For now I can already hear the protests of the non-Christians. Essential Christian values! - Why I Am Still A Christian - Post 4

"That is to say, we cannot put religion aside without accepting the consequences.  We must accept that there is no unconditionally binding obligation to perform a particular humane action without the acceptance of an unconditionally binding authority which lays that obligation upon us. "

In the going on seventeen years that I have been publicly trying to figure out how the American left went so wrong as to have been in the political wilderness longer than Exodus says the Children of Israel were, there have been several breakthroughs in my understanding.  One of the most important was when I realized that it was equality and not the common and the typically childish and self-centered notions of libertarian freedom that was the actual basis of any kind of decent government and society.  Any legitimate freedom is based in equality, which, among other things is an explanation of why egalitarian democracy or, really any nearly decent government would be a new thing on Earth. It also explains the opposite, freedom based on inequality was a guarantee for government to be of, by and for gangsters and oppressors.  

Another was a result of these investigations starting in the context of the atheism fad of the 00's, my long disputations with materialists and atheists and the naive faithful of the secular religion of scientism, that everything from the absolute moral obligation to care for the environment, to treat others as we wanted to be treated to the concept of rights (probably as often misunderstood as the concept of freedom) that a government was obligated to protect rested on nothing less than the human understanding of the will of God putting that obligation on us.  Along the way I found that, in response to some of the more clueless slogans, bromides and pseudo-historical-philosophical lines of popular atheism, that that insight was certainly not limited to the Jewish religious tradition with which Christianity shares its wellsource of thought. And anyone who reads the Jewish Scriptures in which God is said to have made covenants with other Peoples and, also, animals, would not have been surprised at that. I think anything but an egalitarian-cosmopolitan reading of the Hebrew Scriptures misses the point.  God purposefully created all of us.

Among the head-shaking ironies of these years of investigating the problem, I think that there is no better example of the total depravity of refusing to accept the source of the commandment of equality and, so legitimate freedom, to treat others as we would be treated, to tell the truth and not lie, etc. than the God hollerers and Bible thumpers on the American-fascist right and their allies in vulgar materialism, such as the godless libertarians who are more likely to be watching sy-fy movies and series (in my experience, typically boy-men) than in trying to defend any ideology other than selfishness and who generally don't give a shit about much but their pleasure (there are similar people deputed to be on the American left, and I've devoted many a post to pointing them out). If I were in Britain or Russia or Hungary or China or Brazil there would be other named examples to cite but I looked at where the hits on this blog come from and most of them are from North America.  

Two The Nominally Christian and the Truly Christian

NOTE:  I couldn't think of any way to effectively break this up into smaller pieces.  That's because, as I said before, you figure you know where he's going till he gets there, you might just find he agrees with you more than he doesn't.

Here I should like to speak not only to Christians but to non-Christians also, as well as to the many people who simply doubt. Perhaps Christians and non-Christians alike can agree initially on three important points:

- In the present crisis of values, most people are convinced that without the minimum degree of consensus about systems of values it is impossible for human beings to live together at all.  Without the minimum degree of consensus about received, basic norms and attitudes (and these things are certainly under serious discussion in the different political parties today), it is questionable whether even the state can function,  in view of all the conflicting interests.  We can assume that there is agreement about one point at least - that there can be no civilized society and no state without some system of laws.  But no legal system can exist without a sense of justice.  And no moral sense of justice can exist without a moral sense or ethic.  And there can be no moral sense or ethic without basic norms, attitudes, and values

- If (as I have suggested) it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to justify ethics purely rationally, then we cannot recklessly ignore the significance and function of the phenomenon which for thousands of years has offered the justification of an ethic and for the basic values of men and women.  That is to say, we cannot put religion aside without accepting the consequences.  We must accept that there is no unconditionally binding obligation to perform a particular humane action without the acceptance of an unconditionally binding authority which lays that obligation upon us.  There is no unconditionally binding moral, humane action without religion.  And if it is not true religion which performs this function, it will be pseudo-religion or quasi-religion.  But for true religion, the sole authority which is permitted to claim absolute, unconditional obedience is nothing humanly conditioned at all;  it is the Absolute itself, to which we give the name God.

The problem with writing this into a series is that so many of the things contained in it beg for a whole post in themselves, in particular, this line, "there is no unconditionally binding obligation to perform a particular humane action without the acceptance of an unconditionally binding authority which lays that obligation upon us."  I believe that more every time I get back into these issues, I certainly haven't found anything like that in any rationalistic or materialistic or popular articulation, that is even if questions of morality arise under them.  Certainly none that isn't vulnerable to summary dismissal. Most typically, an appeal to mere predilection or habit is the best that can be had under those framings and there is nothing less reliable than those for reasons already stated.

It is my experience that in arguing this someone will bring up this or that atheist who is not a selfish, amoral monster who are that way because that's just how they are.  Such examples of those who behave well habitually or out of their personality are not relevant to the problem of the non-religious who are monsters of some degree, no more than Christians who behave well are part of the problem of professed Christians who are monsters.  The problem is how to get those who want to do evil, atheists, non-Christians, professed Christians, etc. to be good. I would not include those contented middle-class professionals who are content with what they have and are too lazy to actively do evil in those who are no problem, their indifference often becomes a problem in practice, they're especially gifted in committing sins of omission.  Many are mildly jaded faculty members in great universities and lesser institutions of somewhat higher learning.  Many are in research.

I will admit that there are professed atheists I know, some who I am related to, who believe, for good reason, that they behave morally without acknowledging any kind of religious belief and even a few who can be generally counted on to behave well as they are somewhat hostile to everything said in the last paragraph.  

Some people may be able to maintain a lifetime of superior moral behavior while denying or hostile to the the idea of God and certainly to religion even as their non-belief holds no assertions of moral absolutes.  I have known some professed atheists who I would trust to act well, generally, perhaps even more than many professed believers. I think the less intellectually based the atheism is, the more likely the non-ideological atheist will maintain that tendency to act morally. I wonder to what extent that may not be a residual vestige of religion in their family or social heritage.  That conclusion is based on my discussions with atheists and my observations of them.  

I would be least likely to expect that's likely if the typical ideological framings of atheism are held by the atheist, materialism, scientism,  etc. Materialism and scientism being present, the record of those being used as a basis for denying the reality of morality, its dissolution into some scheme of relativism or definition of it as merely a matter of social convention (which means it's not real even by the typical standards of materialst-atheist-scientism) is far more resonably expected than that the dedicated materialist and devotee of scientism will not have made those necessary logical steps in debunking morality. That is also a conclusion of my exposure to the thinking of atheists.

The literature of atheism denying the reality of even the most seriously necessary of moral absolutes, against murder and so against every lesser instance of immoral behavior, is a self-generated reason for anyone, atheist or believer, to suspect that those and similar framings of atheism eventually, followed to their logical conclusions  necessitate the impeachment of morality. I think that's more generally true of any rationalistic attempt to find a replacement for morality.

I would ask all of them, non-ideological and ideological atheists  what percentage of the general population would they want to depend on following their example in the total absence of the idea that God commands us to do to others what we would have them do to us.  I would say that even the claimed belief in God, even the claimed belief that the Golden Rule is a Commandment of God and, more so, merely notional religion isn't anything like a guarantee of good behavior.  I couldn't get farther from asserting the idea that a profession of Christianity is a guarantee of superior moral behavior.  Jewish and Christian scripture are full to the top of assertions and examples of why you should never settle for the idea that such a moral rule is merely a matter of social convention.

Religious appearance is one of the most commonly used tools of con men as Trump's infamous upside-down Bible stunt, the Marjorie Taylor Greens' or the TV preachers' professions of faith provide us with perfect examples of that.  As I noted last week you can see that exaggerated profession of belief is, if anything, at least an indicator you should be on your guard, especially among Christians who are commanded by Jesus not to make an overt display of religion, not to swear oaths, etc.  In light of that indication that a claim of religious belief is an unreliable predictor of moral behavior being in evidence, given the propensity of many, especially ideological atheists to attack the idea of the reality of moral commandments, religion's absence can't be counted on to be a more reliable predictor of the moral behavior that atheism does not have as an associated holding of belief. Despite the advocacy of it by some, I don't think that bold sinning which has the integrity of being within the amoral framing of the sinner is, in the end, superior to cowardly sinning which is sinned by a professed believer, hypocritically.  I say that having admitted that I know atheists who I think are quite as trustworthy of moral behavior as all but the greatest of saints who most sincere religious believers also cannot approach in goodness.

