American Mahdi, continued

Herein we continue our somewhat discursive fulmination...

Simply because both law and religion have failed to rid us of such anti-social behaviors, it does not follow that they are both similarly useless. Indeed, if so many religious dictates weren’t so easily interpreted as “don’t gather firewood on Shabbat,” “women are dirty for a few days every month,” “beat your disobedient children,” “fly plane into building,” “exterminate the unbeliever(s),” and so on, I’d say that religion was just fine at keeping some of those anti-social types in check. Unfortunately, the threats of fire and brimstone and bolts from the blue are neither swift nor sure and serve less of a deterrent than the modern death penalty. Which brings us to the utility of secular law for dealing with conscienceless malcontents: we can lock these people up.

But let’s not stop with the impact of good religious values on one’s propensity to kill people. Surely, without a solid grounding in scriptural morality, courtesy of public school, all our young people will move to San Francisco and have lots of gay sex. Once again, this probably won’t happen. Not that I think gay sex is yucky (actually it’s pretty damn hot if you’re reading about it over at Jefferson's blog) [shameless plug], I just generally prefer vagina. And believe you me, the book of Leviticus (which I’ve (NOT!) just finished reading for the 3rd time…) does not go very far in enhancing one’s appreciation for vagina. If people are upset by such “immoral” behaviour, perhaps a bit of perspective might ease their angry hearts: if you think being gay is deviant or against nature, just think about all those folks who don’t feel anything is wrong with killing people who disagree about what constitutes the “law of God.” Believe me, you have scarier things to worry about – namely your more faithful neighbors who are certainly worth more in His eyes.

An aside: to the extent that the twits at Exodus International manage to turn gay people straight, it is in the same way that fundamentalist Islam allows otherwise intelligent, level-headed folks to strap explosives to themselves: by inculcating a sense of loathing of the state of the self and the world around them, by telling them that their deficiency lies in a deviation from God’s straw-man of perfection. And before you try to sue me in the UK, just remember that truth is an absolute defense to libel.

A rather bright professor recently described to me his thinking on how to mediate particularly intractable disputes (i.e. South Africa, Northern Ireland, Israel and the Palestinian territories). He said that what links individuals who have made substantial progress is that they are the sort of people who can evince in their adversaries a measure of trust that the future they envision would be tolerable to all concerned. Conflict is driven by a refusal to recognize a future environment that does not pose an existential threat to “the other.” The teleology of human freedom, if such a thing exists, points to systems that embrace dissimilar viewpoints and goals to the extent that we can all live with it. I would speculate, upon very little reflection, that there is more room in a community governed by Bill’O’s much-maligned “Secular Progressives” then in one run according the precepts of the Bible or the Koran – which might explain why nobody bothers to write such books in the age of globalization. By all rights, there should be less tolerance of apocalyptic religions than there is for SUVs: global warming will only drown us slowly, but the faithful doomsayers among us will doubtlessly cheer nuclear war as a sign of the rapture.

tags technorati : Culture Ethics Law Religion Society

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%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

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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.

tags technorati : Culture Ethics Law Religion Society

Commentary on "Physiognomy"

An assortment of people have posted commentaries on my earlier post purporting to describe the physiognomy of the hard-ass judge. One particularly Honourable fellow over at "Have Opinion, Will Travel" found my omission of a passage on the dishonesty of the un-able prosecutor particularly amiss. While the dishonesty (legally speaking) was apparent and the rage from the bench "palpable," I would remind readers that the point of physiognomy is to allow for quick characterizations of ball-park accuracy, not immutable judgments of character. For the sake of many a well-coiffed colleague, I hope my description of the prosecutor as "fresh-faced...with a brit-pop haircut" does not encourage the judicial audience to assume the worst from anyone with more than a passing concern for appearances. See generally, Insouciant Highlights, infra (revealing the author's stance with regard to this issue).

Nevertheless, following is the rest of the story of The Un-able Prosecutor and the Hard-assed Judges: Our last observation saw the fresh-faced prosecutor in fearful colloquy with the panel, Prada loafer firmly planted in mouth. Mr. Prosecutor had just made a feeble showing of flipping through various appendices, apparently with an eye towards suggesting that he actually believed that the basis for his assertions (which were admittedly tangential to the issue under discussion: something about whether defendant had taken sufficiently obvious steps towards abandonment of some earlier infraction) lay somewhere within. The lead jurist told the feckless lad to cease and desist, that the panel was well aware of what he was trying to do and the collective mind of the bench didn't like it, not one little bit. There followed some brainstorming as to how to handle the situation with one panel member suggesting a complaint to the State Bar; "I wonder if that was a lie," mused one judge to his brethren. Did I really think they would have him clapped in irons? No, but I don't doubt that the thought crossed his mind. There was no bite, but the barking was loud and sustained. At length, the harshest sanction appeared to take the form of a promised phone call: "The folks upstairs will be hearing about this," said the head judge, clearly in reference to the DA's headquarters housed in the same building. The incident drew to a close when the prosecutor, finally removing the loafer from his mouth but still choking on the polish, stammered something about most sincere apologies...no intention to suggest the court base its ruling on matters not in the record...just describing the earlier case from memory and in passing...please don't tell my mother...et cetera, ad nauseam.

Were the panel members really “hard-asses” in the colloquial sense of exercising capricious severity? Probably not. But it might be useful to assess at a glance the attitude a judge might take towards shoddy lawyer-ing. For those anxiously awaiting the next installment of the Physiognomy series, please be patient. I’m sure we’ll have some great stories and more photos from the upcoming three-month field trip to New York.