The people closest to Jesus were remarkable for their repeated inability to anticipate what He was going to do and say. This alone should give us pause when making claims of knowing what Jesus would have us do. If Peter and John couldn't figure Him out until much later and after much reflection, then who are you? I make no claim that random or always counterintuitve actions are what Christ wants from us, only that the simple answers sometimes blow up in our faces when contemplating Our Lord. Jesus fed the multitudes and quite sternly admonished the rich to give. But he also criticized Judas for wanting to give money to the poor in a particular way at a particular time. Jesus went with complete nonviolence to His death - almost immediately after beating the moneylenders out of the Temple.(full post here)(discussion of "peacemakers" here)
Monday, July 07, 2008
Who Would Jesus Bomb?
I haven't scoured old posts for reprints for over a year. Not only are there a lot of comments on this post, but there are even two from good old Copithorne! From July 2006:
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10 comments:
You missed me!
I still marvel that someone can confound themselves with abstraction so that they can no longer discern that starting wars is wrong.
Moral reasoning is really not so baffling if you have a direct connection to your own conscience. Don't kill other people to build a better world. Each person has an intrinsic value that cannot be abrogated in order to advance an agenda.
Jesus says "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God."
So, what are warmakers? Are they cursed? What are they called?
I think it is only through powers of dissociation and abstraction that you do not tremble at the question, like Robert Deniro did in The Mission.
--Copithorne
Yes, Copithorne, I suppose I did.
Researching the word itself, I don't see that "peacemaker" means in Jesus's mouth what it does in ours today. Lot's of mainstream denomination people would say, with you, that it means something in the conscientious objector, pacifist, 60's coffee house line, but I don't think it's supported.
I used to think it was the same - I was a I-O in the Vietnam draft - but I no longer think so.
You know I read your additional link on 'Peacemakers.' I read it closely.
I can respect the author's appeal that a Christian peacemaker is not a partisan polemecist. But I don't accept the moral agnosticism that you and the author share. I believe that moral reasoning is possible, even Christian moral reasoning is possible.
I know every child will reach a stage where though they can talk and talk and talk, when the discussion comes around to their own responsibilities, suddenly they adopt the philosophical posture that words have no meaning. They see this as a clever way of avoiding responsibility but it isn't effective.
I was reading Scott McClellan's book, What Happened. Scott repeats what has been said elsewhere -- that the WMD rationale was ancillary to the reasons for going to war. George Bush wanted to bring democracy to the Middle East and he thought the best way of doing this was to start a war. He still believes that this decision will be vindicated.
This is morally wrong. This is a failure of moral reasoning the fruits of which are a mountain of corpses and a mountain of debt. You cannot kill people in order to build a better world. There is no 'maybe' about it, or 'perhaps I could see the other side' or 'Jesus could go either way' or 'it would be arrogant to think that anyone could know what is right or wrong in this circumstance.' This is the moral reasoning of a man who as a youth exploded frogs for fun and didn't really grow up because he spent the majority of his adult life as an addict.
I hope for the sake of my nation and my world that I may contribute in some tiny measure to marginalizing that disastrous form of 'moral reasoning' so that it may no longer govern human affairs.
-- Copithorne
(editing. darn)
Copithorne, you say that moral reasoning is possible, but then you don't do any.
Leave aside the President Bush case for the moment, I am interested in the general case. You repeat endlessly that it's all simple, that I (or others) are just playing with words or avoiding the issue if we say otherwise, then make the simple unsupported declaration "This is morally wrong."
Make that case. You keep hoping that your small voice will be a help to the world, here's your chance. Rather than simply accuse others of reasoning incorrectly, show us the correct reasoning. You stated, for example "you cannot kill people in order to make a better world." I say that God disagrees. Give evidence for your point, not merely complaining about my ability to reason.
I've already done so.
The argument which I already stated:
'Each person has an intrinsic value that cannot be abrogated in order to advance an agenda.'
This argument is common to Christ, to Aristotle, to Kant, and to traditions of ethics worldwide with which I am familiar.
Its root is ultimately not based on evidence but on a faith -- whether that faith comes from religion or from humanism.
Which tradition of moral reasoning do you follow that holds the opposite?
-- Copithorne
Oh, I see, I read more closely.
You think God authorizes you to kill people in order to build a better world. You share an ethical tradition with Al Qaeda, with Stalin, Mao, Hitler, the Crusades, the Inquisition.
For humanists we might call this the demonic tradition of moral reasoning.
The 'debate' between humanism and the demonic is never settled by reference to metaphysics or evidence because there is no common frame of reference. In most cases, it is settled because people grow tired of the demonic when the death and debt penetrates the realm of abstraction in which the demonic philosophy is born.
