Chapter 26: American Theocracy
I. Better?
I have written this series to get down into words some of the ideas that I have spent my life looking for. I have been concerned with making the world a better place than it would have otherwise been. I have spent a couple of decades worrying about what creating a “better place” meant. I did not want to end up as one of those people believing that I was making the world a better place, when I was actually making it worse.
While I was struggling to make sure that the “better” world that I sought was actually better, I saw the growth of organizations and movements made up of individuals who seemed to have no such concern. Perhaps they were there all along, and I had not seen them earlier.
These were people who were contributing to a new age of religious fundamentalism in America. I saw it first in the appointment of George Bush as President of the United States. It escalated with the events of September 11, 2001, and grew to encompass Bush’s re-election in 2004. A great deal of the momentum behind this movement was a group of individual aiming at eliminating America’s system of democracy and replacing it with a Christian Theocracy.
It is strange how, with each demonstration of the horrendous evils that can spring from religious fundamentalism, more and more people flock to it. Like moths, they go seeking beauty, and end up consumed by the flame. Unfortunately, they have a bad habit of taking a lot of innocent people with them. Their religion demands it of them.
“If you do not worship our God you will make him unhappy, and he will do great harm to us. Therefore, you must convert or die (or at least be removed from civil society).”
II. Infidelity
My concern over the movement to turn America into a Christian Theocracy brought me to search for an outlet for joining with others who shared those concerns — other potential victims of the immorality of religious zealots. That quest brought me to an Internet community called the Internet Infidels. This community provided me with two things.
First, it was a place where I could express my ideas. I wanted somebody to at least hear the ideas that I had been working on for so long. If I was right in the conclusions I had reached, then others ought to hear them. And if I was wrong, I do no harm in presenting them and allowing others to see and avoid the errors themselves. Unless I was wrong, but very convincing. That would be bad.
Second, the Internet Infidels was a group of people that I could talk with. Too many people that I would otherwise encounter respond to the issues that arise in their lives with myth and superstition. When I talk to people about real-world problems, I prefer that the conversation stay on real-world solutions, and that simply was not available in most parts of society. This, itself, is frightening, because these fantasy solutions are not going to work, and the more people depend on them the more failure they are going to witness.
It was comforting to find people who gave rational, thought-out answers to real-world questions.
Of course, I was going to disagree even with some of those rational, thought-out answers. However, that is how problem solving in an intellectual community works. Address the problem, consider solutions, bring in evidence, examine it in the light of reason, toss out the bad ideas and put the good ideas to work.
A. Subjectivism
In the realm of moral foundations and principles, I did find two ideas that were particularly widespread, and particularly bad.
Many people embraced a form of moral subjectivism, where right and wrong depended on the beliefs of the individual. It is an easy view for a skeptic to fit into. There is no God. There are no intrinsic values. There is no value without a valuer. What else is left?
If I could accomplish one small thing within this community it would be to take this one idea between my thumb and forefingers and squash it, and dispose of the remains, where it would never be seen or heard from again. First, I would do this because common subjectivism is a mistake. I have provided my arguments for that throughout this series of essays, and I will not repeat them here. Second, I would squash this idea because, like most mistakes, it can do great harm when put into practice.
The first of the two worst consequences of embracing subjectivism is that it gives people permission to do virtually anything that pleases them, without consideration for the welfare of others. Under subjectivism, if I do not care about how much pain the child I torture is put through, then it is not wrong for me to torture the child. The only thing I have to worry about is getting caught.
I have argued that morality is a set of institutions for cultivating good desires and inhibiting the formation of bad desires. Abandoning morality abandons a set of institutions designed to promote good desires and inhibit bad desires; and risks making all of us victims of a society where there are fewer good desires and more bad desires. It is dangerous for us, and for those we care about.
The second of the two worst consequences is that the rest of society is smart enough to shun those who would make the world a more dangerous place for them and those they care about. Atheists need a more reasonable answer to the question of how to prevent people from murdering, stealing, lying, and generally being a threat to others. Something other than, “hey, if you don’t have any problem with it, I can’t really say that you are doing anything wrong. The worst I can say is that I don’t like it. But, hey, you don’t like the fact that I don’t like it, so we’re even.”
