When religion and morality fail... who ya gonna call?

[J. Stew]

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Unfortunately, both morality and religion rely on faith.

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Not necessarily. It doesn't take faith to confront your own fears and desires. It takes a certain will and a certain mental quietness so as to clearly see how your fears and desires affect/drive you. This is the same mind as the 'religious' mind and I don't see too much conflict between logic and a clear, quiet, determined mind. I think logic actually comes from a clear, quiet, determined mind. I think the conflict occurs when people think they aren't supposed to think in order to be religious. They think because they read about giving up this and that, that they have to give up their ability to reason which is a misinterpretation. Dogen, a Zen guy, said 'think non-thinking'. Think non-thinking, the mind still pays attention to every detail, analyzes everything, but in the midst of noticing how the mind discriminates from moment to moment, the mind is transcended. Transcend is go beyond, but include. So the mind and it's usefullness to rationalize and lay stuff out in a concrete way isn't forgotten, it is transcended, understood for what it is, and then used as a tool rather than a prison.

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What then is our answer? Where do we turn to for decisions on how to act?

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So it's the self-reliance thing, shine the light inward, be yourself, understand your own relation to everything including yourself to yourself and the answers unfold in the process, that's the kicker, the answers can never be from some standardized system, they can only come spontaneously because to depend on some system is to become stale and outdated. That doesn't mean we can't learn from the past, to forget what we've learned would be irresponsible. The difficulty is that to find the answers, we have to forget ourselves in the present while still using all our mental faculties, to know while at the same time forgetting. Doing that is the art of thinking non-thinking, which is in a way, a non-doing, it's the paradox. My .02 - Stew