Tag Archives: ethics

Moral Landscapes or Human Values?

Posted on by

The question is prompted by this week’s NYRB review of The Moral Landscape by H. Allen Orr, a Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester.

Although Orr took his PhD under the supervision of Dr Jerry Coyne, he is very much a freethinker when it comes to the uses and limitations of scientific know-how and know-what.  In a perfectly chivalrous way, he pronounces the three major premises of Harris’s attempt to bridge the gap from polemic to science unsuccessful.

Orr

I have always been skeptical that science, as a purely descriptive field, would help us to navigate the moral universe.  This feeling–and it’s no more than that, and thus has to be regarded as pure cotton–comes less from my training as a  theologian (there, I said it) than from earlier work in linguistics–what we used to call philology when trying to impress girls.  –It never did.

When language analysis moved away from the older classical models that taught us how languages ought (keep your eye on this word) to behave in their various tenses and moods, to the way language actually works, whole new worlds of understanding opened up.  What we learned from the New Linguists like Chomsky & Co. was that language is both a formative and transformative process.  It changes as long as it is living. When it’s dead, it’s merely “studied.” Classical linguistics and classical archeology have in common the fact that their subject matter is no longer breathing and cooperates efficiently.

Language and ethics are not the same thing.  But ethics depends on language and not merely action, and certainly not merely neural activity.  Choices are formulated in language.  Actions are the effect of linguistic cues.  Some ethical actions are merely linguistic–like saying “No.” Some must be terribly complex, like deciding not to fight in a war, or determining whether to end your own life.  As long as you are living the choices are also (to quote James) live options.  When you are dead, they are philosophical premises to be studied in philosophy classes as test cases.

Sam Harris spends less than six pages and a few footnotes on language, preferring instead to locate the throne of morality in physiological functions of the brain, available through neuro-imaging studies. Orr describes the outcome as “far from compelling.”

  It seems odd to try to assess the relationship between two ideas or judgments by analyzing whether the same brain regions are active when each is represented in the human mind. Surely such an assessment requires one to analyze the ideas or judgments themselves. If the same brain regions are active when people mentally perform addition and multiplication, would Harris conclude that the addition/multiplication distinction is illusory?

Given the fact that neuroimaging doesn’t answer primary questions about action, the desirability of “right” or ‘wrong” action or the adjudicative faculties that cause us to describe certain actions as moral or not, it looks for all the world as though Harris has once again turned  interesting possibilities, drawn from a range of disconnected sources, into extravagant claims.  It’s the same sort of rashness that led to his mistaken view of “religion” in his earlier work, The End of Faith, which people happily ascribed to his relative immaturity as a writer.

This isn’t new to the pop-science genre he is writing in, of course, but given that most of the people who read The Moral Landscape will be neither professional ethicists nor professional scientists (a few of each, no doubt), his performance does raise the question of whether this is not just another expression of scientific hubris directed at religious objects.  Orr thinks so:

But there’s a more important point. Harris’s view that morality concerns the maximization of well-being of conscious creatures doesn’t follow from science. What experiment or body of scientific theory yielded such a conclusion? Clearly, none. Harris’s view of the good is undeniably appealing but it has nothing whatever to do with science. It is, as he later concedes, a philosophical position. …Near the close of The Moral Landscape, Harris argues that we can’t always draw a sharp line between science and philosophy. But it’s unclear how this is supposed to help his case. If there’s no clear line between science and philosophy, why are we supposed to get so excited about a science of morality?

It’s for others to judge whether Harris’s performance in the arena passes the test.  Lions are always circling. But his book raises another, more important question. It’s a question about whether someone purporting to write about morality needs to know something about ethics. And it all hinges on the timeless question of How one ought to behave: like a dead language or a living speaker?

Since the late eighteenth century–in theology since Schleiermacher and in philosophy since Kant–ethics has been seen as the last refuge of the religious imagination.  That’s when supernaturalism exploded in Christianity’s face. Even first year philosophy students know what Kant thought about morality and its “demand” on evilly-inclined human nature.  The further history of philosophy, when it comes to the study of morality, has been an attempt to get away from Kant’s categories to the right while fleeing the command ethics of the Bible on the left.

In many ways, Schleiermacher’s system was more profound, drawing out of Kant’s work ideas that remained implicit or obscure.

Schleiermacher

–And the theologian was much more radical, in almost every department, than the Prussian master.

He is a hard read, but his ideas about the formation of ethical ideas was crucial for practically all later philosophical and psychological reflection. Schleiermacher was aware of the chasm between self-consciousness (Cartesian style) and the wider world of immediate experience, which is always both subjective and objective.  Using ideas that would later become standard in psychoanalysis, he described the way in which we are able to “cognize” an inner life of feeling and outward existence of things that present themselves to us for description.  At every step, we are driven by the inner life of feeling and the outer world of experience (things, events), but see ourselves at the center of both–affected by the consciousness of big ideas like nature, world, goodness, and  other ideas, that have only a “temporal” importance–things that are tolerable choices in children but turn out to be illusions in adulthood:

Is it then the case that the first childish objects of enjoyment must, in fact, be lost that the higher may be gained? May there not be a way of obtaining the latter without letting the former go? Does life then begin with a pure illusion in which there is no truth at all, and nothing enduring? How am I rightly to comprehend this? (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas (trans. W. Hastie; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890), 33

I mention Schleiermacher because Harris doesn’t.  There is a reference to Hume, and almost nothing on Kant.  A bit on Rawls (a scant, useless two pages), but otherwise an extremely eccentric index of authorities that don’t add up to a coherent picture of much of anything in terms of the history of ethics or a wide syllabus on the subject.  If this were a random list of books I read over my summer vacation it would make more sense than as documentation for work on a serious subject.

I can be criticized for saying this, I’m sure.  After all, pop science or not, this is meant to be ground-breaking work. Most ground-breaking work doesn’t trudge through the cemetery of dead authorities.  It transcends them.  Is that the reason for the omissions?  And as to its ground-breakingness, if not in ethics, then in science: someone much more knowledgeable about how it might be scientifically earth-shaking, like Allen Orr, thinks it is merely peculiar.

Which brings me to a related and belated point.  It wouldn’t bother me in the least if the New York Times announced tomorrow that the the morality code has been cracked, and that all of us belong to one of a million phenotypes that accurately predict how we will act in particular moral situations, especially on Tuesdays.

But we are not quite there yet.  For that reason, philosophical speculation still matters.

The terms “science”  and “human values” are still to ethics what bacon and eggs are to breakfast: related, but in a way we are at odds to explain.

Orr puts it down to basic semantic confusion (something philosophers and theologians are supposed to look out for)–in this case over a misue of the term “ought”:

Of course science can help us reach some end once we’ve decided what that end is. That’s why we have medicine, engineering, economics, and all the other applied sciences in the first place. But this has nothing to do with blurring the is/ought distinction or overcoming traditional qualms about a science of morality. If you’ve decided that the ultimate value is living a long life (“one ought to live as long as possible”), medical science can help (“you ought to exercise”). But medical science can’t show that the ultimate value is living a long life. Much of The Moral Landscape is an extended exercise in confusing these two senses of ought. Despite Harris’s bravado about ‘how science can determine human values,’ The Moral Landscape delivers nothing of the kind.

But Harris is not exactly to blame for the confusion, the confused cross-ranking of oughts and is’s.  He’s a victim of a culture that wants the distinction overcome by force majuere since “ought” as philosophers, especially ethicists, use the term still bears the marks of its religious birth.  The mere addition of the word “science” to the mix seems to give the word “moral” a degree of support it doesn’t have when it’s left outside to lean on its own flimsy wall.

A serious, well funded, ongoing project devoted to the intersection of ethics and science (or science and human values) is devoutly to be wished.  But it will not happen in the atmosphere of current proprietary thinking, where scientists  (Is this the I want to be Darwin syndrome?) promise more than they can deliver, and ethicists and theologians are ruled out of order because (why?) they have only language to offer.

James Luther Adams: On the Theological Significance of Unbelief

Posted on by

Jared Sparks

James Luther Adams was required to retire from Harvard Divinity School in 1968 at the ripe young age of 67. He had been at Harvard since 1957, but it seemed much longer since, by the mid-sixties, he was the most famous theologian in America and the unanointed successor of the social justice prophet Reinhold Niebuhr, who died in 1971.

Harvard had a way of making theologians who had spent years labouring in the vineyards of Chicago or (in the case of Paul Tillich) Union Theological Seminary “famous,” or at least obvious and quotable. Unlike the fully academic Tillich, Niebuhr and Adams used the pulpit as often as the classroom as their pied a terre for prophetic discourse on social ethics and reflection on the role (and limits) of the church in society.

I was thinking about Adams yesterday after re-reading Chris Hedges’s much undervalued book I Don’t Belief in Atheists. Chris, like me, was at HDS at the end of the Adams era and probably would not mind calling himself an Adams disciple. In fact, if you were in Cambridge in those days, you almost had to be: Adams was everywhere. He continued to teach at Andover Newton but maintained an office on Francis Avenue, strolled the corridors, talked with students, preached often, and lectured frequently. So frequently that many of us who never received credit for an Adams course still counted him our teacher, and perhaps the most profound influence in the development of our ethical theory. He had the most welcoming face in the world, the sort of man who without saying a word invited you to stop and chat–chats that became half-hour conversations. His colleagues almost always referred to him as “our dear Jim” or “our beloved friend.” I heard no other faculty member referred to with the same natural deference.

Divinity Hall: Site of Emerson's Divinity School Address

In 1976, Harvard was transitioning from being an incubator for Unitarian and liberal religious thought to a school where socially progressive ideas were born, selected, cultivated, and exported. What Union Theological Seminary had been in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Harvard was by 1975. The Divinity School (always underfunded and predestined to produce a class of alumni who could never compete with the high-earning graduates of Harvard Law or Harvard Business), existed as the conscience of the world’s richest university and America’s most influential educational factory.

Like many of the progressive theologians of his day Adams was deeply immersed in German scholarship and thus in German politics and Kultur. During his time at Chicago, where he taught at Meadville Lombard, the Unitarian seminary of the Federated Theological Faculty, he tried to persuade students that the same forces that resulted in the rise of Hitler were nascent in all societies, even within American democracy. For him, the biblical account of evil was “true” in the sense that it was natural: it summarized the craving for what injures the human spirit and causes our separation from the sources of human good.

Similar ideas were being promoted by Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth and the “Barmen Theologians” who resisted Nazi influence over the German churches. In 1935, during a period of leave from teaching Adams was interrogated by the Gestapo and narrowly avoided imprisonment as a result of his engagement with the Underground Church movement. Using a home movie camera, he filmed Karl Barth, Albert Schweitzer and others, including those who were involved in clandestine, church-related resistance groups, as well as pro-Nazi leaders of the so-called German Christian Church. Adams returned to the United States persuaded that the tendency of religious liberals to be theologically content with vague slogans and platitudes about open-mindedness could only render liberal churches irrelevant and impotent in face of the world’s evils.

