the heart of darkness

If you believe that killing is a sin than it doesn't matter who you kill, killing anybody is a sin.  If you are a utilitarian who believes that acts are to be judged by their consequences it would seem like a wrong deed, I am using the term wrong deed because utilitarians don't believe in sin in the sense that a deed is right or wrong just because it is.  But can the errant shooter get a pass because he meant to kill a bad guy?  I think he can.  The world is a busy place with all kinds of shit going on and you never know when somebody is going to jostle your shoulder just as you are pressing the trigger,  We go through the world trying to do good, I think most people, make that almost everybody, thinks they are trying do do good.

Kind of makes you wonder why the world is a better place doesn't it?  Well we have different ideas of what makes a better world/  Uncle Ken likes the worker's paradise and Beagles favors the land of the freeholders.  Neither of us does much about it other than flapping our jaws in the univied halls and going out to the polls, but if we were more active, banging on doors, or doling out our hard-earned cash, I guess we would cancel each other out.  And what exactly is a better world and how complicated to know how to pull it off?  The utilitarian's world is full of doubt,.

But the world of the sinner is pretty simple, just don't sin.  Additionally they can try to keep others from sinning by passing things like prohibition or blue laws.  What makes a better world for them is simply enough, a world without sin.

I guess anybody can decide what is sin and what isn't.  I think the state does, religions do, some philosophies do,  We may not  believe in them, but others do.  I wonder about societies with upper and lower case S's.  There used to be a lot of talk about society.  Society does or says this or that, but as Beagles points out Society is not a monolith.  Now that I think about it, it seems like when everybody was talking about society, it seemed like a bad thing, like society was making you do this or that or judging you, you got the picture of Society like in one of those science fiction depictions of the government of the future with these robed people with goofy hairdos and high foreheads passing down all these laws.

I prefer the world culture, it has an earthier tone, closer to the bone, closer to our DNA, instead of a top down thing like Society it is more or of a bottom up thing.  I think that is where sin comes from, it's not from something we've learned, it's from something inside of us, like in the Heart of Darkness we are nicely-dressed and well-behaved but just beneath it we are savages believing superstitious things, like sin,

I may have gone off the rails again, like a couple weeks ago.  What does Beagles say?  A certain amount of disconnected thinking is not uncommon among those of our age.