- Whether or not we are Christians, we have to admit that the purely humane, basic norms and values of the past were always Christian in character.  And this was entirely for the benefit of human happiness and well-being.  It was the Christian mind and spirit that enshrined the values of human dignity, liberty, justice, solidarity and peace. Without the Christian content that would be, and are equivocal concepts, manipulated at will in both East and West. (It is not only the Peoples' Republics and George Orwell's 1984 which make that plain.) Moreover, whether we like it or not, the Christian message does not offer merely a theoretical and abstract answer to questions about basic norms and values.  It is a practical and concrete answer.

It is here that I should remind you of the approved English title of the book, Why I Am Still A Christian.  It is clear that the European, the Swiss Catholic Hans Kung is saying why HE is still a Christian within what is a more general apologetic work.

I wouldn't have made this claim in this way though I certainly agree that anything good in the modern ethos is a development of the Jewish concept of universal justice and the Christian extension of that in universal love, as I've noted a number of non-Christian thinkers have held.  I've also said that there are other religious traditions that I think hold the same ideas and potentially could generate egalitarian democracy, which, I will repeat, we have only made some progress towards -only to have it turned back under secularism as much as would-be theocracy, theocracy having a nearly uniform history of being a bad idea.

I would stipulate that what Kung said may be true if you are talking about places where Christianity was predominant, I often get the feeling that Kung in this book is mostly thinking of Europe and, maybe the Americas. That is certainly not the case in places where Christianity had not yet been introduced or has never been a dominant religious profession. I think it is too broad to say it's true of the entire world. I think that there are certainly those who would be justified in questioning it, especially in European history.  Though I think in the past thousand years and more, depending on location, most of the moral behavior of Europeans and in other places where Christianity once held sway is due to some observance of the Gospel of Jesus.  I think that Christianity was certainly a moral advance over European paganism.  A comparison with religions elsewhere probably has to be decided on a case by case basis.  Whatever that comparison is, it must be based on performance of morality, not on professions or claims.  But Kung isn't done with this idea, yet.

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 ancient compass, which may not have outlived its usefulness after all.  A compass which -after many other instruments have proven to have given only unreliable bearings in the tempests of modern times- could perhaps point us a course toward a future of greater human dignity.  A compass that might reorientate 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 protests 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 he 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 unbelivers, 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 so many church newspapers and magazines [not to mention TV shows, radio shows and podcasts] 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 countless wrong condemnations 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 of its many failures in the slavery question, the war question, the women's question, the class question and the race question;  and the manifold complicity of the churches with the rulers of various countries in their neglect of the despised, the downtrodden, oppressed, the exploited peoples; and the religion as the opiate of the people . . . . Everywhere here criticism, severe criticism, is appropriate.

But I ask you:  Is 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.

There is so much that is called Christian.  But is it all Christian just because it is called Christian?  We must face up to this question. Even people who acknowledge that they belong to a Christian church - as I do, with complete conviction - would not wish to maintain that everything connected with institutional upholders of Christianity is Christian.

No, with the best will in the world I cannot call it Christian, or possessed of genuine Christian values, when in my own church, for example, ecclesiastical authority alone is involved, instead of Jesus Christ himself, in questions which are important for millions of Catholics.  I must repeat;  With the best will in the world, I cannot think that the One to whom Christianity appeals, Jesus of Nazareth himself, would today take up the same attitude as the Roman authorities in the questions at issue.  I cannot believe
 
- that he, who warned the Pharisees against laying intolerable burdens on people's shoulders would today declare all "artificial" contraception to be mortal sin;

- that he, who particularly invited failures to his table, would forbid all remarried divorced people even to approach that table;
 
- that he, who was constantly accompanied by women (who provided for his keep), and whose apostles, except for Paul, were all married and remained so, would today have forbidden marriage to all ordained men, and ordination to all women;

- that he, who said,"I have compassion on the crowd,"  would have increasingly deprived congregations of their pastors and allowed a system of pastoral care built up over a period of a thousand years to collapse;

- that he, who defended the adulteress and sinner, would pass such harsh verdicts in delicate questions requiring discriminating and critical judgment,like pre-marital sex, homosexuality and abortion.

No, I cannot think either that, if he came again to day he would agree

- that difference of denomination should continue to be considered an impediment to marriage -indeed that such a marriage should recently have been made an obstacle for Catholic lay theologians who wish to engage in pastoral service (as is also true for Protestant would-be pastors);

-that the validity of the ordination of Protestant pastors and their Eucharistic  celebration should be disputed;  that open communication and common  celebration of the Eucharist, shared church building and parish centers and ecumenical religious instruction should be prevented;  indeed that ecumenical services should be systematically forbidden on Sundays in an era of increasingly empty churches;

- that, instead of entering into open and reasonable debate, the attempt should be made to silence theologians, university chaplains, teachers of religion, journalists, organizational officers, and people responsible for youth work with decrees and "declarations" (and even, whenever possible, with disciplinary or financial measures).  

No, if we want to be Christian, we cannot demand freedom and human rights for the church externally and not grant them internally.  We cannot replace urgently needed reforms in the church by fine words about Europe, the Third world, and the North-South conflicts at synods, church assemblies, and papal rallies.  To put it briefly, justice and freedom cannot be preached only where it costs the church and its leaders nothing.

It has to be remembered that Hans Kung was a Catholic theologian, an ordained priest, one who dissented from the official teaching of the Church in a number of instances, including what was probably the most significant critique of the dreadful 19th century innovation of papal "infallibility" (something that led to serious consequences for him even before JPII and his protegee Karl Ratzinger stripped him of his license to be called a Catholic theologian). His later work in ecumenism, not only among Christians but world wide, across traditions, should also be remembered.  His focus in the book can be seen as a criticism of Catholicism first but of Christians in general even as he is presenting a case in favor of Christian belief.  

A lot of what may seem, at first, like presumption in his text can be counted on to turn out to be confession.  

Maybe We're Talking About A New Thing In The World That Paul Didn't Know

More Answers to Trad-Catho Objections To My Call For Faithful, Equal, Loving Marriages

I ADMIT THAT, given his language about Women, about slavery and about LGBTQ People, I had the typical, shallow disdain for Paul that is had only with the selective, distorted, superficial view of what he presumably did write and that which is traditionally ascribed to him  but much of which is probably not by him, some of which certainly contradicts much of what he did write. When you try to read entire letters, to really think about what is said in full instead of by picking out bits from it, those are seldom really understandable out of context.

As I have confessed, from now on I read all Scripture, judge all religious doctrine, dogma, tradition, theological claims according to what both Jesus and Hillel said was the encapsulation of The Law and the Prophets, does it lead you to do to others what you would have done to you.  If that were the way Christians behaved, slavery, Women's subjugation, inequality to LGBTQ+ People, oppression and cheating of workers, the poor,  and virtually every human created evil that has been the norm and which still persists would not happen.  There would be no scandal of Christians who did any of those things.  Christianity would be something wanted by all oppressed people, everywhere.  Equality, economic justice, social justice, charity for all, including the downtrodden and despised, especially for the downtrodden and despised. Those conditions of life might even disappear.

It is as perfect a commandment as any religion anywhere has ever come up with, I trust it entirely as the greatest rule of human conduct, the safest basis of human law.  I judge the obscure cases in which its application is not obvious with that other rule for judging the validity of claims of morality and religion given by Jesus, by their fruits YOU WILL KNOW THEM.  What comes of their application in life?  Do those results comport with the Golden Rule? Based on that, large parts of the Scripture have to be judged to be an invalid basis for human conduct, human law, while much of it gives good advice on how to act that way and even much of what is mistaken as a model for behavior is really a cautionary tale. I will note that it is the best way to view some of the worst passages in Scripture, such as those that command death for this or that transgression of law, things that an 8 year old knows violate the commandment against killing, among the earliest self-contradictions in the Bible that I recall noticing.

I am no student of the literature but certainly the Rabbis who studied the Hebrew Scriptures so minutely for so many centuries noticed that in one place God is said to have said that if a human kills another human they are to be killed by another human, Genesis 9:5.  How this doesn't eventuate in our committing suicide as a species as those who kill the killers must, as well, be killed, I'd like to know.  Of course the first thing to notice about that is it contradicts what God said to Cain when he killed Abel.  And there were certainly many in in Scripture of this or that hero killing many people, soldiers among the Children of Israel, Samson, Joshua, the later kings, etc. who were not held to that rule, many of them lived out their lives and died a natural death. David, Solomon . . . murderers, many are considered great figures in the same religions that maintain that passage in Scripture.

The last time I dealt with Paul on same-sex-sex I noted that you could only maintain the common view of his use of same-sex-sex, that he held it out as uniquely sinful only if you failed to read Paul's flawed and limited concept of it in the context of general, I would say universal human sinfulness that he mentions it in.  Of course nearly everyone who cites Paul to identify this or that act of sinfulness and, in the worst use of his writing, to condemn, to damn LGBTQ People, to support slavery, to tell Women to take a subservient role and to shut up in church is guilty of that dishonest use of him.  

