The Moralizers
It is morality that drives people to learn about philosophy more than any other topic. Indeed, this is what drove me to seek it out my first year of college. I learned from this class that I would never be interested in becoming a philosopher, because I didn't want to become a long-winded professor droning on in monotone about the nature of right and wrong in a manner that ultimately boiled down to personal interpretation or opinion.
That, and I really don't mix up a good Mint Julep. Life coaches now tell us to play to our strengths in picking a career. A philosophy degree would have left me on the streets.
Despite this, I am pretty long-winded, though I prefer the pen to oration; you can venture back through the archives of this blog to see that much.
Originally, my own personal sense of morality came from the Christian tradition, at an extremely young age. I picked it up from a children's book about Easter, and the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which was given to me by a distant family member. Later, when I spent a couple of weeks at a YMCA summer camp, the counselors running the place gathered us together and gave us a modern-day retelling of the Parable of the Sheep and Goats. It is a beautiful passage, with an even more beautiful message, and it resonated very strongly with me. It continues to resonate with me to this day.
In short, who gets into heaven? People who take care of the poor and needy members of our society. Naturally, the passage itself doesn't say anything about heaven or an afterlife; it talks about God interceding here on earth, restoring sovereignty to Israel, and setting up a good Kingdom comprised of the virtuous. Modern-day Christianity comes bundled with a lot of extra nonsense that doesn't come from the Bible, but rather from conjecture.
Later, in my teenage years, I became disillusioned with all manner of authority, and started rebel against the controlling forces in my life, as teenagers tend to do. This included, but was not limited to, religion. In those days, I would have resolutely stated my theological position as an atheist. But despite all my outward fervor, I never really shook the notion that there was something in the hereafter.
Then I went to college, got caught up in getting a degree, then later starting a career. I put all these philosophical musings about right and wrong on hold, with the intention of leaving them there forever. As George Carlin joked, "Some people see things that are and ask, 'Why?' Some people dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?' Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that."
All of this came to head a few years ago, when there was a sudden influx of people into my life in my professional and personal circles. In the midst of these interactions, I noticed that some of them went well, and some of them did not go so well. Among the ones that didn't go well, sometimes this was due to the other person, but more often it seemed to be something to do with me. Naturally, I sought to improve myself.
The genre of self-help books is a body of literature that shares a long and narrow border with metaphysics. These books must, of course, be approached carefully, and their advice filtered through the normal sieve of reason and experience. This was the approach I took, with one exception: it brought me back in touch with Christianity.
I resolved, around this time, to stop dodging the question. Who am I, and what do I believe, in the religious sense? I could waffle no longer. I decided to pursue this, and not stop until I had finally adopted a solid theological understanding, and settled on a position of my own. I set about learning about Christianity, as well as Judaism and Buddhism. I never learned much about Islam or Hinduism.
The first thing I was completely taken aback by is the fact that the "Old Testament" is basically the Jewish Bible, the first 5 books of which are the Torah. I thought the Torah and the Jewish Bible were some mystical scriptures that I had never encountered before; it turns out I was already somewhat familiar with them. Apparently the story of Moses is decidedly a Jewish tradition, as is the Creation and the Flood. Immediately I understood why Christianity and Judaism are so at odds with each other in our world. Mormonism is a newer variant of this tradition of "appropriating by extension".
When Christians insist that the story of Creation or the Flood must be taken as literal truth, I like to remind them that this story comes from Jewish scripture, and ask why they would insist on it since they aren't Jewish. This does little to dissuade them from their beliefs, but if they have more than a surface understanding of their own religion, it tends to take the conversation we're having in a much more interesting direction.
We live in a very scientific age, and so we've generally, as a society, adopted scientific means by which to understand the natural world. For a lot of people, this has supplanted the use of religion for this purpose. It's a good dichotomy, for in every respect, science is superior to aiding and contributing to our understanding of the world over some musty old books from 2,000 years ago.
So what's left? Morality. The nature of what is good and evil. It seems that this is a realm into which science has never been invited, and is left to the purview of religion. Whether or not science can, or should, have a say in human ethics is still an unanswered question in my mind, and one that shouldn't be quickly dismissed. But that's a complicated and tangential topic.