We have a set of tools available for conditioning people to have good desires and inhibit the development of bad desires. We are better off to the degree that these tools function efficiently. It does not cost us anything – we still get to do what we want. The difference is, we come to want that which will fulfill the desires of others, and be adverse to that which harms others. Common subjectivism is incompatible with the use and development of these tools. So, not only is subjectivism wrong (for the reasons I mentioned earlier), it is dangerous.
Let us assume that somebody wants to argue that church and state ought to be separate. Well, ‘ought’ — according to subjectivism — is merely a matter of opinion, and nothing can really be said against the individual who holds a different opinion. No argument can be raised against them. There is no truth of the matter. The only thing that the subjectivist can say is “three cheers for separating church and state.”
If the separationist tries for anything stronger, the opponent says, “According to you subjectivists, it is all a matter of opinion anyway. You cheer for separation, while I boo it. There are more of us than of you and, since you can give no reason to hold that we are wrong to boo it, we hereby remove the separation. By your own admission, you are not saying anything I need to listen to.”
But we can say something that he separationist needs to listen to; only, we have to abandon subjectivism to do it.
Uniting Church and State is dangerous. We have thousands of years of history, and newspaper stories almost every day, that show the ill consequences of mixing church and state. This is something that people ought not to like — which is just another way of saying that this is wrong. It is wrong, as a matter of objective fact. It is wrong in the sense that a person with good desires – desires that tend to fulfill the desires of others — would not like it. It is wrong in the sense that embracing it will make the world a worse place than it would have otherwise been.
Another reason why mixing church and state is wrong is that enforced dogma does not promote understanding. A person taught a ritual of repeating a particular phrase, who is offered an idea unquestioningly, may be able to utter it on a number of occasions, but does not understand it. He cannot understand it unless he sees it put up against its competitors and sees why reason supports one over the other. It is when an idea is understood, that it becomes meaningful and useful. State mandated belief is empty, hollow.
In short, the message that needs to be communicated clearly, and that can be communicated honestly, is that mixing church and state is an objectively, knowably, bad idea — like using a match to see if there is gas in the gas tank. Those who promote this mixture are laying the foundation for new rounds of abuses and violence that are clearly apparent, not only in our history, but around the globe today.
September 11, North Ireland, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan/India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Philippines, you can hardly swing a dead cat without hitting a religious zealot out to kill somebody. All of it aims from the zealot’s craving to take control of the apparatus of government to subject the population to their interpretation of God’s Will.
Which is just another way of saying that they want to control the apparatus of government to force populations into obeying their own will (because there is no God’s Will, there is only the will of the person claiming to speak for God). By attributing their own will to God, demagogues have long noticed that they can impose their will on others much more efficiently.
B. Evolutionary Ethics
The other theory, common in the ranks of atheists, that I would like to squash and dispose of is the idea that moral truths are written onto the human soul/psyche by evolution. This view states that we have somehow evolved a moral sense, and right and wrong simply involves listening to that inner voice.
Even among atheists, listening to voices is not a very good sign.
The first thing to say against this is that moral questions are always questions of choice. We have evolved a tendency to feel pain when burned. Evolution has molded this particular tendency. However, there is no moral obligation to feel pain when burned. Nor is it a moral imperative to be repulsed by the smell of a rotting corpse, or to hunger for food that we like. We do not choose these likes and dislikes, so morality has nothing to say about them. Morality only has a say in things that we can change — things not dictated to us by the laws of nature.
Let us look, instead, at the questions that are a matter of moral debate. They are all a matter of choice. If opposition to slavery was somehow genetic, then are these people saying that the genetic opposition to slavery can arise over just a few generations? Similarly, if a person wants to assert that views on capital punishment are biologically based, then why are Europeans so opposed to capital punishment while their genetic relatives in America find it so appealing? Is opposition to abortion somehow inherited, and does one’s views on homosexuality have a pedigree?
Of course not. Evolution has not given us a moral code genetically written into our psyche. It has given us the power to make choices. Because we have this power, we have to ask questions about which options are best. To condemn or to condone slavery, capital punishment, homosexuality, and abortion are clearly a matter of choice, and different people choose differently. Our attitudes towards these things are not genetically determined.
Evolutionary ethics, in fact, is a hindrance because it distracts us from looking for the answers that would benefit us. If there is no choice to make, there is no need to investigate the issue. If the answer just springs unbidden into our mind as a result of our genes, then we need to only sit and wait for the answer to hit, and whatever inclination strikes us that is the one we are to act on.