His world-view, a phrase he would have detested, could be traced to Kierkegaard’s dissatisfaction with the comfortable protestantism of his own day. The role of the church was to proclaim freedom to captives, light in the darkness of political corruption, salvation (which almost always meant economic or social amelioration) to the afflicted. When it stopped doing this–when it lost sight of its prophetic mission–the church became an arm of the state, complicit in the sins of the state, as officially it was in Germany and long before during the Dark Ages. The church could only fulfill its role in a completely secular context where its freedom to stand apart from the institutions of government was guaranteed; where it existed on a strictly voluntary basis, expressing the same freedom of choice that mythically the apostles had in choosing to follow Jesus–the freedom to be a living witness that the state does not exhaust the perquisites of human liberty and personhood. The Declaration of Independence, he never tired of reminding his classes, has no legal force: it invokes rights that every religious woman and man knew to be self-evident. It does not define them. “The pursuit of Happiness,” in particular, was not just a rejection of Locke’s use of the word “property” in his 1693 Essay Concerning Human Understanding but a call for the good life–the pursuit of morality and conscience, informed by religion.

Peale's Jefferson, 1791

But I was also thinking of James Luther Adams in conjunction with what he thought about the role of atheism in American society. A certain accommodation to unbelief is at the foundation of the Unitarian tradition in the eighteenth century; it’s part of the mortise and tenon of Harvard. It deeply influenced Jefferson and Franklin, neither Harvard proper, though Franklin received honorary doctorates from Harvard, Yale, and Oxford before the Revolution, and Jefferson fell under the Unitarian spell of Harvard’s president, Jared Sparks and to a lesser degree the religious ideas of John Adams, a devout Unitarian. And later it was formative in the thought of Emerson and Thoreau, neither of whom professed a decisive unbelief but held up their disbelief in church doctrine as an essential element of religious freedom. For James Luther Adams, as for his predecessors, the freedom to believe entailed the freedom to disbelieve as a logical complement. Neither option was worth much if it was compelled. Christianity would lose its soul to the state, as it had to the Nazi regime. Atheism would lose its intellectual integrity, as it had to the socialists.

But atheism served an additional purpose, Adams thought: it could be prophetic. It could expose the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of religion in a society that expects religion only to mouth words of comfort: “An authentic prophet is one who prophesies in fashion that does not comfort people, but actually calls them to make some new sacrifices. That’s an authentic prophet, whether one speaks in the name of God or not. A great deal of authentic prophetism in the modern world is to be found in nonreligious terms and in nonchurch configurations, often even hostile to the church. The churches themselves have broadly failed in the prophetic function. Therefore a good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgment upon the pious. An authentic prophet can and should be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality.”

It’s true, of course, that atheists who find their own position comfortable and self-authenticating will hardly find it thrilling that their core position is useful chiefly as a means of keeping religion faithful to its mission. But that is because atheists of a certain sort do not mean by religion what Adams meant. A “religion” whose dimensions extend only from Christian fundamentalism to Islamic terrorism–the unevolved parody of religion that new atheists have made their quarry–Adams with a typical Harvard reliance on common sense, leaves for history to sort out. But the elements of religion that transcend the emotional, the pedantic, and the irrational–what he took to be especially the ethical elements of the Christian gospel, had to be protected from social respectability, from living the comfortable life of country club Presbyterians. Atheism is there to wake the Church up, to call its cherished assumptions, including its claim to possess the unvarnished and final truth, into question. And in the process of challenging the Church to say what it believes, atheism is called upon to define and explain what truths it holds to be “self-evident.”

Atheist Nation Celebrates the Holidays

Posted on by

The Intellectual Highground

Nothing puts atheists in a worse mood than the holiday season. All these dimly-lit people and brightly-lit window displays, making merry over things that never happened, spreading lies, propagating falsehood, singing their rancid carols, and worst of all teaching impressionable, if rather preposterous, children to believe in intellectual crap when they could be playing Megaman 11 or Worms Reloaded–which they got last Christmas. How obscene, how humiliating: Behold, little Buddy praying by his bedside for Megaman, versions, 12-16 (“conveniently boxed as one item” from Amazon.com) to a non-existent deity, having just lodged the same request with the sex-offender in the Santa suit at the mall. No wonder America is going to the red dogs and blue dogs. “Isn’t anybody listening to the Voice of Reason?”

God to a six-year old

Help is on the way.

To combat the forces of Darkness and Superstition, the American Humanist Association and some allies have launched a new ad campaign to put the Grinch back into Christmas. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times charts the new ecumenical spirit of the quest, spearheaded by the same blithe folk who brought us the “Good without God” bus-o-rama and the “Just be Good for Goodness Sake” billboard extravaganza. The campaigns are financed by “a few rich atheists” with money to throw to the wind, and buoyed by research being done by the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life (Trinity College), headed by the eminently reasonable Mark Silk and based on Barry Kosmin’s American Religious Identification Survey, showing that as many as 15% of Americans are “Nones,” i.e., have no religious identification or association.

It is pretty obvious and at the same time hopelessly obscure how Nones relate to atheism (atheists hope they do: this is largely, sad to say, a recruitment push for membership and dues), but as Goodstein points out in her article, the combined membership of the sponsoring organizations numbers only in the thousands. The best course might be to see whether Nones can be divided into groups: Certainly Nones, Possibly Nones, and None Just Now, Thanks–but I mix my politics and religion, which is never a good thing.

Possibly None

I will be blunt: This whole business is idiotic. It is hard to imagine that people like Todd Stiefel, one of those well-endowed atheists with cash to burn, are really on a rampage because of passages like the one he cites from the Bible:

“The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.” (from Hosea 13:16, New International Version).

Reassuringly if a little obtusely Stiefel says that “It [our democracy] has not been based on [verses like these] and should never be. Our founding fathers created a secular democracy….We must denounce politicians that contend U.S. law should be based on the Bible and the Ten Commandments.” I agree. Anyone who wants Hosea 13 added to our Bill of Rights should be tied to a chair, gagged, blindfolded, and made to listen to Diane Rehm read slowly through the whole Book of Leviticus. Presumably (or is it implicitly?) he is willing to throw serous money at billboards so that America does not become a country that kills babies. He will find many friends among Catholics and Evangelicals on that score.

Diane Rehm

If you think ripping open pregnant women is bad, read the story of the wandering Levite in the Book of Judges (ch. 19) where a consummately self-absorbed kidnapper–a Hebrew–offers his concubine to some Village- of- the- Damned- crazed youth who want to have sex with him, gang rape her, leaving her for dead–whereupon the Levite butchers her semi-conscious person into twelve pieces and forwards a limb to each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Please: Don’t quote Hosea to me when there are passages that would make Tarantino wince.

The Levite's Discovery

But to be serious: Do the sponsoring organizations (which include besides AHA the American Atheists and the Freedom from Religion Foundation) think that these stories are read to Christian (or Jewish) children at bedtime? Is it bloody likely that a craven priest in Spokane is going to substitute the Legend of the Lethiferous Levite for St Luke’s Nativity story on Christmas Eve? I know that atheists feel they know a great deal about the mindset of the religious principles they reject, but one has to wonder why this isn’t reflected in their anti-Christian strategies?

Or are the campaigns only a reflection of the sponsors’ shocking ignorance of ancient myth and legend, whereof the Bible is a treasure hoard. I get the sense that the sponsors need to begin with the Brothers Grimm and then read backward in literary time to get a sense of how the grotesque has been used in history for both entertainment and moral instruction. Most “reasonable” people who are slightly sophisticated about the contours of culture know this. Many very nice religious people know this. They know that scaring people to death has been used by religion and nasty aunties for a long time to get people to change their wicked ways, clean up their act, and lead a better life. The question is, why don’t atheists know it? The shock of discovery seems entirely their own; it will not surprise the educated or awaken the irreligious passions of a Certainly None.

We don’t do that any more–scare people to death to make them good. Even very religious people don’t do that any more. The last really good sermon on hell was preached in 1917 by the torture-obsessed priest in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. And I can’t name the last time I heard a robust sermon on Hosea 13.16. Given that real life lascivious priests are frightening enough, it seems unnecessary to reach back to the first millennium BCE for material.

Hell as you like it...

The intellectual isolation of the atheist from wider cultural movements and shifts in perception is one of the great stories of our time. Almost no one is covering it. If the question they are asking about religion is, Don’t these damned believers know what’s in the Bible, the answer is somewhere in the range between probably not to possibly so; but even if they do, they probably know that the Bible is not recommending carving up your girlfriend. And probably can guess that when you find blood and gore of this magnitude the story is about something else. Phrases and words like “symbolism,” “surface meaning,” “allegory,” “folk legend” and “myth” come to mind. Put it under the heading “Things Atheists Missed in College,” along with a good course in comparative religion, ancient history, mythology, and anthropology. It’s only people who have never studied myth who can write in such a yawningly banal way about religion being one.

I find myself constantly challenged on panels with atheists to lecture them on their understanding of words like “superstition,” the “supernatural” and above all “myth.” They in turn find me niggling and pedantic. But really, does the average atheist, village or city style, assume that the toxic texts of scripture are “in” the Bible for moral edification or because they reflect a time and culture different from lunchtime in Chicago?

Richard Dawkins lectures me, London 2007

Which brings us to the question, Who are these ads for? We’re told that a key reason for the aggressively confident style of the campaign (not to mention the unusual spirit of ecumenism that currently reigns in the atheist camp), is owing to their determination to get their “market share [of the Nones].” Leaving the most grievous puns aside, they are also inspired by the need to resist the Myth of the Not Lying Down Dead Horse, that America is a Christian Nation. And as we all know, there is nothing like a Billboard over the Lincoln Tunnel that announces, “You know it’s a Myth. Believe in Reason.” to get uncommitted people thinking and committed people scrambling for the nearest AHA meeting. Add a Hosanna to that and you’ve got something. (Tip for vandals: Spray paint “I’m Lucifer, and I approve this message” on the sign.)

In a particularly poignant way, weary commuters will also be treated to the cheery salvo of The United Community of Reason (not to be confused with Christians United to Oppose Rationality), a group in Washington. Their idea of decorating for the holidays includes spreading the good news of Reason on billboards and ads on bus shelters in about 15 cities: “Don’t Believe In God? Join the Club.” Fortunately, number-wise, the club can actually meet in the bus shelter. Add a few Nones and they can meet at a subway stop, except in cities where there are subway stops no one gives a rat’s whisker about organized atheism.

Far be it from me to lecture atheists. But please accept, along with an eggnog salute, the following advice. Grow up. Learn a little about what Being Clever means. I know we live in a world defined by short attention spans, coffee mugs, T-shirts and bumper stickers. But it’s completely unclear to me whether your ad campaigns will change a single mind, or even whose single mind your campaign is designed to change.

