GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
279. Can You Ever Do the Right Thing? Moral Ambiguity | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue
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What if doing the “right thing” isn’t always right?
In this episode of Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, a deceptively simple question opens into one of the most difficult problems in moral philosophy: moral ambiguity.
Can we ever act with complete moral certainty, or is every meaningful choice marked by tension, compromise, and consequence?
Drawing from God: An Autobiography and real-world experience, Jerry lays out three common ways people try to escape this burden: rigid moral rules, the pursuit of moral purity, and the attempt to rise “beyond good and evil.”
Together, Jerry and Abigail examine why each approach ultimately fails, and what it means to live honestly within the complexity of real life.
Through powerful examples, from the story of Krishna and the Mahabharata to whistleblowers, personal relationships, and philosophical debates from Kant to Aristotle, this conversation moves beyond abstract ethics into lived decision-making.
When truth causes harm, when lies may protect, and when action always carries a cost, how do we choose? This episode challenges the idea that morality is about staying pure or being right. Instead, it asks whether the real task is something harder: learning to navigate ambiguity with discernment, responsibility, and courage.
If you’ve ever struggled with a decision that had no clear answer, listen to this conversation; it will stay with you!
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
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Scott Langdon
[ 00:00:17,229 ]This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast — a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered — in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:00:58,299 ]Episode two seventy nine. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:01:13,559 ]I'm your host, Scott Langdon. I'm thrilled this week to bring you the latest edition of our ongoing series, Jerry and Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue. With our country presently at war, the question of moral ambiguity has come to the front and center and is impossible to ignore. Moral ambiguity shows up in situations where what is considered a correct or right action isn't the best action. And the best action, if taken, often comes with a consequence of suffering. How can we navigate this? Can we learn to live without this conflict? Or is that very struggle part of the point of this life? Here's Jerry to get the conversation started. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:09,339 ]Well, hi sweetheart. Thank you for joining me for another intimate dialogue. And last time, the last episode, I talked about, I think it's chapter forty-two of the book that I was focusing on, of God: An Autobiography of the book. I think I was focused on it because well, the US is at war and we've assassinated one of the most evil people in the world, fanatical murderous killer.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:41,519 ]But I was feeling the heaviness of that because life is so precious. Any life you take. I certainly would have assassinated Hitler had I been there, had the opportunity, knew what he was up to and so on. Nevertheless, in the taking of a life, I felt there's a kind of weight. It's not a just nothing action like putting a letter in the mailbox. It has a weight to it. And one of the things God tells me that's reported in or around that chapter is the moral life is ambiguous.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:20,529 ]Well, that's a disconcerting thought. You would like to just do right things and they'd be right. It's illustrated and this is told in the book by the story of Yudhishthira, or whom I call Yudi for short, in the Hindu epic Mahabharata.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:39,389 ]And Yudi is in the battle of good against evil, the big climactic cosmic battle. And the good guy's gonna lose unless Yudi tells a lie, but Yudi is like George Washington but more extreme. He's a very saintly figure.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:02,109 ]And they have to talk to him, Krishna has to intervene to convince him, because he keeps saying no I can't lie, I can't lie, I can't lie, that's the wrong thing. No, you have to lie. And as I pray about this, God tells me lying is the only way to prevent evil in this case. So what is morally imperfect, God tells me, what is morally imperfect is morally required.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:37,559 ]And in fact, but another... so Yudi does it, saves the day. But Yudi had been so, so sublimely perfect that until this point in the epic, his wheels of his chariot never quite touched the ground. He would just sort of glide across the landscape.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:58,599 ]Now having lied, they sink to the ground.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:03,959 ]And praying about that, God tells me when you commit a moral imperfection, it is important that you are left somewhat compromised. And it is important to know that also.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:05:22,909 ]Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:24,009 ]So there's something like a moral cost even to doing the right thing often. Because of these ambiguities, human beings find this very hard to bear. You kind of want to not be committing actions, you want your actions to stand any test, to not having done anything that someone can catch you out on, say, oh look what you did, you lied.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:49,689 ]You did this, you did that, and there are three ways I looked at in the last episode, didn't pray about this, was just me thinking about all this in the current context that since human beings find this ambiguity hard to bear, there are three three escapes that have been tried. The first is rigid moral rules. You can take and Kant does this and even the Ten Commandments start off with thou shalt not kill, even though a lot of killing then happens immediately after.