I am your king.
Posted on 03/13/2005 9:49:16 AM PST by Lando Lincoln
Is the Judeo-Christian tradition trespassing on liberal-socialist territory?
In economics and political theory, free riders are people who benefit from actions of others, without doing anything to merit it. I asserted in The Moral Free Rider Problem that liberal-socialists are free riders on the social order of Western civilization, which they did not create and do not support.
Western civilization is founded upon the moral rules of conduct deriving from our Greek philosophical and Judeo-Christian religious traditions. Atheistic and agnostic liberal-socialists are moral free riders who benefit from living in a society ordered by the morality of spiritual religion, while sneering at spiritual religion and moral codes as simple-minded ignorance. At best, they do nothing to contribute to social order. Too many of them do everything in their power to discredit or to destroy the very source of social order. Without Judeo-Christian morality, they would be in the position of scientists and scholars in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia: working under orders for the collectivized National State.
To this, a reader retorted that it is conservatives and moralists who are taking the free ride. Liberals contend that all of what we consider to be modern society, with its vast improvements of living standards, is exclusively the product of the rational human mind, in a world of secular materialism and moral relativism. Progress toward human knowledge therefore is diverted by concerns about unreal things like God and moral virtues.
Liberal dogma comes from a very ancient philosophical position, first articulated in classical Greece. Plato, in the Theaetetus, quotes Protagoras as having said that man is the measure of all things, meaning that there are no such things as God, morality, or eternal truths. Each person is governed only by his pursuit of sensual pleasure and his avoidance of sensual pain. Each person makes his own standards, based solely upon the perceptions of his physical senses.
Plato, of course, takes the opposite position: the physical senses are no guides at all to truth, which exists in Ideal form, manifested only as indistinct shadows in our physical world.
Obviously, if Protagoras is our guide, the reader's retort is correct. Conservatives and moralists really would be taking a free ride on secular society and in so doing making life more difficult for everyone. Religion and morality, far from being a force for social good, would oppress human freedom and oppose scientific knowledge.
This is the message given to American students for the past century. As William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale described it, most textbooks espoused socialistic and secular doctrine, and most social sciences professors at Yale in 1951 were socialists and either agnostics or atheists. The same was true of other elite universities and had been so since the first decades of the 20th century. Professors in the social sciences don't hesitate to dismiss spiritual religion as ignorance and, in the physical sciences, to dismiss morality and religion as value judgments having no place in science.
Everything we know of history tells us that this is a false view. How then did religion and morality come to be identified with oppression and ignorance?
The first answer is the brutal Thirty Years War (1612 – 1648) that devastated Europe during Galileo’s and Newton’s era, when rival Protestant and Catholic princes fought for political control of Western Europe. This mass slaughter and destruction led Voltaire, in his 1766 satire Candide, to attack Christianity as the enemy of the people and the senseless cause of European warfare and strife. The Thirty Years War, however, was only nominally about religious differences. Fundamentally it was a struggle for political power, as modern nation-states took shape.
French intellectuals nonetheless identified the Church with autocratic political rule and suffering of the masses during the Thirty Years War. Cardinal Richelieu served as French Minister of Foreign Affairs and War early in the 1600s, and Cardinal Mazarin, as first minister in the middle 1600s.
A present-day variation on this theme is the belief of some feminists that religion was fabricated by men to subjugate women.
The second factor was French Revolutionary philosophers’ assumption in the 18th and 19th centuries that they could discover secular and materialistic laws controlling social behavior and political activity that would be analogous to Newton’s laws of gravity governing the motions of planets. Among them, Saint-Simon and Comte claimed to have discovered the Immutable Law of History that predicted inevitable historical Progress away from the age of spiritual religion and into the new scientific age of secularity, rationalism, and socialism, which Comte called The Religion of Humanity.
