The Uses And Utility Of Morality For Those Who Reject Morality

Update important enough that I'm putting it at the top of the post: In presenting, below,  how the Shoah is inevitably dealt with as an issue in theology, I should have pointed out that theology often includes everything up to and including the discussion of it being a total discrediting of the existence of God, the only reason for theology to exist as part of that theological investigation of the Shoah and other occasions of tremendous and even everyday evil.  Those within science, technology, the various scientistic ideologies that were used to carry out or the generators of those mass murders never question themselves and their field  in regard to those issues.  I should also point out that I didn't even mention the far greater numbers of the totally atheistic Marxist murders of the 20th, 21st centuries and other mass murders .  That is also something I try to no longer overlook anymore.  It's obscene in exactly the same way as the  Holocaust denial, though almost never considered that way.

I have been re-reading Elizabeth A. Johnson's Quest For The Living God, a book about modern theology this week and it occurred to me as I was reading the inevitable chapter of the book in which deals with the Shoah and the other genocides committed by the Nazis that, in light of my reading of the Wannsee Conference documents there is something wrong in the entire current of post-war culture which that issue spotlights.

Thinking about what I read yesterday, that chapter, in light of my reading of the Wannsee documents as posted by the Holocaust Museum and the fact that religion is mentioned nowhere in the planning session of the Holocaust - given what I know about the men who planned it, many of them atheists and I would bet most if not all of them so - certainly none of them following The Law, the Prophets or The Gospels, all products of the Judaism they were bent on wiping out - it's remarkable that, by far, the individuals and institutions that have taken on the guilt for what they did have been religious.  I haven't done it yet but might go through all of the books on modern theology written in the post-war period that I can find to see which of them have "Shoah" or "Holocaust" as an item in their index, my guess would be that any theology book on any issue in which that most crucial event in modern history could possibly,  could possibly impinge would address it, in horror, in shame, in sorrow, in repentance, in abject repentance.   I wonder how many works of the science and technology which comprised the majority of the sentences and lines of the actual planning documents of the final solution written in the post-war period would mention that use to which science and technology, efficient planning and coordination or mention the pivotal role that science and scientists had in carrying out that scientific-industrial process of mass murder.  

Of course, anyone who bothered to read that last paragraph would think it was insane to even ask that question of science, of technology or any other academic study, perhaps excluding history, probably the only other academic topic aside from theology and religious studies which has addressed the Shoah.  Philosophy might have almost approached that, though as philosophy, in one of the more obscene of post-war ironies, the branch of that which calls itself "ethics" is still engaged in coming up with reasons to kill innocent people in the pre-war manner, I'm not willing to credit academic philosophy with having addressed the issue in the same way.  

I have pointed out that science is an entirely human invention, it exists nowhere else in nature, something which I've had push back on by atheists who absurdly enough want to pretend that science has some existence independent of human minds when it does exist in, literally no other place in the known universe.  We know some of the men who invented science, we know its major figures certainly since modern science, science in the proper sense of the word, arose.  It is as much a creation of the imagination of human beings as atheists claim God is but it is to be held to not be what humans made and make it to be.  It was by human choice that science was exempted from the consideration of questions of morality, questions of good and evil.  Though that exemption from consideration was done for logical reasons of efficiency and convenience,  it is only safe the extent to which science exists as a purely intellectual thing.  As soon as science is applied, as it was, in fact, meant to be from the beginning of it, its enhancement of power in the very real world of living beings and living systems makes the immunity from questions of morality, of good and evil, dangerous in a way that is just about never considered, apart from productions of one or another version of Faust and that's never done within science but by theater or opera companies.  

Science enhances power, it is used to generate things and products for sale, science is and has always been funded by governments and businesses in order for it to produce things, especially armaments to conduct warfare and mount conquests.  In the industrial revolution and the increase in the profitability of manufactured goods for sale, scientific research into making new things and their efficient production has meant that rich men (lately women, too) will pay scientists a lot of money to do that work for them.   The processes discussed in the Wannsee document combined the two activities of science, as I mentioned, those comprise the largest number of the sentences in the documents as was the scientific idea, natural selection, which was mentioned as giving the reason for what they were doing. 

