Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America (About The Moral Centre)

In a World Gone Crazy

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

August 20, 2014

In a world gone crazy, it is important for us to learn how to see the root causes. I use the phrase “root causes” deliberately, because it is the kind of thing that liberals love to appeal to, whether we are talking about race riots here, or barbarity in the Middle East. But when they get to talking about root causes and the “broader context” of whatever outrage it is, they invariably veer toward their programs which desperately need more funding.

The root cause is sin — high handed sin in the first instance, and a quiet and mousy enabling sin in the second. What we are talking about is basic — evil behavior in the first instance, and bewilderment about what to do about it in the other. We are now seeing on the national and international stage, over and over again, the same realities that play out when a three-year-old flips out in a restaurant because he didn’t want that kind of ice cream, and his hapless parents are completely and utterly at a loss about what to do about it.

All of these issues are matters of understanding the moral center, and the attendant issues of discipline, strength, incentives, disincentives, resolve, and leading from somewhere other than from behind.

Whether it is a micro issue or a global one, life is a power struggle. There are those with power, and there are those who want it. There are those with power, and there are those who have figured out that those with power don’t know what to do with it. There is right-handed power, Putin-like, which God hates, and there is also limp-wristed power, Obama-like, which God detests. Then there are the bad actors who decide to make the challenge. You show weakness and in about fifteen seconds the challenges come.

And of course every Christian knows that we must distinguish the weakness of the cross, which is true strength, from the weakness of timidity. Christ before His accusers was silent, and He overthrew them all. Belshazzar went weak in the knees at the written word that came to him, and he was overthrown that night. A great deal of weakness is not the hidden wisdom of God. A great deal of weakness is just the manifest folly of man.

ISIS has apparently beheaded an American journalist, James Foley, and threatens to behead another one. Aside from everything else involved in this, who does not see this as a challenge, a taunt, a “what are you going to do about it?” An appropriate response should not be medium level, moderated disapproval by a ditz at the State Department.

When the governor of Missouri calls for “vigorous prosecution” of the the police officer who shot Michael Brown, we all need to know that it is because the evidence demands an indictment. We need to know that it is not because a part of his state is burning down, he is starting to look bad, and he needs a sacrificial lamb. But that is plainly something we do not know. A thousand people in the street with their hands up in a universal sign of surrender does not mean that is what Michael Brown was doing with his hands moments before he was shot. But we do know what Pilate did with his hands — he washed them because a mob was yelling.
If Darren Wilson did an indefensible thing, he should be prosecuted for it. Absolutely. And if Michael Brown did an indefensible thing, we should find out what it was, and there put the matter to rest.

And in the meantime, we need to pray for leaders who understand the world that God made, a world of cause and effect.

Limping Limpidly

The West’s Double Standards

As we write this the Western world is agog with disgust at the brutality of an insurrection unfolding in Iraq.  People are being lined up and mown down.  Others are subjected to public beheadings because they don’t believe in the peculiar doctrines of the Islamic Sunni sect.  The West decries such behaviour as medieval by which it means, primitive–that is, ibehaviours that belong to an age which has not benefited from the Enlightenment. 

The West, in its preening desire to be inclusive and tolerant towards all has conveniently forgotten that the historical symbol of Islam is the scimitar.  The ardent Islamic Sunni soldiers now operating in Iraq are simply being consistent.  And, we want to ask the chattering classes and the Commentariat in the West, what could possibly be wrong with that?  Upon what high moral stool is the West sitting whence to declaim such behaviour? 

The established religion of the West is secular humanism, and its philosophy of existence is evolutionism.  But the West has conveniently forgotten that secular humanism and evolutionism is morally neutral at best, vacuous at worst.  Yet still the West clings forlornly to notions of morality, of right and wrong.
  In one of the weirdest and most circular circumlocutions ever devised, the Commentariat and the Academy have argued that our moral notions are better than the morality of the Medieval Period because we are more evolved.  We have progressed.  We declaim murder, rape, incest, and even theft sometimes because we have morally developed.  Our public morality is evolved. 

But secular humanism has no morality: it is built upon brute materialism.  Whatever is, is right.  Evolutionism, similarly, has no morality.  It is neutral or amoral–whatever survives is right.  Whatever passes away out of existence and history is wrong–in the sense of inferior, or unfit for purpose.  So, if the active and energetic rebels in Iraq succeed, all power to them.  They are the more evolved species in that land, not the effete chattering classes in the West. 

The problem lies right here: the West hates the God of the Ten Commandments.  But, the West wants to continue believing in the last six commandments–from honouring father and mother to not coveting what belongs to one’s neighbour.  The West wants the Law, without acknowledging nor worshipping the God whose Law it is.  Thus, the West lives an acute contradictory nonsense. 

As historian Christopher Dawson expressed it:

. . . the moral idealism which is still so characteristic of the Western mind is the fruit of an age-long tradition of religious faith and spiritual discipline.  Humanitarianism is the peculiar possession of a people who have worshipped for centuries the Divine Humanity–apart from all that even our humanism would have been other than it is.  It is from this Christian moral tradition that both the older Deist movement and the new movement of evolutionary vitalism have derived whatever positive religious value they possess.  Nevertheless this element cannot continue to exist indefinitely, if it is divorced from the historic religious beliefs on which it is really founded.  [Christopher Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Enquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945),  p. 242f.]

So, when the Modern Man, the card carrying member of the Academy or the Commentariat, declaims the brutality being perpetrated in Iraq he or she is drawing on a mere echo–and a faint echo at that–of the Law of the Lord of Sinai and Calvary.  In the light of the evolutionary secularism prevailing in the West it comes across as quaint, even foolish. 

In the spirit of Elijah we find ourselves wanting to cry out, “Grow up, and get a life!”  If the Baal of secular humanism is true, stop prattling on about morality and immorality, right and wrong, decency and indecency.  Live before and serve your god with a modicum of integrity and consistency.  But if God be true, then repent and embrace His Law and His Word with fear and reverence. 

The West is both limping and limpid.  It claims both the autonomy of evolutionism, and the righteous decency of the Lord.  It lives in a pathetic joke.  The Sunni warriors no doubt get the punchline.  That’s why they call the West the Great Satan. 

Ave, United Nations

The World’s Windbag

Our view of the UN is that it is not a pretty place.  It is hopelessly compromised, riddled with corruption, and not in any position to show moral leadership to anyone.  So, when the even more compromised UN committee on human rights slams the Roman Catholic Church for its “record” on homosexuality (which it opposes and rejects as unChristian, immoral and condemned by God), abortion (an act of murder, to be opposed by all Christians and likewise condemned by God Himself) we could not repress a cynical laugh. 