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:23,839 ] But Kant doesn't seem to not, if at least on a casual reading, not to even allow white lies. You just can't tell a lie because they contradict reason in some vastly universal way, or self-contradictory. The liar has to believe in the institution of truth-telling or the lie wouldn't work. And so he's like contradicting himself. So you can't tell a lie, you can't do anything. But the rules are absolute, just stick with those rules and you'll have the morally perfect life.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:56,859 ]Another escape is what Hegel diagnoses, he doesn't advocate it, as the beautiful soul who will, you might say, not let her hands get dirty. Who will, he or she, this is what Jung is trying to protect their own pristine goodness regardless of what's happening, regardless of the requirements of action.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:26,139 ]And maybe I'll just stop there. I have a third in mind, but just see what you really think about this kind of problematic that I'm putting forward, this, you might say, problematic of moral ambiguity, and efforts to escape it.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:07:44,099 ]It's terribly interesting in the human drama. In my own life, I seem to have learned slowly not to look for purity, that, it's a refusal of the ambiguities, the rough edges, the dirt catcher, sweep of actual bona fide human experience, to begin with, like perhaps many young people, I very much wanted to be pure. That was an ideal.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:08:45,049 ]It felt to me like, well, as it feels to Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata, like a wonderful escape from the human condition and whatever challenges being that were sort of needing to be faced as the child of my complicated parents, one way around facing those challenges or figuring them out or boring on through would be purity. So I definitely wanted that. I was fascinated by any story of a saint.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:09:43,559 ]Christian Saint or the latter days of Tolstoy when he got all busy with purity and characters like Thoreau who wouldn't dirty their hands with paying taxes because that went toward a government that was interconnected with the South and its system of slavery.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:10:15,349 ]And of course Gandhi, seemed to me, eminently worth emulating. So, really if you wanted to fool me and lead me down any garden path, the thing to hold out that I would go sniffing after was the prospect of purity and and it's funny because it it took a while and I it would be interesting to sort of clock the stages of my…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:02,139 ] What were the stages? Why didn't that project quite work?
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:11:06,039 ]Well, I was very slow to give it up. I'd keep taking it up in one form or another. I wanted to get out of this world. I wanted to get airborne. I wanted to get above it. And because life is very complicated.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:29,519 ]This is reminding me of something William James talks about in Varieties of Religious Experience, or maybe a subsequent essay, he's talking about some kind of purist attitude maybe in the political order and just thinks it's ridiculous because it can't possibly work. It's just kind of a one of the utopian, not connected to reality sort of visions of purity. But then he comments, the world would be a worse place if there weren't some of these folks around. They sort of remind us of these standards of purity. I don't know, you could say make that case for Thoreau, for example, that well, you don't want there not to have been a Thoreau.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:12:24,189 ]It's pointed out, well, let me see… I don't want to get the purity quest mixed up with the Kantian quest, though they have something in common: don't do anything that's just ad hoc, that's just for this situation and not for any other. Rather, make any action motivated by what you could universalize as a law for all mankind. And of course, well Hegel, who's a shrewd student, notes that you could universalize murder and that would be a consistent position to take, perhaps if you didn't exempt yourself. And then, some century and a half later, we see Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, the man who got the work done of killing six million Jews.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:13:37,029 ]He denominates himself a Kantian. He won't do anything that can't be universalized. I'm not sure how he worked that out. Hannah Arendt, who was a philosophic recorder of the Eichmann trial, argued that he had misunderstood Kant.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:14:04,809 ]Maybe yes, maybe no. Anybody can be misunderstood, but I think he understood Kant about as well as she understood Kant. I married husband number one was a Kantian. It's very hard to give these things up. And I was very attracted to his moral intransigence and finally, noticed that it was a good way to torment a person, be a Kantian for them, but, make exceptions for yourself. That seems to be the way it works out in practice. Eichmann of course didn't commit suicide, he was busy inflicting universal murder on one class of people, the Jews.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:14:59,739 ] So Kantians do seem to find a clause in their universalism that can exempt themselves when need be. Anyway, it's not a reliable formula for doing the right thing. And as for a beautiful soul, hmm.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:23,989 ]Say a little more about what that phenomenon is, what that life strategy of the beautiful soul is.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:15:30,749 ]You want purity. You so much want purity. Life is full of nasty things that stick to you, maybe they're in your own mind, maybe they're in the world around you, maybe they're in the sort of context of ordinary cynicism that allows the wheels of life, the traffic of life to run. You want to get above it.