Guilty or Not

Hello again Folks.  I have been out of town enjoying some down time with my friends in the Sabian Assembly.  When I got back, I felt guilty about not writing something up in my Blog.  So as I sat down to correct that and I reflected on the idea of Guilt or Guiltiness as the case may be.  Where did that idea come from?  Is it born in us or did we invent that concept perhaps to flagellate ourselves to better effort(whatever that may be).   So I did some research.

The dictionary definition which was traditional  sent me to the Bible and Numbers, chapter 5.  And here there was the old idea of sin being a missing of the mark or a deviation from some standard.  Moses was to instruct the priests who in turn elaborately laid the guilt on the sinner and extracted a material penalty from the sinner.  Which incidentally became the property of the priest since after all, God could have nothing to do with material things.

Next I asked myself... is there any survival value to something like a sense of guilt?  Because if there were survival value then the sense of guilt would be innate and it would have evolved over the millenia.  But guilt, unlike fear, did not seem to have survival value.  So I had to conclude that guilt represented a survival value only to the community and not necessarily to the individual.  For example.  If I stole something from some other man, or woman for that matter, it would give me pleasure or satisfaction of some sort.  However, it would cause a sense of loss in the other person.  Soooo the sense of guilt and the state of guiltiness appears to be a man-made concept to protect man's property.

While I had my nose in the Bible, I looked at the  Ten Commandments as a whole.  And I thought I saw a pattern.  It appears that the first five commandments describe the existence and omnipetence of God and the second five describe the respect for man's property.  In biblical times property consisted of a man's women, his children, his animals, his tents wagons and other equipment.

Curiously enough, in today's lexicon this concept extends to women, children, animals, the environment and the like.  In other words a respect for the personality of all living things.