Really.  So, maybe the great and glorious and oh-so-authoritative UN committee on human rights would disclose by what authority it asserts that the unborn child is inhuman or non-human.  By what standard does the UN asserts that homosexuality is moral, and a human right.  The only possible response the committee could make to such interrogation would be to claim that somewhere along the line, some UN body (possibly the committee itself) took a vote on the matter and decided by some sort of majority that “a” was ethical and “b” was not.  To which we retort, any morality grounded on votes is not morality at all.  It is mere relativist bumpkinism.  It is nothing more than standover tactics by a majority against a minority.
  On that basis, the Nazis could legitimately claim complete moral rectitude in their ultimate solution with respect to the Jewish people.  For our part, we could not give a fig about “morality” according to the giant statue of Man.  It is a foolish contradiction in terms. 

There are two other things condemned by the UN Committee.  The first is the Roman Catholic Church’s view on contraception; the second is its position and handling of pederasty within the church.  Since the Roman Catholic Church has condemned pederasty, the real criticisms are about tactics and procedures and processes.  This has been a great scandal, and a cause of much anguish to all Christians.  We grieve along with our Roman Catholic friends, and, we are persuaded, with the Roman Catholic Church itself.  We suppose there is much work still to be done; we are thankful for progress made in recent years. 

The matter of the Roman Catholic Church’s view of contraception is where we part company, only insofar as we do not find this to be condemned or forbidden in Holy Scripture.  Thus, we believe it it a human law, not grounded in God’s law.  The only contraceptions we find condemned (by good and necessary consequence) are those which involve the purposively caused death of the conceived, unborn child–a prohibition derived from the commandment, Thou shalt not murder. 

But the issue at stake here is the authority or the foundation of morality and ethics.  The Christian faith and the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is grounded in God and His absolute, eternal law; the Church’s axiology and morality are likewise grounded.  The UN has no such authority, no such ground.  Its moral judgements quiver on sinking sand, swamped by relativist liquefaction.  It’s moral judgements are not worth the paper they are written on.  It has no ethical authority, no absolute standards, no firm ground–merely the prejudices of some faux majority on any given day. 

For our part, we despise the idol gods of mammon.  But there is a flip side to all this nonsense.  The UN also claims to acknowledge and respect religious freedom.  So with this judgement upon a particular church, is the UN now presuming to decide which religions and which religious principles and doctrines it finds tolerable?  It appears that the UN has decided that it has the authority to discriminate against particular religions, or religious teachings.  Which makes the UN even more of a mockery–a windbag, replete with gaseous hypocritical inanities.

Hypocritical Cant

So, What’s Wrong With . . . ?

We have all heard of “convenient Christians”–folk who seek to maintain a Christian façade when it is socially, politically, or personally convenient to do so.  But, it is all part of acting out a persona.  Such people are rightly called hypocrites, an epithet of disdain.

But far more common, yet equally despicable is the hypocrisy of Unbelievers.  It is impossible to describe adequately the tawdry hypocrisy of Unbelievers prattling on about this evil and that wrong whilst they know–and we all know–they don’t believe a word of it.  Oh, maybe they tell themselves they are true born again believers, who detest whatever particular ignominy of the day.  But in truth they have no foundation, no principles, and no ethics upon which their high dudgeon can be sustained.  At best it manifests mere cant.

Since Unbelievers reject the Living God, anything is possible and acceptable in principle.  Anything which is allegedly not acceptable or wrong or immoral is not actually, for “wrong” and “immorality” have no ultimate or operational meaning.  What is “wrong” to one is “right” to another.  One man’s treasure is another’s rubbish.  Who knows?  Who cares? 

We suspect that more than the odd couple know this to be the case.  That is why Unbelievers are so shrill about their moralities and their principles and their ethics.
  Here is the nub of their hypocrisy.  On the one hand, they will sonorously inform us that there are no absolutes, no ultimate ethical standards–only what seems good for the moment.  On the other, they will rail and rant against this “wrong” and that “evil”. 

Alison Mau is the go-to girl for enlightenment these days.  Alison is a crusading bi-sexual.  She was asked recently for her august assessment of the state of sexism in New Zealand these days.

Television presenter Ali Mau said she believed benevolent sexism (that is, holding doors open for women) was predominantly “an older generation thing” that would probably die out with her parents’ generation, or perhaps with her own generation.  “These people who protest that it’s chivalrous – I think there’s some deep-seated sexism there.”

Sexism?  And your issue is?  Sexism or non-sexism, Alison–it’s all rubbish, nothingness, meaningless.  As you yourself have proclaimed publicly innumerable times–“If it feels right, do it”.  There is nothing holy in any absolute sense whatever.  Only opinions, preferences, cant, and prejudice.  For you to speak or think or imply otherwise is rank hypocrisy.  Get a life and grow up.  Become a serious, truthful, non-hypocritical Unbeliever.  Spare us all this high moral dudgeon. 

Whilst we may laugh at Mau’s foibles and fashionable “principles” the same reality holds true for much more serious stuff.  Take rape for example.  How can Unbelief be in any way consistent or truthful or believable in its condemnation of it.  Nature does not support such a condemnation.  Reason, unhinged from any absolute moral standards, is a wax nose to be twisted into any shape of convenience. It cannot condemn outright or in any absolute sense.  Reason depends upon premises, and the premises of Unbelief will admit no moral absolutes of any kind.  

The media and the Commentariat have been agog over some young barbarians getting girls drunk, then raping them whilst they are insensate.  At one very important level their moral outrage testifies to this truth: that they are made in God’s image and are accountable to Him and His law.  Their outrage testifies to the Living God and His creation of all things and His absolute ethical demands of mankind.  They cannot help but speak out against such horrors (at least for the moment). 

But in their professed Unbelief they cannot ground their opprobrium and outrage in anything meaningful.  Unbelief is forced to acknowledge that it can rise no higher than what will be, will be.  There is no morality involved.  There is only might making right.  And in this case the barbarians had the might, so they had the right.  That’s the best Unbelief can offer.

So, our call to all those who are morally outraged at date rape is simple.  Lay aside your hypocrisy.  Either bow in humility before your Creator and accept all of His law for your life or stop moralising about things which you have no foundation or basis to condemn. 

If Unbelief is right, stop hypocritically moralising and be consistent with your atheistic assumptions.  If it is not right, and your hypocrisy is disgusting to you, then repent and return to your Creator in the days that remain for you upon the earth.

Letter From America (About a Dishonest Englishman)

A Response to Richard Dawkins

He and his supporters have a right to their atheism, but not to intellectual dishonesty about it.

By  Dennis Prager 

October 1, 2013 12:00 AM

National Review Online

This past Friday, CNN conducted an interview with Richard Dawkins, the British biologist most widely known for his polemics against religion and on behalf of atheism.  Asked “whether an absence of religion would leave us without a moral compass,” Dawkins responded: “The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible.”

This is the crux of the issue for Dawkins and other anti-religion activists — that not only do we not need religion or God for morality but that we would have a considerably more moral world without them.  This argument is so wrong — both rationally and empirically — that its appeal can be explained only by (a) a desire to believe it and (b) an ignorance of history.

First, the rational argument.