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:16:06,259 ] You want to not be like those middle-aged grown-ups who look like the embodiment of disappointment with themselves.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:16:20,819 ] You want to live so that you won't be disappointed in yourself. And what better way to try to do this than to be as pure as the driven snow, to be not guilty. You name the guilt possibilities, you want to be able to check the box that says not guilty. If you want anything, I suppose any child who's been raised in a house where you hear moral terminology and that's a way of giving you very bad marks in life, and for some reason, since Adam and Eve, people are very easily nailed and reduced to quivering blobs of protoplasm if you can convince them that they're guilty.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:17:28,799 ]You don't need to tie them up, you don't need to shoot them. You can just condemn them morally and you put them out of play. You've reduced the competition, and of course, for that reason, people distrust moral language because it can be used for the purpose of controlling and dominating people, and it's a very usable tool, especially if you've got in your sights some idealists, somebody who sincerely wants to be upright and true and moral and pure, and exempt from condemnation.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:18:20,209 ]So, the pure soul effort certainly leaves you exposed to feeling defeated and being easily accused of impurity by others who spot your defining weakness.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:49,909 ]Yeah. Well, so a way to avoid that, the beautiful soul strategy, is to not confront morally ambiguous situations, not confront evil situations. Because if you start confronting them and like Yudi, pretty soon you're called upon to do something impure or let the predator, let's call him, get away with it. I keep thinking, why is it that you can't just be pure? You'd think that would be possible, wouldn't it? Because it seems all internal. But it's not all internal. We live in the world. And I often just use terrain as a metaphor. We live in a kind of rough world. We don't just glide along straight lines. And we don't do that with one another. We're not stick figures.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:48,799 ] You can't just make us all fit perfectly like figures that you might put into some ideal little jigsaw puzzle where we all just have our spot. No, we interact all the way in messy ways, in ways that are very rough, uneven, and pursuing different goals, having different needs, different interests, and yet you might say all can be reasonably moral and still have intense conflict.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:20,439 ]And so you gotta, in part you gotta stand for yourself, but you also have to stand for other institutions, your family, your community, an institution. We met defending Brooklyn College, the quality of the college. We want the institutions we live in to live up to their ideals. And so we may have to go push and pull and fight for that. And anytime you get in these messy situations, some of the things you're doing might be oops, white lies at least, and maybe worse than that. Pushing people in whatever way, 'cause if they're in the way of achieving some value that you feel called upon to stand up for, then, well, there's going to be a rough and tumble like boys playing in the schoolyard and they maybe they're just playing, pretty soon the shoving ends up in fisticuffs and so on. And a lot of social life is kind of like that.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:21:29,629 ]Yeah, if I think of the fight by which in the course of which you and I met to save the core curriculum at Brooklyn College, I needed to get information about who was planning what. And I don't remember the particulars now. Maybe there's been a sort of moral anesthesia that's helped me not remember. But I do know that at some points along the pathway of that fight, I had to get information that I was not formally entitled to have.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:22:16,069 ]Okay.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:22:17,519 ]And, I don't recall exactly. People had to tell me things off the record that they were not formally entitled to tell me, and so on. You can't just do everything that you would do in public if you're in a fight.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:22:45,329 ]Think of the whistleblower phenomenon. The whistleblowers are usually violating something. They're finding there's some horrible stuff going on, they have access to, they have the documents, and so they put them out there. Back in what were they? They were called the Pentagon Papers back during the Vietnam years that you and I lived through. But there's always something like that where someone inside an institution, often government, but not necessarily, it can be a corporation or whatever, where something suspicious is going on and a person feels even though it's disloyal to their organization and may even violate pledges and oaths and contracts. They release the information. They get it to the public 'cause the public somehow needs to know. And that's one of those moral ambiguities because they've done several wrong things in the course of doing something they felt was morally necessary.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:23:44,489 ] As I am thinking about this, this is one reason Aristotle's ethics is more applicable to real life than Kant's. Kant has one metric by which every choice in life should be measured. For Aristotle, there are a whole medley of virtues, but you have to ask yourself, what's the real situation I'm confronting, and what's the virtue that's applicable to this situation. Is it courage? Is it tact? Is it piety? Is it self-respect? There are just a medley of virtues. He probably hasn't listed every single one. Truthfulness or subtlety, which is it that's wanted here?