And as he was merely human, his human limitations and flaws are certain, he certainly knew he was imperfect and we know his understanding was.  Things he said which were likely rejected by Christians of his own time.  I mentioned that while we can be certain from what he said that Women were speaking in church in Corinth but, as Elizabeth A. Johnson noted, what the Women of Corinth who were speaking out thought of Paul's instruction is not known. We do know that just as American slavers lied about his instruction to Philemon on slavery to defend them not following the entire context of his advice, that the slaver was to treat the slave as a brother, not as a slave, which would have freed the slave in fact if not under law.  St. Macrina talking her mother into coming to such an arrangement with the slaves in their household was one of few such instances where that was taken seriously. None of the rest of that use of Paul's less than perfect wisdom is even up to his written words.

I'd speculate that there may have been Pauline letters which don't survive including because they were rejected.  But that speculation isn't needed because hardly anyone takes full note of his whole text which, when you do take that in considerations, it changes your understanding of the attention-getting phrase or one or two sentence tid-bits concentrated on.  

Paul is an extremely subtle, at times, sometimes almost ecstatically  poetic writer.  The source of his inspiration was a profound mystical experience that left him traumatized, having serious physical consequences. A lot of it, not just the  word here or there is obscure.  And one of those "arsenokoitai" is not a word whose accurate denotation is not agreed on today.  It very likely did not mean "homosexual" or, as the goddamned KJV has it "sodomite" it is not useful for making hard and fast laws. It certainly did not refer to what we, today, would consider adult, mutually consented to, mutually respectful, responsible, faithful same-sex-sex.

I did state that my conclusion from Paul's words and what we know of Paul's life that he very likely could have been a man who felt exclusively sexually attracted to other men and, in a phenomenon not unknown today, he was scared and disgusted by some of his deepest desires.  But I think to limit him to that on the issue is to a. to presume we understand him on the basis of insufficient evidence and b. that his language (in the Greek) seems only to point to uses of same-sex-sex by others that were evil, the sexual abuse of adults and children in prostitution, whether or not that was in association with pagan temples, masters abusing those they held in slavery, adults preying on children, non-consensual sex among adults in a context of inequality.   I am not a very good Greek scholar and am reliant on scholars of the language but I do think it is a virtual certainty that when we talk about being a fair, responsible gay man or Lesbian woman, or bisexual or transexual, etc. today we are talking about behaviors that surpass what Paul and the majority of his contemporaries who wrote documents that survive, the basis of our understanding of Paul's and others vocabularies, could have talked about. It's clear that many people, both straight and even within LGBTQ+ people have a hard time wrapping their minds around that idea now.

I will take as my text Isaiah 43:19.  I think when we, today speak of real marriage equality we may well be talking about a new thing in the world.

I see no evidence that anywhere in the written record there is evidence that any writers, Christian, Jewish or pagan had a conception of loving, equal, exclusively faithful, adult, consensual same-sex sex.  I DON'T SEE MUCH OF ANY EVIDENCE THAT THEY MUCH CONCEIVED OF EVEN MONOGAMOUS STRAIGHT MARRIAGE IN THOSE TERMS. If there is any classical Greek or Hebrew text that talks about what I am talking about when I talk about marriage equality, I'd love someone to point it out to me. I would not be surprised if there were such relationships among, for example, male couples of that time, I think there is no evidence that any texts they may have written about that survived so what language they would use for that cannot be compared to the words of Scripture.  

I can point out we have little to no language of slaves who rejected their enslavement, we have no language of Women who rejected their subjugation, we have little to no language of so many "others" who are named in Scripture or classical literature but who are not known in their own words or who have had their thinking about their own experience preserved.  Given how rare authorship was, presumably even much rarer than the uncommon achievement of literacy, given the ravages of time on paper, it isn't surprising that we wouldn't have positive examples of same-sex-sex set down in the texts that survive.  If there were any such Jewish or Christian writings, I think it's a safe bet that the Church as they were accepting and rejecting what the bishops decided were to be included in the canon of Scripture would have rejected those.  If there were such texts, by that time, I think it's a pretty good guess that they would have been rejected out of bigotry, not inspiration.  For whatever good and even great things that would come out of the clearly post-Scriptural and novel development of monasticism, on which so much of the transmission of texts and writing and learning depends, it promoted an extremely morbid view of sex that would have guaranteed that.

I have gone back, several times, to the story in John's Gospel, the Woman Taken in Adultery, which so many moderns like to claim was inauthentic, that it was a later insertion because it's not contained in the oldest complete manuscript of John's Gospel.  We don't have any idea why that would be, it could have been not there because it was a later insertion -which, given the already present and extreme sexism of the Bishops and the Emperor who wanted them to select what was to be included, I doubt they'd have included it if they figured it was optional.  

I've got to wonder if whoever created that manuscript or the manuscript they copied may have left it out because they didn't like the story.  We don't have any way of knowing but we do know that its survival in the canon proves that many of the early Christians conceived of Jesus as the kind of messiah who would save the life of the poor woman, doing so overturning the ancient law that adulterers were to be stonned to death.  Which brings us to the sexual sin that rulers, certainly, not infrequently even the most sexually suppressive clerics wink and nod at, today totally accepted among the white-evangelicals among whom it is extremely popular, among the hardest right of Catholic cardinals, bishops, those kinds of young JPII era priests who I cannot find credible as ministers of religion, the Republican-fascists, the Trump voters, even as they are the most vicious voices against LGBTQ+ equality.  

There is no sexual sin that is more continually condemned in Scripture than straight adultery, its condemnation is ubiquitous as mentions of what is taken as the few instances where same-sex-sex is condemned.  Yet in practice, since the dawn of Christianity as an established state church, adultery by the rich and powerful was never much called out. You know, like the serial adulterer, Trump, like Ronald Reagan was, like I'll bet most of the House "Freedom" Caucus are.   Skipping over the long history of adultery being treated with a wink and a nod by clerics and and the legal system, today it is only under a few instances in Catholicism and a few other smaller sects that issues of straight adultery which, by the Words of Jesus has to include remarriage after a divorce, is perfectly legal and not problematical. I hear it's especially popular in "red states" and "red counties."  I would like to know when the last example of a public school teacher, a Catholic school teacher who was fired for adultery was, how many divorced, remarried men and women teach in our schools, I've known of a number who were openly known to be carrying on affairs within the faculty of the school while both were married, we all have. That certainly falls under the most frequently mentioned sin of sexual behavior in scripture AND NO ONE BATS AN EYELASH ABOUT IT.  And I'm certainly not advocating they all be fired (the unemployment rate among straight people would soar) though I do wonder what that example before them holds for students who do know it's going on.  One of my conclusions was that if I were ever married to another man I wouldn't want us to act so irresponsibly and selfishly or so openly.

I think even among the damned Ratzinger-cult bishops and priests who flipped out when Good Pope Francis contemplated allowing divorced remarried Catholics to receive Communion have no real problem with Catholics who commit adultery without remarriage after divorce because I don't hear much from them about it. They certainly have no problem with Newt Gingrich and his third wife, adulterers, both of them, no doubt having bought themselves an annulment, perhaps the most officially hypocritical practice in the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church today. The Catholic annulment industry with its high-price canon lawyers, etc. is a scandal in itself.  

The Catholic Church, the "white evangelicals" as mentioned in the media, the Republican-fascists, perhaps most of all the right-wing media whores, have no credibility on matters of sex, they are uniformly hypocrites in the matter, those who aren't personally hypocritical are typically clueless and have no problem being in league with the hypocrites they don't break with.  

No future Christianity will ever be able to go back to where it was, as my generation passes, as the generation of my nieces and nephews replace us, as the libertarian over-compensation for the oppressive suppression of LGBTQ+ people will have to give way to the consequences of that overcompensation, I have no doubt that LGBTQ+ life will become unremarkable and same-sex marriage equality will become as common as the reality that straight people often marry the wrong person and that a modern divorce with economic security for ex-wives is not the same thing as divorce was in the time of Jesus has become an accommodation for straight people living their lives the best way they can figure out how to.  My hope is that Gay men, Lesbians, etc. pursue marriage-equality so fervently that we will demand to have the best kind of marriages, loving, equal, mutually supportive, faithful and life-long instead of cranky, exploitative, unequal, unfaithful, hateful and ephemeral ones such as so many straight people seem to go for.  If I thought marriage-equality was to enable the worst kinds of marriages, the effort for it would be a waste of time.
 

