Nine Black Poppies

Fair enough, let me attack it in another way then.

I'm sitting here typing this to you right now. Consider all the things that had to happen for this situation to exist. My parents had to meet, fall in love and have me, same with yours, same with the people who created this site and the people who started this thread. Same with the people who designed and built everybody's computers. Same with all of their parents and on and on like that as far back as humanity goes. Plus, the thread starter had to decide to create this thread, both of us had to decide to create accounts here and respond to it. Etc, etc, etc. Not to mention all those meetings were facilitated by other situations (if my dad hadn't decided to transfer schools in 1970, he'd never have met my mom), each of which had thousands of factors that led to that situation. The number of pre-existing situations that created the conditions for me to be sitting here typing this sentence is mind-bogglingly huge and encompasses all of history--there's no point where you're forced to stop tracing back chains of events.

So this brings me to a fate vs coincidence argument--is there some purpose in me sitting here typing this sentence or is it just a random occurrence. I'm suggesting neither/both. On the one hand, I can't claim to know the ultimate purpose of why this is happening and to assume that I'll ever be able to see the end result might be hubristic, but on the other hand it's definitely not random, everything IS fundamentally interconnected.

Okay, so what shapes you as a person? Why do you (or I, or anyone) hold the ideas you have? Probably a combination of nature and nurture, right?

What I was just talking about plays into the nurture side of things--you've developed an identity by internalizing and reacting to situations you've been presented with in your lifetime. But everything that you've reacted to, everything you've been told and every decision you've made has been likewise informed by a cumulative history of every decision everyone's ever made. And likewise, the decisions you've made have affected others in a similar way.

But it's not just the nurture side of things it plays into--nature is affected as well. The makeup of physical reality plays a part in how we react to different stimuli (this seems fairly obvious), but it works the other way too--physical reality can also be subject to perception and observation (psychosomatic medicine, the observer effect, the Heisenberg principle, etc). So not only has the natural world--both in terms of your internal biology and external stimuli--also helped shape your thoughts, emotions and decisions as a person, but those same thoughts, emotions and decisions have potentially conversely affected the natural world in ways we're only beginning to understand.

What you end up, if you follow this line of thinking, is this idea that everything that exists is sort of mutually dependent, but also moving forward along the axis of time (actually there's a tangent I could get into about that but I won't).

So now that we have this complex system, let's introduce morality into the equation. How do you define good? Maybe there isn't a universal definition, but if you had to suggest one, what would it be?

What I'm suggesting here is that the idea of good is self-perpetuating. Like you cited a desire to help others, at the heart of which is treating others with respect, working to create equality. What's valuable about treating others with equality? There's the idea that everyone is important, everyone is necessary, noting is extraneous. That suggests an awareness and deference to this idea that everything is interconnected.

Likewise, evil. Take something generally agreed to be evil, like killing another person. Killing is a selfish act--it's saying that your will (whatever your motivations for killing are) is more important than any potential contribution this person could make to the universe around us. A killer might make an argument that the act of killing is inherently part of this system--that they're merely acting out their role, but that's fallacious. Killing requires action, action requires will--that's why I can't call what I'm talking about strictly determinism [it's bigger than that], because will plays an important role.

Acts of both good and evil affect not only the world around you but yourself as well (I'll address this when I answer Zaqarbal in a sec), again because of this idea of interconnectivity.

So you have this system of cause and effect in which everything--morality included--exists. What is it? Well, for one, it encompasses everything, there's nowhere one can escape it because existence itself is its makeup. So it's omnipresent. Likewise, it includes everything that could possibly occur, again because existence itself is its makeup, which is tantamount to saying there's nothing it can't do. So it's omnipotent. And if nothing exists outside of it, then there is no information it doesn't contain. So it's omniscient.

What do you call something that's omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent if not god?

__________________
Like carnivores to carnal pleasures, so were we to desperate measures...