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:24:53,259 ]And that judgment of the fluidities of life, the changing, it's not kaleidoscopic, but it is changing, it is subtle, and it's seldom universalizable. It doesn't mean it's relativistic, it doesn't mean anybody's sense of right and wrong is as good as anybody else's. There really is a best course of action in a champ de bataille, in a field of action.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:25:30,199 ]There is a too much and too little and just right. The action that hits the target, but the action, that action target hitting, may violate some other set of requirements that would be perfectly adequate for some other situation.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:25:54,959 ]So there's a moral appropriateness that's almost akin to, well, it's not the same thing, but one can compare it to aesthetic appropriateness. Suppose you're doing a painting and there's a beautiful color on your palette, turquoise, let us say, but turquoise doesn't go in this landscape.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:26:30,969 ]Some other, maybe a muddy green goes to perfection in this landscape because it'll bring out the blue of the sky or, it'll do some work that a color beautiful in itself can't get done. So there's a fineness. It's not only that in some situations, for example, you're getting false papers for a refugee who can't allow it to be known that this family is Jewish.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:27:10,889 ]So you give them Catholic names and you hand out some crosses for them to wear, and that's a lie, but it's the right thing to do. So, sometimes, depending on the situation, a lie is better than the truth.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:27:36,179 ]Yeah, the truth would be a little ridiculous in such a case. Hey folks, arrest this guy, this my brother because he's Jewish. I'm Jewish, he's Jewish. And you don't let Jews in here or out of here, it made it more likely, truthfulness is simply morally wrong in that situation. And the Kantian rigidities are damaging, humanly damaging, and obtuse. They simply can't be a good fit for the subtleties, the fluidities of the real situation.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:28:26,429 ]And the world itself seems kind of ambiguous or at least the example that's coming to my mind that I don't know if anyone has an exact answer to or how to go about answering it in an individual case your friend is cheating on his wife with so and so. Do you tell the wife? Do you tell? What do you do with anything? Is it any of your business?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:29:01,059 ]But yikes, the wife is making plans, maybe making plans to give the cheater her estate, or in some form or other, her trust fund. And oh, you're going to let her do that without knowing? On the other hand, I've seen dramas where the person does tell the wife, your husband's cheating, she's known all along and they just live with it. And she's accommodated, it keeps him happy that he's got a filly on the side.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:29:40,139 ]And why are you intervening, interfering? And now that you berate the guy and so on, now it's out in the open, we can't just let it slide by. And so you've created a big problem that we don't know how now to get past. So anyway, these things, I guess the world seems complex. It doesn't have straight lines as I was saying before. And it's as though, you'd like the puzzle pieces to all fit neatly, but they don't. They're little organic puzzle pieces for one thing, they're not cardboard cutouts.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:30:17,729 ]They're living organic things with their own intentions, purposes, feelings, et cetera, enmeshed in their own environments, family, et cetera, et cetera. And it's all very messy and hard to even discern all the elements of a given situation. What are all the factors that you should be taking into account in a case like the person who is cheating on his wife. What are the relevant factors?