In The Last Resort - Post 3 from Why I Am Still A Christian

ARGUING FOR CONTINUING CHRISTIANITY out of some notions about what we are all to think was some high point of Christianity it in the past is a hopeless cause. That is because there is little in that history, especially among those with authority and power deputed to have been "Christian" popes, patriarchs, bishops, most "Christian" monarchs and others crowned in a mockery of Christian sacramentalism such as will be seen in Britain in a few months . . . but whose adherence to the Gospel of Jesus, the words of the Epistles in the rest of the New Testament and their actions and those under their command whose history is more useful to attack Christianity with than a demonstration of it.  If Christians had acted as Jesus instructed, as Paul and James, etc. had instructed, there would be no crisis in Christian credibility, Christianity would not be held to have blood on its hands and past the crown of its head. It would be uniformly praised except by those who love evil.  Marjorie Taylor Green, the rest of the Trumpian Republican-fascists, Putin's regime, the incumbent Patriarch of Moscow would despise the word instead of covering it with filth by associating it with what they do.

If we were in the habit of being honest about the history of "American democracy," with its history of genocidal conquest, its history of chattel slavery and its unofficial continuation in Jim Crow and lynch-law, the subjugation of other racial, ethnic, religious minorities, LGBTQ+ oppression, the wage-slavery and not unoften fatal abuse of workers, the poor, the destitute, etc. we would have to hold that our secular American republic and the Constitution INCLUDING THE BILL OF RIGHTS under which all of those evils flourished is as discredited.  I would say an honest appraisal would be that it would have to stand as more discredited.  The teachings of Jesus were never administered as law by institutions he established in the way that secular, civil law has been administered under the terms set out on our Constitution. What is permitted under the Constitution is a direct result of the terms in the Constitution as laid down by those the Constitution gives authority to.  The evils allowed under law to persist in the secular republic are official governance in a way that the teachings of Jesus, the last word in the definition of what is Christianity, have never been.  He said his kingdom was not of this world. There is not a "Christian country" about which that same point cannot be made because there has never been a "Christian" government, including under the papacy.

As I said the other day, if we are to believe the prophetic words of Jesus, of the New Testament, perhaps including the prophesy of much of the Hebrew Scriptures, we should expect the real golden period of Christianity is to come and when it does come, gold is not going to be the right adjective identifying it but equality, charity, and following the other commandments.  It will not be by any deputation that it will be known but by its fruits.  I would very much recommend reading the short, lesser read but enormously important letter of James for examples of what I'm thinking about.  

How do we know today what we can still rely on, in the last resort?  Certainly every day we receive more and more rules of behavior, "traffic regulations," maxims.  But as we all know, regimentation is not the same thing as having values.  On the contrary, the more regulations, regimentation, planning, and organization we have, and the more laws, requirements, forms, and "the pressure of circumstances" gain control in all spheres of life, the more people feel disoriented and lose insight and oversight; and the more people feel to be losing control over their lives, the more they demand clear sign posts to help them through the confusion of rules, regulations and outside pressures.  In this disoriented age, people long for a fundamental orientation, for some system of essential values, for a commitment.  It is the commitment to these essential values, not to society's superficial rules and regulations, which is the theme of this book.

As I said, I am not a pessimist.  People are no worse today than they were in the past, when values were more abundant. . .

I will break in here to say that, as indicated above,  this may be the single statement in the book I disagree with the most. I don't believe it is true that values were "abundant" in the past even if they may have been more so than today.  That is except in a marginal sense that the values under discussion, as Kung is about to make clear in this discussion, specifically "Christian values," had a marginally greater effect in some aspects of social life and in some instances politics and law. Some.  And that is true entirely because the Christian Churches, imperfect followers of the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets those were, extremely up and down in that, NEVERTHELESS HAD TO DEAL WITH WHAT JESUS SAID and they had more influence on the secular leaders, at times, though frequently and in large areas, little to no influence.  And the Churches were, at times, far more influenced by secular politics and economics than they made up for any inclination to promote Christian values. Those were certainly never more than imperfectly followed and were certainly nothing like universally applied.  

Most of the Gospel of Jesus, for example, the Sermon on the Mount or the "What you do for the least among you," passages of it, has never found much of anything like a place in civil law, not even under most of democracy.   People certainly were, if anything, despite what laws there were against everything from petty cheating to torture and murder, whenever they were able to, people of all classes were not much inclined to treat those not of the dominant group as they insisted on their having a right to be treated, themselves.

In Western counties, whites as a group (with exceptions) were certainly not inclined to treat Black People, People of Color, as equally holding a right to good or just treatment. Nominal Christians were not inclined to treat Jews as they, themselves, wanted to be treated.  In their imperial holdings they were even less inclined to, the genocides of the inhabitants of the Western hemisphere, conducted, to begin with, by anointed princes and monarchs and on the excuse of spreading Christianity as they were really about theft and enslavement, are among the chief violations of the Gospel of Jesus. In the writings of the Calvinist Cotton Mather, his excuses for genocide were given precedent from some of the most vicious books of the Old Testament.

Once the secular republic was established, it proceeded without using that as an excuse as theft with no Constitutional inhibitions at all.  I would go on about the few notable exceptions to that, especially in the later 20th century when some, such as St. Oscar Romero, the Martyrs of Central America, etc. faced death at the hands of the United States' trained client genocidalists. Something going on as Kung wrote his book and still going on, today. If a Catholic golden age is to be a Christian one, I think it has yet to come and it will be, in no small part, due to the teachings of Vatican II taking hold and being expanded on. Good Pope Francis's recent call to revoke Augustine's "just war" theology would be an epoch-ending reform which would, I am certain, be bitterly objected to by many a billionaire-financed astro-turf "trad-Catholic."  Some of the worst figures in murderous American imperialism -such as assassinated Romero and the four American churchwomen-  and now DeSantis-Trumpism have been officially members of the Catholic church and no one, not even Francis, has ever talked about excommunicating them or banning them in the way Dignity or the Roman Catholic Womenpriests have been.  Similar things can be said about most of the Christian Churches.

More generally about Christians holding power, those with wealth were certainly not inclined to treat the poor and destitute as they would want to be treated despite that admonition, that moral value probably counting by far as the most commonly stated Commandment in both testaments demanding economic justic for "the widow, the orphan, the alien" "the least among you" etc.  

Though those as values are still maintained to some extent as a sentimental vestige of a Christian cultural past, the recent attempt to make those governmental policy is foundering badly in such things as feeding the poor, housing and clothing them, getting medical treatment for them, humane treatment of the incarcerated, just about everywhere thirty-six years after the book was published. And it is exactly those who most strongly and insistently self-identify as "Christians" for political purposes who are the greatest enemies of those most obviously Christian of programs. That has been as true for conservative Catholics, bishops, etc. ever eager to concentrate on a relative handful of prohibitions against sex while ignoring the myriads of commandments of economic and general justice as it has been for the stingiest and most resentful of givers among "work-ethic" Protestants.   And there are plenty of Catholics, Orthodox, etc. who are in a contest with them for that ignominious designation.

Any really "Christian age" on Earth is yet to come, if it doesn't it may be because we have committed suicide as a species as the alternative to it.

That said, needing to deal with things as they are, now, back to the text.

. . . Young people have always been "bad," according to their elders. But this much must be said, if we are to understand the present younger generation in particular; social change has never come about with such speed and complexity as it does today.  Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to essential values, and the danger of spiritual homelessness and rootlessness is growing all the time.  Everyone -young and old- is trying to work things out for themselves, often quite naively.  Some people orientate their lives by the horoscope, others -more scientifically minded- by biological rhythms;  some organize everything according to a planed diet, others according to yoga;  one person swears by group therapy, another by transcendental meditation, a third by political action. But it is not merely a question of individual values;  it is a matter of social values as well.  Ethical questions abound; nuclear energy, gene manipulation, test-tube babies, environmental protection, East-West and North-South conflicts;  and it is becoming increasingly clear that such questions are exceeding the comprehension and overtaxing the powers of individuals.  Today we can do more than ever - but what we should do we simply do not know.

Observer of the real-world as he was, perhaps Kung was too serious a person to realize the enormous percentage of us who organize our lives by even less worthwhile things, the TV or other media schedule or sports schedule or whichever series they are binge-watching. I suspect that that is how most people in the West organize their non-work hours. Those who focus on electronic, allegedly religious sources probably among the least susceptible to the Gospel based Christianity that is remote from their cult devotion.  From what I've seen of "Christian TV" the Antichrist is perfectly at home in it.

It is obvious that I cannot address all these complicated questions in this brief reflection.  But perhaps i can say something of fundamental importance toward their solution, something to which our educational system, geared as it is primarily toward the acquisition of knowledge and diplomas, ought to pay more attention.  Perhaps I can say something that will help provide some ground under our feet, a vantage point, from which all individual problems may be judged: the basis for a commitment to the essential values, that is to say the essential Christian values.

But it is at this very point that inhibitions arise. So, after this first section on the crisis of values, let me in the second section make a few comments which will lead us in the right direction. In this context I should like to introduce the important distinction between what is "nominally Christian" and what is "truly Christian."

