W. C. Fields once quipped that he spent a lot of time studying the Bible — to find the loopholes! Surveys indicate that fully 65-70 % of Americans believe that there is no such thing as absolute truth.
Perhaps the only difference between the loophole seekers of Fields' time and the relativists of today is that today almost nobody reads the Bible, churched and unchurched alike.
Loopholes aren’t necessary when you don’t think there is a source of absolute truth in the first place. When everything is relative; when you are your own judge of what is right and what is wrong; you don’t need loopholes; and you don’t need the Bible.
One of the results of this view has been a general relaxing of ethical standards to the point where many things which were seen as moral issues are seen now as simply being individual choices that are neither moral nor immoral.
Some of this is good, particularly when morality has been used to mask prejudice by those who insist that their morality must be our morality.
But I also believe that this relaxation of ethical standards leads to a general reluctance, even to an unwillingness, to distinguish between right and wrong. And, ultimately, that reluctance becomes the new standard of the American way of life.
Today we know that literally thousands of eye witnesses attest to the brutal ethnic cleansing in Darfur. We hear of women being raped, entire villages being burned, men, women and children slaughtered. Women, children and old people who are not killed are driven to the border by the tens of thousands.
And we ask: Should we become more directly involved? Should we commit ground troops? Aren't problems in Africa really none of our business? Hasn’t it always been a mess? Aren’t we making it worse if we intervene? Do you know what we should do?
I don’t know exactly what we should do in Darfur except that talk, some humanitarian assistance and whatever other small things we are doing is not enough.
Let me tell you what else I know. I know that abuse of power is wrong; I know that murdering people is wrong; I know that raping women is wrong; I know that starving people, including children, is wrong; I know that driving people from their homes, and burning their villages is wrong.
And I think that knowing that I could begin to develop a response to the evil being done there that was appropriate to the severity of the problem, which the United States has chosen not to do.
I also know that it is wrong to sell dope to kids; to cheat on your spouse; to treat other people like trash; to pay sweat shop wages; to embezzle funds; to love money more than you love anything else; to lie on your income tax and to cheat, steal, burn, rape, pillage, or lord your power over another. And my list goes on and on and on. So does yours.
You see, while we may not agree on how to solve what is wrong in the world, and while we may not agree on what caused that wrong, we do know that some things are right and some things are absolutely wrong. And we know that everything is not relative.
How do we know? I am not sure about anybody else, but in my case I know because the Bible tells me so. And if you are not Christian, but have taken another path of faith, then the sacred writings of that faith, its books and teachings, likely also tell you that the kinds of things I recite are wrong.
If you are an ethical humanist likely you know right from wrong because you learned the morality taught by your parents and/or in the public schools, the standards outlined within the community in which you lived, and the standards of conduct supported by our national ethic.
All of those sources of ethical teaching are now often ignored. New meanings of "tolerance" and "live and let live" are the mantras most taught today.
Whether this is "good" or "bad" is left to each individual to decide for herself. Is something crude or demeaning? Who knows? Is something insulting and disgusting? Who knows? Is there a standard against which we can judge civil behavior, respect for others, respect for privacy, self, relationships, ideals, manners, or conduct of behavior? Who knows?
Interestingly, in this country people used to turn to the Church as the place where values, standards, morals and absolutes drawn from the teachings of Jesus and the teachings in the Bible were taught as correct beliefs that grounded ethical deportment. Unfortunately, the American Church is badly split into different subsets, with wildly differing ideas about ethics.
The Christian right has always been a place where a strict and literal interpretation of the Bible was the distinguishing mark of those churches.
That is still true, but the Christian right has also moved far, far beyond limiting the force of its opinion to the members of its churches. Rather the right has decided that the morality that they profess is to be compelled upon all of society, forced, if necessary, by secular laws.
The irony of this is that the very churches that used to say that the Christian's duty was to live according to Biblical mandates and to shun involvement in the secular world are precisely the same churches that now have decided that everyone else's morality must be the same as their morality.
Call them what you will: the Moral Majority, the Christian Right, the Conservative Church, but they have turned the intent of the founders of those denominations on its head and have created an image of "Christian" which is not only narrow, prejudiced and based on lousy scholarship, but which hurts liberal mainline Christians like me because all Christians are then assumed to believe what they believe.
Still, there should be places where Christians like me can feel comfortable, and to a certain extent there are. There are several denominations and many individual churches that still offer a plainly spoken understanding of the message of Christ and of the ethical teachings of the Bible. But they are an ever shrinking minority of Christian churches in America today.
Some of that erosion of mainline Churches can be blamed on trying to counteract the image of the church upheld by the loud and insistent churches on the Christian Right.
But some of the shrinking of the size of mainline churches has to be laid at the feet of the mainline churches themselves. Unfortunately, too many of the mainline churches have decided that to be attractive to people they have to be sloppy in their teachings.
I have attended many of those churches where the fundamental leadership idea is to never, never offend anyone. So, whatever you do, do not preach about values, ethics, or morality and certainly never say that there is such a thing as ethical truth. Better we should feel good about our church experience than actually be good in our lives.
In other words, too many mainline churches would rather provide a feel good experience than focus on the requirements of discipleship. After all, which would you rather attend: a barbeque followed by singing about feeling good about yourself, or a talk about how a Christian should behave?
There was a Yale law professor, an eminent ethicist by the name of Arthur Leff, who struggled mightily with the issue of the relativizing of ethics in America. His was a secular, agnostic, view and I bring it forward here to make the point that this issue transcends all facets of American life, and supersedes all ideologies.
Leff gave a wonderful lecture way back in 1979 that is all too relevant today, poignantly so. He titled his lecture, which has become a classic in the field of legal ethics, "Unspeakable Ethics - Unnatural Law."
Leff said, "I want to believe, and so do you, in a complete transcendent, set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe, and so do you, in no such thing; but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to do."
In other words, we want it both ways. We want an external set of universally valid ethical rules and we want to be free to do what we want to do, and to be free to create ourselves in our own image using whatever ethical rules we wish to use at any given time.
In his lecture, Leff struggled with the dilemma he posed, largely, I think, because in his universe there was no one "out there" who could lay down the standards, no God to stand behind the authority of what is right or wrong.
With "no God" we invite the "chip on the shoulder" response which Leff calls the "Sez who?" argument. "Who are you who says that I should not beat my wife to a pulp?" If there is no God, who is to judge whether that is right or wrong?
If God is dead, or irrelevant, then we lose the battle to a nihilism which rejects any outside "evaluator" who makes judgments about how we ought, or ought not, live.
Professor Leff, good soul that he was, came to an interesting conclusion, both depressing in that it has no foundation that he would admit guided him, but admirable in that he comes to a personal decision in spite of feeling that he cannot model any reason for anyone to agree with him.
"All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why any thing should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:
Napalming babies is bad.
Starving the poor is wicked.
Buying and selling each other is depraved.
Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, ...have earned salvation....
Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.
There is in the world such a thing as evil."
Then Leff said to his audience: "All together now: Sez who?"