I've had a few conversations with Christians, in which they make a statement such as, "Morality is important, and there's nothing more important than knowing right from wrong, because that's what impacts our quality of life more than anything else."
I agree with the latter point, as to the critical nature of morality. What I disagree with are the two other implicit points they are making about morality in the context of our conversations: namely, that it should come from religion, because it can not possibly come from anywhere else, and in particular, that it should be derived from the Christian religion, because other religions are incorrect.
Morality, in the Christian religion, is based on the notion of justification. In the jargon, a person is justified before God if they have a good standing before God. In short, if the four horsemen of the apocalypse rode onto earth and started harvesting soul's, people who are justified before God would go to heaven, and everyone else goes to hell.
How a person is justified is matter of some debate. Judaism is a religion of "justification by works"; that is, we earn God's favor by doing good deeds, like, in the aforementioned case of the Sheeps and Goats, taking care of the poor and less fortunate. This parable is Christian scripture, but Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish, and so it's not a stretch to believe that he actually taught this kind of parable. There's also the Ten Commandments, in the Old Testament. The message: be good and you'll be rewarded in this life, but be bad and you'll be punished. The Beatitudes also contain lots of prescriptive advice about how to be "good", and the Sermon on the Mount, despite being Christian scripture, insists that, in order to be good, we should make our actions consistent with the Torah (a.k.a. the "Law").
As I've alluded to, in many ways, Christianity is interpreted as being a religion of justification by works, though in practice, this just makes it a very watered down version of Judaism. Jesus offers a "Cliff's Notes" of the Torah in a speech, so you can just keep the abbreviated version and toss out the rest of it.
What makes Christianity decidedly different is that it is a religion based on "justification by faith". That is, we are not saved by our deeds and actions, but by belief. If you believe in Jesus as the Son of God who came to earth in order to redeem mankind of its sins, then you have a right standing before God. The apostle Paul seems to put forth this view quite strongly, even though it seems at odds with most of what Jesus said in the Gospels. But this makes sense: if all we had to do was obey the rules as documented in the Torah, then there really wasn't any reason for Jesus to have died.
You can find lots of passages in the New Testament to back up a theological position of either justification by faith or justification by works, even though two are at odds with each other. This debate seems to have been ranging ever since Jesus died. The apostle Paul quickly set about spreading the faith position in his epistles--most notably in Romans--but the author of the Book of James wrote that "faith without works is dead". Which is it? Or is it both?
My biggest question regarding this position: belief in something is a result of action. You make a decision to believe something, or not to believe it, the same as you might choose to help the poor, or not help the poor. Belief proceeds from an action on your part, and so the choice to belief seems like a "work" in and of itself. How are they distinct?
This is part of the reason that Christianity has survived 2,000 of these intense kinds of debates: because no one has a final answer, but people make up all kinds of complicated theological positions that are designed to reconcile these contradictions like this one. Among them, you have the doctrine of predestination, which basically says that it's known by God right from the moment of your birth (or, I suppose, conception, if you go by Psalm 139) what you are going to do for your entire life, and so you've been judged as good or bad by what you will do before you do anything, but you still have to believe in order to have any chance of being saved. That whole thing is a real philosophical deep end which ultimately goes nowhere, so I'm not even going to bother discussing that at any length.
I had a brief stint in college where I argued against the notion of heaven and hell, based on simple logic. Later, I learned that these ideas I had are nicely paraphrased in something called Hume's Fork, after philosopher David Hume, which goes something like this:
"Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them."
Christianity in practice doesn't seem to offer a whole lot more. I read a few book by Christian apologist Phillip Yancey. In one of them, he explains why people who are Christians do bad things. He uses the analogy of patients in a hospital; people have come to the hospital because they know they are sick. But everyone is sick, or afflicted by some kind of unwellness, even people who aren't in the hospital. The difference is that the people in the hospital know they are sick, and are working to get better. In short, all of us sin (e.g. are "sick"), but people in churches are trying to purify their actions.