I won't comment on the rest of this except to say that the next chapter has some of the most controversial material in the book but you should hold with Kung till he gets to the end of what you think is outrageous because, in the end, you'll likely find that he's more than ready to agree with you.  He may not have 80 pages between point one and point two, as Brueggemann joked Karl Barth often does, but he does like to make a complete point before he sets down conditions to it.  Kung's doctoral dissertation as a Catholic theologian was on the Protestant Karl Barth's theology. The older theologian issued an appreciative statement that the Catholic Kung's dissertation accurately represented his thinking.   

The Folly Of Trying To Come Up With A Rationalistic Framing To Reliably Produce Decency - Why I A Still A Christian Post 2

If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?  Luke 9: 23-25

Perhaps what is good is simply whatever is to my advantage, to the advantage of my group, party, class, race, or even to the advantage of my business or trade union.  It is not a question of individual or collective selfishness?  Some biologists and etnologists do in fact try to persuade us that for human beings, as for animals, any sort of altruism or love is merely the supreme form of biologically inherited self-interest.  And, after all, philosophers have continually asked where we are to find the criteria to judge the interests lying behind all knowledge -how we are to distinguish between what is true and what is illusory, what is objective and what is subjective, what is acceptable and what is reprehensible.

So the question remains:  How are we to lay down priorities and preferences on a purely rational basis?  Purely philosophical arguments to establish essential values have not come up with anything conclusive.  They have never got beyond problematical generalizations, which all tend to break down precisely in those exceptional circumstances where people do act in a way that is by no means to their own advantage or for their own personal happiness, but in a way which may involve a sacrifice: even, in an extreme case, the sacrifice of life itself.

I might have included this with the portion from Kung's Why I Am Still A Christian last time but I wanted to use it to illustrate the validity of the point that secularism, science, aka "natural philosophy" even generalized secular and quasi-religious philosophy cannot come up with what "we can rely on" to produce a decent society and world, what we can really, fully hold on to as durable, absolute moral positions that we can use in exactly those cases when we really don't want to act against our perceived self-interest for the benefit of others, or even the lives of others or, in the case of our controlling elite, the preservation of life on Earth itself.  Or in deciding when it is valid to legally force people to not just do what they figure is in their own best interest, individually or extended into their family or other wider grouping.  

Although Hans Kung didn't say it, one of the biggest problems with any quest to use rational philosophy to come up with such moral absolutes as revealed religion finds it no problem to assert is that their framing is ill chosen to find them.  That revealed religion has problems in that regard often founders on their failure to admit the inevitable imperfection of our view of revelation and insisting on that imperfect assertion of it no matter what evils come from it.  That is especially an issue in regard to institutional religion, but the rationalistic attempt to use reason, logic, most stupidly of all, some of our more imprecise branches of physical science, shows that as an intellectual holding, the attempt to use the worst tools instead of those that are just imperfect is sheer foolishness.

In regard to the incapacity of secular philosophy to do that, I've pointed out before, I. F. Stone observed when commenting on Socrates in Plato's set-up job ran circles around a shoe-maker, that the shoe maker could make a pair of shoes while the entire 2400 year tradition of Socratic philosophy had never come up with even one universal truth.  Adding scientific method to that has not seemed to improve their odds of getting to one. And morals are hardly the easiest aspect of philosophical inquiry to find them in.  

I will also point out that the various modern attempts to replace revealed religion with formal philosophy, the various and uniformly idiotic schemes of utilitarianism, the modern field of ethics which seems to have turned back to the eugenicist and Nazi projects of drawing up lists of those it is desirable to kill, something which you can do and not only keep but flourish in a modern, university based philosophy department almost eighty years after the largest of the modern scientifically conducted genocides was revealed to the world, only one of a myriad of the 20th centuries modern genocides that outdo past ones.

Yet science is to be considered sacrosanct even though it is among those fields which, by mutual agreement from the start, excludes any considerations of moral consequences in real life.  Similar points could be made about other areas of life which have, by mutual agreement, been freed from moral consequences but which do not suffer nearly as much as religion does when the not only predictable but permitted evils that come from them create catastrophes with huge pain and many dead.  Commerce, business, the law (where contracts, almighty and explicitly written or, as the judicial practice has it, by "implied consent" favors the liars and crooks and, in the fullness of time, those who get people killed in large numbers for their profit, something that allowed "justice" Gorsuch to say that a trucker owed it to his company to freeze to death on the job and then, with that on the Senate hearing record, to be elevated to the Supreme Court.

The critics of moral outrage are mighty peculiar when it comes to which institutions they declare worthy of death and those they have no problem with, especially those critics of moral outrage who have been credentialed by universities and colleges and have a financial stake in such science, such commerce, such business and such law. It is among the rarest things for an economist to note that truth which was made apparent to Paul that love of money is the root of all evil, something which the most devoted of all to his sayings about sex, women in churches, etc. never seem to much pay any mind to.  The love of money is certainly not discouraged by secularism any more than the most corrupt of ecclesiastical institutions, that secularism has no such sayings and its not only accommodation to professional amorality but its institution of all of those bastions banning moral consideration and its full and complete maintenance of them - the Churches, from the early modern era when it overcame the many Biblical condemnations of usury accommodated themselves to the secular world - the foremost forces of amorality never get the condemnation of academia or the scribblers, directors, producers of show-biz (our actual educators) even as the condemnation of organized religion - like shooting ducks in a gallery - is about as guaranteed a movie evergreen as the Blacklist.

----------------------

Back at perhaps was just past the high-water mark of the new atheist fad of the OO's one of the major scientific celebrities of that, Sean Carroll got some of the other brite lites of the new atheism together to, among other things, once and for all provide a rational, naturalistic basis for something like morality.  A number of those involved were exactly from that effort to come up with a biological, Darwinian explanation of what "morality" was and why we, you know, really should do to others at least what we might, kinda want them to do to us, if they were in a position to screw us or, maybe, others. I won't go far into the several philosophers present except that Dennett made a real ass of himself when he said they should just call things what they really weren't and figure that was good enough to fool the rubes.   He fell far after early in his career when he had the attention of someone like Jospeh Weizenbaum. The others, especially one author who, I guess, was let in on the philosophy ticket,  just mouthed the nonsense of evo-psy, weren't much more impressive.

The science Kung was talking about was that threadbare attempt to pretend the doctrine of natural selection didn't mean what the eugenicists and scientific racists and, yes, the Nazis said it meant, to kill the other so the killer survivors benefit from erasing them from society, from the Volk, from the future of the species. In the post-WWII era that is denied to be the case despite Darwin, himself, supporting such ideas within his scientific work and those ideas permeating the scientific as well as popular literature of natural selection.  Kung almost certainly meant the daffy idea of Hamiltonian "altruism" that attempted to dispose of the problem of extreme self-disadvantageous self-sacrifice which turned personal sacrifice for someone else into an act of genetic selfishness on behalf of genes.  

The claim was that the behavior was based in genes, there for the perpetuation and expansion of a specific gene or genes in the population.  Though if that's true you have to wonder why it is so rare in behavior, almost absent from view instead of being among the most typical behavior patterns in all species.  All species, this many billions of years into the evolution of current life having the same chance to exhibit such behavior instead of its most notable novelty even among human beings and our far more morals exhibiting fellow vertebrates. The idea is little more than a PR cover-job at the start and an attempt to rescue natural selection from anything that might indicate it doesn't really exist - true believers can't tolerate disconfirming evidence. If it is intellectually necessary to ameliorate the epic repudiation of the Golden Rule that Darwinism is, as an explanation of disconfirming observed behavior then, certainly, it must be more generally necessary to explain why we haven't all, all sentient, behaving creatures, not killed ourselves off in the Hobbesian war of all against all that Marx correctly noted was the intellectual foundation of natural selection, something you can imagine making Brit-imperialist aristocrats such as Darwin's primary audience somewhat tumescent.

And the biological effort at the atheist hootenanny turned out to be an easily defeated futility.  As the biologists at Camp Carroll fumbled and generally demonstrated their philosophical incompetence, Sean Carroll's fellow physicist, probably the most illustrious scientist present, Mr. "Bad Religion" himself, Steve Weinberg, using the atheist's own favorite tools tore their arguments to shreds saying that he could see no higher basis for morality than what he concluded was in the best interest of his family and his university department, that what he though was best for them (and so himself) was what he though determined his best course of action.  Of course HE didn't see any trouble with that, especially that late in his career, at the top of his professional life, he like your typical tenured university contented head of cattle, he had his and he was good with that. The others couldn't lay a glove on him over that.  Their framing had nothing in it that could overcome that most typical of all atheist lines, "why should I believe it?"  It isn't only religon that that line works on, it works with any proposals that atheists, even those alleged to be reliable science, come up with as well.  Indeed, as you get farther away from the directly observable of simplest of physical entities in science, what led Weinberg to quip "If you've seen one electron, you've seen them all," the more you'll find even what are to be taken as rigorously held scientific articles of faith are vulnerable to that refusal to believe if they don't want to.  That it was the "bad religion" guy who said it, a man who has worked all his life in a science which has produced nuclear weapons but who figures he knows from "bad" and his fellow rationalists had no answer for it reminds me of who Lucifer said he was in Paradise Lost, the one who says no.