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:31:20,099 ]The funny thing is, at least in my experience, that although schematically it's perfectly correct to say that human action is wreathed in these ambiguities, it can happen that
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:31:48,499 ]It's very clear. There's only one right thing to do.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:31:55,879 ]I remember, first a class, an example that came up in class teaching existentialism. Of course you can't help but teach Heidegger. And if you're teaching Heidegger, Mr. Authenticity, you can't help but mention that he joined the Nazi party, became rector of his university, and since the Nazi policy was to exclude Jews as students and to disencumber, to put it ironically, the professoriate that included Jews from any honors, from any title to tenure, from any emeritus status, Heidegger had been brought in to that department by his teacher Edmund Husserl, who doted on the young man and saw him as his, philosophical successor.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:33:15,719 ]And once Heidegger had whatever the equivalent of ten years job security, and once Heidegger had joined the Nazi Party, he removed Husserl from his emeritus status, from his pension, stripped him of every honor to which he was entitled, and also of course expelled from his classroom any student who was Jewish.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:33:49,329 ]um, as I told this, which I think belongs to teaching Heidegger, , it's a phenomenon to my knowledge unequaled in the history of philosophy. The chastening example is Plato's relation to his teacher Socrates. He immortalized him in the complete works of Plato as the wisest and best of men. And Aristotle, who has studied with Plato and goes off on in another direction philosophically with the explanation, Plato is dear, but truth is dearer.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:34:51,829 ]So, all three founders of the philosophic the search for wisdom enterprise that partly, defines Western civilization showed due reverence the teacher of each, and to my knowledge unequaled in the history of philosophy is this degree of betrayal that Heidegger showed for his teacher.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:35:25,699 ]So, a student in my class as I laid that out, I don't know if I laid out the whole contrast, but anyway, told a story of Heidegger and Husserl said, something like: nobody's perfect and shouldn't we avoid judgmentalism? And I think I didn't quite handle it right at the time. I just answered with a certain impatience. But I've thought about it in the years since and what I now think I could have said or should have said is non-judgmentalism is certainly an appropriate virtue to have, avoiding invidious comparisons and avoiding the temptation to be vainglorious morally at the expense of somebody you think is not as moral as you.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:36:38,609 ]But in each situation, you have to find the right virtue. That's not the one that applies here.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:36:47,509 ]Yes, what I do, I think we need to make a distinction, when in trouble make a distinction. And the distinction I want to make is between making judgments, which is the main business of life. You have to judge which course of action is better than that course of action. Is this a good friend or not a friend? Am I hanging out, when they start puffing up the drugs, maybe I should leave. That would be a judgment. But judgmentalism is an attempt to use what looks like judging to make yourself superior, to exert power over the other person. So that's what you're doing. You're using judgment… it doesn't so much elevate you though it may do that a bit but it lowers them because they're under this reign of condemnation of your judgmentalism. And so making judgments is the business of life. Being judgmental is simply a vice.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:37:54,149 ]Yeah you're making use of your ability to make moral discriminations, moral distinctions for the purpose of self-flattery, something like that, for the purpose of saying I'm better than you, which is never a good idea.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:38:19,279 ]Yeah. That's not part of judging. You don't have to say, "I'm better than you."
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:38:25,519 ]How should I know if I'm better than you?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:38:27,819 ]they're guilty of a crime, they're guilty, you pronounce that. And maybe they need to go to the clink. But that doesn't, you don't add, oh, and I'm better.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:38:39,739 ]Suppose you're a judge.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:38:42,069 ]Yeah, that's not going to work.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:38:44,799 ]You can't just say I don't want to be judgmental.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:38:48,539 ]Yeah, right.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:38:49,599 ]That's not a job.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:38:51,259 ]At the beginning I said I'd thought of three ways of escaping this burden you might say of making decisions some of which have these imperfect consequences and therefore always suffering a kind of moral cost or being compromised. And the first was the Kantian: make the rules absolute. That doesn't work well. The second is the beautiful soul which we've been discussing.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:39:23,629 ]And the third I was going to mention is what I always call the attempt to levitate. To move up to the stratosphere that is beyond good and evil. That you get up so far that hey, way up here in kind of pure spirituality of some kind, well, good and evil isn't up here, that's down there. This is beyond all of that. And that's fairly common in the religious literature. I don't know if it has philosophical representatives, probably does. Everything pops up in philosophy, someone tries to run with it and makes that the whole story.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:40:02,549 ]But what about that levitating strategy, sweetheart?