He ended by saying "God help us."
An amazing final statement by a brilliant agnostic, isn't it? I say "Amen" to his "God help us" because we have not come very far since 1979, and, in fact, I think that we are worse off.
The Scriptural text (Jeremiah 31: 27 -33; see addendum) that prompted this essay comes from a time in the history of Israel when relativists held sway. Israel had been devastated and many of its leaders were hauled away in chains into exile. Its cities were destroyed and made virtually unfit for habitation.
There was no leadership remaining worthy of the name: government officials, judges, lawyers, priests and prophets could be bought. The rich got richer and the poor got poorer and ultimately got squashed.
The "leaders" argued constantly over how to run the land, who was to get rich and who was to be killed, who was to lead and who was to follow, who to tax and who went to jail or was executed. Does that sound at all familiar?
Into this mess came Jeremiah, promising a day when cities would be rebuilt and reinhabited, farms replanted, cattle reintroduced; a time of prosperity and peace.
But how could that possibly happen? Who would make it happen? Would there be a new David? Perhaps a new messiah, a powerful military leader that would rise out of the dust of defeat and lead Israel to glory days once more?
No. Jeremiah promised nothing like that. Instead Jeremiah said that God was sick of the old ways of the people and of their abuse of the old Covenant. So God said he would make a new Covenant with the people.
Now, this "new" Covenant wasn't really new. The rules would be the same, but this time the responsibility to uphold the Covenant would be placed not on the leaders and prophets, but on each individual, personally, by God.
God said, once again, "I will be your God, and you will be my people." And they asked, "But, how, Lord, can this be when we broke the last Covenant with you?" And he said, freely paraphrasing here: "You broke my heart. You took my Commandments and stepped all over them; you failed to listen to my prophets. I had written down on tablets I gave to Moses what you should do, and you refused to read or to listen."
But this time, Jeremiah says, God will do something remarkable. God will make it impossible for you to ignore his Commandments, because this time, God will "write them on your hearts."
God said that no longer will you have to squabble over what is right or what is wrong; you won't have to parse every phrase, argue every passage. You will know in your own heart what is right and what is wrong, what to do and what not to do.
What God was saying was really rather simple. This new Covenant was to become a part of us, part of our character. When confronted with a moral problem we won't have to say, "Excuse me a minute, I have to look up whether or not it is right to steal."
Under the new Covenant we'll just know it is wrong because it will be "written on our hearts."
The knowledge of the Law of God, the Torah, the instruction of God as to how to live a godly life, will become a matter of our very being, of our character. Torah will simply be part of us.
When Professor Leff stood before a packed house of lawyers and said that, in spite of every relativist, elusive moral position, he knew that "napalming babies" was wrong, he showed personal courage. But when asked "Why is it wrong?" he could only lead the audience in saying "Sez who?"
His last sentence in that seminal lecture left open a tiny shaft of light to shine on the enigma. "God help us," he said. "God help us" works for me because when I am asked that question my answer is "Says God. That's who!"
And I believe that whenever we go through a litany of things we know are either right or wrong, you, I, and any who know right from wrong are seeing this new Covenant taking hold in our hearts. This Covenant with the Holy One is being "written on our hearts" all these centuries later.
I believe that it is the only means we have, that anyone has, of rising above the slashing, beating, shooting, "solutions" to which modern society has sunk. We who take a stand, even if we do not acknowledge it, have the Torah, the instruction of God, written on our hearts. That's how I see it anyway.
Name it what you will. Credit whatever source you wish to credit, or none at all. But just think about this: What do you call that sense of outrage when you learn about women being beaten, raped and killed?
What do you call it when that small voice inside of you tells you to give back to the cashier the $30 extra change she mistakenly gave you for a $50 when you know you gave her a $20?
What do you call that strength that comes to you when you remain faithful to your beliefs in the face of enormous temptation to let them slide?
From where comes that resolve to not use corporal punishment on your child? That anger when you learn that torture has been covered over by our government? That decision to try to seek reconciliation with someone who has hurt you badly? That hollow pain you feel when you see an animal mistreated, or watch someone abuse a pet?
In things small and large there are some things that are just not right.
And, whatever you call it when you know that is true, I call it a covenant with God that is being written on your heart.
Peace,
Monte
Jeremiah 31: 27-33
27 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. 28 And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD. 29 In those days they shall no longer say: "The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." 30 But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge. 31 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt--a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
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Comments
Maybe it's a jaded view Monte. Maybe it's because 50 years ago we didn't have 24 hour "news" services. Talking heads on every channel.
We've progressed so far in this country that lynching is now no longer a color thing (thank God) but is an ideological thing (God help us). The moral superiors are normally the ones at the helm of the out of control violence ship. A lot of the southern people lynching in America thought they were doing what was "morally and ethically" right for their people. It's the same way with Neo Conservatives today.
The only absolute truth is in the spiritual realm. Mortal man is not pure in his/her ethics. There are degrees of ethical and objective, but no absolutes. The more someone is convinced they are morally and ethically superior, the more work they have to do on themselves. Of course it's a bit off course from your point, but how I see it.
Wonderful piece.
As Greg intimated, things were very different before the advent of 24/7/365 connectivity. There are some pitfalls in being bombarded on an hourly basis by talking points. But there is also some good that can come of it, if we just make the effort. The news coming out of Darfur would have taken months to get to us in the 1800s. Now it reaches us instantaneously.
The fact that we are all brothers and sisters doesn't seem to help. I sometimes wonder why that is.
Whether a person believes in God or Jesus or not, everyone has that "inner voice". I will never understand the people who chose not to listen to it, or who have ignored it for so long they cannot hear it anymore.
Excellent post Monte; I hope it finds its way to those who need it.
:-)
The problem I see with using the Bible as an absolute authority is its confusing language, and plainly untranslatable ideas. How can that provide any clarity of thought? The problem with using our hearts, as "a covenant with God ...written on your heart" --- makes all consciences somehow equal. Human will always interacts with innate conscience.
Lovely people, moral people exist who lead lives which remain damned by Christian dogma---the gays, the lesbians, and all varieties thereof. Those people also have consciences, good and beautiful consciences, and many, many tender monogamous relationships. They have convenants with God and each other unrecognized by traditional Church dogma.
This leads me to believe God is bigger than the Bible---bigger than any book or collection of books. A question which could be asked is: When there is truth, when there is joy--why do we need any book of rules?
To quote a non-Christian book, from around 800BC.
"Where there is creation there is joy,
Where there is no creation there is no joy.
Know the nature of joy.
Where there joy there is the Infinite,
Only in the Infinite is there joy.
There is no joy in the finite.
Know the nature of the Infinite.
--Chandogya Upanishad.
The relationship between our deep sense of joy and the Infinite is clear. This is perhaps a more universal measure than the Bible, or our even own consciences.
Best wishes to you. Charles Roland Berry
But that belief in tomorrow is edgy. Tomorrow is not certain. So the covenant of the moment is the only one that can be known and acted on. Honoring it therefore would be the most "reasonable". Dishonoring it is unreasoned, an act devoid of a rational foundation.