If there is no God, the labels “good” and “evil” are merely opinions.
They are substitutes for “I like it” and “I don’t like it.” They are not objective realities.  Every atheist philosopher I have debated has acknowledged this. For example, at Oxford University, I debated Professor Jonathan Glover, the British philosopher and ethicist, who said: “Dennis started by saying that I hadn’t denied his central contention that if there isn’t a God, there is only subjective morality. And that’s absolutely true.”  And the eminent Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty admitted that, for secular liberals such as himself, “there is no answer to the question, ‘Why not be cruel?’”

Atheists such as Dawkins who refuse to acknowledge that without God there are only opinions about good and evil are not being intellectually honest.

None of this means that only believers in God can be good or that atheists cannot be good. There are bad believers and there are good atheists. But this fact is irrelevant to whether good and evil are real.

To put this as clearly as possible: If there is no God who says, “Do not murder,” murder is not wrong. Many people or societies may agree that it is wrong. But so what? Morality does not derive from the opinion of the masses. If it did, then apartheid was right; murdering Jews in Nazi Germany was right; slavery in nearly all the world throughout most of history was right; and clitoridectomies and honor killings in various Muslims societies are right.

So, then, without God, why is murder wrong?  Is it, as Dawkins argues, because reason says so?  My reason says murder is wrong, just as Dawkins’s reason does. But, again, so what? The pre-Christian Germanic tribes of Europe regarded the Church’s teaching that murder was wrong as preposterous. They reasoned that killing innocent people was acceptable and normal because the strong should do whatever they wanted.

In addition, reason alone without God is pretty weak in leading to moral behavior. When self-interest and reason collide, reason usually loses. That’s why we have the word “rationalize” —  using reason to argue for what is wrong.  What would reason argue to a non-Jew asked by Jews to hide them when the penalty for hiding a Jew was death? It would argue not to hide those Jews.

In that regard, let’s go to the empirical argument.  Years ago, I interviewed Pearl and Sam Oliner, two professors of sociology at Humboldt State University in California and the authors of one of the most highly regarded works on altruism, The Altruistic Personality. The book was the product of the Oliners’ lifetime of study of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.

The Oliners, it should be noted, are secular, not religious, Jews; they had no religious agenda.  I asked Samuel Oliner, “Knowing all you now know about who rescued Jews during the Holocaust, if you had to return as a Jew to Poland and you could knock on the door of only one person in the hope that they would rescue you, would you knock on the door of a Polish lawyer, a Polish doctor, a Polish artist, or a Polish priest?”  Without hesitation, he said, “a Polish priest.” And his wife immediately added, “I would prefer a Polish nun.”

That alone should be enough to negate the pernicious nonsense that God is not only unnecessary for a moral world but detrimental to one.

But if that isn’t enough, how about the record of the godless 20th century, the cruelest, bloodiest, most murderous century on record? Every genocide of the last century — except for the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians and the Pakistani mass murder of Hindus in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) — was committed by a secular anti-Jewish and anti-Christian regime. And as the two exceptions were Muslim, they are not relevant to my argument. I am arguing for the God and Bible of Judeo-Christian religions.

Perhaps the most powerful proof of the moral decay that follows the death of God is the Western university and its secular intellectuals. Their moral record has been loathsome. Nowhere were Stalin and Mao as venerated as they were at the most anti-religious and secular institutions in Western society, the universities. Nowhere in the West today is anti-Americanism and Israel-hatred as widespread as it is at universities. And Princeton University awarded its first tenured professorship in bioethics to Peter Singer, an atheist who has argued, among other things, that that “the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee” and that bestiality is not immoral.

Dawkins and his supporters have a right to their atheism. They do not have a right to intellectual dishonesty about atheism.

I have debated the best known atheists, including Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing), Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Only Richard Dawkins has refused to come on my radio show.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His most recent book is Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

A Man In Full

They Always Punish Prophets

Ariel Castro is a prophet, and we need many more of his ilk.  Of course, he has also committed acts of murder, kidnapping, rape, slaving, and torture–but that’s beside the point.  These things are nothing because . . . well, read it out of his own mouth. 

The man convicted of holding three women captive in a house he turned into a prison and raping them repeatedly for a decade has been sentenced to life without parole plus 1000 years.  Ariel Castro, 53, apologised to his victims in a rambling, defiant statement before he was sentenced. He blamed a sex addiction, his former wife and even the FBI for not thoroughly investigating the abductions while claiming most of the sex was consensual and that the women were never tortured.

“These people are trying to paint me as a monster,” he said. “I’m not a monster. I’m sick.”  [NZ Herald]

Sure he did all these things.  But he was sick.  And the ones truly to blame are those who did not observe and diagnose him skilfully and early enough so that he would not have committed all those crimes and despicable acts. 

Castro is a poster boy for our world.  Evil is not evil; it is merely an illness.  And you can treat illnesses, right?
  Is someone morally wrong for having influenza and infecting others?  No–well, not unless he deliberately attempts to infect them.  But even if he were to do that, it would simply indicate just how sick he really was.  The “influenza” made him do it. 

We live in an ideological evolutionist world.  There is a clear bright line to be drawn from our dominant religion and ideology to Castro’s self-apologia.  In evolutionism there are no morals, no ethics–only what works, what leads to survival and dominance over others.  He is the ultimate dominator.  The fact that he managed forced sexual relations with three women for ten years arguably marks him out as the more committed animal to the survival of his species.  The true Alpha Male. 

But if the rest of the species happen to think him wrong, they are the ones blaspheming evolutionism.  They are the hypocrites.  Even if they gang up on Castro and use the blunt force of  positive law to project their own prejudices upon him, at best they can allege no more than Castro having a sickness. They, we all, are at fault for not diagnosing and “helping” him sooner.  

Castro has remained true to the established ideology of being a mere animal.  He is a consistent, modern day prophet.  We need more of folk like him.  A man in full. 

The Uberman As Paper Tiger

The Christian Sense of Wrong and Right

The Highwaymen made famous a song written by Jarvis and Cook about two kids raised . . .

In the crystal sense of wrong and right
We were born and raised in black and white . . . 

but the very concept of right and wrong–of morality–has come under serious attack in the past 150 years.

Nietzsche was perceptive and prescient upon insisting that there was a connection between God and ethics, between God and morals.  Kill God, and anything goes.  But, for Nietzsche there was a “trade off”.  Kill God, and we kill off morals.  But we are left with man.  Man can grow and develop to be an Uberman, a man with a big chest, a being who would take the place of God and determine his own morals, a morality that was worthy a superman.  Nietzsche sought to kill God off in order to enable man to take His place and assert himself as a demi-god. 

The West has lived with the notion of a dead God and big-chested men for over 150 years.
  Whilst being eagerly taken up by the chattering classes, it’s not making as much progress as hoped.  Neither is the idea that there is no such thing as right and wrong.  Amorality may appear at first glance to make man a more advanced and superior being.  But it quickly crumbles into dust.  Why?  Because man cannot escape what he is–a creature created by the Living God and in His image.  He cannot escape thinking in moral categories, of thinking “in the crystal sense of wrong and right”.