There is absolutely no important or lesser aspect of moral behavior which is not entirely too complex to treat in that way.  It is the pretense of Western philosophy and the science of which it is merely a specialized method of, that we can arrive at ideas which will automatically and of necessity be universally adopted or at least which one with sufficient preparation must, of necessity automatically adopt. That is simply an illusory notion, there is nothing automatic about it, it relies on the most basic act of human will. You have to just say yes to something.

Even the most basic and universal of mathematical and, from there, even the most everyday of common occurrences, the act of believing them rests on choices made very early, most of the most crucial of those made so remotely in childhood we don't remember making the choice to believe our experience and the conclusions we drew from them. All further mathematical learning is built on that choice to believe the primitive ideas of numbers and measurement and which are accepted as true by necessity because they are in accord with what we have already accepted.  The farther we get in the lines of inferences from those, the less reliable our conclusions tend to get and the more vulnerable to non-acceptance by others. Mathematics has the most rigorous human methods of testing new claims made within it but those logical masterworks deal with the most abstract AND NON PYSICAL of all entities which knowably reside only in our minds.  The best methods of science mimic that but, dealing with far more complex realities, far more complex objects as even the simplest of physical objects are, they cannot match mathematics in that regard.  

It is an irony of the materialist-atheist faith of scientism that the most complete logical certainty is available only for non-physical, unobservable objects of no provable objective existence. Science merely buys us a little bit of safety in SOME of what scientists claim to have discovered EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD, most reliably on the simplest and most observable of phenomena with rapidly decreasing certainty as the complexity of its treated phenomena increases.  And they do that in no small part by excluding many aspects of experienced phenomena and, infinitely more so, experienced life.  Most crucial to this argument, they exclude all moral considerations from their method and, especially, what you need to arrive at reliable moral absolutes, especially when those are going to be found hard or unwelcomed and so denied. Those are available no where except from a supernatural source.  And on them rest any hope for decent social interactions, decent communities, decent countries and a decent life for all of us or, as our science and technology increases our powers to do evil in a most imminent of truths, all of us.

I mentioned last time that I've specialized in skepticism over the secular notion of absolute speech and, especially, press freedom but I've also specialized in attacking the doctrine of natural selection. One of my more enjoyably written posts in that tearing Richard Dawkin's faux ethological presentation of Hamiltonian altruism to shreds, as well.  I've never had anyone, from blog rats, alleged science PhD's to professional biologists to neo-atheist mathematicians refute a single point in my attack. Yet it is probably the most famous of all such lines of bilge, I'm sure still taught as science in universities, the peppered-moth of the mid-1970s.  And I've also attacked its expression among others, Hamilton, himself, E.O. Wilson who, very late in his professional life repudiated the idea when his most public fame was based on his own extension of it, others in the evo-psy that was novel when Kung wrote his book but which has already passed the stage of putrescence that is entirely predictable when you try to mix the dodgy at best science of evolution with the even worse pseudo-science of psychology.

Perhaps what Kung lays out in his point about the epic indecisiveness of Western (and other) philosophies in morality can stand-in for the choice many have seen in whether or not you ultimately support a "Greek," that is Platonic Socratic procedure in thinking about things or if you admit what might be a more Hebrew religious conclusion that you are not going to get there out of reasoning, logic, even by formal empircal observation especially as that is hemmed in by the scientific restriction of what can be measured accurately and which must leave out such ideas as God and morality.

In the end what you end up believing you are to do and so have more of a chance of doing it is a choice to believe that you have to rise above your own self-interest.  Conventionally, in the typical academically taught crouch of ass covering, I'd usually say perhaps but I don't see any other choice in how you can frame the issues that can get you to that end on anything like a reliable basis.  

As seen above, even the secular, scientific ersatz and phony stand-in for absolute morality has to deform "altruism," so notably unselfish under an unbiased observation of the act, into "selfishness" it begs the Darwinian question that is at the basis of natural selection, from the start of the inquiry, that all is a matter of self-interest, if not on the part of organisms than in a just-so story about selfish-genes being behind it all. I am so disgusted with the pseudo-scientific attempt to replace revealed morality that I don't even particularly like the word "altruism" given its Comtean implications.  If modernism is a failed project, the entire effort to replace revealed morality with some ersatz, would be sociological-sciency-Millsian substitute is an even bigger flop.

And if having social, political, legal good instead of evil is the goal, it is all an intellectual fairy-tale.  All of that is at something taken as an intellectually elite level, hardly the level that your typical person with dangerously thuggish tendencies is likely to even try to start navigating.  Would the minor Ivy League product Trump do it?  Would his fellow major Ivy League product Peter Navarro?  To have an important impact within human societies, human politics and so law, the conduct of us as nations and as a world-wide species, a reliable basis from a far simpler framing is the only thing that will work.  Get that wrong, as, in fact, the secular U.S.Constitution did from the start, it won't produce what it needs to.  And that isn't merely the fault of the uneducated, the plebs, the "great unwashed" the "masses."  As the eugenicists, the scientific racists, the elite of fascist, Nazi and Communist criminal regimes and their pale shadows in the faltering liberal democracies prove, the educational and intellectual patina that such talk comprises masks only what is, at its basic level, the same thugishness.  

If Sean Carroll's weekend elite university-faculty, atheist camperee couldn't come up with something better, the skin-heads, MAGA's, those vulnerable to "Christian nationalism," etc. all around the world won't use anything that complex in coming up with a reason as to why they shouldn't do to others exactly what they don't want done to them, anyway.

They have to believe that they are to do to others as they would have done to them because God says so. If that isn't the predominant belief among People, if show-biz or hate-talk media (on behalf of their amoral sponsors) or the decadent ersatz-intellectuals, atheists who choose not to believe talk them out of that, then not only is egalitarian democracy doomed, so is even its shoddy imitation of liberal democracy.  Media liberals won't tell you that, academic liberals won't, would be "civil society" backer George Soros won't tell you that, but I just did.

What can we still rely on today?

From Why I Am Still A Christian by Hans Kung

What can we still rely on today?  What can we hold on to?  I am not a pessimist, but we scarcely need reminding that we are now in a "crisis" of values as profound as it is far-reaching. Ever since the youth and student revolts of the late 1960s,* there are no longer any institutions or guardians of values which are not in crisis or have not been radically challenged.  Where today is there any undisputed authority?  We used to be told: the pope, the bishop, the church says;  or the prime minister, the government, the party says; or the teacher, the professor, "your father" says.  Where nowadays could we even settle  discussion -let alone pacify a demonstration- with an appeal to such authorities? No; the state, church, courts, army, school, family -all seem to be insecure. They are no longer accepted without question -least of all by young people- as guardians of values.

With this critical questioning of accepted authorities, traditions and ways of life, the values associated with them seem to be called into question as well.  Liberalization** was necessary but often went further than had been foreseen or planned.  Elaborate processes designed to get rid of taboos frequently turned out to be more destructive than creative, with the result that for many people today, morality as a whole seems to have become relative.  The effects of all these developments have been anything but liberating.  The ground has been cut from under the feet of some people - especially the young - who now feel their lives have no meaning and turn to delinquency, or extreme religious sects, or to political fanaticism, even terrorism.

The large-scale crisis of values has thrown modern society into conflicts which have not yet by any means been resolved.  Indeed their full significance has probably not even been grasped.  For our grandfathers and grandmothers, religion, or Christianity, was still a matter of personal conviction.  For our fathers and mothers it was still at least a matter of tradition and "the done thing."  For their emancipated sons and daughters, however, it is becoming increasingly a thing of the past which is no longer binding, passed by and obsolete. And there are parents today who observe with perplexity that morality in general has vanished, along with religion, as Nietzsche predicted.  For -as is becoming increasingly clear- it is not so easy to justify any moral values purely rationally, by reason alone, as Sigmund Freud would have liked to do; to prove by reason alone why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war. Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, we should not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder;  indeed, why should we be humane or even "fair"?