This is not a “struggle.” The upward march of unbelief is not the forces of liberation against the sources of slavery and oppression. I’m afraid religion beat you to that metaphor. It’s called Exodus. No one is paying attention because no one except your club members actually cares about the private conclusions of people who want to turn being disagreeable into a civil rights event.

Launch of Consider Atheism Campaign: Attended by Several

The slogans are insipid and can only have been vetted by very small committees of Like-minded People–and that’s a real problem, The modern atheist seems to get off on being distaff, minority, contrary, and ornery–the legate of a long free-thought heritage. Would your heart beat faster if you could persuade society that overturning a Salvation Army worker’s collection pot is an act of charity–extra points for snatching the bell? Would you praise a convert who defaced a nativity scene at Christmas, or saved a turkey’s life at Thanksgiving. Don’t be ridiculous, you say: that’s not what this is about. Don’t be ridiculous, I say: this is what you have made it.

Two last things in this little lecture:

Give up using the name humanism. You’re ruining it for people like me who don’t mean by it what you want it to mean. Equating atheism with humanism is a cheap trick, a cop behind the billboard (maybe one of yours?) kind of trick. Be proud of being an atheist. I know I’m not. You are not the American Humanist Association. You are full- frontally and outwardly the American Atheist Association.

And stop this ridiculous invocation of secular saints from Socrates to Einstein. Virtually none of the people you pray to became famous for being atheists and you know it. Not even Darwin. Certainly not Socrates. And Einstein: who knows?

“Yes, you can call it that,” Einstein replied calmly. “Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.” (Quoted by Isaacson in Einstein, 2007)

1933, on a deserted beach in Santa Barbara, California

But the point is, you cannot claim the intellectual upper hand in arguing against “God and religion” and then resort to the authority-argument to win your case. Even if you were joined by all the Nones in America, yours is a lonely lot. Especially at Christmas. Accept it. Live with it. And take down those absurd posters.

Sins of Omission

Posted on by

Catholic theologian and former priest Paul Collins, as every one who has previewed this book has recognized, has a tough job. After saying flat-footedly that “those of us born after World War II will be among the most despised and cursed generations in the whole history of humankind,” it behooves him to say both why this is so and what we can do about it. (Judgment Day, University of New South Wales Press, 291pp, $34.95)

Ecotheology has been around for more than a generation and its themes have become stereotyped. They depend on a particular reading of the creation myth of Genesis that understands mankind as being placed in a stewardly or custodial rather than a dominant position towards nature. It was given to us in perfect condition: we messed it up.

Using myths in this way is perfectly permissible as far as I am concerned, as long as we understand that the Genesis story doesn’t actually teach us anything you can take to the bank or use in constructing environmental policy. According to Genesis 1.26-32, God is quite emphatic to Adam about fertility, productivity, and “dominion” over the earth. –A whole school of theology has taken its name from verse 28, which sees this dominion or authority extending beyond the natural world to politics and society. Whether out or not, most conservative Christians, especially the Tea Party variety, espouse some form of dominionism. Their numbers will grow in the wake of the American congressional elections of 2010.

According to a different account of creation in Genesis 2.15ff., Adam was created as a live-in caretaker of the Garden God had planted for his own pleasure and relaxation. He likes to stroll there in the cool of the morning (Gen. 3.8) and can be heard humming. Adam’s benefits (in kind) include free use of the property except for the tree of life (2.9) and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil–two trees whose magical fruit mythically explain God’s moral powers and longevity to the Hebrew writers who tell the story. And just to mention it, the story is not entirely consistent. Adam’s job description is that of an unskilled labourer, in or out of the garden. His punishment for being a bad caretaker (what if some other god or a mere mortal got hold of the fruit?) is just to transfer him to Arkansas with a shovel and a scolding. His status remains unchanged. The real estate changes.

Scholars see the second creation story as an etiology, a story told to explain not just the origins of agriculture and “sedentary” (non-nomadic) existence, but of the tribulations of crop failure and lack of irrigation. Things were much better back in Babylon, even Egypt-land according to Genesis 12.10ff; not so good in Canaan.

Paul Collins is deeply sensitive to his own better lights in seeing the biblical story, and the traditions it spawns, as a kind of “creation theology.” After all, didn’t God say that what he had created was good, and aren’t we the ones who have made it bad? What Collins especially dislikes is “development”, a trend he sees extending from ancient China in the east and Sumer in Mesopotamia (close to the mise en scene for Genesis 2) when the human race became “irrigation crazy.” And for Collins, irrigation is just the most primitive form of technological and industrial development.

It’s no good saying that at any stage along the way we have ever given a thought to the environment: not in the Middle Ages when the vastness of the earth was being intuited; not in the Age of Discovery, when greed for gold and possessions ruled the heart and inspired armies; not in the Renaissance when our planetary smallness became obvious, nor in the industrial era, nor in the nuclear age, and not nearly enough today. The term biocide did not exist before the twentieth century, but religion (not only Christianity) has been one of the great facilitators of killing the planet in the Name of its creator.

Is material development moral? Should leases be given to BP and other “oil giants” for deep water drilling, after the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe in which–it becomes increasingly clear–human greed and shortcutting and not merely human error played a significant role. How do you go about convincing a fickle electorate that the sin-deaf political party that gave us Dick Cheney (who gave us the vamped up Halliburton behemoth that gave us the cement that led to the rig that Jack built exploding in Jack’s face) should not be returned to power, just when we are becoming aware of the price the earth has had to pay for bleeding so much oil for so long, for so much money?

Collins’s thesis is that everyone should be indignant, but Christians (he thinks) especially so, because they have a mechanism for dealing with what’s going on. It is called sin. And sin is what God looks at, according to traditional theology, when he judges the world–and what we have done with the world.

Because we are both selfish and fickle, but don’t regard selfishness as particularly sinful, it is easy to think of sin as an equivalence-game–to focus on other people’s trespasses compared to our own meager wrongdoing and lapses. Who me? No, that’s you, not me. Better yet, it’s him, not us.

The planet is a very big thing. BP is a very big thing. But private sinners are something you can get your head around–or at least your nose into their business. It is why we love reality TV, Desperate Housewives, Jersey Shore, the Kardashians. They have the courage to be so much more sinful than we have the time or money to be, brave enough to make their private sins public so that we can enjoy them with tortilla chips and beer. Thievery, murder, backbiting, bare-faced lying, serial adultery–the “individual sins” that Protestants are grateful Jesus paid the price for (it saves us so much work), and Catholics can reference on mental index cards during their infrequent confessions–enumerated, of course–are hugely entertaining. Add to these hatefulness and attitude. It is difficult to judge what we have come to love, or the things that have seduced us, as Augustine once sighed reflecting on a boyhood theft at the age of sixteen: “It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error — not that for which I erred but the error itself” (Conf. 2,5)

But the thrill of other people’s sins, and the voyeuristic mind-set that ensures its success as entertainment, is really not what sin is about. Collins is deeply sensitive to the way in which the Church has trivialized and individualized sin. Christian teaching is that the world itself is under judgment. We are under judgment for how we treat it–world both in the metaphysical sense (“world, flesh, devil”–delight) and in the physical way–its beauty and bounty. Sin is not just who you’ve slept with, you bad boy, or lied about not sleeping with, you clever dog, but lying to yourself for your own irresponsibility for the social, political and corporate sins you conveniently overlook. All sin in encapsulated in crimes against the idea of “world.”

It is difficult for the modern believer to vindicate God’s destruction of the “world” by flood “in the time of Noah,” except for this: it never really happened, and the story is told —de pilo pendet–to show that creation hangs on God’s favor, a grace that mankind has abused recklessly through that most biblical of words, “wrongdoing.” No one would argue with the story if, for God, we substituted the word “Planet” and saw the catastrophe as the consequence of inaction, greed, and stupidity. Only the most obtuse literalist can take exception to the need for stern correction of a race that has fallen miserably short, like the mythical Adam, of the role creation requires of it.

Once upon a time, there was a healthy sense of this: In Paul’s declaration that “The good I would do I do not and the evil I would not do, I do.” And in Cranmer’s eloquent rendering of the sentiment in the Book of Common Prayer, turning it into a general confession of responsibility:

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep,: we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and have done those things which we ought to have done.”

Confiteor

Or in the Catholic church’s ancient catechism,
“…quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, opere, et omissióne — “in thought word, deed, and omission.” Or in Martin Luther King’s aphorism, that “In the end we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

The numerical approach to sin favored by conservative Christians and dominionists will always be at odds with the social construct, the idea of a world under judgement for social failures and private indifference, especially when verses such as Genesis 1.28 can be used as an entitlement to wear and tear–drill, pollute, waste and wreck, or Adam’s punishment can be interpreted as an argument for better tractors and antiperspirants. “Development” is no more a neutral word than the word “weapon,” which forces to our consciousness the correlation between a greedy man and a murderer.

It is a tribute to the stupidity of Adam’s children that we can wring our hands over whether we are passing a trillion (three trillion, six trillion?) dollar debt to our grandchildren, but not worry too much about clear lakes, blue skies and green pastures. As Collins recognizes, generations of Christians (including a great many in the “dark ages”) used these very symbols as a cipher of God’s grace, beauty and bounty. Many of the Psalms could not have been written without a sense of the transcendental power of God in nature.

“… Sing praises to our God on the lyre, Who covers the heavens with clouds, Who provides rain for the earth, Who makes the grasses grow on the mountains, who gives the beast its food, and food to the young ravens which cry…. He makes peace in your borders; He satisfies you with the finest of the wheat.”

No one needs to believe in this sentiment descriptively, or in this God prescriptively. But it seems to me, the image of a God who provides for and cares about the world is at least as important as the image of a God who cares about stealing, adultery, how you feel about your neighbor’s wife. Or oxen. As the Church’s attention to sin has now shrunk to focus almost entirely on the uterus, the social, political, and environmental sins against the world receive proportionally less attention. Conservative Christians who believe in the “uterine sins” but cannot turn their attention to the skies, the air, the melting glacial fields, the rapid spread of ignorance and poverty by irresponsible parenting really need to have their baptismal certificates revoked. The only problem is, the Church condones and encourages their ignorance. It tells them to be good Christians by not having sex, or being very careful when they do. When this does not work–in Uganda or Bangladesh or Wasilla, Alaska, it is–reproachably–attributed to the will of God. And yet no one keeps track of how many deaths the culture of life evinces through poverty, disease, starvation, ignorance. The Catholic Church and missionary protestantism do not answer the door when the collection agent presents the bill for the culture of life.

The biblical writers made a close association between sin and destruction. A tormented first-century writer, Paul of Tarsus, sees the whole world order “passing away” as the eschatological reality of his time. It’s corrupt like an apple is rotten: to the core. There is nothing permanent about it.