Hey, Bill. Thank you. I do think that instant communication is a two edged sword. We are more susceptible to being gullible when claims are made that are unsubstantiated, but we also have access to much more reliable information if we search for it. It is a shame, as both Leff and you say, that the fact that we are all brothers and sisters does not seem to mean much to a lot of people.
Hi, SM: I love this from your comment: "Overall, it's having a conscience." And I truly think that we would be a whole lot better of if we all paid a bit more attention to that "inner voice." I have no clue why people chose to ignore it, other than simply wanting to do something that it tells us not to do. IE: willful disobedience to what we know is right. For me St. Paul said it best: "The good that I would do I cannot; and the good that I would not do, I do."
Charles: good to have your comments. I believe that this is the first time you have commented here on my work. I appreciate your cogent and germane comments very much, and agree with much of what you have written. I too struggle with the confusion of certain ethical thoughts in the Bible, it has been a life long study of mine, and, as such, I find the ethical values therein not nearly as opaque as one might who has not done that. Very little of the Bible is untranslatable, while much of it is too broad to be of much value in a situational sense.
A lot of the ethical commandments in the Bible are not meant for anyone other than believers, although you would never know it the way some fellow Christians carry on. All the ten commandments, and the detailed Covenant Codes which followed are meant for believers only. Most people do not understand that. Thus, as a Christian I may break this or that commandment, but a non Christian cannot break it, since it does not apply to him unless he decides that it does. The same is true of many of the commandments of Jesus, although many more of them were intended to be heard and, hopefully, followed, by everyone.
As I said in a reply before this one, I think we need some standard beyond ourselves, lest we be simply guided by the whims of our preferences at any given moment. Many people do not share my view on this.
I think that what you call Christian dogma that condemns gays, lesbians, etc. is simply wrong, and is ignorant of how to interpret the Bible. That is what I was referring to in my essay as a serious problem when the Christian Right asserts poor scholarship and claims it is THE Christian position. It is anything but. You do not know me well but I find those churches' positions on such issues anathema.
You write: "This leads me to believe God is bigger than the Bible---bigger than any book or collection of books." I could not agree more. To think otherwise is foolish. But, as a general guide for a Christian it is in the Bible where we find the most definitive exposition of God's ethical positions. Obviously a non Christian would not likely find exploration of the Bible to be of much use, other than a document to compare ethical values in it with other such values.
I value "Joy" as much as the next person and love the quote you include. But, again, it does come from a book. I am glad that you do find that "the relationship between our deep sense of joy and the Infinite is clear." Many do not. You and I are not so far apart as you might think.
Thanks, Lorraine. Glad you like it, and if you have comments after a deeper look, we would love to hear them.
Hi, AKA: thanks for your thoughtful and insightful comment. I cannot improve on it and only hope that others will take the time to read it and ponder its importance as an existential reality that we need to honor. Many would say, unfortunately, that not only do we not honor the present covenant, but that no such covenant exists; a position which I fully understand but do not concur with. Well said!
Everyone: I will be out of pocket until later this evening, so please continue to comment and converse among yourselves and I will be back and join in later.
Good comments all, and the number of people reading this -- over 500 already, does a real thankful number on my heart! Bless you all!!
Monte
to the least of your brothers,
that you do unto me".
My favourite hymn when I was a kid. Indeed, it is written across my heart and guides me to this day.
Great post, Monte.
: )
As usual you’ve given us much to think about on one of the toughest issues to get our heads around.
I recently read (and I must plead for the author’s forgiveness since I cannot remember who to credit) an interesting exercise when it comes to relativism and ethics/morality.
Most people currently agree that torture is morally wrong. We find the idea of inflicting pain and suffering on a person via torture to be repulsive even in the context of war.
However, we can minimize the pain and suffering of civilians caused by the dropping of bombs on a military target. We call it collateral damage. Children maimed, lifetimes of suffering, children watching their parents die, all neatly packaged away as a lesser evil.
Every bombing campaign has collateral damage so there is foresight. We know every bombing run has an almost certainty of killing or injuring the innocent.
We could not go into Darfur to fight a ground war and save innocent people without killing innocent people.
Somehow, and I think most moral people would agree that action would seem more moral than killing just as many innocent people through torture to find information on a ticking time bomb.
I struggle to know how we can escape relativism.
We are so ready to see how wrong things are now, but I truly wish that we could let African countries develop as they should. Every bit of trouble there has been started and continued by us, Arab Muslims, or Europeans.
It just depends upon which government is being threatened by which outside influence.
And the interference is still going on.
Another thought provoking, enlightening, well written piece, dear Monte.
Mark, Good to have you back. You always help me to think through ideas. Your points are well made and I agree with them.
I think we may be defining relativism differently. Relativism, to me, is saying that everything is relative; that there are no intrinsic higher values, and that each person's idea is equally valuable: eg: A woman not known to either me or a person I am walking with comes into view. I say "do not kill her;" he says, "why not? I feel like killing her so I will." That, to me, is relativism.
What I think you are talking about, and I may be wrong, is what I call "situational ethics." In other words, while we have some things that we value more highly than others: not torturing vs torturing; avoiding collateral damage vs causing it, trying to avoid killing innocent people while saving other innocent people, we have to consider how to apply those values given the existential reality that we are facing in a given situation. We have to take into account the Sitz em Leben, the setting in life, in which the moral imperative is to be implemented.
Doing so, all moral decisions are less than perfect because they, to a greater or lesser extent, compromise the overarching moral principle in the light of the existing reality. A good example of this is the attempt of politicians, philosophers and theologians to define the parameters of a "just war." Obviously, we would prefer that there should be no war at all. But, given the evil in the world, there are times in which war is preferable to the alternative, which may well be annihilation.
I would say that we are not being "relativists" in such circumstances but we are being realists who are applying situational ethics to a given problem. Reinhold Niebuhr, for my money, wrote the best explanations of this problem in several of his books published around the time of the Second World War.
Regardless of how we parse the words, you and I both agree on the difficulty of applying ANY moral values to real life situations. But I believe that the outcome will be far less damaging if we go into a situation holding to high moral values than if we approach it as if everything is amoral, in which case power will always define the result.
Great comments, Mark.
Hi, Zuma: come back when you can take a deep breath and read at leisure. It would surely be great if we could put the genie of our and others meddling in the African experience back in the bottle.
The truth is that the so-called "West" and some in the Middle East have royally screwed up the shape of that continent. We have much to account for. There are no good answers, but I think that if we can at least help clean up some of our mess, acknowledge our sins, and maybe help those who are oppressed and being horribly mistreated we could encourage the peoples of those nations to shape their own futures.
Thank you, fireeyes, much appreciate your reading and commenting.