In response to a challenge about a statement about the impossibility of there being any kind of moral absolute based on a rationalistic-materialistic framing of reality, I had a vague recollection of this statement by the late ecumenical theologian Hans Kung in his book, titled in the authorized English translation, to tweak the nose of Bertrand Russell's fans (my guess), is "Why I Am Still A Christian."  The title of the original was Woran Man Sich Halten Kann, which is more or less the meaning of the first sentence in the text.  In the  preface to the book Kung specifically said he was attempting to summarize the most important points in his three large and fine books of rigorous testing of the bases of Christian faith, Does God Exist, On Being A Christian and Eternal Life?  I went back to the book and have decided to go through it during Lent as I once went through Walter Brueggemann's The Bible Makes Sense, a project that started one Advent and lasted pretty much through the extended Christmas season.  

Given Hans Kung's active and hard work on ecumenical union, not only with Christians but with colleagues from the other major monotheistic religions and with others from other traditions, quite universally,

- given his and his co-workers at his Global Ethics Institute, striving to promote the moral and humane conduct among adherents to all traditions

- and, given, the rigorous devil's advocacy he makes in those three mentioned books (he makes atheists' case better than any atheist I've ever read, and made a better one for belief)

I think you can be confident that if he could have found a convincing, rigorous, durable purely rationalistic origin for absolutes of moral conduct he would not only have admitted it, he'd have promoted it knowing that the atheist, the morally unreliable, we will always have with us.  At least in the present dispensation.

For a book not yet forty years old, his citation of "youth" and older generations might seem a little odd to those who can't remember the grandparents and parents he was talking about. The secularization he focuses on here is far more advanced as a general world trend. Certainly by the time of his death he realized that it was so general a trend that in many cases, such as the English speaking world, the churches were in many cases as fully secularized, in full pursuit of the kind of amorality, in some notable cases, as those without any pretenses of holding religious ideas or associating themselves with any identity. I think, it may be the case that the believed decline in "mainline Christianity" may be due more to their adherence to something more in line with the Gospel of Jesus than their concessions to secularism.  The "white evangelicals" the TV-night club "Christians" have made the most extreme of all concessions to a-Christian secularism and they have flourished in the secularized, media-saturated milieu.

The consequences of the loss of acceptance of any authority -the typically secularist, play-lefty American wet-dream of absolute freedom- is certainly represented as opposed to morality in his list of alternatives:

. . . why under any circumstances freedom is supposed to be better than oppression, justice better than self-interest, non-violence better than violence, love better than hate, peace better than war. Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness, we should not just as well lie, steal, commit adultery and murder;  indeed, why should we be humane or even "fair"?

rejecting the alternatives of morality, the list of self-centered, selfishness left is an honest description of the morality of easily the large majority of "white evangelicals," "traditional Catholics" and the largest part of, really, what most of us do when we come up with a choice between the moral alternative and what we really want.  It has been that way through all of our history, though the chance to choose the selfish part was more restricted to those with wealth and power, the richer and more powerful the more obvious.  Whether the Tudor or Stuart kings, the various royal houses of Europe and beyond, the various scheming and amoral families that had control of the papacy for large stretches of early modernism, the Czars of Russia, their reproduction under would-be Marxism, the continuation of that under Putin, the Emperors of China, both those of feudalism and currently under Communism, etc.

The "freedom" that he opposes to "oppression" is freedom for the other, for the neighbor as well as to yourself.  No one I've ever met is against being free to do what they want to, human oppression is always in operation along with the oppressors being free to do what they want to do.  That is, certainly, an aspect of freedom with few if any secular-political-philosophical declarations of freedom that is seldom considered and is taken as a given only by those too stupid to have the slightest concept of such abstracted ideals as put into effect in real human societies and under real human governance.  The secular American left of my generation could, under that heading of "freedom" overlook Mao and Brezhnev and even Pol Pot (for a time) and the American right can with overlooking America's client fascists and their millions, even billions enslaved and millions murdered, the reason the Republican-fascists slob all over Putin and Orban and whoever else Murdoch or Trump,etc. want to do business with.

I think a lot of the crisis of faith in authorities is due to the growth of the middle-class allowing them to aspire to have, as Huey Long the would-be Trump well before Trump had it, "every man a king," a promotion of a fantasy to those with only a little relative power and at lower budget levels to maintain that as a delusion.  

I think also that Hans Kung may not have realized that with what may, sometimes, sometimes even rarely, legitimate authorities from those institutions he listed as now discredited, the most dangerously unregulated entities, media figures (such as on FOX or worse), show-biz figures (such as Reagan and Trump), billionaires with even a slight sense of how to mount phony PR (such as Elon Musk and Steve Jobs), Youtube and pod-cast hate-talk bigmouths (take your pick) etc. will fill in the gaps left by the discrediting of traditional authority.  Eating up so much of the conscious attention of most people with anything from a radio to the most sophisticated online connection, the modern media, the internet, the very ratfuckable algorithms (if there is artificial intelligence, it's got to be the stupidest intelligence, ever), has produced a nightmare version of authority.  

And it is almost always an authority which shares this with Satan, it will always be strongest when it is appealing to the worst things in us.  I think that every world danger we have, Putin in Russia, Republican-fascists in the United States, various smaller and very dangerous figures in Europe and North America, many of the dictatorships in the third world, the international gangster organizations, the extraction industries, the international cartels, etc. have their power or maintain it against the world and public good due to the power and secular amorality of the mass media.

That's as true of the remaining influential ink on paper New York Times as it is of FOX or Facebook or Youtube.  The part that the NYT played in putting Trump in power through its thirty years of lies about Hillary Clinton deserves to destroy its credibility as much as the priest-pedophile scandal has to destroy the credibility of the all-unmarried-male Catholic hierarchy.

The revelation of discredit and corruption that comes with the the pulling back of the curtain to expose the phony PR is hardly confined to traditional traditional or quasi-religious academic authority, it is as true of secular authority as well as religious, it extends well into what is taken to be secular virtue, as well. I have rather specialized in my skepticism of the most sacrosanct of those as is encapsulated in the American First Amendment.  

The most basic pseudo-moral absolute that imperils us today, one which is granted the most enormous privilege ever given to such dangerous immorality in the guise of virtue, the privilege for the mass media to intentionally lie to its highest profitability (as can be read in the internal e-mails from FOX during the attempted putsch) in the American "First Amendment."  When your profitability model relies on harnessing the power of mass-immorality and gullibility, as you immorally plan on using immorality to make you rich, your own sense of truth and reason will consciously, admittedly be thrown aside on behalf of making money.  That's as true of the New York Times in a little way, of NPR in a "non-profit" scheme, as it is of the most corrupt pod caster or Youtube channel schmuck.

Still, I think that Hans Kung's approach to the problem works very well on an individual and even a societal scale. And the importance of that can in no way be taken as inconsiderable.  The choice to choose what is right over what is wrong is not done on a corporate or even a club basis, it is an individual choice, it is, in the most true sense of it, a choice to believe something.  It is a choice to really, effectively believe:
 
freedom is better than oppression, justice is better than self-interest, non-violence is better than violence, love is better than hate, peace is better than war, we MUST be just,w MUST tell the truth, NOT steal, NOT commit adultery and Not murder WE MUST BE FAIR.

Kung almost gives in to the sin of relativizing even within his listing of absolutely essential moral absolutes when he says:

Or, to put it more forcefully:  why, if it is to our advantage and our personal happiness,

because the very trouble is that WE MUST HOLD THOSE MORAL VALUES AS SELF EVIDENT EVEN WHEN DOING THE OPPOSITE WILL GET US WHAT WE, generally stupidly, BELIEVE WE WANT. What we want for ourselves is the origin of all of the evil we are capable of when we don't take the moral alternative as being absolutely required of us.  Secularism, modernism, "enlightenment rationality" has nothing in it that will make that choice reliably taken by a majority of People in any society or in most places in the world without accepting a supernatural origin of that requirement.

That is what cannot be done on a purely rationalistic basis because it is always possible to rationalize doing what we want to no matter what the cost to others, other People, other living, sentient beings, the local and even world environment, etc. is.  

With modern technology, the products of amoral, secular science and technology (especially global warming), the extraction industries, the weapons industries (physicists and technologists evil gift of nuclear weapons), the organization of secular-clerical efficiency and now computerized technology, even down to the horrific use of Western provided facial recognition to make a place like China into a sci-fi dystopian dictatorship, we can't afford any widespread rejection of morality because the consequences of it are too high.  

Putin, the KGB man and so ultimate company man, the man who followed the Chinese Communists' business model of scrapping pretenses of socialism while keeping the political monopoly of Communism and outdoing the worst of the capitalists at their own game, is pulling out of the Nuclear Arms Treaty as a game of chicken with the West for opposing his imperial annexation of Ukraine.  America's Republican-fascists are in his pocket.  So is a considerable part of the American media and the tin pot "American left" the Greens, and dear old Noam Chomsky.  If I live long enough I think Chomsky, who I once regarded as a kind of intellectual, atheist, secular saint, turning out to be a latter day mid-20th century American Stalinist hack might become something of a milestone in my complete rejection of secularism.  Of course I'm not in favor of the establishment of religion, agreeing with Madison in one thing, that establishment of a state religion is a guarantee of its corruption, but a secularized society in which what you watch on the screen is what you mistake as true is even more dangerous and more bound to corruption.