The literature of judgement–called apocalyptic–can be amazingly detailed about how uncreation will work at the time of judgement; the images range from stars losing their place in the sky to mountains crumbling and seas overflowing the boundaries that were set for them in the beginning, a dizzying succession of events that resembles a super-fast rewind of creation saga. Instead of births, there will be miscarriages–because there will be nothing left to take care of. We will have become unnecessary. The world will end, but badly.

The apocalyptic vision, all of it frantic and fanciful of course, continues to fascinate the most literal believers because of this grotesque detail. They see themselves being scooped up to heaven with the angels because they were, after all, better than the desperate housewives and avoided the fleshpots of Reno. But for the creators of the genre, and the Christian copycats who followed them, it was all about sin and judgement. The world had got very bad. People had lost focus. The Law was being forgotten. The prophets had stopped prophesying, their work done. The unjust triumphed over the oppressed and the weak. Politics then as now, was rough, raw, corrupt, and open to the highest bidder. Eden’s apple lay rotten on the ground as a token of what cost our ancestor his job: abject failure to tend the garden. “Let thy Kingdom come” is a perfectly rational prayer under the circumstances.

It did not come. Jesus did not come. Salvation of the sort expected anyway–the incursion of a divine power from above–did not come. As Loisy once said the Church came instead. But what Christianity in the widest sense did possess is an ongoing sense of judgment and accountability.

It has not solved the problem of the cheap-grace Christian who is still obsessed with the uterine sins and calls herself “pro-life.” The church is now, and has been for a long time, in the reflexive mode of taking counter-cultural positions that it deems unpopular and therefore correct. It has pronounced secular culture evil and knows that other voices are competing for listeners. But in focusing on the “uterine sins,” it has lost track of the larger idea of sin and salvation and traded the chance to be a truly prophetic voice for the far easier task of singing the song it has always sung.

But secularists should take no comfort in the Church’s failure and shortsightedness. A consciousness of judgement, something equating to the ancient religious vision, might be necessary in assessing what anthropologist Thomas Berry calls “our inability to deal with the devastation of our planet.” Ironically, this failure of cognizance and will comes at a time when we know more than we have ever known about our wasteful and wanton habits, the effects of millennia of predation on the earth’s goodness and bounty.

It may be difficult to fathom, knowing what we know about the dangers of overpopulation, starvation, disease and poverty, why conservative religion’s remedy for this failure is to preach against birth control and family planning. But but is also difficult to know what the secular-moral alternative is. In a review of Collins’s book by John Birmingham, published in The Australian for October 9th, 2010, the following paraphrase struck me as significant:

Secular humanism and rationalism, which led us to the edge of destruction, offer little in comparison because, having driven God from our moral discourse, that discourse has become difficult in secular democracy, which has ‘neither the ethical apparatus nor the rhetoric necessary for it’.”

Is it the case that there are no good naturalistic arguments against raping the planet for fun and profit? Or, if it is too easy to say “Don’t be silly” to that question, is it the case that the dual role of applied science in the contemporary period has been contradictory and conflictual, especially for those of us who are not scientists but reap its benefits every day: to guarantee our pleasure, our longevity, our convenience and comfort by extending the outreach of technology, while pausing occasionally to warn us that the reach cannot be extended indefinitely. The warnings are not usually framed as moral caveats. They seldom involve the idea of “judgment”; they are framed as arguments about non-renewable energy resources and diminishing capacity. They are arguments for greater ingenuity and more development.

Drill, Baby, drill!

I do not see a consistent ethic of responsibility on the secular side. And like Collins, I find the vocabulary so far developed to be vacuous and uncompelling. It lacks what philosophers might once have called a “telic focus”: we need to know why oiled pelicans off the coast of Louisiana are an evil. We need to know why it is ever so much worse to pass on black rain and unbreathable air to our descendants than a trillion dollar deficit. We need to to know that in some way we are judged, not just that we need to be careful when we buy our next car.

sins of the flesh

Science as a facilitator of human pleasure, the life span, the ethics of convenience, can issue perfectly sane warnings about this urgent state of affairs–much as the ancient apocalyptic writers once made promises of judgment to overreaching kings and idolaters. But now, as then, consequences postponed do not constitute effects. Long range predictions are not threats. They are merely mystifying to most people in a distractable age. The delay between an eternal God’s anger and his punishment for wickedness extends back three millennia and promises to reach into futures we cannot imagine, because it will never take place in history and time. Our situation with respect to judgement for sins against Nature is more dire because there is no God to save us and no God to judge us. Scholars have found that the favourite prayer added to the numerous litanies developed during the Black Death in Europe was a a modified version of the ancient prayer, “Agnus Dei“: “Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, spare us O Lord.” But we have to help ourselves.

The consequences that science envisions are real enough. And without the moral equivalent of God, we need to develop ways and words to make the consequences and the judgement of our own irresponsibility plain and real: a people guilty of lethargy, hardheartedness and inaction–the sins of omission, a world under the judgment of universal conscience, a betrayal of the knowledge we might possess, and do possess, shoved to the margins of our collective vision.

Deficiently Humanistic?

Posted on by

This from Ed Jones, concerning the recent post on Religion. He cites Schubert Ogden, once one of my intellectual heroes, from The Reality of God, 1967: 40-41:

The characteristic deficiency of all nonthestic moral theories is that they leave the final depth of morality itself utterly unilluminated. Although they may well focus our moral action and the immanent standards by which it is governed, they fail to render at all intelligible the underlying confidence and its transcendent ground in which our moral activity, as our life generally, actually has its roots.

Often enough, this failure is not lacking in a certain irony. Proponents of nonthestic moral theories typically pride themselves on their right to give a fully rational account of man’s moral experience. Nothing in this experience, they contend, is to be left merely at the level of unexamined belief or tradition. but must be raised to the level of complete self-consciousness. Ironically, however, this demand for rationality is not extended to the basic confidence that all our moral experience necessarily presupposes. Hence, for all their vaunted “Humanism” such theories are, in truth, deficiently humanistic. While they may cast a bright light on the foreground of morality, they leave what Whitehead calls its “background” wholly obscure. They allow the original faith in which all our action is finally based to remain a merely incompleteness, quasi-animal kind of faith.

The basic point Ogden makes here, it seems to me, is unarguable. The demand for a totally rational morality must either be grounded in some theory of the human person–which takes us into the vaporous realm of metaphysics–or in some pragmatic view of consequences for the person and society in the absence of moral conditions.

If for example we are speaking of “law” in a secular and civil context, it is pretty easy to conclude that it is grounded in the latter of these conditions (“If men were angels,” Hamilton famously said, “no government would be necessary.”) The coercive and restraining power of law is therefore based on consequences imagined to arise if law did not exist. But this makes it virtually clear that law does not arise from a view of human action as innately (if that word means anything any longer) virtuous or placid. It arises from the idea that human action is brutish and mean. But hearken: Law has a problematic relationship to morality, and most theologians and philosophers have thought that its role is not to make a man moral but to make him pay his taxes or get him out of the ditch.

But by the same token, religion has never regarded humanity as innately virtuous either. Quite the reverse. A virtuous creature does not need saving from original sin, does not need the counsel and prods of the church, does not need commandments or pastoral care, does not need the promise of heaven or the threat of hell.

Ogden does not of course take such symbols literally: his God is much too “real” (meaning much too misunderstood) for that. But it has to be acknowledged that religion–in the broadest sense–but the book faiths in particular–virtually invented the language of legalistic morality and penal atonement. Its main difference from more mundane law is that the laws of religion are forecast in relation to a personified divine being, a sovereign king and judge, who can be personally offended by the violation of his rules and who has established specific ways of coping with transgressions. In theology, mankind is caught between heaven and earth; the best he can hope for is to be free from sin. In secular law, he is caught between the state and his own instincts; the most he can hope for is to stay out of trouble. There is no virtue and no morality in either scenario, though in traditional Christianity, the rewards for being good are infinitely greater.

Thus when Ogden says a secular morality “fails to render at all intelligible the underlying confidence and its transcendent ground in which our moral activity, as our life generally, actually has its roots,” he is trading in obscurity. It is the denuded theological doublespeak of an era that rewarded vacuity. Especially since this transcendent ground appears to be a not terribly clever circumlocution for God. Moreover, why should this transcendent ground be given any consideration in moral decision making if it is in no sense personal, cannot be offended (or pleased, or pacified), has no stake in the outcome of our decisions and actions, and could do nothing about it if it did?

Secular morality–Ogden is right–is greatly deficient because its instruments are not mathematically precise, its premises are negotiable and its outcomes approximate. Given its evolution as a rebellion against theological certainty, it could be nothing else. It is true that the absolute “standard”–or ground if you prefer–has been sacrificed to modern consciousness of real rather than transcendental ends and means.

But secular morality is not humanistically deficient, anymore than a religious morality is theologically perfect. It’s merely human. And its theological deficiency is nothing to apologize for.

The Little Humanist Lexicon

Posted on by

Dr Johnson

Death: The point at which decision-making and its consequences cease, along with the opportunity to acquire virtue, act in conformity with reason or to invite blame for failing to do so. As a self-conscious and anticipated reality, death has a special purchase on human imagination because it gives rise to the concept of “mortality,” whose root mors defines humanity in a teleological way: being toward death.

Masquerade: (1) The celebration of the Eucharist by a faithless priest. (2) Neol., A performance of piety contrary to conscience and common sense, especially prevalent in political life.

Complacency: (1) The opposite of tranquility (qv), complacency is passivity in the face of choice rather than philosophical resignation to consequences over which we have no control. (2) A false sense of the security of the status quo, based on ignorance or willful misunderstanding of causes, situations and solutions. In this sense, especially applicable to fictional characters like Jay Gatsby and British royals in the twenty-first century.

Tranquility: (1) Philosophical satisfaction involving a balanced sense of the both the possibilities and limitations of existence.
(2) The opposite of wealth.

Indifference: (1) One of the primary attributes of a discriminating mind, consisting in the belief that some things, ideas, people and movements are not worth caring about. For the true humanist, indifference is related to objects and not categories: for example, relative indifference to possessions does not entail a positive assessment of poverty. Indifference to particular ethical systems does not require complete cynicism towards morality. (2) Not many things are worth doing at all, let alone worth doing well.

Reverence: (1) An attitude of respect that entails personal, social and environmental (natural) objects and is rooted in the evolutionary and developmental history of the human race. Reverence does not necessarily entail respect for the supra-personal or supernatural except as “images” of natural things, misconstrued as objects of devotion (qv). (2) A fundamental summary of humanist ethics (Schweitzer: Reverence for Life) based on the belief that “good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.” Not to be confused with the Roman Catholic theological principle enunciated by Pope John Paul II in Evangelium vitae (the Gospel of Life).

Mystery: (1) The unexplained or unknown, not the misunderstood or hypothetical. (2) A natural sense of humility (qv) in the face of an intellectual horizon that can only be crossed, and then only imperfectly, by imagination. (3) A feeling that can range from elation to fear based on the quantum of discovery (fascinans: Otto), vastness (tremendum: Otto) or difficulty with which an event confronts us. (4) “Nostalgia for Paradise” (Eliade); “Choose Something Like a Star” (Frost).