The story is told that Nietzsche had successfully killed God.  Yet one day he was driven to apoplexy because he saw a beast being foully mistreated in the street.  He descended into madness and never recovered, dying an imbecile.  God was not dead at all.  Nietzsche could not escape the conscience God had woven into the fabric of his being.  His compassion for an animal  (a deeply religious concept) should have been easy to shrug off for an Uberman.  But in the end a crystal sense of morality caught up with him and provoked his madness.

So it is with modern Western culture.  At every hand we proclaim amorality and that morals can never be more that a mere a social construct for the convenience of Ubermen.  Men make morality; Ubermen are never subject to it.  Part of the drive to be Supermen expresses itself in the incessant lust for “freedom rights”.  What a Superman wants, a Superman should get.  Do we want to gamble?  Since we are Uberman, we should all have the freedom to do as we please.  The function of law is to remove any restrictions to our self-expression.  Morals become the hand-maiden of the right to do and be as one chooses.  If we want it, it is right by definition.  Morals in the modern world are voluntaristic by definition.  Therefore, morality and ethics are profoundly relative.  And that is as it should be.  It befits a race of Ubermen.

Take the case of prostitution.  One group of Ubermen declares it wants to employ the services of prostitutes.  Another proclaims that prostitutes have a moral right to pursue the profession of choice.  All very Nietzschean.  Morality dies.  God dies.

Not so fast.  Men cannot deny what they are.  And men are divine constructs, not Darwinian accidents.  The rejection of amorality and a re-assertion of a crystal sense of wrong and right continues to percolate everywhere, like a Rotorua mudpool, for the “crystal sense of morality” is actually the Christian sense of wrong and right, and God will not be denied.

Several years ago in New Zealand prostitution was made a legally recognized, lawful occupation.  The Ubermen had declared it to be moral, deserving of all the protection of the law as any other lawful profession or occupation.  This Nietzschean move made it perfectly permissable to have brothels in residential houses in quiet neighbourhoods.  After all, freedom rights recognized a person’s right to run a seamstress business out of a residential home.  Why not a brothel?  Why not indeed?

But then the mudpool starts boiling.  The words employed in the argument are instructive.  This, from the NZ Herald:

A Mt Eden property owner has been compelled to send a letter to neighbours telling them his house is not a brothel after another resident delivered flyers claiming that it was.  The Auckland Council has inspected the address and confirmed it is not being used as a brothel, but says a previous owner of the property may have run an online escort agency from the house.

Last week, neighbours received an anonymous flyer in their letterboxes asking them if they knew that the new owners of a Grange Rd property had put in an application for a brothel.  “It hasn’t even been approved, and they have a website and are currently renovating ready for business.  Do we want this on our road? Close to primary schools and kindergartens, in a respectable residential area, surrounded by families with young children,” the flyer said.  It urged neighbours to call the council to make a complaint.

Not much respect for Supermen there.  Clearly the local populace believes such things are wrong. 

But the owner of the property, who rents it out and did not want to be named, said the claims were untrue.  “The accusations they’ve made about what they’ve seen or haven’t seen are totally incorrect,” he told the Herald.  “It’s more than a headache, really. No one likes to be accused of such things.” (Emphasis, ours).

Now that a pretty clear sense of wrong and right.  Crystal, one might say.

The recent lust in the West for man to become Ubermen, men with big chests, men determining at their own pleasure the very foundations of morality, will not last.  In the end we will not be able to deny our own being.  One can live in denial only so long.

We were not only created in God’s image, we were also wrought to think His thoughts after Him.  No amount of relativist, voluntarist, and amoral legislation is going to change that.

Those who persist in denial, risk Nietzsch’s asylum. 

Man As Animal

 Unleashing Sin

One of the abiding lusts of Western pride is the lure of a perfect society brought into being through human ingenuity, planning, and enlightened application.  No matter what problem we face, throw enough resources at it, study it to death, put a management plan in place, and hey presto, the problem will be solved. 

Such approaches may work well when we are dealing with problems arising out of the non-human natural order.  They fail miserably when we are dealing with human beings.  Why?  Precisely because man is not a cipher.  He is not the impersonal product of impersonal natural forces.  He is altogether more wonderful and complex: he is a moral agent made in the image of God.  When sin entered the human race through Adam and spread to all mankind “descending from him by ordinary generation” the wondrous complexity and moral agency of mankind became perverted.  The sophisticated complexity of humanity became a spectacular resource for cunning, duplicity, and evil.  

But modern man has “advanced” to the point where he sees himself as a sophisticated animal, nothing more.
You can train mice to do certain things.  Similarly human beings can be conditioned to do whatever can be imagined.  If man is malfunctioning and if there are problems in society, all we need is the right plan, the application of marshalled resources, and all will be well. 

Economics has been called the “dismal science”.  For good reason.  Modern econometrics offered the prospect of unending growth and prosperity through, firstly developing a sufficiently complex model of how the modern economy works, then having applied sufficient computing and civil powers, governments could control the economic machine through adjusting inputs, prices, outputs, wages, capital availability, labour hours, and the money supply.  If we could do that well enough (that is, if the model were both accurate and comprehensive) we could have an economy which would grow at 3.256 percent real GDP endlessly.  No more crashes.  No more “Great Recessions”.  No more systemic unemployment.  No more plutocrats.  Just a well run, smooth machine-like progress to perpetual wealth and prosperity.

Go figure!  Well, the econometric modellers did.  They failed dismally.  Why?  For many reasons, but chief amongst them was this: human beings were not ciphers, and economics is always about human beings and their actions, goals, choices, preferences, fears and lusts.  Moreover, value is a subjective concept.  For one person, value lies in owning nothing.  For another, value is to own the whole world.  As soon as an econometric policy or lever were put in place, human beings (the market) cleverly adjusted to make the lever ineffectual and inoperative.  

Take for example monetary policy where a central bank (or government) manipulates the money supply, using short term interest rates.  Econometric research established that this would work.  Put up the price of short term money (the interest rate) and economic activity would slow.  It worked for a short time, until clever, resourceful human beings worked out that they too could use the same analytical tools and anticipate what the monetary authorities would do.  In gaming this system they could make money.  And they did.  As a consequence, the manipulation of the short term money supply by central banks became more and more ineffectual. 

So powerful is this phenomenon of human anticipation and adjustment it coined an economic “law”: Goodharts’s law–which reads,

“As soon as the government attempts to regulate any particular set of financial assets, these become unreliable as indicators of economic trends.” This is because investors try to anticipate what the effect of the regulation will be, and invest so as to benefit from it. 

The assumption that human beings are not moral beings but mere ciphers to be manipulated and controlled has worked through almost all societies in the West.  Take, for example, the issue of crime. 

