Morality, Religion & Philosophy: September 2003 Archives

I don't know anything about Salman Sharif other than that he ran a violent resistance group that planned and executed a nearly-successful assassination of a prominent politician. Doesn't sound like a very nice guy, does he? Well his target in 1996 was Uday Hussein.

It was obviously against the law of his country for Sharif to attempt to kill Uday, but I have a rather hard time condemning his actions; Uday was responsible for thousands of deaths in the past, and would certainly be responsible for thousands more in the future. Uday hadn't broken any laws -- his word was the law -- nevertheless, I believe that an attempt to kill him was morally justified. It wasn't attempted murder, it was attempted justice.

Someone please help me make a distinction between Salman Sharif, and Paul Hill. I want to be able to, but I'm having trouble. Yes, it sounds like Paul Hill was a little crazy, but let's isolate his intent from his motive. He may have been motivated by "God telling him what to do", but his intent was to kill people responsible for murdering babies, so that they couldn't murder any more.

[Note: even if you're pro-choice, consider how you could draw a distinction without resting on your belief that an unborn baby is not a human.]

Maybe "fool" is too strong a word, but that's what comes to mind. Check out this comment thread over at Quiet Here.

The problem I have with most "liberals" (i.e., leftists) is that although they aren't purposefully fascist, they seem to think that they can bring about an "ideal" society -- utopia -- by forcing people to behave properly. Christopher, who writes in the comment section (and blogs here), isn't ill-intentioned, but he doesn't want to face the reality that many of his positions are untenable, and many of his policies are impossible to implement; in the attempt to create the utopia he desires, he would instead bring about the wholesale elimination of the freedoms he values. Example:

And about getting what you deserve, i'm sorry but i don't agree at all. people do what they have to do to support a family. It doesn't mean that they decided that they wanted to get paid less. They decided that a meager meal was better than no meal. But it doesn't mean they don't deserve better. I'm not asking for Government intervention, I just want to see corporations that actually care about their employees in a more than superficial way. I really need to know, do you look at Enron or WorldCom or the New York fucking Stock Exchange and not get upset? I mean, these are the businesses we trust. Besides what workers get paid, isn't there something, some kind of justice that needs to take place with these guys? And I don't mean slap on the wrist now enjoy the bahamas kind of justice, I mean you fucked over a lot of people and now you're going to pound-me-in-the-ass-prison justice. Shouldn't that happen? Why isn't it?

He wants companies to "care" about their workers, and he's willing to throw executives into "pound-me-in-the-ass" prison if they don't "care" enough. (Note: the criminals at Enron and WorldCom are being prosecuted, as far as I know).

I use scare-quotes around "care" because what he really means is that he thinks workers should get paid more. But workers agree to work for a certain wage when they agree to take a job; maybe they'd like to earn more, but if no one is offering to pay them more then by definition they don't "deserve" more. If you have a job, then both you and your employer have agreed to the wage you're paid. You can ask for a raise and leave if you don't get it, but the idea that you somehow "deserve" more is pure fantasy. Christopher's solution? Not government intervention! Just throw the executives in prison.

Christopher accuses me of arrogance, but what I am is realistic. Sure, it would be nice if everyone were paid a million dollars a year, right? Except that if they were, a million dollars wouldn't be worth anything anymore, and people would still be poor.

Striving for perfection is noble, but it's important to be able to accept the fact that sometimes reality will not match up to your ideals. Not because people are "mean" or don't "care enough", but because the numbers just don't add up. In such cases you can either attempt to force reality to fit your idealistic fantasies, or you can compromise and try to make the best out of the circumstances that you face. It's tempting to never give up your ideals and to go down in flames (cf. European socialism), but in the end all you end up with is charred remains (cf. the former USSR).

If you are wise enough (and humble enough) to resist this temptation, you can compromise your ideals and take what you can get, make the best of your situation; reality is a harsh mistress, and you won't get everything you want.

In a comment to my "Proselytization and Free Speech 2", Les says:

I'd be very interested in hearing more about what Secular Humanist viewpoints you feel the public school systems are promoting. While I largely don't have a problem with Secular Humanism myself, I do agree that schools should try to concentrate more on facts and knowledge than the promotion of specific belief systems.