Hi, Cathy, as usual you are right on the money. Everything seems to come down to "interpretation" doesn't it? I do think that we all have an obligation to rise to the more godly and humanly giving interpretations. We have been given great gifts for us to manage and be stewards of in this world. None of it, to my way of thinking, involves the exploitation of others to the benefit of ourselves. We could start with that. Kind of like acting as if the Golden Rule were actually worth something. Wouldn't it be something if we did just that?
God bless you all,
Monte
I guess the main difference between liberal Christians (as well as others with conscience) and so-called conservative Christians would be whether the morals they claim to possess were handed out by God or fabricated by man for personal or political gain. I'm sure that when God wrote that "covenant on our hearts" he didn't include such things as intolerance for others or killing in the name of protecting life. To me, those are clearly man-made "ethics."
Thanks so much for this, Monte.
When anyone under the guise of religion or ideology or philosophy makes up a set of moral standards and then searches for out of context "proof" of their convictions they can always find something that will justify their prejudices. Such "proof texting" is the bane of serious scholarship when studying the Bible or any other literature.
I think it is particularly obnoxious when someone claims that texts in the Bible intended solely for the instruction of particular believers in a particular time an place are then anachronistically applied to all people now. That dog simply will not hunt.
Nor am I pleased when a small piece of text is taken out of context and then used as a bludgeon that allegedly overrides the plain and simple teaching of love for all that Christ taught over and over.
In any case, you and I are once again on the same wave length.
Blessings and Peace,
Monte
Thank you so much for this. Your well-considered words, and the equally well-considered replies, once again have made me aware of the odd perceptual gulf between us and "non-believers" that I can't figure out how to bridge. I'm not going to allow myself to be drawn into interacting with any of them tonight.
In a Bible study recently, someone I know said something very similar: "If we have no soul, there is no right or wrong." That makes sense; there is no sin inherent in H1N1 killing young children, or in dogs killing squirrels. (Then that led into a discussion of whether there were dogs in heaven; we have really free-ranging Bible studies.) That is less congruent with a lack of transcendent values, though, than with a lack of awareness and understanding of those values and adoption of them. I do believe transcendent values exist, because we see that demonstrated, albeit imperfectly, in the great deal of overlap between the behavioral codes of very divergent human societies. The basic framework of rules often is very similar; it's the human element that fouls it up. I have spent years developing the idea that the values are transcendent *between* people rather than *in* them individually. (Individualism is one of my bugaboos.) At least the concept of reciprocity shines through, or perhaps that's just detente. I have had children who spent their early years in situations of such indifference toward morality that they developed no awareness of it. Yet of course there are right and wrong ways to treat them, as there are right and wrong ways to treat dogs and perhaps even viruses, tapeworms and the like. We all draw a line; as far as I know none of us is able to defend it logically. What we consider morality may be a luxury available only at the top of the food chain.
All that is rather beside the point I intended to make, which I have forgotten, but it had elements of "meat sacrificed to idols" "now I see through a glass dimly," and "bidden or unbidden." I saved your post until I had time to read it and ponder it, and now I'm too tired to make sense of a reply.
Grace to you, and peace.
Transcendent values, or absolute values, or higher values, whatever we name them, are, in my opinion, not something that we can think our way to. They are something we can "know" if by knowing we mean something that we feel is right.
But where we fall off into arguing about the wrong thing is when we, as Dr. Leff tried to do, think we can find inherent within the human being or in societies some universal attributes which can be "proven" as to why, for instance, we either think it is OK to kill someone for no reason at all, or we do not. Mostly people everywhere think that is true, except for canabals and warrior nations and, well, there are several anomolies which make that a universal truth impossible.
We can say, "Well, we should not kill someone because it takes away their right to exist." But the answer is "Who says they have any right to exist?," and on and on, regressively, until all it takes is for someone to say that they disagree and you have no basis of proving anything. I know people who argue that seriously, or, if for no other reason than to be irritating. But there really is no response to them intellectually regardless of their motive.
So I think there is no "proof" that transcendent values exist any more than there is "proof" that God exists. BUT, if you believe that God exists the first thing you have to decide is whether God is good, or evil, or in between or both. If, like me, you decide that God is good and, because God is good, God has our best interests at heart then we begin to see some of those ethical imperatives come to fore. Ditto for Creation (the environment) for animals (stewardship) and on down the line. For me then, everything starts and ends with whether or not one believes in God. Call God a higher power, or Mother, or whatever you want to call God, but God is the ultimate arbiter of all things earthly, and cosmologically if you want to take it that far.
Now, all that is a belief. And, just so, I think that the belief in higher values, or ultimate values, or transcendent values is just that, a belief. Within that belief system we can argue about which values are most important, which must be compromised when faced with situational ethical decisions, etc. But outside of that belief not much dialogue is possible. And that is simply because someone will say "prove it," or "sez who!" or "So what, I disagree."
There is room for discussion only if we all openly concur that each of us does, in fact, have a set of things that we feel are right and a set of things we feel are wrong. If we can agree on that, regardless of the source, it is possible to discuss specifics.
Thanks again,
Monte
Monte
With the proliferation of the Moral Majority or the Christian Right, (whichever moniker we choose to hang on them,) and the pointed 'shunning' of specific groups of people, I have come to understand and appreciate even more fully the verse in the Bible that instructs each of us to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." There is a huge "margin of error" in so many teachings that come out of the Christian Right, the judgmental and sweeping condemnations of groups and individuals, with what appears to be little to no concern for the broken hearts of the rejected and not even a nod in the direction of the Grace of God. I have so often wondered, "where is the grace?" It seems to have been lost in all the declarations of , "God said..." when so often it is not what God said that we are quoting, rather it is our interpretation of what we THINK God said.
"God help us" should be constantly on our hearts - however we define God. In this wicked age in which we find ourselves, I keep remembering my favorite passage: "Where sin doth abound, grace doth much more abound."
Great post, Monte. Thank you.
Rated.
This is very bothersome to me and I can see how it gives liberal Christians like you a bad name by association. You simply can't throw everyone under an umbrella and say they are all the same. It's like the way we on OS rail about Republicans. I live in a very red state and can assure you that not all Republicans think the way the far right do, but I am also guilty of saying "those damned Republicans". We could all use a little civility and qualifying when we do that sort of thing.
"I have attended many of those churches where the fundamental leadership idea is to never, never offend anyone. So, whatever you do, do not preach about values, ethics, or morality and certainly never say that there is such a thing as ethical truth. Better we should feel good about our church experience than actually be good in our lives. "
Now you know I don't attend church, but it seems that preaching about wrong behavior and wrong beliefs would be pretty important. I think a preacher should make those in his audience a bit uncomfortable if they are acting inappropriate outside the church's walls. Those in the audience that are living clean lives would be far less affected.
"The rules would be the same, but this time the responsibility to uphold the Covenant would be placed not on the leaders and prophets, but on each individual, personally, by God."
I agree. It IS the individual that makes the decision to do good or bad. Almost all of us know the difference between right and wrong. Whether we choose to follow that knowledge or not. "The devil made me do it" just doesn't fly any more than shooting an abortion doctor and saying, "it is God's will."