History tells a different story. The popular idea that religion prevented scientific inquiry is simply not correct. Ironically, the Catholic Church's preservation of learning after the fall of the Western Roman Empire was all that kept scientific inquiry alive.
The Renaissance, beginning centuries before the 18th century Enlightenment, was preeminently a period when all of the talents and energies of poets, architects, builders, sculptors, and painters were focused on glorifying God. It was the Renaissance’s flowering of new perspectives in art and literature that led to renewed interest in nature and the beginning of the physical sciences.
The most widely known and admired person in this humanist revival was Erasmus, a devout Catholic priest. One of his closest friends, humanist scholar Thomas More, died to defend his Catholic faith.
The greatest leaps of knowledge in mathematics and the physical sciences occurred in the 17th century, many decades before the revival of Greek sophists’ secular materialism by French Revolutionary philosophers. It is from this period that liberals build their religion vs. science case. Galileo is usually the only exhibit entered in evidence.
Despite the generally propagated myth, Galileo got into trouble with the Church, not because he advocated the theory that the earth revolves around the sun, but because he was a man with a colossal ego and a startling lack of judgment.
For a number of years the Church had raised no serious objections to Galileo’s heliocentric theory, so long as he expressed it as one of the several theories explaining movements of the planets and did not present it as the only true doctrine. But for Galileo this wasn’t enough.
In 1623, Galileo's long-time personal friend Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. Barberini had always championed Galileo’s right to express his theories and gave his blessings for Galileo to publish a discussion of the theories of planetary motion. Galileo then repaid his friend’s support by ridiculing him publicly.
Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It is cast as a conversation among three gentlemen, one of whom is given the name Simplicio (or simpleton). The arguments, even the exact words, attributed to Simplicio were known to all as the arguments advanced by Galileo’s old friend Barberini. Galileo was, in effect, declaring to the world that the new Pope was a fool and that the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church was ridiculous nonsense. He had punched the Church in the nose and dared the Church to hit back.
Unfortunately for him, Galileo’s ridicule came at a time when the Roman Catholic Church was under attack, and Europe was ablaze with the Thirty Years War between Protestant and Catholic states. His action was comparable to France’s diplomatic stab-in-the-back of the U.S. at the United Nations after Al Queda’s 9/11/01 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center buildings.
Given the prevailing state of war and its struggle for survival, the Church was remarkably restrained in giving Galileo a choice between excommunication and cessation of further writing on the subject. Galileo accepted the ban on writing and remained a Catholic until his death.
As a final note, at the time, Galileo had no conclusive evidence to support the view that only the Copernican theory was correct. A rival theory by noted astronomer Tycho Brahe had as much evidence in its favor and was as accurate in its predictions as Galileo’s. We now know, in fact, that Galileo’s assertion that the planets travel in circular orbits was incorrect.
Note also that the greatest of all the 17th century mathematical geniuses was Isaac Newton, whose laws of motion and the equations for predicting gravity’s effects on movements of heavenly bodies, not to mention invention of calculus and the physics of optics and light, were the foundations of modern science. Newton was a life-long, devout Christian who never questioned the existence of God. Nor was publication of his work proscribed by the Church.
Liberals can only make the case that believers in spiritual religion have argued against secular materialism, not that religion has suppressed scholarship or scientific investigation. Today the shoe is really on the other foot. It is liberals who attempt to suppress spiritual religion and personal morality.
A final point of considerable importance is liberal-socialism’s antagonism toward private property and corporate enterprise. Think, for example, of the knee-jerk reaction from liberals that the Bush administration invaded Iraq solely to enrich corporations like Halliburton. It is impossible to reconcile this with my critic’s assertion that the great successes of modern economic and technical society are the product of liberal-socialist rationalism and its amorality.
Since the early 19th century, especially in Karl Marx’s works at mid-century, liberals have preached that private property and Big Business are oppressors of the workers and are the chief bulwarks against perfection of human society in a socialist political state. Wars, crime, poverty, and other social ills are said to be the product of private business activity, whose profits represent the stolen part of labor’s full wages.