In this sense – where moral truth is whatever strikes the inclinations of the individual who is trying to decide what to do — evolutionary ethics is almost as dangerous as some religions, and much more dangerous than others.
C. Relevance of Differences
If one can rid the secular meme of these two defects, then I think it has a much greater chance of promoting a way of thinking that would benefit people.
However, the problems within the secular community are minor compared with the problems that exist for religious ethics.
III. Can a Christian Be a Good Person?
If there is a right and wrong, discoverable by reason, and independent of God, then one has to ask if it is possible for a person who derives ethics from religion to be a good person.
Of course he can be, as long as he adopts a religion that commands him to do that which is, as a matter of objective fact, right. If the commandments of a religion deviate from what is right in fact, then the person can be good only insofar as he or she leaves that religion behind — or, at least, reinterpret its commands to make align them more carefully with what is right.
It is important to note that we are not dealing here with a question that has a black and white answer. The starving person who takes a loaf of bread after exhausting all other options to obtain food in a land where bread is plentiful is in no way comparable to the leader of a religious cult who orders the mass murder of people who will not convert to his religion.
So it is not a case of looking for “evil; yes or no” but “evil; shade of gray”. The question becomes one of the influences of a religion on a person’s shade of gray.
IV. The Bible as a Source of Right and Wrong
If we take the Christian religion, we see a religion where its practitioners already deviate from its strict teachings so that they can align their religion with what is, as a matter of objective fact, right and wrong. Any Christian who took the Bible’s moral commandments literally would quickly find themselves locked away, even by other Christians.
The bible permits and commands things that are clearly wrong — from slavery to the slaughter of disobedient children to the destruction of the temples of people following a different religion to the use of biological weapons (plague) as a way to convince a political leader (the Pharaoh) to ‘let my people go,’ to the punishment of children for the crimes of their parents to execution for the crime of planting the wrong crops or wearing the wrong types of clothes, to a ban on the collection and payment of interest to executing those who work on the day of the Sabbath. The bible is a treasure trove of evils.
The fact that most Christians have abandoned these moral prescriptions shows over the years shows their tendency to alter their religious beliefs to conform to what is objectively right and wrong.
To do this, the Christian must then ask, “How can I tell the difference between the biblical prescription that I should obey, and the biblical prescription I should ignore? How can I know what is objectively right and wrong so that I can make my biblical interpretation better aligned with it?” The Christian avoids evil by correctly picking which biblical requirements are good, and which are not. He must have some method for determining that ‘thou shalt not murder’ is a commandment to be obeyed, but “Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” is a biblical prescription to be ignored.
If a person wants to insist that the bible contains no error, that the appearance of error in these cases is based on interpretation, he still needs a way to determine which interpretation is correct. How do we tell that murder really is bad and stoning a person who collects interest on his retirement money really is not bad?
How can he know?
Can he follow his conscience?
No. His conscience tells him only what he does and does not like; it does not tell him what he should and should not like. The crusaders, inquisitors, witch burners, slaveholders, the leaders and soldiers in religious wars, the terrorists on 9/11, and suicide bombers today, all let their conscience be their guide. In their conscience they found only their own learned bigotry. Letting their conscience be their guide meant giving this bigotry free reign, and our history books and news sources report the outcome every day.
To determine right from wrong, a person needs something a bit more reliable than conscience. He needs something a bit more reliable than the literal truth of the bible.
He needs to think.
The same tools that the Christian must to determine which biblical prescriptions to obey and which to ignore are available to the atheist. There is nothing in the arguments that I have written that requires the assumption that God does not exist. Even if God exists, it may well be the case that He created a world in which good and evil are found in whether malleable desires tend to fulfill or thwart other desires.
Whatever the answer happens to be, a Christian can be a good person the same way that anybody else can be a good person — by aligning his behavior with the moral facts.
V. Faith-Based Injustice
In the United States today, I fear that the rise of faith-based injustice in this country may rival its occurrences in other parts of the world now, and in the past.
A. Promote Morality
It is often argued that the nation needs to recommit itself to God and to religion in order to promote morality. However, we must still question whether those who call for this commitment are seeking to promote morality, or promote injustice. If we promote the commandments against lying and stealing, are we going to promote the commandments endorsing slavery and the execution of those following the ‘wrong’ religion as well?
Where is there a guarantee that religion brings justice? History tells us of more injustice than justice in the name of God.