Faith: In its non-theological sense, unsupported or provisional confidence in the reliability of unexamined propositions, states of affairs, or reports. In the epistemological sense, faith is a form of trust and as such not a step in a “reasoning process” grounded in the experimental world. It is different from “belief” in historical terms (e.g., Aquinas) as often being cited as a source of knowledge or wisdom and thus an alternative, or even superior, to such process.

Ethical Idealism: In the popular sense, the belief that we can construct noble and universally recognizable standards (norms) of behaviour based simply on rational principles. Modern discussion actually derives from ancient speculation, e.g., Cicero: “How are such virtues as generosity or love of country, or the desire to do good to your fellow man or gratuitude possible? All of them spring from the fact that we are by nature impelled to love one another.”

Altruism: An idea invented by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century but anticipated in the ethical teaching of some religions, especially Christianity. Based on the belief that it is possible to intend to “do good” without promise of reward or fear of punishment, the concept properly belongs to evolutionary biology and behaviouralism rather than to theology. As an ethical ideal there is nothing in humanism that makes altruism an inappropriate symbol for personal conduct.

Revelation: (1) Metaphorically, the light of human reason: a capacity to know what is true. (2) Theol., The archaic doctrine that a divine being speaks through agents (prophets, seers, holy men, etc.) in order to communicate his will, laws, or intentions (“divine” or “particular” revelation); in this form, often associated with sacred books and practices.

Falsifiability: (1) A quality of statements of fact valued by reasonable women and men; (2) As a rule of thumb, a way of testing whether an event, entity or state of being existing in nature is generally true by limiting the domain of reference to what can be finitely observed to refute it. As an instance, the statement “God exists” is unfalsifiable (not false) because it cannot be refuted through finite observation or experimentation. (Cf. Verification)

Inspiration: That point in solving an equation, writing a sonnet, concluding an experiment, contemplating a difficult passage in philosophy, or listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral when the real purpose of being human becomes momentarily obvious.

Curiosity: (1) A healthy mental disposition towards discovery, satisfaction and understanding when accompanied by temperance (qv) but the source of uncertain consequences when pursued as mere experimentation. (2) Often used synonymously with “care” (worry) as a killer of cats.

Wit: (1) Knowing < wissen, archaically “having your wit(s) about you,” but more generally, exercising your intellectual powers. It can be found in wordplay, japes, quips, and off-the-cuff remarks. Never in a memorized joke, which is its opposite. (2) An intuitive perception that most apparently serious events, such as illness, stardom, pregnancy, or election to high office, are temporal and dull.

Ingenuity: (1) To create ethical or pragmatic solutions to situations that have arisen for an individual without a precedent in experience or learning. (2) Clever Clogs.

E.g., Theseus

Empathy: The ability to derive from the joy or suffering of another a lesson for the self that results in a passionate response.

Hope: A fantasy permitted the humanist when combined with realism (qv), but never to be allowed when defined as “faith” or “chance.” (2) An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733.

Hedonism: (1) Physical, intellectual and spiritual contentment pursued as harmonious ends in their own right; (2) A joyous utilitarianism: “An introspective attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and pleasuring others, without harming yourself or anyone else.” (Michael Onfray)

Piety: (1) A completely secular term meaning loyalty or devout attention to responsibility, thus devotion to family, or to a vocation, or to the state. (2) As appropriated in philosophy and religion, doing what the gods desire (e.g., Euthyphro 12d, where it is defined as “a kind of justice.”)

Honesty: (1) Purity (qv) of intention as expressed in thought and action; the desire to do what love requires. (2) “Honesty has such scent; fresh-mown grass and rose perfume, fused with a warm Summer’s breeze.” (Fresh Cement, Dan Brown)

Indecision: (1) As a temporary state, the only defensible position for an intelligent woman or man confronted with the facticity of existence. It is not the same as “Choice” (qv) which is an action rather than a state of mind. It is not the same as “free will,” which applies to conditions rather to virtue itself. (2) As a chronic state of mind, a crippling inability to tell truth from fiction and to equate reality with physical options.

Hobbestulation

Exuberance: (1) An intense response to beauty in nature, and its reflection in art, music, literature, and, especially, conversation; (2) Wordsworth, Prelude (Book XI, ll. 258-278).

Pleasure: (1) Affirmation of the sublimely physical but not of the merely temporal, experimental, or casual. (2) A mental state; (3) Illusory happiness based on physical intensity.
Continue reading →

Religionless Morality? On the Folly of Global Ethics

Posted on by

“And God spake unto Moses saying: This will you say unto the children of Israel: Be Good! And Moses went down from Sinai, and the children of Israel said: What hath the Lord said unto you? What is his plan and purpose? And Moses lifted up the tablet of the law, whereon was writ: Be Good! And they laughed and said unto Moses. What is this ‘good’? We need more.” (Exodus, The New Last Chapter)

I’ve touched this topic before, but it may be time for a summertime lite version of my comments. Especially as Scipio has just read a monstrously bad piece on the subject.

In a previous post, I argued the familiar theme that not only is religion not necessary for morality but that dogmatic religions are antithetical to the development of an ethical program. They interfere with two things that make a genuine morality–a program that results in the cultivation of virtue and the avoidance of injury–possible: conscience and choice. Before ethicists became classifiers, taxonomists, and quantifiers, in fact, these two ingredients were linked to the idea of practice. Following Mill and his wretched spawn, the do-gooding ethics of utilitarians, consequentialists, pragmatists, situationalists and others tended to obscure the fact that ethics has more to do with the examined life than with mathematics.

Mill

A moral life in the modern world has to be lived without religion. It does not need to be anti-religion. It has to be lived without religion because the idea of a law-giving god has become preposterous to most people, even to people who cannot acknowledge that the world we inhabit is post-Christian (and by extension, post- every other religion). By that I simply mean that the world we live in would be incomprehensible if we adopted the cosmology of the ancient world, the world of the Bible and its literary cousins. And to the extent we don’t or cannot, it’s foolish for us to imagine that it has intellectual or moral authority over us and over the decisions we face.

It has been a long time since Bultmann, the titanic biblical scholar of his generation, reminded his profession that the biblical world is based on a myth that has ceased to have a purchase not only on the mind but on the imagination of the modern world. And while it is possible to wish otherwise and therefore to think otherwise, “wishful ethics,” in my view, does not have much of a future.

So there is no reason to consider the God of the Bible as a source of virtue or standard of right conduct in the twenty-first century, and in fact, a little study of biblical history would show that he was not so regarded by the shapers of Jewish tradition either: it’s only when Christianity (and elements of Judaism) become saturated with Greek ideas that biblical precepts and customary law acquire the force of “ethics” and get themselves philosophized into religion.

As part-time philosophers, it was part of a theologian’s job description to make room for “ethics,” but whether we are glancing back at Augustine, or (later) Aquinas or Abelard, we are looking at men who were making the recipes up as they went along: One stick Plato, melted, three parts commandments, a dash of Epicurus, and a cup of Aristotle; cover and let simmer for one thousand years; remove from heat and sprinkle with beatitudes.

Abelard teaching: The first Naturalist?

“Jesus,” as a former archbishop of Canterbury once said to me, “was a very nice man, but he wasn’t an ethicist.” We can be grateful for that. Neither was Moses, and neither was Job. So to continue to think of the suzrerainal Yahweh as anything more than a heavenly king enforcing tribal customs on a wayward people (the tougher the better, lest Israel go astray), or Jesus as much more than the condensed version of what many Jews wanted to hear in the graeco-Judaism of first century Palestine, would really be to miss the point. It is important to let the Bible be a book of its own time. That’s not how it loses but how it acquires relevance.

You can’t get to ethics, however, simply by (a) tossing religious ethics out the window and (b) keeping the good bits–using slogans like “being good without God,” perhaps the most irksome, historically challenged and simplistic phrase ever coined in the name of secular morality.

You certainly cannot get there if you assume that there are universal and trans-historical norms that were as true in ancient civilization as today. For example, there was no prohibition against lying in Hebrew law (“bearing false witness” is a juridical sanction). If there had been, the Abraham who tries to pass his wife off as his sister and the God who commands Abraham to use his son as a sacrificial goat would not have speaking parts in Genesis. But just as significant, a thousand things we regard as repugnant–blood-hunters, infanticide, the execution of disobedient sons and the selling of family members into slavery–were widely practiced in ancient society. A little history and anthropology teaches us that religion, law, and morality were not three strands but a knot, the ends of which are sometimes difficult to untangle.

Being good was not the goal for Aristotle, was it? Habituating yourself to virtue through the practice of reason was. You can habituate yourself to other things of course, but you will always fall short of the “defining virtue,” which can only be the exercise of the one essential thing that makes you human. Some of us share with garden slugs a love for lettuce. But we can’t stop there. Some of us are good with wood. So are termites and beavers. I think my point is clear: the right use of reason, which is always painfully hard work and always requires judgment about things like the relationship between action and reflection (the classical mode assigns this to the “soul”) is the only source of ethics. And to be ethical is never therefore to be good. It is to be the sort of person who does the right sort of thing.

A little meditation will convince us that this excludes the possibility of God–not as a philosophical postulate but as a practical matter. God the father wants what is best for his children; but the biblical god at least leaves them in no doubt about what that is and what the consequences are for not acquiring it. He is the worst father ever: the kind who would let his own son die for crimes he caused to happen himself.

Thy will be done.

This concept, which most people would identify as the heart of religious ethics, is personally and morally insidious. It is fine for the eternally stupid Adam, whom God endows with the reasoning powers of a three year old, and fine for other heroes who beat their chests and whack their heads trying to figure out God’s justice. Of course, the moral thing to do would be to run away from home, away from the abusive father who makes unreasonable demands for unreasoning obedience to his arbitrary dictates.

Curse God and die.

Ethical responsibility requires at least that–to be, as H. R. Niebuhr strikingly phrased it a “responsible self.”

But there comes a time when the ethical framework invites the incorporation of lessons learned through religion as the story of our moral background, our infancy.

If letting go of God is part of that story, in the same way that coming to adulthood requires us to understand the pains and tremors of infancy, we should be prepared to answer to other tribunals, identify other sources of value, specify the norms we regard as relevant for leading a good life.

Is moral life always culturally specific? If we cannot identify trans-historical and universal norms from the past, why do we suppose we will be able to construct a global ethic for the future–or is the desire to do so simply another case of the totalizing conceit that we thought we abandoned when we left religion behind us?

These are the sorts of questions we need to be asking about an ethical program for the future, and I suggest that religion has a lot to teach us about where to look for answers.

Good without God? Not the Problem

Posted on by

Reprinted from Spinoza’s Lens (2007/8) http://www.clipclip.org/clips/detail/159809/spinozas-lens-good-without-god-r-joseph-hoffmann

Being good is not the same as being ethical ,or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life.