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:40:07,519 ]It's funny, as you describe it, I immediately rather to my surprise identify my sense of distance from that syndrome, that levitating syndrome, in terms of feminine interest, it's as if somebody you love, with whom you could form a couple, wants to be too good for that, wants to be better, better than the eros of real life.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:41:10,079 ]Yeah, explain that more. I'm not sure I'm quite recognizing the…
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:41:14,359 ]Yeah, I'm not sure I know what what I'm…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:41:18,199 ]I remember in the hippie era, the 60s, a very common attitude that certainly that often served men better than women was, oh, we're like ships passing at sea, and if in a moment we can move into each other's orbit, something beautiful will happen, but then we move on, no attachments, no anchors dropped, we just sail on to another beautiful rendezvous with another.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:41:48,929 ]Sort of don't tie me down. And the hippie syndrome, the sort of bohemian superiority to bourgeois norms was one variant of it. And romanticism had that, from its beginnings in the early 19th century and perhaps from time to time one could find it in the cultural history of the West. People who got above the norms and usually it's the girl who pays.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:42:28,619 ] Lord Byron is busy being Byronic. Meantime, Miss whoever and Miss whoever and Miss whoever else is pregnant and even though girls now can manage not to get pregnant, at least, that's the hope, I sense that, somebody's going to bear the weight of this self-important transcendent personality, is something I'm registering as a woman who's being sort of cheated on in the form of something that calls itself higher things.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:43:23,279 ]And of course, not every boy wants a girl and not every girl needs a boy. But there's something about the superiority to the, I guess the eros of human life in the middle passage of history where we are with our bodies, with our connections to the mores of society which we either conform to or resist, but in any case have to deal with. If there's a kind of pre-romantic pretentiousness, and I don't want to be unfair.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:44:14,269 ]Sometimes you have a quest whether it's scientific or mystical or other or artistic that only one can do and it's perhaps a privilege of masculinity that it's often better equipped to be that sort of individual and pursue that kind of purpose. And not everybody has to be in a couple or conform to the preferences of the woman he loves or or even look for such a relationship.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:45:01,169 ]But I think of it because the asym- it has some sense of self-importance and asymmetry and I have for some reason, as you describe this option, I have an instinctive reaction in terms of abandonment; the feminine abandonment.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:45:40,239 ]And I'm not responding very clearly. I'm really reporting.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:45:47,749 ]Well, one form of this beyond good and evil stratosphere takes or one implication it often draws is that just focus for the time on male-female relationships. I'm talking as a man here. The man should not be possessive.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:46:10,849 ]But if you think of possessiveness, and then therefore let go, that's another way of saying… If you're possessive, that's a kind of commitment, isn't it? You're going to stick with the woman you're regarding as a possession. And you can see all the horrible things that can happen from the attitude of the woman I love is actually the woman I possess, a kind of ownership model. But it is a kind of commitment. And if you say, oh, no, no, no, don't, you've got to keep a distance.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:46:49,719 ]So, you may swoon for a moment, but you've got to then drop that attitude, drop that attitude, drop that connection and move back to the stratosphere. And let her move to her own stratosphere, .
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:47:08,319 ]She's less likely to occupy comfortably. One doesn't want to make excessively general pronouncements here. There are people, let's say Michelangelo is one, you don't want to say to Michelangelo, hey, get married. Well, for one thing he preferred boys, from what I understand, and for another thing, he was busy being Michelangelo.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:47:40,339 ]Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:47:41,389 ]Until the last breath left his body, he said to his assistant, I am dying, whatever his name was, assistant, and my work is still unfinished. So, somebody like that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:47:58,719 ]Yes.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:47:59,579 ]Stand back, you get out of his way. There are people, and they tend to be male, male, men, but not all are men, for whom a kind of solitary quest to achieve their calling is called for. Once again, in real life, these distinctions are subtle.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:48:38,539 ]You take a guy like Søren Kierkegaard, who decides to schematize the levels of human development, there's the seducer level, there's the householder level where you can get married and live reasonably comfortably, and then there's the transcendental suspension of the ethical or whatever he calls it, which he describes as some kind of beyond the ethical spiritual level higher. But how did he live it? It's not as I say, it's not for me to say he shouldn't have been Kierkegaard, he should have been a nice guy. Everybody's happy he was Kierkegaard, I guess. But he jilts the girl he's engaged to and then keeps her on a sort of spiritual string for the rest of his days so that she can never, she marries, but she never gets rid of his clinging to her ankles, his domination of her emotional and passionate life. He's always the big one that got away, and there are people like that, and their spirituality is a tease for women and somehow they, you can't catch me, but you'd like to, and I'm very good catch, seems bound up with their attainments of some kind. And it's suspect and these things are subtle.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:50:51,963 ]And perhaps the agent himself doesn't quite know, you're not always aware that you're in bad faith. But, there aren't only Jews in the world. Jews, it’s said, and I will say it live on the historical plane, the plane of the here and now, the plane of chronology, and I think that's a wholesome way to live. And it's not wholesome to be hated and persecuted. But I don't think that needs to go with the job. I think anybody who wants to do that is in the wrong.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:51:40,103 ]But it's precisely on that plane of historical time and everyday lifetime from one day to the next to the next that all these ambiguities are present.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:51:51,293 ]Yes