Already at the turn of the century, Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who achieved notoriety defending Darwinism in the Scopes trial, was portraying criminals as helpless victims of their circumstances.  In 1902, in a widely published speech to the prisoners in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, he declared that “there is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. . . . I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be.  They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible.” [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 181.]

The implication is that if “society” were to change the circumstances of such people, crime would disappear.  A further implication is that no-one is responsible for any actions whatsoever.  We are creatures of instinct and conditioning.  We are animals and animals only.  If we do evil it is the fault of “society”–that is, of the powers that created bad conditioning in the first place. 

These false beliefs are now so disseminated through Western culture that they crop up everywhere and govern almost all social policies.  Take the punishment of crime, for example.  The man-is-a-cipher philosophy applies here as well.  Harsher and longer punishments will condition the prisoner not to do such things again. Punishment is nothing more than a calculation of incentives. There is little consideration given to the prisoner as a moral being, responsible for every action, thought, word and deed performed, firstly to the Living God, and then to his fellow man. 

Man is a glorious being–capable of highly moral actions, and of desperately wicked depravities.  Modern society ignores the possibility and reality of depravity.  Instead, modern society conducts a never-ending symphony of exoneration.  It’s always someone else’s fault.

Preposterous examples are legion.  Like the woman who entered a hot-dog-eating contest in a Houston nightclub.  In her rush to outdo the other contestants, she ate too quickly and began to choke.  Did the woman shrug off the mishap as a natural consequence of her own zany behaviour?  No, she decided she was a victim.  She sued the nightclub that sponsored the contest, arguing that the business was to blame because “they shouldn’t have contests like that.” (Ibid., p. 182).

When we deny sin as a society, when we officially regard human beings as ciphers or nothing more than animals, then we foolishly concede that all we need is more planning, more controls, more government and social programmes to resolve all human problems.  But by so doing we do not remove sin and evil, we actually unleash its destructive power on the community.  

Letter From America (About Moral Schizophrenia)

Postmodern Prudes 

In the age of relativism, popular morality hasn’t so much disappeared as become schizophrenic.

By Victor Davis Hanson
April 18, 2013
National Review Online

More than 500 people were murdered in Chicago last year. Yet Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel still found time to berate the fast-food franchise Chick-fil-A for not sharing “Chicago values” — apparently, because its founder does not approve of gay marriage.

Two states have legalized marijuana, with more to come. Yet social taboos against tobacco smoking make it nearly impossible to light up a cigarette in public places. Marijuana, like alcohol, causes far greater short-term impairment than does nicotine. But legal cigarette smoking is now seen as a corporate-sponsored, uncool, and dirty habit that leads to long-term health costs for society at large — in a way homegrown, hip, and mostly illegal pot smoking apparently does not.

Graphic language, nudity, and sex are now commonplace in movies and on cable television. At the same time, there is now almost no tolerance for casual and slangy banter in the media or the workplace. A boss who calls an employee “honey” might face accusations of fostering a hostile work environment, yet a television producer whose program shows an 18-year-old having sex does not. Many colleges offer courses on lurid themes from masturbation to prostitution, even as campus sexual-harassment suits over hurtful language are at an all-time high.

A federal judge in New York recently ruled that the so-called morning-after birth-control pill must be made available to all “women” regardless of age or parental consent, and without a prescription. The judge determined that it was unfair for those under 16 to be denied access to such emergency contraceptives. But if vast numbers of girls younger than 16 need after-sex options to prevent unwanted pregnancies, why isn’t there a flood of statutory-rape charges being lodged against older teenagers for having consensual relations with younger girls?

Our schizophrenic morality also affects the military. When America was a far more traditional society, few seemed to care that General Dwight Eisenhower carried on an unusual relationship at the front in Normandy with his young female chauffeur, Kay Summersby. As the Third Army chased the Germans across France, General George S. Patton was not discreet about his female liaisons. Contrast that live-and-let-live attitude of a supposedly uptight society with our own hip culture’s tabloid interest in General David Petraeus’s career-ending affair with Paula Broadwell, or in the private e-mails of General John Allen.

What explains these contradictions in our wide-open but prudish society? Decades after the rise of feminism, popular culture still seems confused by it. If women should be able to approach sexuality like men, does it follow that commentary about sex should follow the same gender-neutral rules? Yet wearing provocative or inappropriate clothing is often considered less offensive than remarking upon it. Calling a near-nude Madonna onstage a “hussy” or “tart” would be considered crude in a way that her mock crucifixion and simulated sex acts are not.

Criminal sexual activity is sometimes not as professionally injurious as politically incorrect thoughts about sex and gender. Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer — found to have hired prostitutes on a number of occasions during his time in office — was given a CNN news show despite the scandal. But when former Miss California Carrie Prejean was asked in the Miss USA pageant whether she endorsed gay marriage, she said no — and thereby earned nearly as much popular condemnation for her candid defense of traditional marriage as Spitzer had for his purchased affairs.

Critics were outraged that talk-show host Rush Limbaugh grossly insulted birth-control activist Sandra Fluke. Amid the attention, Fluke was canonized for her position that federal health-care plans should pay for the contraceptive costs of all women. Yet in comparison to Fluke’s well-publicized victimhood, there has been a veritable news blackout for the trial of the macabre Dr. Kermit Gosnell, charged with killing and mutilating in gruesome fashion seven babies during a long career of conducting sometimes illegal late-term abortions. Had Gosnell’s aborted victims been canines instead of humans — compare the minimal coverage of the Gosnell trial with the widespread media condemnation of dog-killing quarterback Michael Vick — perhaps the doctor’s mayhem likewise would have been front-page news outside of Philadelphia.

Modern society also resorts to empty, symbolic moral action when it cannot deal with real problems. So-called assault weapons account for less than 1 percent of gun deaths in America. But the country whips itself into a frenzy to ban them, apparently to prove that at least it can do something, instead of wading into polarized racial and class controversies by going after illegal urban handguns, the real source of the nation’s high gun-related body count.

Not since the late-19th-century juxtaposition of the Wild West with the Victorian East has popular morality been so unbridled and yet so uptight. In short, we have become a nation of promiscuous prudes.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Faux Outrage

When the Amoral Profess Morality

The amoral brigade regularly festoons itself with faux outrage.  We have in mind occasions when Christians are exposed as having been engaged in sinful practices, sometimes extremely bad ones. 

The Christian position on such travesties is sound, sure, and consistent.  The Christian Gospel teaches that all men, all men, are totally depraved–by which we mean that the thoughts and intents of the heart are evil.  So it is not unexpected that from time to time professing Christians fall into sin once again.

The amoral brigade shrieks, “Hypocrisy!”.    No–hypocrisy would be if the lapsed believer and the Christian Church attempted to justify, explain away, excuse, or in any other way deny the evil and sinfulness of the person’s actions.  After all, we believe that Peter–an apostle, no less–publicly denied the Lord thrice, despite the fact that he had heard the solemn utterance of our Lord that the one who denied the Christ before men would be denied by that same Christ before His heavenly Father.
 