That situation, the economic profitability of science and technology, as well as the somewhat over-sold omniscience of at least the science part of that, not to mention the envy for its status and the status of its professional staff,  made the imitation of its methods nearly ubiquitous in other academic fields and in the professions and in the general culture.   You were nothing if you didn't put a gloss coat of scientific method or, as in the case of popular articulation and journalism, sciencyness on things.  The writing of history didn't escape that influence or at least the general tenor of the culture that that aping of science produced.  One of the foremost of those was the demotion or elimination of questions of morality and good and evil, which could not be defined with the rigor and alleged complete reliability that was supposed to be a product of the new sciencyness.  I think the more unattractive motive for that, though, is the inconvenience to that human activity in which that elimination of moral considerations preceeded even the exemption given to science in such matters, the making and accumulation of wealth.  I think that apart from the purely utilitarian convenience of not letting question of morality impinge on a quest for reliable information about physical objects and forces, the exemption from morality that wealth accumulation found useful for those who amassed wealth was granted to science as its tool.  

I think that it is as a part of the hankering after more money, more stuff, more physical gratification by those with the power to get it,  that accounts, in the end, for the modernistic demotion of questions of morality and good and evil and the erection of a convenient moral relativism and the scientific-materialistic rejection of morality, entirely.  Modernism, science, is morally nihilistic, science couldn't find morality or come up with any way to determine good and evil so modernism held they didn't exist and that people, to the extent they had power, could do what they wanted.  

But, even as they reject morality,  the use of questions of morality are useful for attacking the weakened, shattered remnants of the religion which is an inconvenience to people who dislike moral constraints on them and who reject it in all other institutions and all other contexts in life and modern society - until they want to claim the benefits of morality, for themselves.  IT'S ALWAYS DIFFERENT WHEN ITS A QUESTION OF EVIL DONE TO "ME".  That use is in holding religion responsible for things like the Shoah, which those who planned and carried out the mass murder rejected, indeed, while the Nazis were planning their scientific-industrial genocide, they were also planning the post-war destruction of Christianity, replacing The Bible with Mein Kampf, a book which led Hitler's second in command to define Nazism as "nothing but applied biology".  

This strange state of affairs shows up, sans science, for the most part,  in the issue I wrote about yesterday, the child raping epidemic of which only that which happened in the Catholic church seems to have any journalistic or cultural legs even as that accounts for a tiny percentage of the widespread rape of children.  And, lest it be forgotten, that is the same journalism which, by and large, holds that the world-wide porn industry is a flower of the "free speech-free press" regime they hold as one of the few ersatz moral principles they recognize.  

I can easily imagine a future in which the Catholic Church is the only world-wide institution which was anything like thoroughly investigated and held responsible and tried to make some kind of effort to abolish the practice, even as the rape of children flourishes as a world wide business, a business allowed and enhanced by modern technology as, in fact, it has been through the online distribution of pornography and spread of information for men procuring opportunities to rape children has grown by staggering numbers.  As I mentioned yesterday, I don't see much in the way of that secular, very materialistic child sex abuse scandal being covered as the journalists concentrate on that one aspect of it.   As I said, their refusal to look at the large majority of the moral atrocity leads me to think that protecting children isn't their primary motive in covering the issue.  It's the generation of a religion-bashing scandal.  I have no problem with anyone being held accountable for doing wrong, that's one of the reasons I read so much more theology than when I was a cowardly agnostic who willfully cast a blind eye on the right kinds and categories of immorality.  That's what I do now that I didn't do then.  I have every problem with the general culture of scientific-industrial-modernist ideology that grants immunity to the very things that do the most of that evil.