This is a great post, Monte. As usual, very well thought out and presented.
“Relativism, to me, is saying that everything is relative; that there are no intrinsic higher values, and that each person's idea is equally valuable”
I think we were on the same page until the each person’s concept of morals being equal part. My concept of relativism (at least moral relativism) stops at the level of societal and cultural perspectives on the circumstances being examined.
On the topic of absolute truth or authority on morals, in my opinion, the God of Abraham seems like a relativist. Clearly based on the commandments killing is a sin. Based on the situation though, He sometimes commands it.
Our hearts would tell us that some of those commands were relatively more moral than others. For example, to me, it would seem less moral to have killed every first born in Egypt (including I can imagine innocent babies) than it was to impose the death on sinners (who at least knew the rules and the punishment for breaking them) or the obliteration of the Amalekites (who at least provoked the Israelites).
Our current moral compass (at least in our culture) would seem to bear this out; capital punishment still exists, but only for the perpetrator. Some (most?) of us in our hearts are unsure of the morality of capital punishment, but far more of us (all?) would be repulsed at the idea of punishing a criminal by executing his first born.
Maybe I’m too dense to get the point of an absolute truth, but I fear that what some people mean is “thinking about ethics is hard work and involves self examination, I’m going to defer this work to someone else”.
Thanks again for the food for thought.
I applaud yr back to basics approach to Creation.
we choose immediate satifaction of the self
instead of developing our innate capacity to
return to the divine ground
(which is the whole point of Creation, or , better: CREAT-ING)
too bad...the ground is firmer beneath my feet
than the shifting sands of time...
time: a sandstorm of atoms in seemingly chaotic motion..
or,,..better: E-MOTION
hungering for the most immediately profitable form..
the form
not ultimately
best &
certainly way too damn entropic
thats for sure...
entropy...yuck...is entropy a
quality of Satan?
James
"what's best for me"
becomes the moral code
the breakdown in the family is also responsible
parents who don't care enough to give their spouse or kids a stable life
young people who falsely assume that elders know nothing
Unbreakable: I always hate to call out any person or group, but the Christian Right has made it impossible for me to avoid doing that and still be content within my soul. So much damage has been done in the name of Christ, and, as you rightly point out, by mass condemnation of large groups of people. This, to my way of thinking, only drives a further wedge between the church and the rest of society, and makes it almost impossible for liberal Christians like myself to function. I spend about as much time explaining that "all Christianity is not like that" as I do explaining that "Christ is inclusive, not exclusive, and came for ALL of us, not just a handful of self proclaimed righteous people."
Hi, Mike. What I said to Unbreakable applies equally to your good comments. We do, at least I do, tend to gather a bunch of people into a stereotyped group, Republicans, Bushies, Right Wingers, etc. just as much as they do to us. But, as with you, a lot of my friends are Republicans and while we differ on political issues we are still friends. This country has become more fundamentally divided along ideological fault lines than at any time I can remember since Nixon was President.
It is very disheartening to me to attend liberal mainline churches and see how little is preached these days about the obligations of discipleship, including discussion of what is right behavior for a Christian. Far too much preaching in those churches today is devoted to making everybody "feel better about themselves" when they leave worship. That is fine to a degree. People do need to feel good about themselves when they are living in a godly manner, but there is more to being a Christian than patting each other on the back. A balance between preaching about how we should live and preaching about how wonderful life is has to be achieved. Most liberal churches are not there yet.
Thanks for coming back and engaging in some more conversation, Mark. I think we are closer together on this issue than we are apart. Some of the problem is that you take the Bible stories about the God of Abraham as being literal statements about what all Christians believe about how God behaved back then. I take the Old Testament stories as stories that were passed down through the generations orally and then finally written down as stories of the heroic fathers and mothers of the faith. I do not take them literally. For example I do not take the stories about the angel of death killing all of the first born children of Egypt, or the plagues upon Pharaoh literally. They are like campfire tales, or family tales that get embellished to make our ancestors look good, often much better than they were in real life. There is truth to be found in those tales, but they are not literally true.
So I can see how that angry and vindictive God could be seen as a relativist. But that says very little to me about how God views the world and a whole lot about how a small group of people who were persecuted and hated by most other groups at the time felt that they needed to have a God who was on their side, a warrior God who would reap vengeance on its opponents. If you read closely enough in those stories you will see that even the redactors admit that some of the stuff that allegedly happened actually did not. They are myths that when put together form a saga about the origins of a culture that came to believe in a single God over a period of centuries. There is, of course, truth to be found in myth, but not the kind of literalist truth that some people believe in.
I think that you are far from dense and that your struggles to understand how I feel about moral imperatives is valid and understandable. Please read what I wrote, above, to High Lonesome and perhaps that will clarify things about what I believe just a bit.
Hi, Jim, glad to see you reading this one. I would think that it is a subject that you have thought about and struggled with about as much as I have. When you get right down to it, ethics is the basis of every important social action we take: whether or not we think there is even such a thing as ethics, our actions tell where we stand on ethics.
Creation is a gift. Even as our lives are gifts. To the extent that we do not honor our obligations to be stewards, caretakers, of God's creation we show clearly that we do not care about the gift of life itself. It is all of one cloth. Nothing we can do does not affect someone else, or something else. On a side note: I spend very little time worrying about entropy. There is quite enough matter and energy in the world that is still working, often times poorly, that I do not worry about that which is not.
Hi, Leonde. Your comment reminds me that I have a series of essays on the Ten Commandments that perhaps I should dig out of storage and rewrite for a series here. Would you read those essays if I did that? I remember working very hard on them a few years ago and it might be fun for me to take a look at that again. The problem with series in a blog format is that people tend to start out interested but as the series goes on it tends to lose readers. In any case I am glad that you find the Commandments an anchor in the shifting sands of our permissive society.
Hi, Kathy. People, and maybe particularly unchurched young people, tend to think that there are hypocrites in church in part because they really have no clue what goes on in church. There ARE, of course, hypocrites in church just as there are elsewhere in society. The difference, it seems to me, is that most of them are trying to do something about it. If you go to church long enough you will at least be able to hear what you ought to be doing and perhaps decide that what you have been doing doesn't quite cut it. I think churches can do a far better job than they do currently in engaging young people in the activities of the churches. Unfortunately I think that the very conservative churches tend to do that better than do the mainline churches. We have a ways to go yet. Your point about parents not caring enough is important here. If parents do not model the kind of behavior a young person should have it is likely that young person will grow up either indifferent or hostile to the church.
Thanks so much, everybody.
Monte
What I see are people who violate these societal rules because they believe they can get away with it. They are not interested in society as a whole, and whether the believe in God or not has no bearing on the issue. They believe in the power of money. This is enforced when our laws have been crafted to value the corporate above the individual. If it doesn't make money, it's not worth anything.
