I dreamt last night about the concept of absolute morality vs flexibility in different cultures, to my dreaming brain it was the same as a flower. In the centre was love with all the positive values essential to a functioning society and the petals were different cultures and belief systems that bring people closer to love, to God, or to however they conceptualize goodness. I got up, made a note, went back to sleep. So today I'm super excited to make it into a blog post!
The dream wasn't just of a daisy-like flower, it was more detailed than that. Only ideas that are opposites can be sorted to go into the centre, so like love and hate, the positive emotion is assigned a number one and hate is assigned a zero. Only the number one's go into the centre of the morality vs. culture flower. Beliefs that bring one closer to Love, to God, to the Divine, to Goodness are the beautiful petals.
So for me, I can build the centre of my own morality flower like this:
love 1 hate 0
kindness 1 cruelty 0
forgiveness 1 grudges 0
grace 1 intolerance 0
save 1 kill 0
self love 1 selfishness 0
truth 1 lies 0
.... you get the idea! Only the number one's go into the centre to make up the morality you personally won't compromise on. But I believe there is a set of values we can all agree on, and that would be an absolute morality for humanity. We are all born with love in our hearts and souls, all with the same moral compass, but in this crazy world of persuasion and spin we can act in ways fundamentally against the peace and mercy that should reign within us.
For me the many cultures of the world are the beautiful petals, and who among us would want a world without flowers?
Love to all,
Daisy
P.S. Thank you to Hester for your comment, I guess for you Jesus is at the centre of your "flower" and from there radiates the wonderful petals.