It is salutary that the disciples did not gather round shouting, “Hypocrit”.  Nor did our risen Lord.  Rather, he restored him to Himself and to the office of an apostle, forgiving his sin.  He had already borne the full penalty for the sin of Peter’s denial upon the Cross. 

We come from a long line of public sinners–who have sinned in office and in private life: Abraham’s lies over his wife Sarah, Noah’s drunkenness, Moses’s anger, David’s adultery and murder, Eli’s indulgence of his wicked sons–we could go on for a long time.  But most of these people were dealt with by God, humbled, granted the grace of repentance, and were restored.  This is not hypocrisy.  It is human reality.  It is the Gospel in action. 

The real hypocrisy is the faux outrage of the amoral.  These folk celebrate homosexuality, licentiousness, greed, covetousness, lying, fraud, drunkenness, theft, gossip, slander, adultery, blasphemy, cursing and pretty much every other kind of human evil.  For them morality is just a matter of personal preference.  If you should happen to change your preferences, so be it.  What’s sauce for the goose may well be poison for the gander–and that’s just fine.  It’s all an expression of genes and evolutionary conditioning. 

What we find contradictory and truly hypocritical is that these folk express moral indignation at the lapsed Christian.  If they truly believed what they daily profess they would welcome and celebrate the lapsed.  “You have become like one of us,” they would say.  Consequently, their outrage is actually false.  But it does betray their stated beliefs as untrue to their own hearts.  They demonstrate they have the law of God written on their hearts, as indeed the Scripture declares.  They demonstrate their own guilt by continuing to live as amoral persons, despite knowing the truth and the law and their own depravity.

By their faux outrage, the amoral condemn themselves.  They heap up more guilt upon their heads.  Even as they stand condemning the lapsed Christian, they heap up guilt upon their own heads, because they betray the truth: they know that such things are wrong.  They know that their amorality is perverse.  They know their own guilt before a holy God.    

Oxymorons Aplenty

Private Religion Only Need Apply

One potent component of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is the author’s ability to describe and convey the slime, the decay, the degradation of Mordor and its works.  It befouled everything it touched. 

We have seen Mordoresque societies in recent history.  These have not been fictional representations.  They are the real article.  Peter Hitchens reflects upon life in the Soviet Union as he experienced it for years as a foreign correspondent.  Reading these words makes Reagan’s “honorific”, the Evil Empire appear apt.  But we must bear in mind that the Soviet Union was overtly created to be the first atheist civilization–the first self-conscious civilization of Unbelief.

Mistrust and surveillance were not the only things that quickly struck me as different about this society.  Soviet life, I learned speedily enough, was incredibly harsh and often dangerous.  My Russian acquaintances thought my wife and I were ten years younger than we were.  We thought they were ten years older than they were.

Life began with harshness.  Even for the married, the main form of family planning–in a society that had little room for big families–was abortion, legally unrestricted in the post-war USSR as the need for a vast conscript army receded.  In 1990, there were 6.46 million abortions in the USSR and 4.85 million live births.  Birth itself was an authoritarian ordeal, with the newborns snatched away from their mothers by scowling nurses in tall chefs’ hats, tightly wrapped like loaves, and denied breast or bottle until the set time came around.  You could spot a maternity hospital by the strings hanging from the windows bearing pathetic messages of love or need from wives to husbands . . . .

While tourists and distinguished visitors were taken to the ballet, ordinary male Muscovites (women wouldn’t have dared go there) patronized beer-bars so horrible that I could only wonder at the home life of those who used them.  You took your own glass–usually a rinsed out pickle jar–and a handful of brass coins worth a few pennies, along with some dried fish wrapped in old newspaper.  You fed your coins into a vending machine, and pale, acid beer dribbled intermittently out of a slimy pipe into your jar.  You then went to a high table, slurped your beer (which tasted roughly the way old locomotives smell), and crunched your fish, spitting the bones onto the floor.  There was no conversation. . . .

It is absolutely true–I saw it many times–that traffic stopped dead when rain began to fall, as every driver fetched windshield wipers from their hiding place and leaped out to fit them to their holders.  Any wipers left in place while the car was parked would be stolen as a matter of course.  Petty theft of unsecured property was universal–and universally accepted as normal.  [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 87, 88.]

Civilization, says Hitchens, is not racially, nor even culturally grounded.  It comes from the heart of the populace.  After life in the USSR, he concluded that high moral standards cannot be reached and maintained unless they are generally accepted and understood by an overwhelming number of  people.  He goes on to tell us that he has since seen evidences of Mordor in Britain:

I have since concluded that a hitherto Christian society that was de-Christianized would also face such problems, because I have seen public discourtesy and incivility spreading rapidly  in my own country as Christianity is forgotten.  The accelerating decline of civility in Britain, which struck me very hard when I returned there in 1995 after nearly five years in Russia and the USA, has several causes.  The rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears, seem to me to be a major part of it.  (Ibid., p. 91)

 Hitchens recounts how the recovery of his faith was a long, slow and gradual affair.  Initially, his faith remained intensely personal and private and familial–precisely the kind of faith that secularists insist upon being the only valid and tolerable manifestation of Christianity.  They would have cheered him on–a model Christian they would say, as they settled down to tea and crumpets.  What jolted him out of this ghettoised Christian faith was his experiences in Russia–and his days of terror in Mogadishu where he was confronted by hell upon earth.  He writes:

At this point in my life I had already returned to Christianity, rather diffidently, having been confirmed into the Church of England about seven years before.  My reasons had been profoundly personal, to do with marriage and fatherhood, a cliche of rediscovery that is too obvious and universal, and also too profound, private, and unique to discuss with strangers.  I saw no particular connection, at the time of my return to religion, between faith and the shape of society. I imagined it was a matter between me and God. 

The atheist Soviet Union, where desecration and heroic survival were visible around me, began to alter that perception.  Mogadishu accelerated the process.  I thought I saw, in its blasted avenues, its private safety and public terror, and its lives ruled by the gun, a possible prophecy of where my own society was headed–though for very different reasons.  I still think this. (Ibid., p. 92f)

He provides a vivid description of the terror of Mogadishu when life was nothing and terror ruled, bribery and guns one’s only feeble protection.  When he eventually got out and back to safety the point hit home.  He writes:

Safely back in London, I was shown old pictures of Mogadishu as it had been a few years before.  the lineaments of the great wide avenue where I saw the armed trucks were just discernible.  But where I had seen mud, gangs, and wreckage, there were Italian-style pavement cafes, smart cars in orderly lines, a white-gloved policeman directing the traffic, well-dressed and prosperous people passing by, even a telephone box, and of course, modern shops and civilized looking hotels.

This was the familiar world that I was used to, and in a short time it had become the miserable urban desert in which I had rightly feared for my life.  I am sure nobody ever set out to get from the one to the other.  But they had done so all the same and in a very short time.  (Ibid., p. 97f).