I like this viewpoint because it espouses my own, namely, that good and bad actions are done by Christians and non-Christians alike. It equates the morality of believers and non-believers. This is a welcome change from the "holier than thou" notion that believers are inherently superior to non-believers in some way. But if this is the case, all you have to do is demonstrate that non-believers tend to work towards bettering themselves, and if you do that (which you can, pretty easily), then what do you need the religion for?
One Christian once argued to me that the doctrine of "love thy neighbor" only applies to fellow Christians; you don't have to show kindness or respect to non-believers. Doesn't this interpretation go against the Parable of the Good Samaritan? Or to put it another way: "Are not even tax collectors doing that?"
I could go on pointing out inherent contradictions in scripture versus how they are interpreted, but this has pretty much been done to death by people more educated on the matter than I am. The one question remains: in this flurry of debate, where do I find myself now?
Simple answer: nowhere. People ask me for a label: "Are you an atheist? An agnostic?" And so on. I have a belief system, but I eschew any and all labels. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, any kind of label, in the religious sense, gives some kind of credence to religion itself. If all the major religions of the world are non-zero integers (like 1, 2, 3, and so on.), then "atheism" could be interpreted as a zero. Zero is still an integer. My position is better summarized by a null value, or NaN (not a number). People who are religious tend to use their belief system as a key part of their own self-identity. My lack of belief just means that religion adds absolutely nothing to my existence or identity, not that I self-identify as someone who disbelieves. I'm a son, a brother, an engineer, and a slew of other things, but religion has no grasp on any part of me. (Save for intellectually, but this makes me an intellectual, not an atheist.)
Second, and more importantly, once you take on a label, you take on all of the baggage that goes along with the label in the mind of the person you are talking to. Throughout this post, I've been referring to "Christians", as though they were all one homogenous group that believe a single thing. They are not, nor have they ever been. Ever since Jesus died, people started debating about who Jesus was, what he taught, what we're supposed to do about his teachings, and so on. There was never an early period of "Christian consensus", just as there isn't one now. There is nothing new under the sun.
So I do not adopt any label of the non-believers. We are individuals. I enjoy conversation, and the debate. I'll talk to you like the individual that you are, so long as you respectfully do the same back to me. We are all humans, sharing the same space, for an extremely limited time span, so let's make sure we treat each other well.
That, and I really don't mix up a good Mint Julep. Life coaches now tell us to play to our strengths in picking a career. A philosophy degree would have left me on the streets.
Despite this, I am pretty long-winded, though I prefer the pen to oration; you can venture back through the archives of this blog to see that much.
Originally, my own personal sense of morality came from the Christian tradition, at an extremely young age. I picked it up from a children's book about Easter, and the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which was given to me by a distant family member. Later, when I spent a couple of weeks at a YMCA summer camp, the counselors running the place gathered us together and gave us a modern-day retelling of the Parable of the Sheep and Goats. It is a beautiful passage, with an even more beautiful message, and it resonated very strongly with me. It continues to resonate with me to this day.
In short, who gets into heaven? People who take care of the poor and needy members of our society. Naturally, the passage itself doesn't say anything about heaven or an afterlife; it talks about God interceding here on earth, restoring sovereignty to Israel, and setting up a good Kingdom comprised of the virtuous. Modern-day Christianity comes bundled with a lot of extra nonsense that doesn't come from the Bible, but rather from conjecture.
Later, in my teenage years, I became disillusioned with all manner of authority, and started rebel against the controlling forces in my life, as teenagers tend to do. This included, but was not limited to, religion. In those days, I would have resolutely stated my theological position as an atheist. But despite all my outward fervor, I never really shook the notion that there was something in the hereafter.
Then I went to college, got caught up in getting a degree, then later starting a career. I put all these philosophical musings about right and wrong on hold, with the intention of leaving them there forever. As George Carlin joked, "Some people see things that are and ask, 'Why?' Some people dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?' Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that."
All of this came to head a few years ago, when there was a sudden influx of people into my life in my professional and personal circles. In the midst of these interactions, I noticed that some of them went well, and some of them did not go so well. Among the ones that didn't go well, sometimes this was due to the other person, but more often it seemed to be something to do with me. Naturally, I sought to improve myself.