I don't dream of retreating into a "Christian summer" of the kind that Karl Rahner imagined as he nostalgically declared that we are in a "winter season of Christianity " in which the full flower of Christian cultural, societal and political influence is felt.  The history of Christianity mixed with political power and institutional strength was, for the most part, a hot house profusion of unreliable and gaudy blossoms, more typically a hideous fake polyester stage set of phoniness. What admitted good it was over classical and European paganism was not enough to avoid scandalous corruption.  That is how it was so easily discredited as, in fact, the similar Wizard of Oz facade of liberal democracy and academic credibility has now fallen, too. The typical stereotype of ugly Americanism in the post-WWII period, now turning in on itself under the likes of Marjory T. Green and other MAGA fascists, is a similar thing.  

I think that one of the lesser discussed items of Christian faith, the idea that we are to pray for God's kingdom on Earth through God's will being done must mean the best days of Christianity must lie in that as of yet unrealized hope.  Rationally, I shouldn't believe that little evidenced possibility will come about, though the prophesy of Jesus that the meek will inherit the Earth leads me to start to think the idea has more credibility in it than the arrogance of modern secularism, the very thing that has provided us with the means to make the alternative impossible.  If those meek are the remnant of a nuclear apocalypse with seriously reduced life-span and a very high level of birth defects - we only have ourselves to blame for it and I hope any surviving of us will never forget that.

I will be going though at least more of Hans Kung's book if not the entire text.  I think it has as much potential for productively thinking about things as the excellent work of Brueggemann.  
 
* Finding out more about the personality of the late Benedict XVI, having known that after Kung got him, then Karl Ratzinger, a job teaching in the University of Tubingen, when the student revolts of 1968 happened and offended his sense of faculty status, his right to the respect of the students, he went to a more conservative university and took a sharp turn right when he'd become prominent as  a progressive during the Vatican II years, has given me more insight into why Benedict XVI was so uninterested in the pastoral welfare of lay Catholics.  

One of the stories I recently read was when one of his former grad students led a delegation in a visit to him, then the Pope, he made the mistake of saying he was his friend.  Benedict coldly corrected him that he was his student, not his friend. That Pope could be a real prick. I can't imagine Francis doing anything remotely as unfriendly or unkind.  It's especially remarkable as Jesus is recorded as calling his followers his friends. It is doubtful that Ratzinger, or Benedict, had many friends nor do I get the sense that he much missed them.  He was a disaster as Pope and as the chief enforcer of John Paul II, the second least pastoral Pope of the previous hundred sixty years, so far as I can discern.  

** Here, as so often when reading literate Europeans, it's necessary to point out that "liberalization" here is in line with the secularist, amoral meaning of the word popularized in France and England in the 18th century, meaning mostly freeing investors and businessmen, landowners, etc. to maximize profitability for the rising middle class and untitled wealthy, more to do with breaking down the remnants of feudalism than with much of anything else.

Such "freedoms" as promoted in the English revolution, the French Revolution" and the American revolution, with their various and never unalloyed benefits were secondary, such as freedoms for some and when those wouldn't endanger wealth accumulation, never in practice for all, certainly in their effects if not their promotion were incidental to the larger purpose.  A lot of that was more a matter of style, as can be seen in Jefferson's turn from "All men are created equal" to his mathematical analysis on the profitability TO HIM of slavery and Madison's late in life bitter skepticism about freedom.  There is nothing more telling than a 60s anti-war activist turned Republican-fascist once they were out of danger of being drafted(David Stockman to  Peter Navarro), an apostate Marxist (Horowitz is merely one of literally hundreds I could name), a cynical business monster ex-hippy (too many to choose a typical example of one), to show just how phony pseudo-morality under secularism really can get.

Remember You Are Dust . . . Or Reject It?

RMJ has posted an excellent Ash Wednesday liturgy, which is better than what I was thinking of posting. 

It might seem morbid to some but I always feel something's  when Lent starts late in the civil calendar.  There seems to be something more suited to late winter in Lent, a season for sober thoughts and experimenting with leaving excess in the past.   Though I've always detested carnival,  the disgusting celebration of excess, mostly among those who have no intention of conducting the experiment with simplicity and non-consuming.  Of course, given what I said a week and more back about America's imperial religious holiday and its commercially encouraged excess, you don't have to wait for Fat Tuesday for that.

The problem with using symbols as sacramentals is that they can be so easily emptied of their meaning as they become a thing in themselves.   Wearing the ashes after Mass as a show is directly contrary to the Gospel for the day - see RMJ's excellent post.

I always thought that the use of the "Remember you are dust. . . " line from Genesis 3 was scandalous because the Gospel of Jesus certainly sees us as far more than dust.  I think it's like the nasty old procedure of Last Rites, designed to scare someone, a form of psychological torture.  Guilt for real wrongdoing, a healthy sense of shame is something I'm all for,  needless morbidity and torture, not so much.   Even as a little kid getting palm ashes rubbed on my forehead that it seemed like a refutation of eternal life and perhaps that was the meaning of whoever put it in that glorious mess of a book.  As someone recently said to me, if there's no afterlife, why would anyone thing anything mattered?   As someone else has pointed out,  if you figure you can eat, drink and be merry, or rule as a totalitarian and murderous dictator and you'll end up in the same oblivion as the most self-denying saint then there's nothing to trouble you as you do what you want to.  

Whatever residual unbelief I may suffer from the generally overwhelming human urge to get away with as much as you figure you can get away with without feeling any consequences is something I not only believe, completely, but know empirically.  It is the history of human depravity expressed aphoristically.  But I'm going to get long if I keep this up.

I'll keep working on what I was working on, maybe it will come more together.  

Hate Mail - I Can Always Count On It When I Diss The ACLU

THE PREVALENT SUPERSTITION that there is some virtue in the idea that because the 100% of propertied white males,  from many states exclusively Protestant propertied white males who elected and comprised the First Congress, the legislatures of the various states and who were the only people of "We The People" who wrote, adopted and passed the First Amendment were too stupid to stipulate that there was a difference between malicious lies which have no right to be told and the straight forward truth which PEOPLE have a right to hear, so WE THE PEOPLE in perpetuity are NEVER EVER to learn the most harsh lessons of history,  slavery, genocide, insurrections, lynch-law,  the perpetual war against Women (3-4 women are routinely lynched every single day to little to no notice),  eco-cide, etc. and that those who want to perpetrate those are always, for eternity to have a second chance to impose those on the country and the world is probably the stupidest idea common among college-credentialed Americans, certainly among liberals.

I will never, ever say that white supremacy, male supremacy, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, other and assorted forms of bigotry,  . . . lies about man made global warming and other universal evils have any right to be promoted, to be foisted on gullible and ignorant people, that we must! must! allow those lies to be spread because "the First Amendment" is worded so stupidly.  It is exactly as stupid to hold that because those amateurs who drafted the "Bill of Rights" were too stupid to be explicit in the rational limits of speech and press freedom as the fascists outside of and on the goddamned Supreme Court use the 2nd Amendment those numbskulls wrote is similarly and vaguely dangerous. 

Nazis have no right to lie that I am obliged to recognize or which it is safe to allow the law to grant them, they abandoned even a presumption of a right to unlimited speech by the lesson of history about what they are able to do when they find enough stupid, vulnerable people to gain power.   Their intentions of depriving others of every right, up to and including the right to live annul that as a right and transforms it into an insanely granted privilege to lie with impunity no matter how dangerous that is.  The idea that once they have the power to take power by force then we then can stop them is one of the stupidest refusals to learn from observed history that is ubiquitous among the allegedly educated elite.

White supremacists have no right to lie, male supremacists have none (remember that FBI estimate of 3-4 women EVERY DAY! WHO ARE MURDERED BECAUSE THEY ARE WOMEN). 

The oil, coal and gas industries have no right to lie us into ecocide because the assinine Supreme Court says that they are "people" and so have the same rights that they stupidly allow Nazis, white supremacists, other malignant people. 

Anyone who claims  Nazis, etc. have those rights are saying they are to be allowed, forever, a chance to turn "Never Again" into X number of times again.   Anyone who belongs to any beleagured group who holds that First Amendementy nonsense is a complete chump.

The excuse that if we don't allow Nazis, etc. that chance then "someone may take away our right to tell the truth and promote equality and universal respect for all" is an idiot because it's exactly those they empower who will guarantee that happens.  It is worse than paradoxical, it is totally stupid!