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Primitive Christianity Revived, Again
Does God have a moral system?
I started working, some time ago, on the blog post "Political Minds with Religious Implications", because it seemed to me there were religious implications and I couldn't quite get my mind around them. [I realize that that post itself, a short summary of where George Lakoff's thinking has led me, is a lot to digest & comment on right away... and I hope that's why I'm not seeing comments there.]
What makes a system of morality 'moral', as I see it, is that regardless of whether it seems right to me, there are people able and willing to agree that action via its principles is a right means of acting and of settling disputes between them. Lakoff says that "liberal" and "conservative" positions on issues differ because people on different sides, on any particular issue, are applying different moral systems to evaluate the rights and wrongs of it. The two basic available flavors are what he calls "nurturant parent" and "strict father". [People have preferences between these models, but typically can apply both in different circumstances.]
Clearly, the so-called Testimony of Equality clashes with "strict father" morality; I've heard somewhere that when a few 17th Century crewmembers started holding Meeting for worship on a British warship, what first got them into trouble was not an attack of pacifism (though violence & authoritarianism seem to be mutually compatible) but an inability to justify 'sir'ing and saluting their officers.
But I'm not so much examining Quaker "doctrines" as general theological ones. All persons are morally equal because God utterly outranks us all... which seems to make for an egalitarian morality with one big exception. Throughout the Bible you find God acting in a high-handed and sometimes violently punitive way, presumably because He's doing so from a position of transcendent benevolence and wisdom-- but where people have trouble discerning that, the splat flat fact is that He can.
Between people... Early on, you don't seem to have any authority of one person over another-- until Cain, in founding a city, and his descendants presumably lord it over their adherents. The patriarchs live in an inter-tribal anarchy, a sort of 'peer-to-peer' moral system where there are customs governing raiding, hospitality etc.-- but enforcement of them seems to depend on who's got more trained fighters on the spot... and within each tribe, a despotic father. But the women have their own ideas on this. And cunning is a value, even when it undercuts hierarchical authority. Consider how Jacob snatches the birthright and the paternal blessing, with his mother's connivance. Or how, when he takes his women and secedes from his father-in-law's household, the women bring the family idols and hide them by sitting over them, claiming to be having their period. (This is evasion of their basic top-down moral order-- but no one makes them return the idols.)
Abraham dickers with God like a fellow-trader, and indeed seeks to catch Him in a moral headlock: "Shall not the Lord of all the Earth do right?"
Moses, under God's orders, subverts the authority of Pharaoh and leads a multitude out of slavery... who then persistently kvetch and dispute Moses' authority, and God's, for some forty years, whereupon the lot of them move into Canaan and set up an anarchistic tribal theocracy. Establishing a monarchy, and a centralized Temple, is at first seen as not what God wants-- but then we find a hierarchical moral order established, generally considered to be God's will, for some time thereafter. It is the hubris and injustices, the worldly-mindedness of the elite under this moral order, which the prophets insist God objects to-- and punishes-- with murderous conquests by the Assyrians (of Israel) and the Babylonians (of Judah). Here we have a classical picture of God, supporting (and dominating, and making use of) the powers of the world, but strongly disapproving of oppression.
But by Jesus' time, the land has passed into the power of several oppressive world empires, enjoyed a brief independence under its own squabbling local oppressors, then fallen into the iron grasp of Rome. "The Kingdom of God", which many of his people yearn for, would imply the overthrow (undermining?) of all that established "order". Jesus himself (as I see him) seems to embody the ultimate "nurturing parent" ethic, but with an ominous element of "Just wait until your Father gets home! You'll catch it!" That element, of heavy-handed Fatherly 'discipline', manifests in the Jewish Revolt(s), the destruction of the Temple, indeed in our increasingly violence subsequent history...
and in fact, to this day you will find large numbers of people, utterly certain that their version of hierarchical, punitive, militaristic, sexually-restrictive, harsh morality is just what God (and Jesus) ordered.
And God built all of this into us, into this world-- produced people unquestioningly dedicated to one or another conflicting systems. I've got my notions on this, but what do others think?
What makes a system of morality 'moral', as I see it, is that regardless of whether it seems right to me, there are people able and willing to agree that action via its principles is a right means of acting and of settling disputes between them. Lakoff says that "liberal" and "conservative" positions on issues differ because people on different sides, on any particular issue, are applying different moral systems to evaluate the rights and wrongs of it. The two basic available flavors are what he calls "nurturant parent" and "strict father". [People have preferences between these models, but typically can apply both in different circumstances.]
Clearly, the so-called Testimony of Equality clashes with "strict father" morality; I've heard somewhere that when a few 17th Century crewmembers started holding Meeting for worship on a British warship, what first got them into trouble was not an attack of pacifism (though violence & authoritarianism seem to be mutually compatible) but an inability to justify 'sir'ing and saluting their officers.