You're absolutely right about people not reading the Bible. And it's a shame. I grew up as catholic by association - my father was raised a catholic and fortunately taught by Jesuits, so I learned to question everything. When I was old enough to think about religion seriously, I read the Bible. And then, when I majored in Literature, I read it again. And again when I was a graduate student. I've read it many, many times and what I find is that most people haven't got a clue what the Bible really says. They've never read more than a passage, and that is usually read to them in church. 100 years ago, almost everyone in this country knew the Bible by heart. It was often the only book in the house and those who were illiterate, memorized it. People 100 years ago were less likely to behave like sheep. They didn't appreciate religious leaders telling them how to think and they didn't follow political parties as if it were a religion.
As to the Bible, it is unfortunately the largest selling book in the world year after year and one of the least read at the same time. Far too many church members are functionally Biblically illiterate, and I do not see that changing in the near future. It seems that having a Bible and reading a Bible are two entirely different things. And studying the Bible is a whole other ball game left largely to the professionals, when it should be left to the individual and to families.
Thank you, JRD, for reading and commenting. Much appreciated.
Monte
I don't know what it is going to take to get the liberal churches to turn back to spending times looking at ethical issues and speaking out about the need for moral courage in our individual and family lives. But if the churches don't do it, I surely do not know where that teaching is going to come from.
Monte
Monte
I meant to post this this morning, got interrupted and forgot to push the button.
One of the issues we've been pondering in Bible study lately is what happens when people want exclusive ownership of values. I think we saw some of that in Kyle Dykman's blog about the difference between "conservatives" and "liberals." If liberals espouse a value, e.g. health care reform, conservatives must disavow it or risk losing what they perceive as the moral high ground. On the other hand, when conservatives stake out ground, e.g. "family values," liberals can't seem to manage to say, "No, caring about families is a universal value that should not be limited to prohibitions on abortion or screeds against homosexuality, etc." So many people seem to need opposition in order to hold their own positions, and it keeps them from claiming ownership of positions they actually do hold. For example, Kyle was very brave to write about being pro-choice; she probably couldn't do that and get elected as a Republican right now even though all the statistics I've seen show that Republicans and those who claim adherence to conservative religious themes have the same rate of abortion as the rest of the population. While I try to steer clear of organized politics, because both of my professions depend on being trusted by more than the small percentage of people here who would agree with my politics and I feel I'm more effective in bringing change by other means, I am somewhat distrusted by my liberal peers because of my lifestyle — because having a bunch of children is not what liberals do. At the same time, I'm reviled when I mention care of the environment, because conservatives don't want to be mistaken for tree-huggers. Now the Navajo, who have spent many years positioning themselves as people who love the earth, have kicked environmentalists off the rez because of opposition to a coal-fired power plant that will bring jobs (and more deaths, especially of children, from respiratory ailments). And so on.
It makes me very tired, and so the idea of transcendent values appeals greatly. It's no wonder we have 4,000 denominations, or 40,000, or whatever the number is. People love to argue, even when, as Leffs said, they really want to believe in right and wrong — except when the "other side" is right.
I do understand that you yourself are motivated by religion but to think that everyone must have a religious backdrop (and that can be any.... you said) is unfathomable to me. I like the way you put things and thus find it interesting to read. I think if we ever had a chance to meet though I would be questioning you constantly. Always with respect and love, T1
Sometimes it gets very depressing. Here on OS some think I am to the right of Kubla Khan because I am a Christian, and some think I am not liberal enough given some of my stances on national politics. Others think I am a traitor to the cause when I call out the President for not following up on his campaign promises, and mostly for handing Wall Street a free ride, etc.
I think we have a lot of bridge building in this country over the next several years and am not very sanguine about our being able to do that.
Meanwhile, "To thine own self be true" sounds like good advice.
Monte
I never did say that ethics had to be religiously motivated. In fact I said that I personally found my ethical core in my faith. But I also said that there were other sources, for instance:
"How do we know? I am not sure about anybody else, but in my case I know because the Bible tells me so. And if you are not Christian, but have taken another path of faith, then the sacred writings of that faith, its books and teachings, likely also tell you that the kinds of things I recite are wrong.
If you are an ethical humanist likely you know right from wrong because you learned the morality taught by your parents and/or in the public schools, the standards outlined within the community in which you lived, and the standards of conduct supported by our national ethic."
Nor did I say that there were not other grounds by which individuals could come to ethical decisions.
In my reply to marcelle I wrote: "Thanks, Marcelle, for your comments. I hope others will read them to see an example of one way that people can look at ethical issues: from a societal/anthropological perspective. You express very well how that reasoning works."
I certainly have no problem with you finding an ethical core in "...evolutionarily beneficial for mankind to act a certain way such that the species can actually thrive...." if that is what is comfortable to you.
What I was mostly concerned about in this post is that we find some basis for ethical and moral behavior in this world beyond the idea that every decision is amoral, that every idea about ethics, including the denial of the need for ethical conduct, is equally valid, and the everything is relative. That is the focus of my concern.
I don't mind taking it on the chin for what I say but finding things "unfathomable" that I never said..........
Take care, blessings,
Monte
I believe what is put out in the universe is coming back to us, and it makes sense to me to be putting out positive, not negative. I've seen firsthand how being kind, empathetic and reasoned can come back tenfold.
Religion, especially the fringe right or left of either is defining love too narrowly, and that makes room for hatred. I have no room for hatred, and pray others don't either.
Wonderful post.
You and I will get along fine Monte because I can feel the same passion in you as there is in me and the same respect for the "other" point of view. Cheers!
The Christian right has been not only leaning to imposing "Christian" morality on the whole society but has been selectively doing so in ways I can't relate to. I don't see how anyone can read Jesus' teaching and think that war - for any reason, at any time - is OK and then that same person can turn around and try to legislate heterosexuality. It just does not compute for me. So many people in our churches seem to be just parroting a political manifesto that they have not even thought about. And sometimes is it hard to see evidence of that Covenant that should be in Christians' hearts working in the world.
Sara
I haven't read the other comments; someone else may have already pointed out the horrific acts of God in the Old Testament, where he repeatedly advocates the murder of women and children in the cities conquered by the Israelites, the stoning of unfaithful wives, and the execution of children who curse us (if I'd followed that one, my eldest would be dead ten times over, and innumerable students as well.) The Old Testament documents the works of a violent God in whom I cannot believe. I have come to reject it, selectively choosing to base what faith I have on the gospels and epistles of the New Testament.
Jesus, in his sermon on the mount, articulates what many ethical religions and philosophers have advocated when he tells us to treat others as we would have others treat us.
This has always struck me as the most succinct and practical way of summing up right behavior. I can't think offhand of a single contingency it does not cover.
Buffy: good to hear from you. You are so right about how our actions and even our attitudes affect others. The "butterfly effect" is at work every second, and if we do not put off positive energy and offer the world a positive ethic then we simply are not doing our part to make this a better place, not only for our children but for each other. Glad you enjoyed this post.
Traveller: Thanks for clarifying. You are welcome here any time.