B. “In God We Trust”
Let us consider the move to post “In God We Trust” on all public buildings.
There is the question, of course, of asking, “In which God do we trust?” Where two people want to trust two different Gods (or trust the same God in two different ways), then what happens?
This is a general problem. There is a more specific evil embedded in this motto.
If there is a “we” who trusts in God, then there must be a “they” who do not.
Such a motto, then, can only be interpreted as follows: It says, “Of all the things this country stands for, the one principle more important than all others, and upon which right and wrong is to be measured, is the principle that national populations are to be divided. We are to conceive of nations as being made up of two groups. There is a group of first-class, included, ‘we’ citizens who trust in God. And there is a group of second-class, excluded, ‘they’ citizens who do not.”
Is this truly what America stands for?
Is this truly what America should stand for?
Is it really the case that the most important idea that a American soldier is to train and possibly sacrifice his life for is to defend and promote division and bigotry? Is the most important lesson that we have to teach our children is the virtue of dividing populations up into groups of ‘we’ and ‘they’ and putting them in conflict against each other – by asserting that the ‘we’ group is morally and patriotically superior to the ‘they’ group, based solely on religious beliefs?
Can there truly be any pride in such a motto?
The doctrine of ethics defended in the earlier chapters says that good and evil primarily concern what we should like. And what we should like is that which is compatible with what fulfills human desires generally speaking.
What we should like is a government that treats its citizens with equal respect and affords them equal dignity, so long as they are not engaged in any activity that threatens others. What we should hate are governments that assign dignity of its citizens based on those citizens’ decision to accept or reject a particular government-approved religious belief.
In this country, we have laws at the highest level that insist that the Senate should not apportion respect among its citizens based on their religious beliefs. Yet, the law is ignored.
Just law is distinguished from unjust law by its conformity to pre-existing moral principles. One of those principles is the principle of equal respect due to all peaceful citizens. Government mottos that afford different peaceful citizens different levels of respect based on their beliefs about God stands squarely in violation of that principle.
The philosophy that endorses this motto is a philosophy of divisiveness and conflict no different in kind (though, thankfully, much milder in degree — for now) to the attitudes behind the crusades, inquisitions, 30 Years War, and the holocaust of the past.
There is an easy way to expose the lies behind the arguments of those who seek to post these mottos. Simply ask if the people insisting on these signs are “doing unto others what they would have others do unto them.” If, for example, Christians were to find themselves in a minority, and the majority was to insist on posting signs that say, “We trust in no God,” would the Christian be willing to throw their support behind this law and endorse it? Would they think that those who endorse and promote this policy are in their rights to do so? Or would they protest that those promoting a policy of posting “We Trust in No God” are unjustly seeking to use the government to establish a religion?
Are they truly seeking to do unto others what they would have others do unto them? If not, then they prove themselves to be moral hypocrites.
C. “One Nation, Under God”
As I was growing up, I was raised with the idea that coercing people — particularly other peoples’ children — into pledging allegiance to your beliefs was so unconscionable it could never win public support. No idea stood out as such a clear example of what was great about America than the idea that it was a country where people of different beliefs could live in harmony, and forcing one’s beliefs on others was the very characteristic that defined anti-Americanism. Like the institutions of monarchy and slavery, it belonged in the distant past, never again to see the light of day in any civilized country.
Coercing children into pledging allegiance to the Christian God is now a national policy.
“It is not coercion. Children can refuse,” its advocates claim.
I find it strange that people who hold that adults may not have sex with a child because such relationships are intrinsically coercive – particularly so when the adult is in a position of authority over the child, such as a teacher — do not see the same intrinsic coercion in having teachers ask students to pledge allegiance to the Christian God. The teacher’s job is to evaluate the student. The student’s assessment depends on his ability to please the teacher. Saying that the teacher has no power to coerce the child is insane.
In fact, the policy of requiring a ritual pledge to the God, with the option for others to sit silent, has a great deal in common with the NAZI policy of demanding that Jews wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. The NAZIs commanded this because they wanted a system whereby Jews can be known on sight. This then allowed their storm troopers and citizens fed on a steady diet of hate against Jews could then target these citizens with abuse. Otherwise, it was difficult to tell who was a Jew, and these undesirables might be able to get away with blending unseen in Ayrian society.
In America, the undesirables are not marked with a Star of David. They are marked by their refusal to stand and pledge allegiance to God in school.