Moreover, liberal-socialist theoreticians like Max Weber and R. H. Tawney have linked the rise of capitalism (taking that term as a synonym for private property and corporate enterprise) to what they term the Protestant Ethic. This Christian ethic is criticized by liberals, because it is highly individualistic and thus at odds with socialist collectivism.
The facts, of course, are that the industrial revolution was just getting a full head of steam at the time that Saint-Simon and Comte were promulgating the secular religion of socialism. From that time forward, the living standards of the whole world, especially of the West, have risen far faster than ever before in history. And that improvement, until after World War II, was overwhelmingly the result of individualistic initiative by entrepreneurs in Christian societies. Far more than half the world’s industry and commerce in that period was accounted for by the two greatest Christian nations, England and the United States.
Contrary to my reader’s retort, demonstrating that secular materialism has benefited humanity, let alone that it is the sole source of scientific knowledge and economic well-being is an impossible task.
The bitter fruit of liberalism's secular materialism has been, not social harmony and prosperity, but the mass murders of the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Russia, Hitler's National Socialist Germany, Mao's Red China, and Castro's Cuba. Without the moral restraints of our Judeo-Christian heritage, on rulers and ruled, there would be precious little science and improvement of living standards. The implosion of Soviet Russia and the slow withering of socialist France and Germany make this clear for all who will see.
Thomas E. Brewton had the extraordinary good fortune to study political philosophy under Eric Voegelin and Constitutional law under Walter Berns. His website is The View from 1776.
Nonsense. Anyone who earns an honest living contributes to the "support" of his civilization.
The suggestion that one's contributions are irrelevant unless accompanied by right ideology is the sort of totalitarianism associated with the little troll in Pyongyang.
Does this mean that one can have an absolute system of morality if one believes in a higher power?
I've have often heard this argument, usually to support Christian morality. But something about it leaves me uneasy. What is it that makes us adopt the moral code prescribed by the higher power?
If it is because we face punishment for disobedience, does that make morality ultimately just a matter of utilitarian self-interest? If it is because we are commanded to, isn't that just a circular argument? And if it is something else, outside of the higher power's prescribed code, doesn't that mean that our morality is based on something outside of the higher power- or possibly within ourselves?
I am your king.
And, for that matter, what makes us declare that the Prophet John Doe is conveying the will of a genuine higher power but the Preacher Richard Roe is just spouting crazy talk?
Nope. Buddhists have transmitted their ethical teachings across more generations than Christianity has existed. For that matter, the classic Greeks maintained a moral system independently of their belief in various gods (the denizens of the Greek pantheon might as well have been so many comic-book superheroes, and their mythology contained less moral edification than an average month's worth of Marvel or DC output).
Indeed. Would the author defend Clinton for siccing the Secret Service on a guy who yelled "You Suck!"* at him? (After all, yelling vulgar insults in a crowd does show "startling lack of judgment", does it not?)
*This event, of course, occurred before it became known that the passive voice of the verb would have been more accurately descriptive.
Breaking natural adjustment mechanisms is stupid. In this case, it is clearly necessary for the birthrate to adjust downward once individual resource consumption, energy use, etc rise to levels characteristic of a mature economy (otherwise, the various bleak forecasts of environmentalists become fact rather than Chicken Little doomcrying). The fact that it happens naturally is fortuitous, as it avoid the need for government intrusion upon the family (which would also be incurred by any social engineering efforts to "break the link" of natural adjustment).
The problem is that our society is based on growth and once a society stops growing it starts declining and gets replaced. That is exactly what is happening in Europe where the Arabs are displacing the normal ethnic populations.
I think the reason for our population not growing and starting to decline is partly because the government has stepped in to provide services that children typically performed. From a selfish viewpoint it doesn't make much sense to have a big family and spend your life raising those kids when the government will take care of us in our old age.