Hello, again, Blue: I think sometimes it is very difficult to live in an area where the Christian Right is so dominant. Sue and I live in such an area but have found some sanctuary in the churches I have pastored (although the congregations themselves have always been much more conservative than we are). And there are several liberal churches within a half hour drive from here. But in Texas I imagine it is more difficult to find liberal church communities, although I think that it is worth the effort to search, as I believe you do too. And I agree completely that it is very easy to get into a church and accept the political/social ideas of the dominant group. So many people are unwilling not to cave into peer pressure, and I am not condemning them for that, because it is very hard to be independent in a church setting. Some of my good friends are incredibly conservative and when you talk to them about why they really don't know; it is what they grew up with, what all their friends think, and so they have just never questioned it. These are good people on 90% of the issues but they just don't think about the other 10%.
Hello, Anne, so good to have you reading my posts and commenting. I love your honesty and your willingness to admit to the struggles we all have with our faith, particularly in focusing ourselves and our prayers on the needs of others. It is hard to do. I spend far too much time worrying about and focusing on my medical issues and not enough time focusing on others and on the big events, so I share some of those concerns you express. I try to use my posts as a way of reaching out and I do hope that helps, but I know that I can do more. And like you I pray that I "never ever ever give up."
Thanks for the kind words, Professor. I saw your PM that you have posted a piece on this same subject. I haven't read it yet, but will and look forward to it.
Hey Sara, good to see you! Thanks for your kind comments!
Hi, Cindy: You are never late as long as the post is still up. I have addressed the Old Testament issue in my reply to someone else's comment. Here is what I wrote:
"Thanks for coming back and engaging in some more conversation, Mark. I think we are closer together on this issue than we are apart. Some of the problem is that you take the Bible stories about the God of Abraham as being literal statements about what all Christians believe about how God behaved back then. I take the Old Testament stories as stories that were passed down through the generations orally and then finally written down as stories of the heroic fathers and mothers of the faith. I do not take them literally. For example I do not take the stories about the angel of death killing all of the first born children of Egypt, or the plagues upon Pharaoh literally. They are like campfire tales, or family tales that get embellished to make our ancestors look good, often much better than they were in real life. There is truth to be found in those tales, but they are not literally true.
So I can see how that angry and vindictive God could be seen as a relativist. But that says very little to me about how God views the world and a whole lot about how a small group of people who were persecuted and hated by most other groups at the time felt that they needed to have a God who was on their side, a warrior God who would reap vengeance on its opponents. If you read closely enough in those stories you will see that even the redactors admit that some of the stuff that allegedly happened actually did not. They are myths that when put together form a saga about the origins of a culture that came to believe in a single God over a period of centuries. There is, of course, truth to be found in myth, but not the kind of literalist truth that some people believe in."
It is also important to understand that the commandments and laws discussed in the OT were intended to apply to that particular people at that particular time and have no relevance to non-believers, in spite of what so many right wind Christians say today. They are simply not relevant. I think, as you do, that the Golden Rule is about as good a summing up of ethical behavior as there is out there. Thanks for commenting.
Hi, Dusty, I do the same thing on other people's posts that I really want to take my time and think about carefully. I am honored that you think my posts deserve that.
Thanks, everyone. Much appreciated!!!!!!!!!!!!
You're talking about taboo here; or things universally held as wrong. I'm not too fond of the wiki definition of taboo - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taboo - but it's a starting place. Incest is bad because, well, genetically speaking it's a dead end for life as we know it. Patricide is bad because... well... damn, hopefully most folk don't need an explanation of that.
I actually think you're completely right, though. We do know what is right and wrong, generally. I have a pretty good idea of the actions I take and the end results of those actions before I take them. Take lying. Lying to my wife about cheating on her is bad - think of how many ways that could go wrong. I could give her a disease. I could get another woman pregnant. A thousand things could happen to destabilize the life and family I have worked so hard to form.
So, I choose never to lie to my wife. Seems like a no-brainer. But take another lie - a few years back, a friend of ours invited us over to dinner. It was to reciprocate a dozen or more dinners we had hosted, and so we were more than happy to go to his dinner invitation.
He made fish. It was horrible - as in, I had to choke the food down to eat it. I have a wide range of tastes, but my friends monkfish stew was... horrid. The fish itself must have been bad.
I choked it down, thanked him for dinner, and lied. I said it was great, and I thanked him for the chance to spend time with him in his home.
Did I lay awake at night feeling guilty over my lie? No. I knew it was a "white lie" - the kind of falsehood we tell to avoid causing greater harm.
I think that many times, though, the answers to what we want to know are written on our hearts and we just refuse to listen to them. I find that oft-times, when I listen to my heart, I come up with an answer that is far removed from what society would have me do, but I feel I could meet Jesus head-on and explain my reasons for doing X, Y, or Z... and He Himself would understand me fully.
I think Kierkegaard shared this experience at times, too, after reading his works. Society and God - even Society and Universal Law - aren't always working in cohesion; aren't always working in tandem.
I think individually, though... yes, we usually know everything we need to know. It is indeed written on our hearts.
I do think that if we listen to our hearts, nothing mysterious or mystical in that, just LISTEN, we will find that most of the time we know what is the right thing to do. And I don't mean that from a Christian only point of view. I think that most people know the right thing even when they go ahead and do the wrong thing. In Christianity we call that simply "sinning." Paul said it best for me, and we are talking about a major intellectual and spiritual leader here, who was wonderfully honest about his own limitations" "The good that I would do, I do not; and the bad that I would not do, I do." And all that I can say to that is that I fit into that truth far more often than I care to admit.
Good comments from you. And thanks for reading my posts.
Peace,
Monte
You seem to make me consult my Eckhart more & more.
"People should think less about what they ought to do,"
he says, "and more about what they ought to BE. If only their being were good, their works would shine forth brightly. Do not think that you can ground your salvation upon actions...
it must rest on what you ARE."
.......................................................................
The image of a covenant-- a sacred promise---
written in our hearts is a beautiful one.
To put it legalistically, it's a deal with the
Creator that the equipment is good,
and if you have problems with its
operation, they are from your use...
Use of free will...
Of course, they have , in their finite wisdom,
taken away this most precious gift of ours.
It's all biochemically (pre-)determined.
But even that is a free choice:
to choose slavery to the flesh. The meat.
Meat puppet psychology.
.............................................................................
No wonder heart disease is such a big killer.
No wonder a new epidemic of diabetes.
Lots of brain tumors, too...not to mention
cancer, mindless proliferation of useless cells.
God has a devilish sense of humor.
...........................................................................
Too bad god couldnt write the law into our brains
and our tongues, too...
"Wishing to entice the blind,
buddha playfully let words
escape from his golden mouth;
heaven and earth are filled, ever since, with entangling briars."
Jim
One of the great mysteries is why God allows evil to be in the world, including evil such as natural disasters, illnesses that kill, accidents that take innocent lives. Some of that can be laid at the feet of free will: living where it will flood, where hurricanes can devastate, not taking care of our bodies, making stupid decisions that lead to accidents that kill innocents, etc. But there is a whole lot of it that cannot be explained. Some of that residual evil can be seen as a test, a pruning of the vine, things that make us stronger by being tempered in the flame of pain, etc. And yet that still leaves a lot of questions for which no one has answers.
