Thought cannot achieve a certain ultimate spiritual reality. If such a thing exists, that’s fine, but attempting to find it is futile…. Man seeks happiness and satisfaction…. Man needs security and happiness…. If a tenet provides satisfaction to its believers then it is all right. If it doesn’t, it will evolve with man’s ideas as it is gradually made to fit more and more people…. All systems are relative and any amount of seeking in this matter will only result in confusion for we cannot really know if such things as good and evil exist.
This presents us with a problem: if all this is true, then why follow a moral code?…. We have all been developed. We are the products of heredity and environment, our consciences included. Unfortunately, we cannot escape our conscience. If we oppose it, we set off a system in our body that makes us unhappy (guilty). Obviously, we cannot attain happiness if we continually make ourselves feel unhappy. Thus, through no virtuous or religious motive, but for the sake of self-happiness, it is best to follow the conscience…. The idea of love is very good. It’s great for promoting the progress of the human race; it can probably provide the greatest happiness, and it’s the greatest thing (along with sex) that can happen to a marriage or male-female relationship. That peculiar situation in which one member of a couple is capable of appreciating all in life through his love for the other member is inexplicable…. It is best defined by the word “love”, and demonstrated in the total life between the two individuals and in their individual (note that word) attitude to the rest of the world.
Martin Ahrens 