I think that secular humanism has become the de facto theology of public education. There may be an organized effort to bring this about by leftist intellectuals (not that they're secretive about it), but I doubt most teachers even realize it, care, or think about it. I'll present a simple example, that I think will illustrate my point.

In 3rd grade, my class was forced to sing "Greatest Love of All" at a school show. Some lyrics:

I believe that children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride to make it easier
Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be

Everybody's searching for a hero
People need someone to look up to
I never found anyone who fulfilled my need
A lonely place to be and so I learned to depend on me

I decided long ago never to walk in anyone's shadow
If I fail, if I succeed at least I'll live as I believe
No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity
Because the greatest love of all is happening to me
I found the greatest love of all inside of me
The greatest love of all is easy to achieve

Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all

To a Christian, that's all nonsense -- even blasphemous. My teacher, Mrs. Hall, probably thought it was a great song for building kids' self-esteem. She didn't say "and if you think loving others or loving God is more important than loving yourself, you're an idiot", but that's the message that is implicitly conveyed. She wasn't trying to undercut Christian teachings (and in fact this was a Lutheren school!), but she did so nevertheless. Secular humanism is so pervasive among educators that no one even notices.

In contrast, try to imagine a public school class singing about loving God and loving other people.

Update:
Cypren comments quite extensively.

To attempt to teach children that science holds the answers to everything in life is to blatantly lie to them, a violation of everything for which an educator should stand.

Of course, propose an argument like this and you'll often hear things such as, "no credible scientist questions the veracity of , so we're not going to put it in the same basket as a bunch of religious teachings," and they're quite right--because in their minds, scientists' credibility depends precisely upon them not questioning certain venerated assumptions. In the days of old, scientists were precisely those people who studied the world around them and drew conclusions they could prove, speculated upon that which they could not, and often did so in defiance to the rule of the established religion threatened by uncovering of the facts. Modern science, however, has become almost pseudononymous with the secular humanist worldview, and is now, itself, the establishment, ruthlessly ridiculing and suppressing new theories and discoveries which challenge its hallowed assumptions of ultimate human supremacy. Truth is no longer important if it interferes with belief.

Sydney Smith, a family physician, of MedPundit, writing on Tech Central Station:

Who, after all, could consider a fetus as life unworthy of living, once they've held its hand?

Via Dean Esmay, who is pro-choice but believes that surveys indicate that support for abortion -- even among women -- is fading fast. As technology advances, the evil of abortion becomes clearer and clearer.

Beth's original response to my "Jews for Jesus" post.
My response to her response: "Proselytization and Free Speech".

Beth comments further and says that she dislikes the idea of proselytizing. I don't mean this to be sarcastic at all: do all attempts to change people's minds about philisophical issues bother Beth, or is she only bothered when it comes to what she sees as "religion"?

A lot hinges on the definition of "religion", and that's why I normally refer to "belief systems" instead. An atheist, agnostic, secular humanist, or what-have-you wouldn't like their world-view characterized as "religion", even though those belief systems fall into the same category as Christianity or Islam (as SDB has explained).

So does Beth think that no one should ever try to convince anyone of anything, or are only certain topics off-limits? If so, does only "religious" proselytization bother her, or does the proselytizing of people with non-"religious" systems of belief bother her as well?

This is important to me, because I believe that our public school system (as one example) pushes a secular humanist world-view that is, in fact, essentially religious. Similarly, there is a group of people that would push this belief system on our entire society, while on the surface only advocating the removal of "religious" influence. The failure to recognize and acknowledge that secular humanism is a "belief system" akin to any religion is disingenuous, in my opinion.

This is not to say that Beth holds any of these views -- I'm simply expounding my thoughts on the matter. It's a fascinating topic, and I hope she does write what she thinks about Christianity in the Middle East at some point, as she indicated she might.

Beth over at Mutated Monkeys writes about "Getting Along", partly in response to my earlier post about "Jews for Jesus". She says that Jews for Jesus uses deceptive claims to woo Jews to Christianity, but the instances she mentions only seem deceptive to her because of her own system of beliefs, which is itself the topic of discussion to Jews for Jesus.

I don't know much about the organization, and they may in fact advocate theology that I would disagree with, as well.