The genre of self-help books is a body of literature that shares a long and narrow border with metaphysics. These books must, of course, be approached carefully, and their advice filtered through the normal sieve of reason and experience. This was the approach I took, with one exception: it brought me back in touch with Christianity.
I resolved, around this time, to stop dodging the question. Who am I, and what do I believe, in the religious sense? I could waffle no longer. I decided to pursue this, and not stop until I had finally adopted a solid theological understanding, and settled on a position of my own. I set about learning about Christianity, as well as Judaism and Buddhism. I never learned much about Islam or Hinduism.
The first thing I was completely taken aback by is the fact that the "Old Testament" is basically the Jewish Bible, the first 5 books of which are the Torah. I thought the Torah and the Jewish Bible were some mystical scriptures that I had never encountered before; it turns out I was already somewhat familiar with them. Apparently the story of Moses is decidedly a Jewish tradition, as is the Creation and the Flood. Immediately I understood why Christianity and Judaism are so at odds with each other in our world. Mormonism is a newer variant of this tradition of "appropriating by extension".
When Christians insist that the story of Creation or the Flood must be taken as literal truth, I like to remind them that this story comes from Jewish scripture, and ask why they would insist on it since they aren't Jewish. This does little to dissuade them from their beliefs, but if they have more than a surface understanding of their own religion, it tends to take the conversation we're having in a much more interesting direction.
We live in a very scientific age, and so we've generally, as a society, adopted scientific means by which to understand the natural world. For a lot of people, this has supplanted the use of religion for this purpose. It's a good dichotomy, for in every respect, science is superior to aiding and contributing to our understanding of the world over some musty old books from 2,000 years ago.
So what's left? Morality. The nature of what is good and evil. It seems that this is a realm into which science has never been invited, and is left to the purview of religion. Whether or not science can, or should, have a say in human ethics is still an unanswered question in my mind, and one that shouldn't be quickly dismissed. But that's a complicated and tangential topic.
I've had a few conversations with Christians, in which they make a statement such as, "Morality is important, and there's nothing more important than knowing right from wrong, because that's what impacts our quality of life more than anything else."
I agree with the latter point, as to the critical nature of morality. What I disagree with are the two other implicit points they are making about morality in the context of our conversations: namely, that it should come from religion, because it can not possibly come from anywhere else, and in particular, that it should be derived from the Christian religion, because other religions are incorrect.
Morality, in the Christian religion, is based on the notion of justification. In the jargon, a person is justified before God if they have a good standing before God. In short, if the four horsemen of the apocalypse rode onto earth and started harvesting soul's, people who are justified before God would go to heaven, and everyone else goes to hell.
How a person is justified is matter of some debate. Judaism is a religion of "justification by works"; that is, we earn God's favor by doing good deeds, like, in the aforementioned case of the Sheeps and Goats, taking care of the poor and less fortunate. This parable is Christian scripture, but Jesus of Nazareth was Jewish, and so it's not a stretch to believe that he actually taught this kind of parable. There's also the Ten Commandments, in the Old Testament. The message: be good and you'll be rewarded in this life, but be bad and you'll be punished. The Beatitudes also contain lots of prescriptive advice about how to be "good", and the Sermon on the Mount, despite being Christian scripture, insists that, in order to be good, we should make our actions consistent with the Torah (a.k.a. the "Law").
As I've alluded to, in many ways, Christianity is interpreted as being a religion of justification by works, though in practice, this just makes it a very watered down version of Judaism. Jesus offers a "Cliff's Notes" of the Torah in a speech, so you can just keep the abbreviated version and toss out the rest of it.
What makes Christianity decidedly different is that it is a religion based on "justification by faith". That is, we are not saved by our deeds and actions, but by belief. If you believe in Jesus as the Son of God who came to earth in order to redeem mankind of its sins, then you have a right standing before God. The apostle Paul seems to put forth this view quite strongly, even though it seems at odds with most of what Jesus said in the Gospels. But this makes sense: if all we had to do was obey the rules as documented in the Torah, then there really wasn't any reason for Jesus to have died.