Be a good boy, Beaver

Let me begin with two stories. The first comes from Voltaire, who is reported to have said to his mistress, Marguerite, “Whatever you do, don’t tell the servants there is no God or they’ll steal the silver.”

Another, told by the writer Diderot in the 18th century, is about the journey of Catholic missionaries to Tahiti–a dialogue between a chief named Orou and a priest, who tries to explain the concept of sin.

Orou says that many of the things Europeans find sinful are sources of pride in his island.

He doesn’t understand the idea of adultery, since in his culture generosity and sharing are virtues. Marriage to a single man or woman is unnatural and selfish. And surely there can be nothing wrong with being naked and enjoying sexual pleasure for its own sake—otherwise, why do our bodies exist. The horrified priest delivers a long sermon on Christian beliefs, and ends by saying,

“And now that I have explained the laws of our religion, you must do everything to please God and to avoid the pains of hell.”

Orou says, “You mean, when I was ignorant of these commandments, I was innocent, but now that I know them, I am a guilty sinner who might go to hell.”

“Exactly,” the priest says.

“Then why did you tell me?” says Orou.

These stories indicate a couple of things about the relationship between religion and morality—or more precisely, the belief that God is the source of morality. The first story suggests that belief in God is “dissuasive.” By that I mean, religion is seen as a way of preventing certain kinds of actions that we would do if we believed there was no God. The kind of God religious people normally think of in this case is the Old Testament God, or the God who gives rules and expects them to be obeyed.

Not all religious people believe these rules were given by God to Moses or Muhammad directly, but most would agree that it’s a good idea, in general, not to steal, commit adultery, hate your neighbor (or envy his possessions obsessively), or kill other people.

For at least a thousand years busy theologians have tried to put these essentially negative rules into more positive form: for example, by saying that people should act out of love for each other, or love of God, and not out of fear. Most Christians would say this is the essential difference between the laws of the Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus in the New. But they are only partly right. Both books of the Bible and all of the Qur’an emphasize fear of God, judgment, and the rewards and punishments of the hereafter as goads to repentance, leading a better life, giving up your rotten ways. Even the books of the Bible that are tainted with Greek thought—like the Book of Proverbs–emphasize that “the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” So it’s mischievous to say that fear and trembling aren’t used for moral leverage throughout the Bible.

The God of the book religions, regardless of theological attempts to transform him into a God who loves the social agendas of the twenty-first century, is not a god who would understand the phrase “unconditional love.”

Modern Christians, Jews, and the Muslims who focus on God’s compassion and mercy, are required to ignore a whole cartload of passages where God reminds people, like any ancient father (and not a few modern mothers), that his patience is wearing thin. Jeremiah 5:22 (NIV) “’Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’” The answer is a deafening: “Yes.” Remember the flood? Remember the first born sons of the Egyptians? Remember the plagues and famines? Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? You love this God because you ignore his commandments at your peril. He has chosen you; you have not chosen him, and he can withdraw his favor whenever he wants. (As Jackie Mason used to say, “You look at Israel and you have to wonder if maybe the Samoans aren’t the chosen people”).

The theme of the oldest books of the Bible is very plain: God “loves” (more precisely, he watches out for) the ones who keep his commandments and punishes those who don’t. –A simple message that theology has had two thousand years to massage. In fact, the New Testament belongs to the history of that massaging process. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the first spin doctors–re-writing the script, transforming Yahweh into a compassionate conservative.

But let’s be clear that the hero of the story is a typical Near Eastern tyrant: powerful, vengeful, jealous by his own admission, proprietary (“His is the world and all that dwells within”), and though slow to anger, fearsome when his wrath is provoked, watchful to point of being sleep-deprived (Ps 121.4). This God is not a model for progressive parenting; he’s not interested in the self-esteem of his people, has not read Dr Wayne Dyer, and will not break down weeping on Oprah! for being compulsive. The message of God the Father is, “Do this or else.”

A larger question posed by Voltaire’s little story is whether the motivation of fear is ever ethical. If you do something because there is a threat of pain and suffering if you don’t, or if you hold off doing something you would really like to do—for the same reason—are you being moral?

What Voltaire is really saying—as Nietzsche, Marx and Freud would later say—is that religion is useful for keeping certain kinds of people in line. Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- century European society could be neatly divided into those who knew better and those who served the ones who did. Marx went so far as to suggest that the social deference the moneyed classes paid to religion was simply intended to convince the lower classes that religion is true—in fact, that’s exactly what Voltaire is saying: Religion is a mechanism used by the knowledgeable to keep the unknowledgeable in their place. It has social advantages—Marx’s Jewish father conveniently “converted” from Judaism to the Prussian State Church in order to go on working as a lawyer. And we all know the younger Marx’s most famous verdict on the topic: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”

The young Marx

Religion functions through its dominant image of God and his punishments to make people “good” in the same sense servants, dogs and disobedient wives were made to be good in the ancient world. A later era would use the word control mechanism to describe this kind of incentive.

What’s missing from this critique, of course, is the question of whether a “religious act” can ever be a “moral act.” Clearly, belief in God (or a specific kind of God) provides behavioral incentives. As a system of control based on fear, religion keeps people from “being bad,” or at least doing things considered bad by the controller. But it does this inefficiently. Clearly it offers people an explanation for why they behave in certain ways, ranging from the “Bible tells me so” to “Papa dixit”—the pope says so. As a means of consolation, it teaches people to deal with the fear and insecurity created by oppression. But it does this at the expense of self-fulfillment, wholeness. It is the security of an abusive relationship, where comfort consists in being able to predict and manipulate eruptions of violence. In fact, to look back to the sacrificial origins of religion, this was precisely its social role. Even the story of the crucifixion, which many people believe is all about love and forgiveness, is the story of a God so angry at the sinful imperfections of humanity that he transfers his violence to his only son, who becomes the redemptive victim—the buy-back price—for sins he didn’t commit.

crucifixion

Let’s call this religious approach to behavior “Being Good.” Being good is not the same as being ethical or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life. It’s a mother wagging an imperative finger at a three year old and saying “You’d better be good.” It always involves threat and reward. Two generations ago, the image would have included threats of belts or woodsheds spankings, going to bed without dinner. I guess, unfortunately, in some places it still does. But you don’t get ethics out of this. You get obedience and submission.

What about Diderot’s story, the one about the missionary and the tribal chief? If the story from Voltaire suggests that religion is dissuasive and coercive, Diderot’s suggests another reason why religion doesn’t sit well with ethics: Religion is prescriptive, and like politics, it’s local. In 2000 years of massaging the message, it has changed because human beings, the true makers of religion, have changed their minds. Most of the biblical rules about property, goods and chattels, adultery and incest were typical throughout the Middle East; in fact, as Freud recognized, the taboos against murder and incest are the earliest form of laws in some tribal societies. But the books we call the basis of the “Judaeo-Christian-ethic” weren’t written by tribes—tribes don’t write. And the body of laws we call the Ten Commandments contain lots of rules that have been quietly put in trunks and sent to the attic.

For example, we all applaud the wisdom of the commandment that says, “Honor your father and your mother.” It has a nice ring, especially during school vacations. But Deuteronomy 21.20 says that disobedient sons should be stoned in front of the elders at the gates of the city. And Exodus 21.17 says that anyone who insults his mother and father shall be put to death.

As for adultery, which belongs to ancient property law in the Jewish system, the punishment is stoning—normally only for the woman (Deut. 22.21). In Deut. 22.28, the penalty for raping an unbetrothed virgin is a fine of 50 shekels–plus taking her on as a wife. There are laws protecting the rights of the firstborn sons of unloved wives when a man has several wives (Deut. 21.15) and even laws about how long a Jewish warrior must wait (one month) before he can have intercourse with a woman he has captured in battle (21.10). According to Leviticus 19.23, raping another man’s female slave is punishable by making an offering to the priest, who is required to forgive him. There are laws covering how long you can keep a Hebrew male–slave—6 years—but if you sell your daughter as a slave to another man she cannot be freed, unless, after the master has had sex with her, he finds her “unpleasing”—in which case she can be put up for sale (ransom) (Exodus 21. 7ff.). On it goes—throughout the books of the Torah—the Law.

Sarah, Abraham, and his concubine Hagar

The sheer ferocity of the God who gives, or rather shouts these commandments to his chosen people is distant from our time. The voice is unfamiliar: Failure to do what he says results in terror: In fact, that’s the very word he uses: “I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting disease, recurring fever, plagues that will blind you….those that hate you will hound you until there is no place to run; I will multiply your calamities seven times more than your sins deserve. … I will send wild beasts among you and they will tear your children from you. … If you defy me , I will scourge you seven times over. …I will send pestilence …cut short your daily bread, until ten women can bake your bread in a single oven. … I will punish you seven times over. … Instead of meat, you shall eat your sons and your daughters.” Don’t take my word for it: read Leviticus 26. It has literary flair.

Cronus Devouring His Children (Goya)

The God of the Old Testament is a three dimensional figure—far bigger than Zeus and twice as officious. (Perhaps Zeus was able to give freer rein to his sexual appetites, whereas Yahweh limits himself to one Galilean virgin?) And look though you may, you will not find these laws “repealed” in later books, at least not in the way modern laws can be amended and repealed. But it’s absolutely certain that anyone who tried to obey these laws in twentieth century Europe or America would be slapped into jail, and the defense “The Bible told me so” would not be an adequate explanation for what we routinely call “inhumane acts.” –Try posting these commandments above the blackboard in your neighborhood school or the court house wall above the judge’s bench.

One way of charting the so-called progress of western civilization is to trace how human values eventually triumph over the ferocity of religious law. The kind of morality that Diderot’s priest represents, like the morality of the Bible, and even the reductionist versions of biblical and Quranic teaching that modern religious denominations espouse, is not ethics. It is not ethics because ethics can’t be grounded in what I’m going to call “prescriptive dissuasion.”

If you say to me, “Well: no one believes these things any more,” then I say “Good for us for not believing. Then time to stop letting the Bible be the source of moral authority when the conduct of its hero is not up to our standards of civil behavior.”

If you say, “There is great wisdom and poetry in scripture,” then I say “Please then, let’s treat it like other great books that express ideas, customs, and values that have no authority over how we lead our lives.” I have no quarrel with those who want to appreciate the Bible as a product of its own time and culture—with all the conditions that attach to appreciation of that kind. My quarrel is with people who want to make it a document for our time and culture.

And I suppose my quarrel extends to people who consider themselves experts, when what they are really expert in is reading around, into, or past the text. Liberal theologians are immensely gifted at reinventing the God of the Bible in the light of modern social concerns. But the project is a literary–not an ethical one. At another extreme, which is really a false opposite, are the fundamentalists who claim to defend the literal truth of the Bible while ignoring two-thirds of the text and focusing on the convenient “literal” truth of bits and pieces.