Mainly, I wanted to address one sentence of Beth's:

So here's where I stand: I support perfect freedom of religion, so long as the religion in question doesn't want to impose its beliefs on me, either by trying to convert me to it, or by intertwining the religious and the secular into law.

There are two separate issues here that she conflates unjustifiably. On one hand, I too would not approve of any religion (or person) imposing its beliefs on me; on the other hand, mere proselytization cannot be properly characterized as "imposition" of beliefs.

Along with freedom of religion and freedom of speech comes the freedom to attempt to convert others to your beliefs through peaceful proselytization. Beth appears to advocate proscribing such activities, and doing so would require abridging one of these fundamental freedoms.

Here is an earlier essay about "Religious Freedom" emerging in the Middle East, and the role of Christian missionaries.

I've been asking Eugene Volokh to write about property rights and intellectual property for months, and he's finally done it! He argues that intellectual property rights are just as valid a concept as tangible property rights. That's not to say that the existence of intellectual property is good policy, but he thinks the idea is reasonable.

On the other hand, I think that in the digital age intellectual property can be reduced down to the allowing of ownership of pure numbers. For that reason, I think that intellectual property is ultimately doomed.

For my musings on the subject:
1. Ownership -- how can anyone "own" digitally-encoded information? Anything encoded digitally is just a binary number, and how can anyone own a number?
2. Ownership 2 -- more on the same topic.
3. Common Law and Copyright -- can "everyone is doing it" justify violating copyright laws?

Eugene Volokh has been posting quite a bit about the idea of Jewish Christians, and he's been getting a lot of email, it seems. I don't really have much to say on the matter, other than that as a non-Jew I generally agree with Eugene's position -- accepting Jesus as the Messiah is no more divergent from traditional Jewish beliefs than are the beliefs of Reform Jews. It appears to me that many Jews define themselves by their non-acceptance of Christianity (as do many atheists, for example).

I have a lot of Jewish friends and acquaintances, and we occasionally talk about religion -- in a sense. The vast majority of the Jews I know are entirely secular and non-observant, except when they indulge their older family members. They often express curiousity about my beliefs and are interested in discussing philisophical issues. The main difference between my secular Jewish friends and my secular non-Jewish friends is that when I invite a Jew to come to church and check it out themself, they are astounded at my suggestion. It's quite impossible for them to set foot inside a church, you see, even out of curiousity, because they're Jewish.

Update:
I have brought this post back up to the top because David Bernstein has some interesting thoughts on the matter over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

The answer is at least in part that Jews have a residual distrust of Christianity born of centuries of oppression in Europe, both by the official church (which, for example, encouraged the Spanish Expulsion/forced conversion and then tried to ferret out hidden Jews via the Inqusition), and by local priests and ministers (who, for example, often fomented pogroms on Christian holidays through anti-Semitic sermons in church). ...

I've explained this to Christians, who typically get offended. But that's not true Christianity!, they protest. Moreover, whatever the sins of European Christiandom against Jews, American Christianity has arguably if anything overall been philo-Semitic. All true. But I'm talking about deep-seated, inherited cultural fears, not objective analysis.

Note that this is not analogous to anti-Semitism. Inherited distrust or whatnot of Christianity does not mean that Jews dislike Christians, or think ill of them, or even want them to stop practicing Christianity.

I'm not convinced that this is completely un-analogous to anti-Semitism; I've met plenty of Jews who do dislike Christians, do think ill of Christians, and do want Christians to stop practicing Christianity. Certainly not all Jews are not, but some Jews are anti-Christian in an analogous way. Just as, of course, many non-Jews are anti-Christian, and many Christians are anti-whomever. My point isn't to single out Jews, but to say that just about any negative religious prejudice is "analogous" to anti-Semitism.

[Note: I'm not sure about this idea of brining old posts back up to the top by re-dating them. Thoughts?]

Lileks has a typically great post up commemorating 9/11. I want to briefly address an experience he relates from summer camp, 1968.

It was 1968. On the night before the last day of camp, a counselor named Charlie Brown interrupted our sunset meeting by the shores of White Bear Lake to tell us the news: Russia had launched their missiles and they would destroy America before the night was out. It was time to get right with God.