What I think we simply have to accept or reject by faith, not by reason, is that for God's own reasons he made the earth a place where we must make a choice: to accept that God knows what God is doing and allows the chaos in the world for reasons we cannot understand, or, that God does not care. I choose the former. Others choose the latter.
But I do know this, like Job we have to accept existentially that God chooses not to intervene to stop much of the evil in the world. I think that issue, theodicy, is the hardest issue for any believer to accept. More people fall away from the faith when they are tested by catastrophe than for any other reason. Some, however, accept that God knows best and maintain their faith. I am one of those as you know.
Hope you have by now found shelter and a little normalcy in your life. I pray for you. But you know that.
Peace,
Monte
Monte
Monte
My daugther who claims to be a christain informed me that Jesus was not real. I asked how are you a christain and not beleive in Christ!!!!!. I told her about the many true miracles that she has witnessed in my healings. Thank God her boyfriend is a true chistain. I told her to ask him about Jesus.
Don't know what to say about your daughter except that you told her the right thing. The funny thing is that many "Christians" do not think that Jesus is who he said he was. Some even teach in major Christian seminaries. We live in a strange world.
Monte
Under the new Covenant we'll just know it is wrong because it will be "written on our hearts." """"
I came back, as promised, to get the lesson of this post, and have not been disappointed. It is, indeed, written on our hearts, but sometimes, I need an external set of checks and balances because, no way, can a person do it all without some negative beliefs creeping in.
Your posts are as good as any church that I've been to.
Monte
You say, "How do we know {right from wrong}? . . . in my case I know because the Bible tells me so."
Then you go on to say, "I do not take them (the Bible stories about the God of Abraham) literally," and" I can see how that angry and vindictive God could be seen as a relativist. But that says very little to me about how God views the world."
Why? My guess is because you, as you said, "know in your own heart what is right and what is wrong," When you assume the bible is the source of morality, you apply your innate morality to the bible and discount or treat as "campfire tales" those aspects of the bible that don't match your morality.
This is what most good Christians do. The fundamentalists do it, too. They harp on the few passages condemning homosexuality and ignore large tracts on heterosexual sexual morals that make it clear that divorce is wrong.
I strongly feel that we all, Christian, atheist, pagan, agnostic, know in our own hearts what is right and what is wrong.
Churches are merely places that our society uses to discuss morals and church teachings, like the rest of human endeavor, are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.
Do you mean our Gov't? For example, would you feel better if the US sent troops to Darfur to carry out your need to do more? Why should other people die to help you be more moral?
Are you saying that *you* are not doing enough? You could do more. You could volunteer and work in Darfur with some aid organization.
Or are you saying the rest of us are not doing enough (and should pony up more money)?
I ask because, having spent a number of years of my life working with aid organizations to improve the world's sore spots, I'm a bit cynical about how much we can achieve. Money and humanitarian aid won't stop rapes. US interventions in Mogadishu, Yugoslavia, Iraq and countless other places have had the best intentions and not the greatest results.
Monte
First, my interest in the Bible is not casual. If I discount some portions of the Bible it is because it is clear to me and other Bible scholars that those parts of the Bible are part of the myth that was handed down in oral traditions before the Bible was written, and then carried forward by redactors who put their own spin on them to reflect the environment in which they were writing. But I do not read back (eisogesis) into the Bible my preconceived ideas of morality. Those are two separate issues. I get my morality from the Bible. You need not believe that and you may find it strange but that is how it works for me.
When they asked the most respected theologian of the 20th century who had spent his life studying Biblical theology why he believed what he did about ethics he said "Because the Bible tells me so." I am no Karl Barth, but my reason is the same. d
I know that there is a vast difference between how the Christian right and the fundamentalists view the Bible compared to how I view it. Their methods of getting to their ethical positions is far different than mine. I do not have the time to go into all the details of that but it is true. The hermeneutics of liberal theology versus conservative hermeneutics make that clear, but this is not the forum for discussing that.
As for Darfur I made a very specific point that I do not have a plan for how to fix it. "I don’t know exactly what we should do in Darfur except that talk, some humanitarian assistance and whatever other small things we are doing is not enough." I said nothing about sending in troops.
The point was not that I do not have a plan but that "we" -- meaning those who agree that we are not doing enough -- should be doing more. Money, personnel, UN peace keeping and aid, US political and diplomatic pressure, etc. can all be taken into account. As for me personally I do contribute money through our church's missions program but it is a pitifully small amount in and of itself. And money alone is clearly not the solution if the aid given is siphoned off by TPTB. But to say that we should not do more is, for me, ethically unsustainable. You are not saying that we should just stand by and do nothing, but many are.
I am sorry that your work in these areas has led to cynicism, but I fully understand why. I have been deeply involved in local efforts against poverty and homelessness in the northern Appalachian hills where I live. And I have watched program after program not work very well for a whole variety of reasons unrelated to the good intentions of people like me. And I have gotten cynical and jaded about what we were doing to. But, in the end, I decided that until someone comes up with better ideas and the money to fund them I will continue, old and stove up as I am, to work with the programs we have. My medical condition no longer allows me to work in the trenches but I can do my small part to help financially and to help with whatever I can do from home.
So I do understand the cynicism. It is hard to not have it. And as you say US interventions may have had good intentions and have done instead a lot of harm. In some instances, like Iraq and Afghanistan, I am not convinced that there were ever "good intentions" regarding US intervention, but there seems to be some intent now to clean up the mess WE made. I am not convinced either that we know how to do that. But that is another subject for another time.
So, thank you for your comments. If you want to continue this discussion lets do it by PM. I do not have a lot of time right now to devote to a dialogue with you as I am in the middle of another series of essays and have to stay focused on that, but I will be available by PM and will try to make the time because you raise legitimate issues and I do not want you to think I am avoiding them. But answers to them cannot be either simple or short.
Peace, (another good ethical idea that is hard to come by, isn't it?)
God bless,
Monte
I didn't go there for that. All i want is to hear the word interpteted understandably.
This pastor was amazing, what he was saying was healing my spirit.
I found a home, except i'm going to show up 2 hours later at the start of the sermon
Monte
Monte
If you are going to hang around OS a bit just let me know and I will immediately add you back to my favorites list, since you always were one of my favorites and more importantly one of my very first friends on OS.
As for an EP or Cover don't hold your breath on that happening with a religious or ethical post. Not titillating enough. But as you can see for some reason this one has taken off like a rocket the last few days. I have no idea why but am not complaining. The more people hear about the necessity of making ethical decisions the better I feel.
Well, I really am off to bed now, but if you feel up to it take a look at my blog and see all the trouble I have been getting into in the past year. My latest post is a thank you to all the wonderful people on OS like you who have been such friends and strengths to me.
God bless you, Millie.
Monte
Tremendous essay, Monte!
Rated
Monte