Growth always stops, because exponential increases always exceed any finite limit. It can happen the easy way (gradual adjustment) or the hard way (a collapse). Nature doesn't care which.
Ping
1-Buddhism is not atheism.
2-What are the "holy books" of the Greek atheists? Plato's Republic? The ancient Greeks had a pantheon of gods. By and large they were not atheists.
These quibbles are beside the point, which is that the promulgation of morality without divine sanction is clearly illustrated by Buddhism (which does not encompass belief in a divinity) and classic Hellenism (in which the gods were, as I put it, the equivalent of comic-book superheroes about whom larger-than-life tales were told).
Actually, quite a few RELIGIONS have started that way. If we follow your logic, the morality of the followers of these religions has just sprung from some guy named Fred. That certainly was the case with the Manson family...although the guy was named Charlie.
If you pick up a morality or ethics textbook and go to the footnotes, and then get those books and go to their footnotes, and so on and so on, you will find they trace their roots back to belief systems that at their founding premise assumed the existence of a Higher Power. The school of thought known as morality originated based on a belief in a Higher Power. The school of thought known as ethics grew out of the school of thought known as morality. This isn't my opinion it is just a fact.
But morality is, as we defined earlier, a doctrine or system of moral conduct, any particular set of moral principles or rules of conduct. We debate about whether those are divinely inspired or universally present, and human morality corresponds to a supernatural code of ethics, which is absolute, or whether it is a human phenomenon, that can be explained as a result of genetic and cultural forces, and a true, universal moral code does not rightly exist. If you could prove that the former was the case, you would cite to these footnotes and do so. You cannot. It is your assertion and your job to look it up and back it up with facts, but you will find it tough or impossible to do, because the origins of morality are not footnoted. The reason we're debating this at all is you deny even the possibility that morality could exist outside religion. I've demonstrated otherwise by proving there are groups that have a morality of their own and aren't religious or basing their morality on religion.
But if you'd like to say that those groups aren't really outside of religion, then YOU show me how it is that the teachings of the Buddha or the doctrine of the Soviets were NOT atheist. That's how logic works. You make a statement that's unsupported, I show you an example of how you're wrong, and to prove otherwise YOU need to defuse the examples' viability. You can't do so.
I can see how using the word "absolutely" twice when talking about absolutes could be a little "unclear."
Sure, all we did was talk about absolutes before your latest reformation of your thesis. /sarcasm Whatever.
Personally, I don't think anything at the UN has ever had anything to do with morality, nor is morality a particularly good starting point for an analysis of Soviet treaty signing motivation.
Your dismissal of the example is indicative of your dedication to your thesis in the face of any evidence otherwise. You stated that if I have a rational basis to declare something as heinous as rape or genocide objectively wrong, a higher power must exist. The Soviets declared that genocide was wrong. We can safely presume they had a rational basis for their declaration, they weren't insane. Therefore under your terms, a belief in a higher power must have existed in the Soviet Union. Except that was against state policy. You may dismiss the U.N. or the Soviets, but you can't dismiss the fact that the example is dead on applicable to your stated thesis and proves its untruth.
You seem to think that in personally, or collectively, viewing something as always wrong that this qualifies as an absolute morality--it does not.
Not at all. Just that it qualifies as morality, which you think can't exist outside of religion. But how have you demonstrated that it doesn't qualify as absolute? You haven't. You've just stated that it doesn't, which isn't the same thing at all. I've already demonstrated that other people may have a moral code and an ethical sense when they perform acts outside of OUR code of morality. They may know right from wrong--in the context of their ethical system. They may even have the same absolutes we do. But they do not necessarily need a higher power to have those absolutes, and to claim otherwise is simply a claim, one without any proof. I've provided examples. You just deny, without any assertion as to how those examples are somehow false.
