What?!?!

I’m not one to attack religious beliefs if someone isn’t trying to stuff them down my throat, either at my door on a Sunday morning or by attempts to seize power through the Commonwealth. Still this one, if true, really requires some serious criticism. This is what can happen if you let supernaturalism co-opt your moral decision making.

“A man in southern India has married a female dog in a traditional Hindu ceremony in a bid to atone for stoning two dogs to death, a newspaper reported on Tuesday.”

(AP, 2007)

Repeat after me. “Whaaaaat?!?!”

I mean, the marriage to the dog is flat out bizarre, but things often seem bizarre to outsiders. I’m assuming that the marriage won’t be consummated, so I won’t criticise the marriage itself on moral grounds. The marriage itself, based on what has been said, seems like a pet registration with ceremony.

The guy (P. Selvakumar) stoned two dogs to death and then blames his ailments on his misdeed. Maybe it’s psychosomatic, maybe not.

Stoning the dogs was apparently immoral because the spirits (or whatever supernatural force) deigned fit to cause him personal detriment. What if he didn’t develop health complaints? The apparent motivation for this marriage was his ailment, for which he sort out help from an astrologer.

You can see how supernaturalism has facilitated a kind of defacto moral egoism in this scenario.Imagine this in the news; “Man drives truck through preschool killing 11 and is given a clean bill of health, so all is well. Later stated that his self-interest has been served well. He was initially worried that he’d have to serve a prison sentence because he is prone to headaches in such instances.”.

I don’t have a Rolex. I suffer from Rolex-deficiency. Perhaps I’ll ask a Tarot reader to tell me how to arbitrarily appease the spirits for my wrong doing, and my personal fortune will increase! Maybe they will tell me to serenade a teapot.

The arbitrary nature of the penance should worry people as well. Personally, I like my penances to be utilitarian and relevant. Cause X amount of harm? Then you have to alleviate a net amount of harm equal to X. But what happens when the penance doesn’t logically follow the crime?

Why not go to a psychic faire and get a moral reading? “I annexed Poland and was a little unkind to Jews, homosexuals, the disabled and burned art to get back at those art teachers who failed me. What? All I have to do is rent a holiday cottage on the coast with an octopus each winter solstice for the rest of my life? Sweet!”

Of course, the dubious nature of the egoism in these examples aside, such ambiguity, the absence of a requirement for a reasoned link between transgression X and consequence Y, essentially allows you to hand out any penance for any crime. It’s not only marrying dogs and entering into real estate deals with cephalopods that pass the benchmark when reason doesn’t matter. “Kill member X of outgroup Y” makes it past as well, as does “empty the contents of your savings account into my wallet”.

Thank Dog we are only talking about canine marriage. Still, it’s a pity the guy wasn’t properly made to make amends for cruelty to animals. Selvakumar should perhaps spend the rest of his life laboring in a dog shelter for his cruelty. At least until he realises that it’s not about his best interests, it’s about the dog’s suffering.

~ Bruce