You can find lots of passages in the New Testament to back up a theological position of either justification by faith or justification by works, even though two are at odds with each other. This debate seems to have been ranging ever since Jesus died. The apostle Paul quickly set about spreading the faith position in his epistles--most notably in Romans--but the author of the Book of James wrote that "faith without works is dead". Which is it? Or is it both?
My biggest question regarding this position: belief in something is a result of action. You make a decision to believe something, or not to believe it, the same as you might choose to help the poor, or not help the poor. Belief proceeds from an action on your part, and so the choice to belief seems like a "work" in and of itself. How are they distinct?
This is part of the reason that Christianity has survived 2,000 of these intense kinds of debates: because no one has a final answer, but people make up all kinds of complicated theological positions that are designed to reconcile these contradictions like this one. Among them, you have the doctrine of predestination, which basically says that it's known by God right from the moment of your birth (or, I suppose, conception, if you go by Psalm 139) what you are going to do for your entire life, and so you've been judged as good or bad by what you will do before you do anything, but you still have to believe in order to have any chance of being saved. That whole thing is a real philosophical deep end which ultimately goes nowhere, so I'm not even going to bother discussing that at any length.
I had a brief stint in college where I argued against the notion of heaven and hell, based on simple logic. Later, I learned that these ideas I had are nicely paraphrased in something called Hume's Fork, after philosopher David Hume, which goes something like this:
"Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them."
Christianity in practice doesn't seem to offer a whole lot more. I read a few book by Christian apologist Phillip Yancey. In one of them, he explains why people who are Christians do bad things. He uses the analogy of patients in a hospital; people have come to the hospital because they know they are sick. But everyone is sick, or afflicted by some kind of unwellness, even people who aren't in the hospital. The difference is that the people in the hospital know they are sick, and are working to get better. In short, all of us sin (e.g. are "sick"), but people in churches are trying to purify their actions.
I like this viewpoint because it espouses my own, namely, that good and bad actions are done by Christians and non-Christians alike. It equates the morality of believers and non-believers. This is a welcome change from the "holier than thou" notion that believers are inherently superior to non-believers in some way. But if this is the case, all you have to do is demonstrate that non-believers tend to work towards bettering themselves, and if you do that (which you can, pretty easily), then what do you need the religion for?
One Christian once argued to me that the doctrine of "love thy neighbor" only applies to fellow Christians; you don't have to show kindness or respect to non-believers. Doesn't this interpretation go against the Parable of the Good Samaritan? Or to put it another way: "Are not even tax collectors doing that?"
I could go on pointing out inherent contradictions in scripture versus how they are interpreted, but this has pretty much been done to death by people more educated on the matter than I am. The one question remains: in this flurry of debate, where do I find myself now?
Simple answer: nowhere. People ask me for a label: "Are you an atheist? An agnostic?" And so on. I have a belief system, but I eschew any and all labels. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, any kind of label, in the religious sense, gives some kind of credence to religion itself. If all the major religions of the world are non-zero integers (like 1, 2, 3, and so on.), then "atheism" could be interpreted as a zero. Zero is still an integer. My position is better summarized by a null value, or NaN (not a number). People who are religious tend to use their belief system as a key part of their own self-identity. My lack of belief just means that religion adds absolutely nothing to my existence or identity, not that I self-identify as someone who disbelieves. I'm a son, a brother, an engineer, and a slew of other things, but religion has no grasp on any part of me. (Save for intellectually, but this makes me an intellectual, not an atheist.)
Second, and more importantly, once you take on a label, you take on all of the baggage that goes along with the label in the mind of the person you are talking to. Throughout this post, I've been referring to "Christians", as though they were all one homogenous group that believe a single thing. They are not, nor have they ever been. Ever since Jesus died, people started debating about who Jesus was, what he taught, what we're supposed to do about his teachings, and so on. There was never an early period of "Christian consensus", just as there isn't one now. There is nothing new under the sun.
So I do not adopt any label of the non-believers. We are individuals. I enjoy conversation, and the debate. I'll talk to you like the individual that you are, so long as you respectfully do the same back to me. We are all humans, sharing the same space, for an extremely limited time span, so let's make sure we treat each other well.