In contract law, they teach us, that withholding vital information needed to judge the terms of a contract makes the contract voidable.  You all know, from having watched way too many court dramas, that withholding a material fact can completely change the story, and thus the judgment of the jury or the judge.  Too many secrets can make people commit atrocities, simply because they didn’t know.  It seems that while not knowing the law is not an excuse, not knowing the facts because they have been deliberately concealed, is very much an excuse.

Thus, we come to morality.  People who know more about the story of the planet tend to have different morality structures than those who don’t know as much.  Let’s face it, though, trudging through life as a smart person feels like a hangover.  It honestly feels as though I “should” know more to the story than I do.  Piecing together the puzzle pieces, and looking at all of the myths and the science, knowing that parts were deliberately kept from me, is demoralizing.  I use the word demoralizing in a different sense there; it means that it breaks down the morality I was indoctrinated as a child.  Oh sure, we all were.  Don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t cheat, obey the law, don’t lie, don’t run stop lights.  This basic morality is taught because it must be, because it works, and because it has stood the test of time through aeons of trial and error.

As you grow in power and influence, your morality changes.  Cthulhu’s all-powerful morality is so very different from the one children are taught.  Odin kills the frost giants, and yet he lets the fairies and the dwarves live.  Voltaire knocks a hole in a fishing boat which was ferrying them across the lake, because boats with holes are not taxed and boats without holes are.  Voltaire goes and kills an innocent child, explaining that the child was going to grow up and become a genocidal monster.  How much different from Voltaire’s morality is Haephestus’s?  How much different from Haephestus’s morality is Hera’s or Zeus’s?  They would let the genocidal monster child live, and wipe out all of the non-believers in the next nation over.  They would create ebola, the flu, childhood bone cancer, and all of the sexually transmitted diseases to afflict innocent newborn babies with.  When they said that “God’s ways are not our ways”, they were absolutely right.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Actually, if I remember the story correctly, absolute knowledge of good and evil corrupts absolutely.  Do you really think that I know right from wrong?  Do babies know it?  Of course they don’t.  That’s why we have to teach them right from wrong, and what we teach them is very crude.  As an adult, you know very well that there are times to kill, and times to lie, and times to steal.  The Jewish morality allows all of those to be broken to save a life.  Prosperity Gospel Christianity allows all of those to be broken to make a profit, pumping oil from the ground and destroying ecosystems worldwide to do it, stealing clean water and dumping fracking chemicals and cancer-causing chemicals into it.  It seems the entire pantheon of gods throughout the world allow this.  They allow rape to go on, allowing the entire police force to look the other way when several of their own engage in violence of various types within their homes or on the streets.  Surely you can forgive the atheists for thinking that there are no gods when they never witness gods interfering for the benefit of mankind as a whole.

Humans are pretty bad at foretelling the future.  Oh, granted, far better than chance at the general outlines and probabilities, but the specific details?  Not so much.  We can’t even tell the past, because so very much of it has been kept from us.  We can’t tell even the future, because there is way too much privacy at all levels.  How are we supposed to be held morally accountable for our actions when we don’t know 90% of the story?  Unless we know every material fact, we can’t be held morally responsible for what we do.  We know not what we do.  I would go further, and say, from a gnostic point of view, even if we did know, there is nothing we could do to change the story of the planet.  We are powerless over humanity’s oil addiction.  Even the .01% are powerless over humanity’s oil addiction.  According to leadership boundary theory, if I am powerless over a thing, it is not my problem, and I instead focus my energies upon the problems which I do have power to create and/or destroy with.

Too Many Secrets.  Here we are with access to much more knowledge and information than ever before, than even the kings of old had at their fingertips in their vast libraries of records and messengers and spies.  We still can’t make good moral decisions about where we want the planet to go.  We CAN, however, affect the local scene quite a bit.  Anything within walking distance, you have much more local knowledge than any national level bureaucrat ever will, or could.  That is always the way of things, even in the forest between the vast fungi networks interlinking the trees and shuttling nutrients to and fro.  If you were to decide to kill all the psychopaths and rapists in your local area, or to throw them out, I simply don’t have the information available to judge your decision with.  And why should I bother to judge you anyway?  If you want to bottle feed or breast feed, it really isn’t any of my business.  If you abort babies, it is not my business.  I honestly have enough moral decisions without sufficient information as it is.