Can the Bible make you good? If you accept the framework, beginning with Adam and Eve, and the creation of a race doomed to be perpetually three years-old and scolded into obedience, I suppose it can. Would you want to be good without the Bible: No, because even without the dominance of a sacred text, “goodness” stems from authority rather than conscience and reflection: good dog, good wife, good Nazi, good Jew.

Reduced to basic form, the temptation in the Garden of Eden is a story about a cookie jar and a sly, accusing mother. But it takes more than avoiding mousetraps for a choice to be moral or an action to be ethical. A moral act is one in which you can entertain doubt freely, where a person confronts human choices and human consequences, personal and social.

To be fair: the Bible and its cousins are important records of those human choices and their social consequences, coming from an age which is no longer relevant to us. To make it a book for our time is an abuse of the book and a misunderstanding of its importance. More depressingly for some, perhaps, there will probably be no book to replace it. Not even one by a secular humanist. But there will be wisdom, and reason and choice-making, and that will make us humanly better, perhaps even virtuous. Pray that nothing–no power or text on heaven or earth–will arise to make us “good.”

Of Pharisaic Humanism

Posted on by

caiphasI’d like to coin a phrase: Pharisaic Humanism. The phrase describes what I think is the tragic flaw of so-called “secular humanism.”

Humanism has never been one thing. Renaissance humanism was a bundle of things, unified mainly by a principle we all learned (or were supposed to) for that literature exam back in college: it shifted the focus from giving God the glory to giving man his due–an adequate summary of what the never-much-read essay by Pico della Mirandola was doing in the first humanist manifesto, his Oration on the Dignity of Man.

Mind you, Renaissance humanism was not about subtracting from God’s glory. It simply saw humanity as his crowning achievement, endowed with beauty, intelligence, creative power and free will rather than some pitiful mob of sinners begging for mercy and salvation.

But it’s a short step from that to Newtonian Physics and Hume’s philosophy and a sequence of movements that put God and religion on the defensive, as if the creature had at last learned to stand on his own two feet, think for himself, and was ready to make his own way in the world without papa’s rules.

In the Enlightenment, without much flourish, it was permissible for God to die. Maybe that’s why the era produced the most poignant Requiem Mass ever written–Mozart’s–because its real sadness springs from the loss of the hero of western religion. If you have never wept at its Dies Irae, you have never wept for the right thing.

Arising out of this new self-confidence were new theories of government and social order, including America’s secular democracy. Kings were uncrowned. Revolutions were fought. Money under new theories of wealth became popular: greed was transformed into investment and venture, and the virtue of poverty was laid aside as a lingering superstition of the Middle Ages, like the Eucharist and biblical miracles.

These secular and rationalist movements were not the essence of humanist thinking—and the term was, as far as I can tell, almost never used to describe them. But without a doubt they were consequences of what had taken shape in the sixteenth century, across Europe. The eighteenth century, which both Kant and Diderot called “enlightenment,” was to ideas what the previous centuries had been to art, music and literature.

They were also self-satisfied, arrivistic, a bit too spiteful. Of course, we all applaud Hume, puzzle with Kant, laugh with Voltaire, and nod in agreement with Hegel. If God was spared the executioner’s blade, as Charles I and Louis XVI were not, he was at least put on notice and a renewable contract without tenure.

His good behaviour was demanded by a world that in its European format anyway increasingly found his word and commandments onerous rather than sources for progress and material good. His limitations were surprisingly similar to those imposed on the surviving monarchs under evolving ideas of constitutionalism: he had the right to warn and to be advised. In America he had the additional privilege of being the source of certain “rights” that people possessed apart from those defined by usurious kings.

But let me just linger over the word “self-satisfied.”

Early humanism was all about the power of the human imagination—not just as it gets expressed in Shakespeare’s plays or the Sistine chapel ceiling (although those are worthy coordinates), but also in the cartoons of Da Vinci and the scientific spirit of Francis Bacon. In the theological era, before the eighteenth century, self-satisfaction was another word for pride, and considered the greatest of sins, that “by which Satan fell.”

Making yourself like God, however, was not an especially Christian idea. It keeps Gilgamesh from his prize, gets both Achilles and Agamemnon killed, Prometheus shackled, Job broken and doomed to listen to the rants of gossips–the worst of all puinishments.

Part of the irony and beauty of the death of Jesus and the death of Socrates is that they die “in the right,” but not because they are trying to be godlike. They are innocent of vanity (Socrates a little less than Jesus perhaps), or to use the biblical trope, they humble themselves to be exalted. The sophists and aereopagites of Greece were to that process what the priests and pharisees were to Jesus.

In Dante’s Hell the proud are regarded as defective in love and generosity. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, pride is the idolatry of believing in an imperial Church or in the Stuart monarchs’ claim to divine kingship. The point is not that a succession of thinkers was correct in their condemnation of vanity, idolatry and self-satisfaction, but that with loss of a theological ideology to keep things under control—the idea that pride is a dangerous course of action, the idea that an unrelenting fate or a supreme God punishes pride—the stage was set for a new kind of idolatry.

I speak of scientism, secularism, the conviction that the idols of the tribe are superior to the God of human history. Pico’s claim was fairly modest in the fifteenth century: God must be pretty remarkable because man is truly remarkable. In the sixteenth, Shakespeare makes Hamlet exclaim, “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”

The verse is often quoted out of context, minus Hamlet’s conclusion–the bit that keeps it from being an instance of self-worship: “And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights me not.” What we miss—or rather, what we don’t really have—in a world in which human intelligence, the natural order, and material progress are the measures of all things, is distance.

What we get in exchange for the idea of Adam and his heavenly maker is the idea of a being infinitely small but elementally the same as the boundless cosmos. We are what we see. Carl Sagan’s insipid chorus that “We are star stuff” makes perfect sense if you honestly believe that it is the universe defined by physics that evokes what Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. But I personally doubt many people have their peak experiences in meditating on the analogy between themselves and the dust on Mars. It is simply an attempt to endow science with the awe, mystery and wonder that people possessed when awe, mystery and wonder were religious, the sort of wonder Donne examines in “I am a little world made cunningly.”

What we get in exchange for the idea of having infinite worth derived from an infinite being who raises that smallness to dignity is the idea that we have more in common with what we eat than what we pray to—much more, since what we pray to doesn’t exist at all.
Away with the idea that we are made for higher things. In with the idea that we are about as “high” as it gets, and that what we feel and know are adequate instruments (or at least the only instruments available) for leading fully human lives.

The distance between the aspirations of man, as Aristotle realized, and the physical realities of our existence are the stuff of comedy. We have always wanted immortality and ended up dead. We have always wanted complete knowledge and ended up settling for glimpses of the truth. Science is one of those glimpses, not the True Gnosis of the Elect.

Spun differently, this distance can be the source of tragedy, compassion, challenge, heroism, and creativity. But our lives without distance, without a sense of proportion and humility, are merely farcical. The darker legacy of the Enlightenment in the form of the cult of science and the religion of naturalism gave us farce and deprived us of the tragic and the comic. There was no humanism in that, just self-glorification. Only pride.

I reject the idols of self-esteem, the whole philosophy called “secular humanism” as an oxymoron, in the same way Jesus rejected the Pharisees’ claims to piety and righteousness.

First, because there is no true humanism that is not based on a profound sense of humility. A parochial form of atheism may divide the world into Brights and Dims with the same glee the church fathers once divided the world between orthodoxy and heresy, but only the humanism of the Pharisees would be content with such a self-satisfied and facile division of the world.

“The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: ‘My God, I thank You that I am not like these sinners’.”

Humanists cannot side with the uncompassionate because any humanism worth its salt will, secondly, begin with reverence for human life and a sense of gratitude that among all the creatures of the earth we are endowed with knowledge and understanding. When Job challenges the theology of the backbiters, those are the grounds he uses in his own defense: “I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you in any way.” We do not need to deny God’s existence, or for that matter have any position on it, in order to give man the credit for the accomplishments of human civilization.

Real humanists have to believe in a common humanity based on intelligence, not on some falsely deduced “global community” held together by a tissue of inconsistent ethical norms carved out in blissful ignorance of the religious values it despises.

Finally, I charge secular humanists with hypocrisy and a failure of philanthropy. The most maligned and self indulgent religions can exhibit charity, bury their dead, visit the sick, fund hospitals and medical research, feed the hungry, create orphanages, give to the poor. Say what you will about Christianity, it is a matter of record that the church virtually invented charity—so much so that the emperor Julian scolds his pagan priests for not doing enough for the poor of the Empire.

The Pharisees were notorious for piling on empty phrases, full of critique and challenges and legal posturing, proud of their tithing, careful to do just enough. Secular humanism has never built a hospital, never paid a teacher’s salary, never endowed a college, never funded medical research, never founded a hospice, never sent workers to deal with a health crisis in Malawi or plant trees in Zambia and never dried a grieving eye. It has never expressed the humanist virtue of compassion in a material way.

If many secular humanists are wealthy, it has to be because they find the tradition of Christian charity more objectionable than the virgin birth. Intellectual critique is easy and cheap; competing with the charitable impulses of religion is expensive. If the answer is that religion can afford to do these things because the church is rich, I say Christians developed these habits when they were poor and in part because they were poor.

Does the secular humanist aversion towards charity arise out of the Pharisaic sense of knowing better and therefore “being” better? Is it because too many of the poorest and most vulnerable are also Dim, or at least religious? Or is it because the word “humanism” has been so thoroughly divorced from its cognate “humanitarianism” that the words have become antonyms. Is secular humanism merely a sense of confederation among those who think they know there is no God, without practical application, without a sense of responsibility for the human consequences of such a position?

What is humanistic about an elitist philosophy of life that has no room for the application of virtue and whose identity seems simplistically derived from its mere opposition to the philosophies and feelings it considers inauthentic or unreasonable? Secular humanism is that kind of humanism and therefore no humanism at all. It has pilfered a term it cannot define and has never actualized in good deeds.

Pharisaism was not the whole of Judaism but an ideology, a sect. The slant we get on it in the New Testament is the slant of a new “faith”—one also rooted in Jewish ideas—that saw the Pharisees as hypocrites, lawyers, and loudmouths—all words and no action, all talk and no walk. Secular humanism as an ideology has become an ossified form of atheism rooted in a blunt rejection not only of religious ethics and ideas but of other forms of humanism as well.

The Pharisees disappeared from the scene before the end of the first century, probably still praying loudly and secure in their righteousness as the tides of history swept them away.

Quodlibet: Good without God?

Posted on by

adam1

Being good is not the same as being ethical, or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life.

Let me begin with two stories. The first comes from Voltaire, who is reported to have said to his mistress, Marguerite, “Whatever you do, don’t tell the servants there is no God or they’ll steal the silver.”

Another, told by the writer Diderot in the 18th century, is about the journey of Catholic missionaries to Tahiti–a dialogue between a chief named Orou and a priest, who tries to explain the concept of sin.