The ritual then serves to tell the students – those who stand and pledge and those who do not – that those who stand are the special, accepted, and included group, while those who do not are the inferior, ostracized, and excluded group. The excluded group is symbolically ostracized by being left out of the ceremony; and the lesson is that this is how the excluded group are to be treated outside of the ceremony as well.
There is no coercion? We can begin to judge how free children feel not to participate by the numbers who do not participate. Is virtually everybody standing? That sounds like good evidence for coercion.
Of course, for those who want to add a bit more coercion, they add elements such as “you can only be excluded if you bring a note from your parents.” A person who does not have coercion in his heart would not even dream of asking for such a requirement.
The ulterior motives are so near the surface, nobody can deny them except those who do not want to see them, or who do not want others to see them. The ulterior motives are so near the surface you cannot understand the most widely used argument in its favor unless you understand that coercion is involved.
The main argument states that the pledge has a secular purpose of promoting patriotism. However, if promoting patriotism is such a good thing, then why is it only a good thing to promote Christian or Theist patriotism, and not a good thing to promote patriotism among others? Should we not be promoting the patriotism of all citizens? Exclude the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance and everybody can be patriotic. Keep the words “under God” in the Pledge, and you communicate the clear message that America is only interested in Christian patriots; and that the very concept of a non-Christian patriot is to be rejected.
Since a person promoting patriotism would promote patriotism across the board, and the Pledge does not do that, then true goal of the Pledge cannot be patriotism. Its true goal is to divide the population, to identify a group, not by their actions, but by their beliefs, and to mark them as outsiders that are not acceptable members of the society.
The effects, whether intentional or not (and I would be surprised if many proponents of such laws are not intuitively aware of this) can be even more sinister.
In 1968, a 4th grade teacher, Jane Elliott, divided her class into brown-eyed students and blue-eyed students. In this exercise, the brown-eyed students were informed that they were superior to the blue-eyed students. In her estimate, it took only minutes for this class distinction to affect the minds of the students, such that the brown-eyed students were denigrating, bullying, belittling, and dominating their blue-eyed class mates. It took only minutes for the blue-eyed students to become submissive to these injustices, to internalize the idea that they were ‘inferior’.
Since then, social science experiments have repeated the experiment under more controlled conditions. They showed that the effects of these types of proclamations are very powerful and emerge very quickly. As with Jane Elliot’s class, the effects show up much more quickly and much more powerfully than even those who initiate them anticipated. What starts off as minor harassment, turns into violence. On national levels, they turn into inquisitions, crusades, and holocausts.
This is the effect that Hitler accomplished when he forced Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes. This is the effect that advocates of a mandated Pledge of Allegiance to the Christian God are heading for when they insist on ceremonies where God-fearing citizens stand and demonstrate their superiority over classmates who are to remain seated.
It is ironic that the ‘superiority’ that the included group claims to have is a moral superiority. Yet, they claim this through practices that a moral person could never endorse. Drawing these types of distinctions in a society is evil, and history shows us that the longer that this evil goes unchallenged, the worse it becomes over time.
D. The 10 Commandments
Those who defend posting the 10 Commandments in public buildings is that, “When we post the 10 Commandments, we are merely showing recognition of our legal heritage, and this is not to be understood as endorsing or promoting a particular religion.”
Yes, and when I say that something is circular, I am merely making a statement about its shape and am not to be understood as commenting about its roundness.
It is ironic that those who advocate posting of the 10 Commandments in public buildings, while saying that they represent our heritage, and that they are useful in promoting a more moral society, is that the commandments include one that says “Thou shalt not bear false witness”. Yet, those who are arguing for its placement load their claims with statements of “false witness” without a twinge of conscience?
Humans should really strive to be better people than this.
I should not even need to offer an argument to illustrate this deception, but I will.
Let us erect statues of Jim Crow, Joe McCarthy, and Adolph Hitler and claim that these statues, placed in prominent locations in our public buildings, are not meant to honor these people and promote their ideas, but merely to acknowledge the fact that they existed and had an influence on our history.
Such a project is laughably absurd on the surface. The statues and plaques that we place in prominent places indicate not only that they had an influence, but that they are to be honored and respected. These are not random pieces of history selected independent of their perceived merit. They are selected by those who want to say, “This is what you, the observer, should honor and respect.”
