choices

If one chooses the morally right courses in life one is traveling the right path; if one is making morally wrong choices in life then one is traveling the wrong path. To be indifferent about morality and if things are good or bad, right or wrong and so forth is to live the unexamined life such as Socrates thought was of little value for a human being.

William James (the guy that wrote pragmatist philosophy from Charles Sanders Pierce's pragmaticist philosophy) wrote about forced options as being a situation when one cannot avoid making a choice, and to not make a choice results in certain consequences that happen because one did not make a choice. If a baby is lying in the street and a truck is driving toward it in the dark, and will probably crush it when it arrives in a minute and there is adequate time to safely remove it but you don't-you have made a choice even if it is non-action. Some would say a morally wrong choice was made it not walking out into the street and removing the toddler from the crush of the semi tires (18 wheels) while others would say that morality is superfluous and that nothing matters.

Sin literally means to miss the mark or target as in archery...one is sinning by not traveling the right path in life. In the largest sense the right path is renormalizing unto God, unto The One, from which all things have issued. Wickedness and worldliness want to obscure the light in the darkness-Jesus Christ-who is issued directly from The One, and dominate the world, society and universe for itself.

God is good, and there is a natural law, a natural calling that draws mankind to the right-or as the Buddha said to right speech, right though, right actions-and look what happened to that-it became left-handed Tantric Buddhism as written in the Tibetan book of the dead. Mankind will always find a way to mess things up because none are perfect, none are deserving and all fall short of perfection or as Augustine said the nature of mankind is totally depraved. In a sense Augustine was a neoCalvinist before Calvin in that he relied totally upon the grace of God for salvation from the human condition.

It isn't just that certain authorities have a proper franchise on the right way and the right things for there is corruption in high places the Apostle Paul wrote-evil wickedness and corruption are socially transcendent things and establishments on Earth normally become corrupted over time. The kingdom of Jesus is not of this world-it is a battle of powers and principalities and the interesting thing is that in the cosmogyny of the neo Platonist philosopher Plotinus from the over-lapping second and third centuries the emanation from The One goes through a series of stages and reductions to materialize as this Universe. It is a long way from the Source in a sense.

The wrong way will consistently over value the Universe yet simultaneously under-value the goodness of right moral choices...on making those one must develop a moral conscience and think for oneself reading what one can of aretaic ethics, learning about society and how it functions and understanding the social structures and spirit of each individual too in that it should be actualized and developed toward fulfillment in the morally good so far as possible. Worldly security isn't antipathetic to virtue in pursuit of the good, sublime and beautiful ad knowledge of God, instead it is as element in the compresence of life that presents one with moral choices in social guise.

In the modern world some people would transcend the reality of the phenomenal universe if they could through getting so far into it as possible that it becomes an absurdity for them. Choosing the wrong way in life intentionally is stupid basically-it is stupid like walking in front of a truck just to see if it hurts to get hit by steel moving at 70 m.p.h. One should make the inference from comparable phenomena that the right thing to do is to avoid the maladroit choice a priori. The consequences for making morally wrong choices may not be immediately present yet they do exist and so it is worth doing what is right. If one must pay a price for doing what is right that is better than to simply forfeit any chance of moral correctness by choosing what is wrong and wicked, or evil. There are times when the authorities themselves perpetrate the morally wrong as did the court that convicted Jesus Christ starting a death sentence rolling.

Jesus Christ overcame death and was resurrected-take that as a matter of faith with evidence existing too. Jesus was here to renormalize the lost humanity onto The One. If you happen to read 'The Essential Plotinus' a book with the best of the 54 tractates of Plotinus on The One named 'The Enneads' you can get a rough sketch of where Jesus came from and what this universe is although Plotinus was not a Christian. The One is absolute Spirit yet absolutely perfect-the material world is a sort of phenomenal crust of the Creator that exists with a variegated concatenation of complete and incomplete broken forms-sin and the wrong way are of the process of getting mired into broken forms and a remote universe cut off from God without faith.