How should we live?

How should we live?

Most religions are concerned with this question. Some are more interested in the God question and our relationship with the all mighty. But I’m interested in how we should live, because it seems to me that how we should live is still being questioned.

We have lots of laws, rules, codes of conduct and moral and ethical standards. We have our version of right and wrong. Lots of dusty old books full of other people’s wisdom, who in their time, tackled the same question.

Every nation on Earth has variations on how should we live, and by and by, we disagree, argue and go to war over what should be an easy answer to an easy question. In fact the idea that we don’t know, raises questions. How come we don’t intrinsically know?

Interestingly, once some people have written down the codes of conduct and of law, the question changes to how do we get people to follow how we should live, as we have determined.

I’ve never done a survey of all the world’s laws and codes of conduct, but I wonder if there are a lot of similarities. Things like mercantile practices, how do we conduct ourselves in business, relationships, marriage, religious observance and the love of music and food.

Are we all, very much the same, and why then are we always wanting to get the bottom of that question…”how should we live?” if we are all living very much the same???

As babies, we don’t understand anything. And as we grow, we learn the meanings of things, and we want to start putting all these meanings of things together in a way that makes our life make sense. And it doesn’t work terribly well. Lots of what we know is contradictory.

So the sum total of all that we know just confuses us,  leaving us to ask yet again, “how we should live?”

Paul