The future belongs to the young and so it is they in particular who must face this urgent question: Ought we not to take more seriously again the familiar system of values which can help us determine what to do? I am not suggesting a nostalgic retreat into the past; but perhaps we should chart our future course with the help of a certain antique compass, which may not have outlived its usefulness after all. A compass which -- after many other instruments have proved to have given only unreliable bearings in the tempests of modern times-- could perhaps point us to a course toward a future of greater human dignity A compass that might reoirentate us with essential Christian values once more, and in a new way, in an era whose values have been so impoverished. But here we have to make some distinctions.
For now I can already hear the protest of the non-Christians. Essential Christian values! What is Christian supposed to mean today? Christianity is finished. But here I should like to explain myself to these people too, the non-Christians, the unbelievers. Not only the unbelievers outside but the unbeliever within, in ourselves, who repeatedly raises doubts and objections, who says "I believe" but like the man in the Gospel, adds: " Help my unbelief!" To these people I should like to give a frank and honest answer.
Frankly and honestly, if many people, whether they consider themselves believers or unbelievers, in considering the possibility of essential Christian values, reject everything that has to do in any way with an authoritarian, unintelligible dogmatics or an unrealistic, narrow-minded morality, then I cannot contradict them. If they are exasperated with the legalism and opportunism, arrogance and intolerance of so many ecclesiastical functionaries and theologians; if they want to attack the superficial piety of the pious, the boring mediocrity of many church newspapers and magazines, and the absence of creative people in the church, I am on their side. Nor am I by any means ignorant of the failure of Christianity in history For I have no intention of whitewashing the history of Christianity, or glossing over its defects; not only the persecution of our Jewish brothers and sisters, the crusades, the heretic trials, the witch burnings and the religious wars; but also the Galileo trial and the countless wrong condemnation of ideas and people - scientists, philosophers, and theologians; and all the involvements of the church in particular systems of society, government and thought; and all its many failures in the slavery question, the war question, the women's question, the class question, and the race question; the manifold complicity of the churches with the rulers of various countries in their neglect of the despised, the downtrodden, oppressed, and exploited peoples; and religion as the opiate of the people . . . Everywhere here criticism, severe criticism is appropriate.
But I ask you; Is all this even "Christian"? Believers and unbelievers must affirm that it is "Christian" only in a traditional, superficial, and untrue sense. Christendom certainly cannot shed its responsibility for what is called "Christian." But none of this is Christian in the deeper, pure, original sense; none of it is truly Christian. It has nothing to do with the Christ to whose name it appeals. In many ways it is part of what brought him to the cross. It is in fact pseudo-Christian or anti-Christian.
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It was a watershed moment in my writing which was noticed, the time I dropped the scare quotes around the word "science" as I wrote about eugenics. And not only when the science in question was eugenics but in scientific justifications of racism, of sexism, class, race, gender discrimination, etc. I also stopped using those quotes when I talked about the science of the Nazis in these and other areas and I got considerable push back when I dropped that post-WWII convention that conventionally protected science from the taint of these things which were promoted, explained, even invented through science as done by professional scientists working in even the most reputable universities and scientific organiations, laboratories, professional groups, publishers of journals from obscure (though still accepted as science) through to the ones with world wide, virtually unanimous elevation so as to comprise the pinnacle of science.
Who, I asked, am I, or other laypersons or even other scientists to second-guess the designation of all of that putrid morass of science as being science by the scientific establishment of its time, by people who, even when you don't have to overlook their past and now discredited of, all too temporarily, embarrassing published work of the past, who are held up as the greatest of scientists? Eugenics and everything on that list was standard science of its time and, I have documented over and over again here, has a way of being brought back as surely as antisemitism flourished in evolutionary psychology, from there to be taken up by neo-Nazism which explains pretty much everything they claim through science, citing science which was not only accepted for publication but which led to the honoring of their authors by science.
And what can be said about science can be said about many other academic topics, history, economics, the law, philosophy, literature, etc. None of which ever has, to my knowledge, ever produced passages of writing such as that of Hans Kung, written above, which is not only not atypical of modern writing by theologicans and those who write on Christianity (and other religion) they start virtually as soon as the literature of religion started in the monotheistic tradition. It was one of the most important points I've read made when Marilynne Robinson, in answer to the pop-religious writings that slam Moses, the Mosaic tradition and Judaism for the ancient wrongs as recorded in the book of Joshua, Judges, and all through the Jewish Scriptures, THE ONLY REASON WE KNOW OF THESE WRONGS TO MAKE SUCH DEBASED USE OF THEM IS BECAUSE THE WRITERS OF THE JEWISH SCRIPTURE CONFESSED AND CONDEMNED AND CRITICIZED THEIR MORAL VIOLATIONS AND SHORTCOMINGS, INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY.
Kung was practicing one of the characteristic acts of the Jewish and, yes, later Christian religions, the confession of sin and the attempt to do better. AND THAT IS AN INTERNAL PRACTICE OF THOSE RELIGIONS.
It is not so with that proposed replacement for religion, science. Scientists in trying anything like that must leave science. There is no possibility for a truely internal moral reassessment of what scientists do as science. If they want to make that criticism they have to borrow the moral standards of religion, yes, in the West, primarily Christianity, to come to anything like that kind of self assessment and evaluation and even more so, if they want to try to not do it again.
And, since there is nothing of moral consideration within science, you can count on scientists, few or many, mediocre or great who will reject that kind of moral assessment because a. they don't want to do it or have it done (not least of which because it might impinge on their interests, professional or economic) b. they will get up on their high horse and do so to defend the integrity of science against the imposition of something as foreign as morality to it.
I agree with everything Kung listed as a, sometimes, in some cases, in a few in almost all cases, catalog of sins of Christians, at times done in the name of Christianity. I agree they are sins BECAUSE THEY VIOLATE THE CHRISTIANITY THAT TAKES THE FALL WHEN CHRISTIANS DISOBEY THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS, PAUL, MOSES, ETC. If I were to look at that list with the standards of science, of economics, of history, of philosophy, it would be impossible to even designate any of them as being wrong.
For bad people to even know they're being bad, sorry Steve Weinberg, but that takes religion. That takes religion of a specific kind. Science is incompetent to tell them that.
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