Like a Spirit in the Night Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Wrong Turn Jr.'s teeth are bursting through! Two little Gillettes, bottom gum center, ready to saw apart daddy's fingers and other objects of suckitude. Work is bursting through! Many, many late stories--and a certain thrill at being under the gun. Hmmm.

Tim and Aaron (with a hot-snark injection from BeK) have a fine debate going in the comments section below. To (hopefully) move the discussion a bit. some ideas. Note: I am starting to lose concentration here, so these will be sketchy. Do me a favor, and don't drive too big of a truck through the holes, OK?

Free Will: The point isn't that God makes us do right. (If so, he'd have a pretty crappy track record.) It's that God strengthens us to do right. We can call on that strength or (more often) ignore it. But it's always our choice.

Ethics and Atheism: I conceded at the start that most of the atheists I know are better people than I am. But I don't agree that those fine ethics come out of thin air. I would argue that atheism, as described and practiced in the comments, is a relatively recent historical development--and the underpinnings of its ethical system are rooted in that old bugaboo, the Judeo-Christian tradition. In other words, when the rationalists cast off religion and went casting for something else, they didn't "make it new"--they drew on what they had at hand. Even if we don't mention his name, God is in the DNA of our institutions, and hidden all through our societal memory. When it comes to ethics, he frames the debate.

I would further argue that all those fine ideas that are supposedly a priori--for instance, self-sacrifice for people outside your immediate family--are not instincts at all. Contra Rousseau, people aren't born generous and gentle. We have to be nudged toward sanity, a thousand prods a day from family and friends and faith. Wrong Turn Jr. reminds me of this constantly: He had to be taught to swallow, for instance, and that nighttime is for sleeping. So when it comes to abstract stuff like morals, I'm not going to rely on what he can pull out of the a priori zone.

There's more to say, especially about Aaron's key question. But I'm fading and it deserves closer attention than I can give.

For now, a Biddy Buddy:



Pax.

@ 9:26:00 PM,

6 Comments:

At 1:03 PM, Blogger BeK said...

Admit it, you yearn for my hot-snark injection.

 
At 10:00 PM, Blogger Aaron said...

Sure. WT Jr. would be a wild animal if you didn't bother to teach him to be human. But you do bother and it's unthinkable to you not to bother. It's probably even more unthinkable to Mrs. WTJ. And just like you, people without Judeo-Christian ethics have been raising their children not to kill and eat them all over the world for thousands of years.

The notion that God, and specifically the God of Abraham, is necessary to form an ethical or moral code is very hard to square with Buddha. It is a hop-skip-and-a-jump from writing off Africa as the Dark Continent jungle of savages because they lack Jesus to make them civilized. People have been moral and decent to one another, beautiful and heroic, all over the world in every culture throughout history with absolutely no notion of God as He is invoked in the Judeo-Christian world. If they are all simply self-deceived and the God of Abraham was really in the driver's seat, inspiring them, again I say we have a problem of free will.

But anyhoo... My point is not that we can't kill each other. Obviously, we can. Neither is it that there's no such thing as a person who has been raised without any moral code and is capable of (and commits) horrifying acts. Obviously, that too is true. My point is that I am able, with absolute clarity, to call those acts horrifying and wrong without needing God to back my call or an elaborate Wittgensteinian thesis on morality. I have neither, and yet I'm saying it and I believe it. What else really matters in agreeing on shared "values"?

 
At 9:40 AM, Blogger Rob L. said...

As soon as we lose the moral basis, we cease to be religious. There is no such thing as religion over-riding morality. Man, for instance,cannot be untruthful, cruel or incontinent and claim to have God on his side.
Mohandas Gandhi

 
At 10:11 AM, Blogger Pete said...

Sorry, but I don't understand "Gillettes." Is that supposed to read "Chiclets"?

 
At 1:11 PM, Blogger Aaron said...

Like the razor.

 
At 1:26 PM, Blogger Pete said...

Thank you, I get it now!

 

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