The common frame of reference comes to be: what causes suffering and what causes happiness. Ultimately people have a natural preference for peace and prosperity over war and recession. That preference is not based on evidence or metaphysics but in the human body.
This is what has happened in our country. The demonic moral reasoning of the Republican Party has caused so much suffering that it has been popularly discredited and as a result it will lose power.
As I came to be satisfied that this is the case, I stopped coming by places like this. After all, there are still Stalinists -- even though Stalinism has been discredited -- but we don't worry too much about them.
-- Copithorne
Copithorne quote: 'Each person has an intrinsic value that cannot be abrogated in order to advance an agenda.'
What if the agenda is to save the lives of their neighbors? How about their children? Or their health? Or their freedom, or their dignity, or their kohlrabi? Where are you drawing this absolute line?
As to the idea that the each person has an intrinsic value, that is actually a pretty recent idea. I subscribe to it, but it's not ancient.
As to your second comment, you are simply declining to answer, evading my question with clever words.
The idea of a soul -- intrinsic absolute value -- is an ancient idea. I don't know why you think it is novel. Theistic religions have always shared the belief that people are endowed with a soul, made in the image of God, that has an absolute value. Ethically, people are not authorized to destroy that image in order to service an agenda of relative values. No relative value can ever supercede the absolute value of the soul.
This is not complicated or mysterious or unfathomable. It's really simple.
At least the philosophy of Al Qaeda is internally coherent. They believe in an absolute soul and they believe that the absolute God is instructing them to kill people.
On the other hand you say you believe that people have an intrinsic value and yet you see yourself as entitled to destroy that intrinsic value in order to advance relative extrinsic objectives. You haven't obtained a even minimal level of ethical coherence.
No wonder you find the Gospel of Jesus Christ so confounding.
No, there is no moral philosophy -- save the demonic -- which holds that you are entitled to decide who you can kill in order to save others that you deem more valuable or worthy or in any respect to engineer your vision of a better world. Certainly there are no laws which recognize any such entitlement.
-- Copithorne
The idea of a soul is not at all the same idea as an intrinsic absolute value. You are either playing with words here, or are defining words on the basis of your feelings. I suspect that latter, which is why you are so certain that it is all so simple. In your telling, you believe in clear absolutes, all those stupid others believe in relative values. But you don't have clear absolutes - you just have strong feelings.
The idea of the worth of every individual is new. The idea of the worth of any individual trumping all other values is rare. You may think that it should be a trump, but your assertion that it is ancient and obvious is rather silly.
Next, you equate the destruction of the body with destruction of the soul. I don't believe I have the power to destroy souls. Most people who have ever believed in anything soul-like have believed that such are beyond their power to destroy. So you play this cute little word-switch when it suits your argument.
Your last paragraph is the beauty: "No, there is no moral philosophy -- save the demonic -- which holds that you are entitled to decide who you can kill in order to save others that you deem more valuable or worthy or in any respect to engineer your vision of a better world. Certainly there are no laws which recognize any such entitlement."
Actually, all moral philosophies hold that some people are entitled to decide exactly that. The three monotheistic religions explicitly sanction it - utilitarians, existentialists, Buddhists, Hindis, animists, Zoroastrians, Shinto, objectivists, socialists - all both limit and allow the taking of life. As to laws, the statute books of all nations are chockablock full of what rules apply to defense, protection, and the taking of life.
If you are positing that all moral systems are "really" pointing to that old fraud Gandhi, you will have a hard time proving it. (Not that Gandhi believed in any infinite value of the individual soul either, by the way.)
The idea that we should have let slavery continue, or let Jews be butchered by the millions, or allow rulers to starve or torture their people seems rather morally cowardly to me.
To maintain that all clear moral thinking forbids taking action in those situations because killing the body is the same as destroying the soul is not only an inaccurate picture of history, but quite nearly the reverse of what all moral systems teach. You can pick out isolated quotes from many moral sources that could be twisted to mean what you want - but there is not a moral system in history that does teach what you claim they all teach.
Slavery. Rape. Thievery. Torture. You either stop them or you have them. They don't go away.
This is all old, but you just seem kind of bewitched by your own sophistry.
There may be moral traditions for killing people to defend oneself or others. [Though they are unlikely to be Christian -- they may be reasonable.] But there are not provisions for killing people to engineer a better world. When I observe that Scott McClellan reports that George Bush's true reason for starting a war in Iraq was to engineer democracy in the Middle East, this is wrong. It is evil. It is demonic.
The Confederate states started the Civil War. The Nazis started the Second World War. These actions are wrong. For people with a conscience, we call them evil. You should turn away from such examples, not embrace them.
"Slavery. Rape. Thievery. Torture. You either stop them or you have them."
I am trying to stop them. But unfortunately people such as yourself will continue to rationalize these activities until judgment day.
Copithorne
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