Orou says that many of the things Europeans find sinful are sources of pride in his island.

He doesn’t understand the idea of adultery, since in his culture generosity and sharing are virtues. Marriage to a single man or woman is unnatural and selfish. And surely there can be nothing wrong with being naked and enjoying sexual pleasure for its own sake—otherwise, why do our bodies exist. The horrified priest delivers a long sermon on Christian beliefs, and ends by saying,

“And now that I have explained the laws of our religion, you must do everything to please God and to avoid the pains of hell.”

Orou says, “You mean, when I was ignorant of these commandments, I was innocent, but now that I know them, I am a guilty sinner who might go to hell.”

“Exactly,” the priest says.

“Then why did you tell me?” says Orou.

***

These stories indicate a couple of things about the relationship between religion and morality—or more precisely, the belief that God is the source of morality. The first story suggests that belief in God is “dissuasive.” By that I mean, religion is seen as a way of preventing certain kinds of actions that we would do if we believed there was no God. The kind of God religious people normally think of in this case is the Old Testament God, or the God who gives rules and expects them to be obeyed.

Not all religious people believe these rules were given by God to Moses or Muhammad directly, but most would agree that it’s a good idea, in general, not to steal, commit adultery, hate your neighbor (or envy his possessions obsessively), or kill other people. For at least a thousand years busy theologians have tried to put these essentially negative rules into more positive form: for example, by saying that people should act out of love for each other, or love of God, and not out of fear. Most Christians would say this is the essential difference between the laws of the Old Testament and the teaching of Jesus in the New. But they are only partly right. Both books of the Bible and all of the Qur’an emphasize fear of God, judgment, and the rewards and punishments of the hereafter as goads to repentance, leading a better life, giving up your rotten ways. Even the books of the Bible that are tainted with Greek thought—like the Book of Proverbs–emphasize that “the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” So it’s mischievous to say that fear and trembling aren’t used for moral leverage throughout the Bible.

Modern Christians, Jews, and the Muslims who focus on God’s compassion and mercy, are required to ignore a whole cartload of passages where God reminds people, like any ancient father (and not a few modern mothers), that his patience is wearing thin. Jeremiah 5:22 (NIV) “’Should you not fear me?” declares the Lord. ‘Should you not tremble in my presence?’” The answer is a deafening: “Yes.” Remember the flood? Remember the first born sons of the Egyptians? Remember the plagues and famines? Remember Sodom and Gomorrah? You love this God because you ignore his commandments at your peril. He has chosen you; you have not chosen him, and he can withdraw his favor whenever he wants. (As Jackie Mason used to say, you look at Israel and you have to wonder if “maybe the Samoans aren’t the chosen people”).

The theme of the oldest books of the Bible is very plain: God “loves” (more precisely, he watches out for) the ones who keep his commandments and punishes those who don’t. — A simple message that theology has had two thousand years to massage. In fact, the New Testament belongs to the history of that massaging process. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the first spin doctors–re-writing the script, transforming Yahweh into a compassionate conservative. But let’s be clear that the hero of the story is a typical Near Eastern tyrant: powerful, vengeful, jealous by his own admission, proprietary (“His is the world and all that dwells within”), and though slow to anger, fearsome when his wrath is provoked, watchful to point of being sleep- deprived (Ps 121.4). There is no unconditional love here. God is not a model for progressive parenting; he’s not interested in the self-esteem of his people, has not read Dr Wayne Dyer, and will not break down weeping on Oprah! for being compulsive. The message of God the Father is, “Do this or else.”

A larger question posed by Voltaire’s little story is whether the motivation of fear is ever ethical. If you do something because there is a threat of pain and suffering if you don’t, or if you hold off doing something you would really like to do—for the same reason—are you being moral?

What Voltaire is really saying—as Nietzsche, Marx and Freud would later say—is that religion is useful for keeping certain kinds of people in line. Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- century European society could be neatly divided into those who knew better and those who served the ones who did. Marx went so far as to suggest that the social deference the moneyed classes paid to religion was simply intended to convince the lower classes that religion is true—in fact, that’s exactly what Voltaire is saying: Religion is a mechanism used by the knowledgeable to keep the unknowledgeable in their place. It has social advantages—Marx’s Jewish father conveniently “converted” from Judaism to the Prussian State Church in order to go on working as a lawyer. And we all know the younger Marx’s most famous verdict on the topic: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”

What’s missing from this critique, of course, is the question of whether a “religious act” can ever be a “moral act.” Clearly, belief in God (or a specific kind of God) provides behavioral incentives. As a system of control based on fear, religion keeps people from “being bad,” or at least doing things considered bad by the controller. But it does this inefficiently. Clearly it offers people an explanation for why they behave in certain ways, ranging from the “Bible tells me so” to “Papa dixit”—the pope says so. As a means of consolation, it teaches people to deal with the fear and insecurity created by oppression. But it does this at the expense of self-fulfillment, wholeness. It is the security of an abusive relationship, where comfort consists in being able to predict and manipulate eruptions of violence. In fact, to look back to the sacrificial origins of religion, this was precisely its social role. Even the story of the crucifixion, which many people believe is all about love and forgiveness, is the story of a God so angry at the sinful imperfections of humanity that he transfers his violence to his only son, who becomes the redemptive victim—the buy-back price—for sins he didn’t commit.

Let’s call this religious approach to behavior “Being Good.” Being good is not the same as being ethical or virtuous, or doing good, or even leading a good life. It’s a mother wagging an imperative finger at a three year old and saying “You’d better be good.” It always involves threat and reward. Two generations ago, the image would have included threats of belts or woodsheds spankings, going to bed without dinner. I guess, unfortunately, in some places it still does. But you don’t get ethics out of this. You get obedience and submission.

***

What about Diderot’s story about the missionary and the tribal chief? If the story about Voltaire suggests that religion is dissuasive and coercive, Diderot’s suggests another reason why religion doesn’t sit well with ethics: Religion is prescriptive, and like politics, it’s local. In 2000 years of massaging the message, it has changed because we have changed our minds. Most of the biblical rules about property, goods and chattels, adultery and incest were typical throughout the Middle East; in fact, as Freud recognized, the taboos against murder and incest are the earliest form of laws in some tribal societies. But the books we call the basis of the “Judaeo-Christian -ethic” weren’t written by tribes—tribes don’t write. And the body of laws we call the Ten Commandments contain lots of rules that have been quietly put in trunks and sent to the attic.

For example, we all applaud the wisdom of the commandment that says, “Honor your father and your mother.” It has a nice ring, especially during school vacations. But Deuteronomy 21.20 says that disobedient sons should be stoned in front of the elders at the gates of the city. And Exodus 21.17 says that anyone who insults his mother and father shall be put to death. As for adultery, which belongs to ancient property law in the Jewish system, the punishment is stoning—normally only for the woman (Deut. 22.21). In Deut. 22.28, the penalty for raping an unbetrothed virgin is a fine of 50 shekels–plus taking her on as a wife. There are laws protecting the rights of the firstborn sons of unloved wives when a man has several wives (Deut. 21.15) and even laws about how long a Jewish warrior must wait (one month) before he can have intercourse with a woman he has captured in battle (21.10). According to Leviticus 19.23, raping another man’s female slave is punishable by making an offering to the priest, who is required to forgive him. There are laws covering how long you can keep a Hebrew male-slave—6 years—but if you sell your daughter as a slave to another man she cannot be freed, unless after the master has had sex with her he finds her “unpleasing”—in which case she can be put up for sale (ransom) (Exodus 21. 7ff.). On it goes—throughout the books of the Torah—the Law.

The sheer ferocity of the God who gives, or rather shouts these commandments to his chosen people is distant from our time. The voice is unfamiliar: Failure to do what he says results in terror: In fact, that’s the very word he uses: “I will bring upon you sudden terror, wasting disease, recurring fever, plagues that will blind you….those that hate you will hound you until there is no place to run; I will multiply your calamities seven times more than your sins deserve. … I will send wild beasts among you and they will tear your children from you. … If you defy me , I will scourge you seven times over. …I will send pestilence …cut short your daily bread, until ten women can bake your bread in a single oven. … I will punish you seven times over. … Instead of meat, you shall eat your sons and your daughters.” Don’t take my word for it: read Leviticus 26. It has literary flair. The God of the Old Testament is a three dimensional figure—far bigger than Zeus and twice as malignant. (Perhaps Zeus was able to give freer rein to his sexual appetites, whereas Yahweh limits himself to one Galilean virgin?) And look though you may, you will not find these laws “repealed” in later books, at least not in the way modern laws can be amended and repealed. But it’s absolutely certain that anyone who tried to obey these laws in twentieth century Europe or America would be slapped into jail, and the defense “The Bible told me so” would not be an adequate defense. –Try posting these commandments above the blackboard in your neighborhood school.

One way of charting the so-called progress of western civilization is to trace how human values eventually triumph over the ferocity of religious law. The kind of morality that Diderot’s priest represents, like the morality of the Bible, and even the reductionist versions of biblical and Quranic teaching that modern religious denominations espouse, is not ethics. It is not ethics because ethics can’t be grounded in what I’m going to call “irrelative prescriptive dissuasion.” If you say to me, “Well: no one believes these things any more,” then I say “Good for us for not believing. Then time to stop letting the Bible be the source of moral authority when the conduct of its hero is not up to our standards of civil behavior.” If you say, “There is great wisdom and poetry in scripture,” then I say “Please then, let’s treat it like other great books that express ideas, customs, and values that have no authority over how we lead our lives.” I have no quarrel with those who want to appreciate the Bible as a product of its own time and culture—with all the conditions that attach to appreciation of that kind. My quarrel is with people who want to make it a document for our time and culture.

And I suppose my quarrel extends to people who consider themselves experts, when what they are expert in is reading around, into, or past the text. Liberal theologians are immensely gifted at reinventing the God of the Bible in the light of modern social concerns. But the project is a literary–not an ethical one. At another extreme, which is really a false opposite, are the fundamentalists who claim to defend the literal truth of the Bible while ignoring two-thirds of the text and focusing on the “literal” truth of bits and pieces.

Can the Bible make you good? If you accept the framework, beginning with Adam and Eve, and the creation of a race doomed to be perpetually three years-old and scolded into obedience, I suppose it can.

Reduced to basic form, the temptation in the Garden of Eden is a story about a cookie jar and a sly, accusing mother. But it takes more than avoiding mousetraps for a choice to be moral or an action to be ethical. A moral act is one in which you can entertain doubt freely, where a person confronts human choices and human consequences, personal and social.

To be fair: the Bible and its cousins are important records of those human choices and their social consequences, coming from an age which is no longer relevant to us. To make it a book for our time is an abuse of the book and a misunderstanding of its importance. More depressingly for some, perhaps, there will probably be no book to replace it. Not even one by a secular humanist. But there will be wisdom, and reason and choice-making, and that will make us humanly better, if not exactly good.