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:51:52,043 ]And I know by your conception, which you advocate, it's not just relevant to Jews, but you think, well, this is kind of true, that we live in a temporal dimension from one moment to the next, but that is precisely where these ambiguities Yeah almost daily, I suppose daily if you pay it paid enough attention.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:52:16,883 ]Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:52:17,563 ]be confronting these ambiguities. Even shall I donate to the, I've got ten dollars, shall I send it to this or to that? Oh my gosh. If I send it here, I've neglected that. No,mthese things you can't do every right thing even if you're doing only right things and so something is being neglected.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:52:36,083 ]Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:52:36,773 ]And so that's daily life on the timeline as you sometimes call it, just in ordinary chronological historical time. Whoa.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:52:48,013 ]So how do you live with that, I guess is my sort of final question. How do you live with that degree of ambiguity, of doing this good thing thereby failing to do that good thing? Do these sort of mount up as a kind of on your more on your moral and life ledger, as well, here are the assets, the things I did do good. Here are the debits, the things I failed to do that would have been good , that's got to be a very long list because you're failing to do more than you're act- than you're doing.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:53:23,173 ]Mmm. I think we can't… we can't be so unfair to ourselves. We have to be fair. You're not an octopus with ten hands.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:53:45,533 ]Right.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:53:46,183 ]You are who you are and you weight things in order of their prominence, in order of what you perceive to be their urgency, and you're allowed, unless you're in an emergency situation, which many are, you're allowed to get some time off, to have a little fun, to get some respite, R and R, to get heart for the journeys of life, which are never the same from day to day.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:54:34,803 ]And often moments of high drama where you're in total focus and every decision is of life consequence, not every day is like that. Sometimes the decisions appear trivial or routine and we are impatient for larger challenges. Peacetime is rough when you've been in combat, there are people who can't stand it. So, the sense of the rhythm of life and the tolerance for the, or the limitations of one's reach at any given moment. Sometimes you're called to do the right thing and there seems to be a great cost. You wish there weren't. You wish you could both do the right thing and compensate yourself or others for the cost, but you can't do both. You have a limit imposed by the physical constraints, the time constraints, the cultural constraints, the biologic constraints, and some of the grace of life involves knowing that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:56:17,183 ]that itself is a virtue.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:56:19,853 ]Yeah, not making exorbitant demands where the situation doesn't call for that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:56:29,073 ]Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:56:30,423 ]Well, I think that's a wonderful reminder because there we can get stuck in a kind of perfectionism and that anytime you aren't just perfect, do just the absolute most wonderful sublime thing, then you're failing and that my ledger idea was probably completely wrong. You can't think of, oh, here are the good things I'm doing, but there's a ledger over here with the things I'm failing to do, because we're limited beings after all. And as you say, someone sometimes needs recreation, you just can't wear yourself thin and it would be wrong life strategy to ignore that fact, to not allow yourself a moment's respite, to not just listen to some music idly and let your mind wander, fantasize or whatever, have ancient memories flood back. It would be wrong to ignore those needs. And so just living reasonably, this is good Aristotle, I think, just living reasonably is good enough. So good enough is good enough. You don't have to be perfect.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:57:43,983 ]Yeah, you don't have to be on a taut string all the time.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:57:48,933 ]Yeah, on the high wire.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:57:50,763 ]Yeah, exactly. And we're here to make sense of the human condition, not to abolish it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:58:02,813 ]Yes. Well, that's a good thought to end on, sweetheart.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:58:08,313 ]We're good. We're two embodiments right here of the human condition.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:58:13,413 ]It's so funny. For better or worse.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:58:16,793 ]For better or worse
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:58:18,243 ]What we signed up for
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:58:19,973 ]We'll accept that.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:58:21,753 ]Yeah, I think you can. Yes, I think it's feasible.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:58:25,153 ]Okay Thank you for another intimate dialogue.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:58:28,233 ]Thank you. Sweetheart.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:58:39,863 ] Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with Episode 1 of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted — God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher — available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God’s perspective — as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I’ll see you next time.