God has so created the world that religion (or cult) generates culture and culture generates governments.  Evil or superstitious religion produces a brutalized or fearful culture and a government which reflects the culture of the day.  We will either have God or Baal, Belief or Unbelief, Gondor or Mordor, Jerusalem or Mogadishu.

Every Christian has a duty to reject outright the insistence amongst the Pagans that Christianity must remain private.  They only seek the privatisation of Belief more easily to facilitate the imposition of their version of Mordor upon us all.   
 

>Without God, Without Creed, Part IV

>The Necromancer is Back, and He is Cloaked in Morality

By the nineteenth century the church had so occluded the Gospel and the true faith with human idolatries that it was severely compromised.  This was true throughout Europe and the UK.  It was also true in the United States.

By making the creation autonomous–its own centre of authority over against the Living God–it was forced to “redefine” God Himself.  Like a Hollywood makeover, God was now conceived of as a localised authority–one centre of power alongside a host of others.  God was now unofficially an idol–a creation of human imagination and invention.  Baalism has returned to God’s covenant people.  God became a localised deity, no longer the One Who was infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, goodness and truth.  He was no longer infinitely transcendent.  Consequently, He was no longer infinitely immanent in the Creation.  He was a demi-creature.

The outcome would be the same as had occurred in ancient Israel.

>Another Empty Shibboleth

>The Non-Possibility of Not Legislating Morality

We hear repeatedly that the state has no business legislating morality. This is errant nonsense. Every piece of legislation, every fabric of the law necessarily involves enforcement of some moral doctrine or view or ethic. To suggest that only “value free” laws are acceptable is, itself, a deeply value inherent position; to codify that position into law necessarily involves enforcing that particular value and its value system upon the community.

Micah Watson, visiting fellow at Princeton University, has written a short essay exploding the popular canard that the law cannot enforce morality and that morality should not be legislated.

Why We Can’t Help But Legislate Morality
by Micah Watson
November 4, 2010
All legislation is moral. The sooner we recognize this fact, the better.

“You can’t legislate morality” has become a common turn of phrase. The truth, however, is that every law and regulation that is proposed, passed, and enforced has inherent in it some idea of the good that it seeks to promote or preserve. Indeed, no governing authority can in any way be understood to be morally neutral. Those who think such a chimerical understanding is possible could hardly be more wrong. For, in fact, the opposite is true: You cannot not legislate morality.

It is of course true that some laws will be better conceived than others, and many may fail entirely to achieve their purpose. But that they have a purpose, and that the purpose includes at least an implicit moral element, is incontrovertible. One need only ask of any law or action of government, “What is the law for?” The answer at some point will include a conception of what is good for the community in which the law holds. The inversion of the question makes the point even more clearly. What would provide a rationale for a law or governmental action apart from a moral purpose?

The “good” here in question is not merely the product of passing fads or idiosyncratic preferences. When something is wrong, it is not wrong merely because it offends someone’s personal taste. The governing authority’s power to pass and enforce laws takes account of the beastly side of human nature while holding that some wrongs are so fundamental that they demand a robust and coercive response. If there are truly deeds that are gravely morally wrong, then it follows that there must be an authority established to command that such deeds be avoided and to punish the transgressors who commit them.

As Hadley Arkes has argued, if it is wrong to torture other human beings, then we do not content ourselves with mere tax incentives to encourage citizens to stop. We know that the wrong of torture requires that this choice be removed altogether from the domain of what is acceptable. You can enjoy the symphony, a NASCAR race, or the latest offering at the movies, but the logic of morals and law removes the option of torturing your neighbor for your weekend’s entertainment—even if your neighbor annoys you.

Of course, some choices will fall within the discretion of a polity’s citizens. Not every decision has profound moral consequences. But even drawing the line between morally innocent choices and morally culpable choices demonstrates our moral understanding. Abraham Lincoln made this clear in his debates with Stephen Douglas when he noted that Douglas’ professed ambivalence about whether states voted for or against slavery showed that he did not think slavery belonged in that category of actions that are truly morally wrong. If you don’t care which way a state votes on slavery, then you clearly don’t view it as a horrendous moral evil. Rather, you treat it like a state lottery: it is fine if the people want it and vote for it, and it is fine if they don’t.

The logic of morals, then, means that there can be no right to do a wrong. Built into the notion of wrong is the corresponding truth that an authority is right to punish perpetrators of the wrong. The idea that government can act as a neutral arbitrator between competing notions of the good life is ultimately incoherent because the idea itself promotes an underlying conception that this arrangement will lead to the best state of affairs.

It is a historical irony that the most famous attempt to sever the connection between law and morality illustrates the enduring link between the two. This attempt was made by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1897 address at the graduation of Boston University Law School, “The Path of the Law.”

Holmes argued that high-minded moral concepts only detract from a clear understanding of what law is and what it should do. Holmes proposed to completely eviscerate moral considerations from our understanding of law. “For my own part,” he said, “I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law.” To understand law, Holmes declared, we must adopt the point of view of a “bad man” trying to avoid getting in trouble rather than start off with idealistic concepts of moral improvement and the good life.

Unfortunately for Holmes’ argument, his denial of the link between law and morality can only be made by invoking the language of morals and law. To understand the law, he suggests, is to look at the law as the bad man does. But this raises a question: How, might we ask, are we to truly understand what it means to be a “bad man” and what it means to be a “good one”? Is it not telling that Holmes’s very attempt to expurgate morality from the law itself depends on making a moral distinction? If Holmes is using the terms “good” and “bad” merely as descriptive statements about how some men see themselves (the bad men looking to keep out of trouble, and the good men thinking that they are beholden to some external morality), then he is doing more than attempting to separate morality and law; he seems to be denying morality altogether. Yet he explicitly denied any moral skepticism in his address.

But if Holmes is using the normative words as truly normative, then he cannot help but back himself into the logic of morals by requiring us to make a judgment about good and bad men. That is, he requires us not merely to make moral judgments distinguishing between “goodness” and “badness” (and thus better and worse, right and wrong) but also to associate “badness” with those who do not see a link between morals and law. Whatever his intentions might have been, Holmes winds up illustrating the link between the logic of morals and the logic of law.

To legislate, then, is to legislate morality. One can no more avoid legislating morality than one can speak without syntax. One cannot sever morality from the law. Even partisans of the most spartan libertarian conception of the state would themselves employ state power to enforce their vision of the common good. Given this understanding, the term “morals legislation” is, strictly speaking, redundant. The real question is not whether the political community will legislate morality; the question is which vision of morality will be enforced and by what sort of government.

Micah Watson is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Affairs at the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and Director of the Center for Politics & Religion at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. This article is adapted from an essay on morals legislation in a forthcoming volume honoring the work of Hadley Arkes edited by Robert P. George, Francis J. Beckwith, and Susan J. McWilliams.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Once we have got beyond the inane shibboleth that morality ought not be legislated, and morality cannot be (successfully) legislated because laws which enforce morality will always be ignored, we get to the far more helpful and constructive discussions. Among these are:

* Since all law is the enforcement of morals and an implicit system of morality, whose morals and ethics and what system is applicable and appropriate?

