prioritize them, and arrange
them into hierarchies. That makes them sophisticated. That makes them work
with each other, and with the desires of other people, and with the world. It is
in that manner that our desires elevate themselves. It is in that manner that
they organize themselves into values and become moral. Our values, our
morality—they are indicators of our sophistication.
The philosophical study of morality—of right and wrong—is ethics. Such
study can render us more sophisticated in our choices. Even older and deeper
than ethics, however, is religion. Religion concerns itself not with (mere)
right and wrong but with good and evil themselves—with the archetypes of
right and wrong. Religion concerns itself with domain of value, ultimate
value. That is not the scientific domain. It’s not the territory of empirical
description. The people who wrote and edited the Bible, for example, weren’t
scientists. They couldn’t have been scientists, even if they had wanted to be.
The viewpoints, methods and practices of science hadn’t been formulated
when the Bible was written.
Religion is instead about proper behaviour. It’s about what Plato called
“the Good.” A genuine religious acolyte isn’t trying to formulate accurate
ideas about the objective nature of the world (although he may be trying to do
that to). He’s striving, instead, to be a “good person.” It may be the case that
to him “good” means nothing but “obedient”—even blindly obedient. Hence
the classic liberal Western enlightenment objection to religious belief:
obedience is not enough. But it’s at least a start (and we have forgotten this):
You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and
untutored. You will not know what to target, and you won’t fly straight, even
if you somehow get your aim right. And then you will conclude, “There is
nothing to aim for.” And then you will be lost.
It is therefore necessary and desirable for religions to have a dogmatic