Silence; crickets; small sobs. I’m sure no one thought much about Jesus right then. We thought about Mom and Dad and Spot and our room, where we really, really wanted to be right now, with the familiar smell of the goldfish bowl, and -

Charlie Brown guided us through some prayers. We all said Amen, and I’m sure for some it was the least heartfelt Amen we’d ever said. Then Charlie Brown said he had made up the story. Russia hadn’t launched the missiles. But what if they had? Were we right with Jesus?

That's the impression many adults today have of Christianity. I can't blame them; that sort of bizarre knife-twisting can easily leave a kid scarred for life. Lileks wasn't traumatized by it (or isn't anymore?), but the experience certainly had a profound effect on him -- and not for the better, as Charlie Brown probably intended.

I've talked to many people who have had similar experiences, either at a church or at a religious school, or even at summer camp. It's profoundly saddening to me; I work with children, and it's hard to even express how important each one of my kids is to me. The thought that something I say or do may drive one of them away from God is a heavy burden.

Matthew 18:6
But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Update:
So I'm playing Jenga [Maybe not the best game for 9/11 -- Ed.] tonight with one of my kids from church, and she utters one of my common exclamations when she almost topples the tower.

"You got that from me!" I tell her.

"Probably; I'm around you so much."

"Yeah, I suppose you are."

"Too much!"

"Too much?"

"No... not enough."

See, that's why it's worth it.

Should churches be patriotic? I definitely don't think that a church should take a partisan political position, endorse candidates, or be involved in non-relevant issue advocacy, but does standard run-of-the-mill patriotism have any place at church?

One of the most direct references Jesus makes to our responsibilities to the state is really more of a challenge to give over to God everything that we owe him.

Matthew 22:15-22
Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words. They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians. "Teacher," they said, "we know you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren't swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?"

But Jesus, knowing their evil intent, said, "You hypocrites, why are you trying to trap me? Show me the coin used for paying the tax." They brought him a denarius, and he asked them, "Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?"

"Caesar's," they replied.

Then he said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.

The focus of Jesus' teaching here isn't on what we owe the nation -- give Caesar what belongs to him -- but rather that we should be giving God that which bears God's image: ourselves. Nevertheless, if flying an American flag were required by law, then churches would be obligated to follow that law, under this teaching. However, in America we're free to display patriotism, or not, however we see fit.

As I see it, there are two main factors to consider. First, God has laid upon government certain responsibilities; a just government that fulfills those responsibilities and works to spread God's common grace is pleasing to God. In the book of Romans we see a picture of how we as Christians should submit to a just government.

Romants 13:1-7
Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God's servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God's servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.

I believe that these principles give government wide latitude, and that it's pretty clear that liberal democracy (as much as I like it) is not the only form of government that can meet with God's approval. In this passage, we are commanded to respect the authority that God has placed over us -- and considering the condition of the Roman Empire at the time, it's hard to really complain about most governments these days.

If a country and its government fulfill the responsibilities that God lays upon it, then we should be thankful, both towards God and towards the people who -- in a sense -- minister God's common grace to us: our government officials, our soldiers, our police and firefighters, our road workers, &c. Although all of these people are human and make mistakes, and even do evil intentionally, they are part of the system that God has put in place as his agent of common grace in the world.

As an American, countless men and women have given their careers and their lives to protect my freedoms and to provide God's grace to me, often unwittingly. I think it's fitting for me to be thankful -- first to God, for putting me in such an amazing time and place, but also to the men and women whom he has used to provide so richly for me. Just as we should be thankful for the teachers and servents God uses to administer his saving grace, we should be eager to recognize those who administer God's common grace.

However, that first consideration may sometimes conflict with this second: the purpose of a church is to spread God's message to people who haven't heard it, and to teach them about God. There are many people who don't like America (specifically), or their government in general, no matter where they live. Such people need to hear about God as much as anyone, but they may be turned away by displays of patriotism that they see as offensive.

Some people in some countries have excellent reasons to despise their government; some people in some countries may despise their government for foolish reasons. This question is not for the church to decide -- the church is called to spread God's message of love and forgiveness, not to make political disciples or patriots.

These two principles may live together in harmony under many circumstances, but when they clash I think it's clear that the first must give way to the second. It is fitting to give thanks publically for what God has done with a nation, but it is not required. What is necessary is that no mere worldly, temporal distractions cause anyone to reject the spiritual calling of God.

1 Corinthians 9:19-22
Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.