* Where can the distinctions be drawn between sins and crimes (the latter being extreme immoral actions which require state sanction and punishment?

* When does an act become public, rather than private, making it subject to public law (aka, public morality)?

* What wrongs and immoral acts are outside of the purview of the sanction of the state, such that no law ought to be written interdicting them, and how ought such questions to be decided?

Debate and research over these issues is far, far more fruitful and constructive.
Hat Tip: Justin Taylor

>A Matter of Pride and Prejudice

>Christopher Hitchens as Deity

In a recent edition of Vanity Fair, atheist Christopher Hitchens attempts to revise the Ten Commandments into something more suitable for modern man. He is not unmindful of the extreme hubris which necessarily attends such an enterprise. Accordingly he attempts to guild the lily with a self-deprecatory patina, but nonetheless Hitchens is serious–and, given his militant atheism, he needs to be. Intractable issues over whether there can be any ground for ethics and morality continue to dog all evolutionary atheists. Hitchens knows this.

Now it is pretty clear that there is plenty of stuff which Hitchens believes to be immoral. But before we consider his ruminations and suggestions, it is apt to consider the being and person of our new lawgiver. There are actually two Hitchens. The first is Hitchens according to his self-revelation or self-narrative. (We shall denominate this Hitchens as Hitchens-II.) He believes himself to be a creature of the evolution of matter–a process which has resulted in life forms moving from the simple to the horrendously complex over endless periods of time. As such, Hitchens II purports to believe himself (along with his contemporaries) to be the latest off the evolutionary production line–the biggest, brightest, and best yet seen in the universe–at least the universe as we see it.

We do not offer this summary of Hitchens-II’s’ self-revelation as a criticism per se; it is certainly not exclusive to him. It is a belief shared with millions upon millions of people, predominantly in the West. When it comes to ethical systems specifically, Hitchens-II believes quite consistently that all historical ethical systems are passe and, by definition, primitive. They are radically relative, situational, limited, temporary, and prejudicial. Thus, the Ten Commandments reflect an ancient, primitive, and ignorant world.

When it comes to lawgiving–which is what Hitchens-II turns himself to in the Vanity Fair article–he is thus not to be taken seriously. He knows that his new commandments ought not to be given any more than a scintilla of reflection, and only then, to be dismissed as a passing, temporary curio. Hitchens-II, if consistent, would ask for nothing more.
For Hitchens-II would acknowledge that, along with all other men, he is due to depart this celestial orb in rather short order. He will be replaced by forthcoming generations of the human race who will not be subject to the same temporary, limited, situational, and prejudiced conditioning as Hitchens-II was, and will have very different–and much more advanced, superior, ideas about morality, ethics, and law. Things like that happen in a random universe that is “ruled” by an evolutionary process of inevitable advance. Hitchens-II would insist that the views forthcoming in the future will be better than his own, because that’s what evolution is all about.

So, the law-code of Hitchens-II must be considered a rather insipid affair. It has no law-giver worthy of fear. Why would mankind ever fear Hitchens-II? There is no sense of true moral guilt attached to the law-code of Hitchens-II. There can be no true guilt, nor meaningful or just punishment for sins against the code of Hitchens-II. At best it consists of a bunch of suggestions as to how we may proceed–without any consequences if we demur or move in other moral directions. After all, movement away from Hitchens-II is not only inevitable, he has to deem it as “good”.

Here, then, is the law-code of Hitchens-II:

Still, if we think of the evils that afflict humanity today and that are man-made and not inflicted by nature, we would be morally numb if we did not feel strongly about genocide, slavery, rape, child abuse, sexual repression, white-collar crime, the wanton destruction of the natural world, and people who yak on cell phones in restaurants. (Also, people who commit simultaneous suicide and murder while screaming “God is great”: is that taking the Lord’s name in vain or is it not?)

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

Hitchens-II quite consistently tells us that he has no basis to declare “Thou shalt not.” But he wants to. He clearly believes it is appropriate to lay down imperatives such as, “do not ever use people as private property.” But this is nothing more than question begging–why not? we find ourselves asking, over and over. We invite Hitchens-II to lay aside all the emotive baggage, and explain the ground of his imperatives from within the Hitchens-II world-view. The best that world-view would provide is reference to convention, habits, current practices, and pragmatic utility. But the precepts must ever remain qualified, tentative, suggestions, relevant only to a certain time and place, of temporary validity only. They can never reflect any more validity than administrative codes, such as road rules. One day we drive on the right side of the road, but the next day, the law may change to driving on the left (as happened in Samoa recently). This is why the law-code of Hitchens-II is nothing more than a curio and cannot be taken as a law-code at all. It can never be anything more than personal cant. Hitchens-II’s precepts are not precepts at all, but preferences, and personal ones at that.

All talk of judgment in the Hitchens-II code has to be a non-sequitur. When he writes:

Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.

we are bemused. If one is successful in robbing people with a false prospectus and getting away with it, one ought to be respected and congratulated. Success, after all, is the ultimate affirming ethic in the Hitchens-II perspective. To have survived is the final affirmation of superiority of being in the evolutionary world-view, which Hitchens-II espouses.

But there is a second Hitchens, whom we will denote as Hitchens-I. Hitchens-I is made in the image of the Living God and he cannot help speaking in terms of moral absolutes and eternal law, even though he realises the incongruity of doing so in light of Hitchens-II. He cannot help fulminating against, for example, violence to, and harm of, children. He wants to present it as something nauseating, disgusting, horrific–worthy of judgment, even damnation–yet Hitchens-II will not bear such weight.

Hitchens-I knows the being and character of the Living God and fears him above all else. This is the real Hitchens, underneath all the charades and masks (Romans 1: 18–23). He knows that he has repeatedly and perpetually rebelled against Him, and broken His laws. His only defence is to hide away from God. Hitchens-II is the result. Hitchens-II is Hitchens-I with fig-leaves on. Yet, like a child playing a game of hide and seek, who believes that when you cover your eyes, no-one else can see you, Hitchens-I cannot stop intruding into Hitchens-II. He cannot bring himself to face up to the face that, although he hates with all his being doing harm to children, and wants to say so loudly, expressing his abhorrence at the idea, Hitchens II will never allow him to offer it as anything more than a suggestion for discussion.

Hitchens-II is nothing more than Hitchens-I covering his eyes, and thinking that he is invisible to everyone else. It is a sad and tragic thing. But, then again, so is all self-willed blindness, by which men try to hide away from the God who made them and in Whose image they are.

Postscript:

Christopher Hitchens has a brother, Peter. Like his brother, Peter has been for many years an atheist. Then, by the grace of God, his eyes were opened and his chains fell off, and he has become a Christian. He is about to tell his story in a book to be published by Zondervan, entitled The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith. More on this to come. Marvellous indeed are the works of our Lord Jesus Christ.