You can have a moral code that has a rational basis to declare something always wrong. At the same time, someone else can have a rational basis to declare that very same thing not wrong, or even right and desirable. Either you believe that those two value systems can coexist with no contradictions (moral relativist) or you believe that one must be right and the other wrong (absolute morality.)
This is true. It doesn't disprove the fact that the other morality EXISTS, which is what we're arguing about. Not that there is a right and wrong morality; that there ARE other moralities outside of religious thought.
Compare the rational basis for these two contradictory value systems and you will find it is rationally impossible to declare one absolutely correct and one absolutely incorrect without looking to a Higher Power. (If you can, I'm all ears.)
You certainly are not. I have already done so. A Utilitarianist view that providing the greatest good for the greatest number is the goal of government shows that the Soviet and American systems competed rather poorly. If we allowed analysis of the citizens' opinions under their system, the judgment would inevitably come out on the side of the American system. There would be an absolute as to the judgment of the people involved, no relativity there whatsoever. A poll is not a higher power. I am not a utilitarian, but I've already noted that there are ways to judge the difference between competing moralities and you sweep these aside as unacceptable and wrong--demonstrating again that as far as you're concerned, your thesis is unassailable even by facts or examples which show it's wrong.
Ok. Why? What is your rational basis for declaring one morality definitively superior or inferior to another? What moral authority do you draw upon to declare Eichman's morality to be wrong? Is it just your subjective opinion that Eichman was wrong or was he objectively wrong on the face of what he believed?
Irrelevancy again. I said that to demonstrate that there can be more than one morality, and to illustrate that I'm not a relativist in so saying, and you brush it aside with 'but what's YOUR opinion on the wrongness of the morality?' That is simply not relevant, when the debate's about whether morality can exist outside of religion. You are dismissive and attempt to distract from any example that demonstrates your point is wrong. It's tiresome.
Getting back to the atheists--and try not to read any superiority complex into this, it is only an intellectual argument to make a point. This Country was founded based on a certain set of beliefs. All our laws trace themselves back to the Constitution--it's the thing that says we can make laws, the Constitution traces itself back to principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence--it's the thing that says we can make our own government. Thomas Jefferson and those who helped him write it reasoned that "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." They based this on the belief, "that all men are created equal" and have "certain unalienable Rights." That belief is premised on those rights being "endowed by their Creator." If you dispute the postulate the those Rights are endowed by a Creator, all that followed that postulate--the founding of America, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and all of our laws--is brought into question. If "Nature's God" does not entitle men "to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station" and found their own country, what does? So all of our Constitutional Rights are premised on the existence of a Creator.
Flag waving irrelevancy. You are trying to get me to say that the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or the United States would exist without religious people acting on inspiration from God, and I never said anything of the sort and disagree with that. Where we disagree you have already been proven wrong--that morality can exist independent of religion.
Therefore there is a certain level of irony in an atheist-- who based on the definition of what he is disputes the premise of those rights--invokes those rights to try and abolish the symbols that are the basis for those rights existing in the first place.
Irrelevancy again. That American atheists derive rights from a constitution that religious people were the motivation for, we don't argue about. And if you were arguing from a strictly American standpoint, you wouldn't have made the statements you did about morality in general. You believe morality can't exist without belief in a higher power. Post 2--All morality stems originally from a belief in God. This flag waving is distraction from our debate, because you've already lost it.
I've been trying to avoid this thread. I knew it would take a lot of time and reading and I've been overwhelmed. But you have now officially served it onto my plate, thank you very much! I'll get to it later tonight after the other half of little jeremiah goes to bed.
:-)
Laura Ingraham is an arrogant, sanctimonious, but well educated moron. To her truth is congruent with her assinine chatter each day only by coincidence and only when it suits her daily irrationality.
Of course their are limits to growth. It is just that if I had my preference I would rather limit the Muslims growth rather than ours. You on the other hand seem to want the Muslims to conquer the world by out breeding us.
Are you an advocate of the thoroughly discredited book "Limits to Growth?"
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