There are, of course, a few contexts in which this is not true. Put a quote on a wall in a context where some are clearly to be accepted and others are clearly to be rejected, and this says that it is up to the viewer to determine which is which. Put a quote on a wall where every other quote is meant to be endorsed or accepted, and this implies that the new quote is to be promoted and accepted as well.
Any who say otherwise are attempting to deceive either themselves or others. Morally, it does not matter which; both forms of deceptions are equally villainous. Both forms of deception demonstrate a lack of concern on the part of the individual with what is right and what is wrong. Both forms of deception prove that the speaker does not truly accept the moral injunction ‘thou shalt not bear false witness’. If he did, he would come up with an honest argument.
E. “Faith Based” Initiatives
This is another policy that wears its injustice so far out on the end of its sleeve that denying its presence is absurd.
This policy says, “Tax all citizens equally regardless of their beliefs, but hand the money back only to those who profess allegiance to religions acceptable to the state – most notably, the Christian religion.”
Each government expenditure is, in part, a program to create jobs. Through this, the expenditure creates opportunity. In some cases, it provides an individual with an entry-level position; a way to gain experience and to start his move up the economic ladder. In other cases, it provides the next step up the ladder. In a few cases, it provides the career itself.
If a government finances a program, and says that those who do not participate in the institutions that are not the beneficiaries of these programs are excluded from these jobs, then it is a joke to say that this is a land of equal opportunity. It is a land in which a citizen’s religious beliefs entitle them to special, government-funded opportunities not available to others.
It is, in short, a nation that has slipped further down the slope toward inequality and injustice.
Once again, we face the irony that those who promote inequality and injustice are those who claim that their devotion gives them a moral superiority over others. The very policies that they defend in the name of promoting a more moral society are those that no moral person could accept. The arguments that they use in defense of these policies are arguments that no truly moral person — whose morality is concerned with making sure that he is not tricked into accepting injustice in place of justice, evil in place of good — could ever find convincing.
The injustice does not stop there. Those who claim this moral superiority ultimately argue for compounding this injustice. I began with a premise that the burdens of government are assigned to individuals regardless of beliefs — that the tax laws are neutral with regard to religion.
Well, that’s not exactly true either.
The burdens of government do not fall evenly among those of different belief systems. Theists participating in institutions that participate in these programs are free to shrug off some of the burdens of government, and the burdens that they are allowed to shrug off, others must pick up. A society of faith-based initiatives and faith-based tax cuts, those who do not participate on those institutions are not only denied equal opportunity in this land of alleged freedom, they are also bound with a disproportionately large share of their burdens — because of their beliefs.
Those who claim to have cornered the market on virtue, demonstrate their moral character by stacking injustice on top of injustice.
F. Reason, not Scripture
Perhaps the ultimate hypocrisy to come from these self-proclaimed icons of perfect virtue is that they are not willing to follow their own ‘golden rule’ to do unto others as they would have others do unto them.
Ask them if they would be willing to see a motto of “We Trust No God” posted on the walls of their public buildings and printed on the money. Would they accept a pledge of allegiance to “one Godless nation, indivisible”? Could they be content with the 5 Pillars of Islam on public display? Would they not protest a law that prohibited the hiring of people who professed a belief in God?
These issues point out a pair of relevant facts. First, it identifies the injustice in the practices being promoted. Second, it points out that there remains a fairly significant gap between religious faith and moral virtue. To promote injustice is a serious problem in itself; to lie in defense of injustice compounds the problem.
Where a filter is needed to distinguish truth from error, reason is the instrument that must manufacture that filter. Reason tells us that slavery is wrong, even though the bible sometimes permits and even requires it. Reason tells us that that what the bible permits in terms of punishing a child is actually abuse and is to be prohibited. Reason tells us that working on the Sabbath should not carry a death sentence even though the bible says that all who work on the Sabbath are to be put to death. Reason tells us that charging interest for money is not only permissible, even though the Bible condemns it, but it is necessary for a healthy economy.
It is also reason, not scripture, which tells us that all people shall have equal treatment before the law. Reason, not scripture, gives each of us a say in our government. Reason, not scripture, tells us that no person is to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; that each is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty; that each is entitled to a trial by a jury of his peers.
