American Mahdi, or, The Dangerous Glorification of the Simple, God-centered Life
I have no good excuse for neglecting this blog.
You know the Bible 100%!
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At the outset, the preceding should adequately demonstrate my credentials to those who would argue that I don't know or understand the biblical worldview.
Parts of America have a long-term affair with anti-intellectualism, following the gut, olde tyme religion ("It was good for my dear mother...It's good enough for me"), and similar platitudes that tell people they're doing OK when they're really just losers who for a host of reasons have little to look forward to besides the end of the world.
The moral certitude of this ilk is particularly troubling. Owing, as it does, more to the homogeneity of environment than to the exhausting of alternatives through ethical investigation, be it consequentialist, utilitarian, contractarian, or whatever. As one's high-school math teacher would intone, you really must show your work. The effect of this sort of ethical non-reasoning is that there is no individual moral calculus to go with the certitude. Religious moral indoctrination does not consist of a realistic discussion of what makes something right or wrong. Unless you count the definition of sin as a deviation from the perfection that is the essential form of reality. Which is to say, sin is "a privation of conformity to right reason and to the law of God."
Translation: sin is not what you or your friends feel to be wrong; it is what God (and His legion messengers, interim representatives, and assorted acolytes) tells you is wrong.
Admittedly, there is some merit to the argument that secular law, being a mere aggregation of society's moral attitudes tempered by the thoughts of several wealthy men (plus, Ginsberg), is somewhat suspect. But no more so than the package of mores derived from ancient texts and regurgitated by those saucy controllers of our private steps, Messers Robertson and Falwell, and written into the platform of a major American political party. The difference I find most edifying is that secular law, and ethics, requires an explicative process, an articulation of rationale, a weighing of the likely impact, an accounting of the expressed feelings of interested parties. In short, it requires an exercise that forces us consider the effects of our actions on people who are dissimilar in interests, opinions, and values. Because of its explicit reliance upon one's subjective theory of what constitutes the law of God, basing one's morality on a doctrine of sin rather than a religiously neutral and personal sense of right and wrong necessarily discounts dissimilar perspectives. Christians don't get to write Sharia. More’s the pity; it would be fun to watch.
Perhaps religion’s biggest selling point is that without it people will do as they please, giving themselves over to an inherently sinful nature and wreaking untold havoc upon foe and family alike. People have certainly fallen for more transparent frauds, but this one is pretty big. Most people within a given social milieu don’t like killing, or rape or theft for that matter. The properly socialized among us view such actions as abhorrent (except for theft, which inexplicably remains a favorite diversion of the well-heeled). Quite predictably, we’ve made laws against. The question I pose is whether in the absence of religious faith, and its accompanying moral sense of right and wrong, everyone would suddenly want to rape, murder and steal. Unless you don’t have a conscience, the answer probably goes something like “probably not;” perhaps in more tortured cases one might say “well, it depends on the circumstances…but, probably not.” Surely there are plenty of people running about sans conscience, but I highly doubt that any of them are deterred from engaging in the shit that scares the hell out of the rest of us by a sermon or faith in one or more good books. Such people, usually by definition, don’t like books (good or otherwise) and don’t have the requisite attention span for sermons. They’d just ignore them anyway.
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