Reason tells us that dividing populations into groups of “we” and “they” based on religious beliefs is unjust. Reason tells us that rituals that force ‘undesirable’ but peaceful citizens to wear a badge — in the form of a yellow Star of David or conspicuous nonparticipation of a religious ritual at school and at government functions — is wrong. Reason tells us that posting a statue or monument in a public building is a way of endorsing and promoting the views expressed on it. Reason tells us that the burdens and benefits of government are to be distributed justly among its people, and that peaceful individuals are not to be taxed for having one belief to subsidize another, where justice demands that both people stand as equals before the law.
Reason tells us that stem cell research can save lives and promote good health; and the cells themselves are not going to mind what we do to them. These are not persons until they have wishes and desires of their own. When that happens, we have an obligation to respect their interests. Until that happens, it is a mistake to treat them as anything other than another bundle of cells.
Reason tells us that homosexual acts between consenting adults thwart no desires except the acquired prejudices of people who have adopted a bigotry that should never have survived two thousand years.
It tells us that there is a time where old age renders a body no longer useful, and that it is not irrational for a person at that time to accept the fact that all they have left is pain and suffering that they would rather avoid, or a life of an empty shell occupying a bed that is of no use to anybody, and a great burden to some.
Reason tells us that those who do not recognize these facts are making the world worse than it would otherwise be — not better. Those who practice these policies may feel a great deal of pride in what they do. However, their pride is no different than that of the Confederate soldier, inquisitor, or crusader of the past — people who also thought that they were doing good deeds when, in fact, they were not.
Reason tells us that these policies are wrong. If the Christian is the morally superior person he claims himself to be, he would not be promoting these policies, but opposing them, in the name of Justice, and in the name of God. They would stand side by side with the atheists, who promote the same justice and fight the same injustice, on the grounds that reason dictates that it is what ought to be done.
VI. This Is Personal
Here I sit, while people across the country that I call home daily write to their followers that I am lacking morals, that people such as I are the root cause of all that is wrong with this country, because I do not believe in God.
This is an injustice on another level, in addition to those described above. This is bigotry, wearing the same stripe as the bigotry that says that all Jews are involved in a money-hungry conspiracy to control the world, and all Muslims are terrorists. It identifies an individual as inferior, not because of anything he has done against his fellow human, but on his membership in a group.
I am responsible for nobody’s life but my own, and I do not ask anybody else to answer for my transgressions. Fairness and justice, concepts which many people seem all too unfamiliar, gives me my right to insist that I be judged by what I do.
VII. Reason and Morality
(a) Starting the Journey: What Is ‘Better’?
I started with a quest to make the world a better place as a result of my having been here. But I wanted the world to really be a better place — a life spent falsely thinking I had made the world a better place would still be wasted.
What is ‘better’?
Good, bad, better, worse, they all describe relationships of objects of evaluation and desires. Every value term does this, including words like harm, injury, benefit, health, dangerous, abuse, kindness, and all of their kin.
I learned that a ‘desire’ refers to one of two families of propositional attitudes; the other is ‘belief’. Propositional attitudes are terms that refer to how the brain is wired.
Beliefs and desires are distinguished in a number of key ways. Most importantly, beliefs attempt to describe the world. They may not describe the world accurately…erson may have false beliefs – however, that is their function. If I believe that I am traveling at 60 miles per hour, then I am saying that the world is one in which the proposition “I am traveling at 60 miles per hour” is true.
Desires, on the other hand, are prescriptive. If I say that I desire to travel at 60 miles per hour, then I am saying that I prefer a universe in which ‘I am traveling at 60 miles per hour” is true over one in which it is not true.
All value relates states of affairs to desires.
To make the world a better place, then, is to make true the propositions that people desire to be true, to whatever degree that is possible.
But there is a bit of a hitch. People always act for the greater fulfillment of their own desires, given their beliefs. This is a little bit tricky to understand. If I am thirsty, I seek to fulfill my desire for water — I seek to make the proposition, “I am getting a drink of water” true. I see a glass of colorless, odorless liquid in front of me. I drink it, because I believe it to be water. But assume that the belief is a mistake; the beaker contains something else. Though I seek to fulfill my desire, I act to fulfill my desire, given my beliefs.
This is why false beliefs are a bad idea. They get in the way of our fulfilling our desires. True beliefs are better.
Better?
Yes, better. True beliefs help in the actual fulfillment of one’s desires. Truth helps to fulfill desires; errors and deception thwart desires. We have a reason to prefer truth over error and deception.
Given the importance of truth, I am surprised at how little respect people show for it. Entire industries exist for the purpose of manipulation and deception, and no protest is raised against it. Individuals can utter the most outrageous nonsense, and the fact that they are lying is given little notice. A person should be as willing and as quick to denounce a liar who works even in support of his own cause, as he is to denounce somebody who does violence in the name of that cause.
The logical fallacies and the techniques of rationalization should be near the surface of every person’s consciousness, so instances can quickly be recognized and dispensed with, so that we can move on more efficiently.
(b) Morality: The Evaluation of Desires
We act to fulfill our desires given our beliefs. But, our desires can also be evaluated. A good desire is a desire that tends to fulfill other desires; and a bad desire tends to thwart other desires. I want to make the world a better place than it would have been if I had not been a part of it. That’s a good desire, all things considered. It is a desire-fulfilling desire; unless my beliefs about what a ‘better place’ consists in are mistaken.
So, I owe some care in determining that my beliefs about a better place are correct.
People who do not take such care, they are not good people. People who care so little about being accurate that they readily accept and repeat flawed arguments — people who rationalize away the harm they do to others — are not good people.
How do we help in harvesting good desires, and weeding out bad desires? There are a number of ways, but the methods most important in the field of ethics are praise and blame; reward and punishment — in short, through positive and negative reinforcement. An aversion to killing innocent people is a good desire. To foster and promote this desire, we praise it, and we condemn any instance in which we find it lacking. We make sure that, even though the agent might not have had the aversion to killing he should have had, that we can give him something to be adverse to. That ‘something’ takes the form of punishment.
Morality is the institution for discovering the value of desires — ranking them as good or bad (good or evil), fostering the growth of good desires, and inhibiting the development of bad desires, through praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment.
(c) Immorality and Religion
Morality requires no God. Murder, theft, lies, and deceit all thwart desires. A universal aversion to these things would prevent the thwarting of the desires these things cause. We have reason to condemn instances where these aversions are absent, and praise instances where they are present. Even if no God exists, reason dictates these conclusions.
Religion can get in the way of morality — where a religion preaches as ‘good’ what is, in fact, ‘bad’. Where religion teaches the virtue of piloting airplanes into sky scrapers, or stoning to death a woman who commits adultery or the child who talks back to his parents, or condemns the consenting adults who engage in homosexual acts, religion does not promote good, it promotes evil.
Religion can also promote morality. Where religion provides food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, and medical care to the sick, it makes the world a better place.
My present concern is that we are starting to see a resurgence of the bad side of religion. We see it not only in Muslim fundamentalism abroad, but in Christian fundamentalism in the United States.
We see it in a range of programs that aim to establish a two-tier system of citizenry. One class of believers trusts in God, participates in patriotic rituals, promotes their religion above all others in public displays, is exempt from many forms of taxation yet excludes others from obtaining the opportunities that those taxes provide.
A desire for justice and fairness is a good thing. A wise society would promote a desire for such things. It would do so by praising instances in which it can be found, and condemning instances in which it is lacking. But justice and fairness are lacking in the policies advocated by fundamentalists here and abroad who seek a society in which their sect and its members stand above others before the law.
To be fair, it is not being encouraged by subjectivists who say that all of morality is merely a matter of personal prejudice, or that we can find our morality in whatever inclinations nature and nurture have instilled within us either.
As long as this continues, the world is not becoming a better place than it would have otherwise been.
VIII. The Present, and The Future
I have likely made mistakes in what I have presented here. In fact, I announce with total confidence that it contains at least one error, though I don’t know where it is. Wherever it is, I hope that somebody finds it and points it out to others before it does any great damage.
My adult life has been spent mostly investigating the issue of right and wrong. I was exceedingly fortunate to have had the luxury of spending 12 years in college, where I could devote my thoughts to these problems full time. With all of that effort, I hope that I have learned something along the way.
I have, at times, grown nervous over the fact that the thoughts I had developed existed only in my head. At other times, I chastise myself for the arrogance of thinking that those thoughts had any real merit.
Ultimately, whether they had merit or not was something that I wanted others to decide for themselves. Therefore, I acquired a laptop and decided that I would write a story — a story that started at the moment I first remembered seriously asking myself the question, “What is good and bad?”. The story would continue through my encounter with different theories and explain the conclusions that I hold today. I write it in the hopes that somewhere, in these, there is something that just might make the world a better place than it would have otherwise been.