But I'm not so much examining Quaker "doctrines" as general theological ones. All persons are morally equal because God utterly outranks us all... which seems to make for an egalitarian morality with one big exception. Throughout the Bible you find God acting in a high-handed and sometimes violently punitive way, presumably because He's doing so from a position of transcendent benevolence and wisdom-- but where people have trouble discerning that, the splat flat fact is that He can.
Between people... Early on, you don't seem to have any authority of one person over another-- until Cain, in founding a city, and his descendants presumably lord it over their adherents. The patriarchs live in an inter-tribal anarchy, a sort of 'peer-to-peer' moral system where there are customs governing raiding, hospitality etc.-- but enforcement of them seems to depend on who's got more trained fighters on the spot... and within each tribe, a despotic father. But the women have their own ideas on this. And cunning is a value, even when it undercuts hierarchical authority. Consider how Jacob snatches the birthright and the paternal blessing, with his mother's connivance. Or how, when he takes his women and secedes from his father-in-law's household, the women bring the family idols and hide them by sitting over them, claiming to be having their period. (This is evasion of their basic top-down moral order-- but no one makes them return the idols.)
Abraham dickers with God like a fellow-trader, and indeed seeks to catch Him in a moral headlock: "Shall not the Lord of all the Earth do right?"
Moses, under God's orders, subverts the authority of Pharaoh and leads a multitude out of slavery... who then persistently kvetch and dispute Moses' authority, and God's, for some forty years, whereupon the lot of them move into Canaan and set up an anarchistic tribal theocracy. Establishing a monarchy, and a centralized Temple, is at first seen as not what God wants-- but then we find a hierarchical moral order established, generally considered to be God's will, for some time thereafter. It is the hubris and injustices, the worldly-mindedness of the elite under this moral order, which the prophets insist God objects to-- and punishes-- with murderous conquests by the Assyrians (of Israel) and the Babylonians (of Judah). Here we have a classical picture of God, supporting (and dominating, and making use of) the powers of the world, but strongly disapproving of oppression.
But by Jesus' time, the land has passed into the power of several oppressive world empires, enjoyed a brief independence under its own squabbling local oppressors, then fallen into the iron grasp of Rome. "The Kingdom of God", which many of his people yearn for, would imply the overthrow (undermining?) of all that established "order". Jesus himself (as I see him) seems to embody the ultimate "nurturing parent" ethic, but with an ominous element of "Just wait until your Father gets home! You'll catch it!" That element, of heavy-handed Fatherly 'discipline', manifests in the Jewish Revolt(s), the destruction of the Temple, indeed in our increasingly violence subsequent history...
and in fact, to this day you will find large numbers of people, utterly certain that their version of hierarchical, punitive, militaristic, sexually-restrictive, harsh morality is just what God (and Jesus) ordered.
And God built all of this into us, into this world-- produced people unquestioningly dedicated to one or another conflicting systems. I've got my notions on this, but what do others think?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Tom Smith on
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I disagree that God "built all of this into us, into this world," but rather still asks us "Where are you?" from the beginnings of human history. One of the next questions was "Where is your brother?" In both cases I believe the intent of these myths is to point out that we as humans choose to disconnect ourselves from God and each other when we place ourselves and our own interests above those of God. The subsequent stories of constant human weakness and stubbornness with God's grace and forgiveness overriding these. The prophets tried to steer the stories in a different direction and the Prophet above other prophets, Jesus, spoke not of doing away with the laws trying to keep human weakness and stubbornness in check but rather in fulfilling the intent of these laws by showing the way to overcome these ways. Not by entering the Roman garrison overlooking the Jewish temple, but rather entering the temple and showing that what God requires is loving mercy, doing justice and walking humbly with God.
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Permalink Reply by Forrest Curo on
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No doubt that was a rhetorical "Where are you?"... (He knew where Adam lived.)
It isn't just that people place 'ourselves and our interests' apart. We have systems indicating how we and our interests should be reconciled with other selves and their interests; we'll even place these above our personal interests, when we have to. Sometimes these don't really keep human weakness and stubbornness in check, but actually exacerbate the worst human weaknesses, as in political/economic systems that promote war, or reward profiting on other people's misery etc. Jesus had a lot to say about the latter, how the Torah that was supposed to ensure "There shall be no poor among you" was being evaded to ensure that "The poor you will always have with you." His enemies thought Jesus entered the Temple to pronounce its destruction-- and from the Jeremiah verses he alluded to, and from the fact that the conditions he was arguing against, much like Jeremiah before him, led eventually to such destruction, they had a point. He would certainly agree with you that mercy, justice, walking humbly with God were of the essence of what needed to happen, and wasn't happening sufficiently... But there were different ideas of 'justice' going around, 'justice' to the poor rich guy who'd lent to his neighbor and wanted repayment, vs justice to the neighbor who would die in destitution if the court took his ancestral farm plot. Much as modern Americans have different ideas of justice.
Okay, we have such disagreements because of the human disconnection from Spirit; I don't know as we choose that-- but we habitually, reflexively maintain it, and the result is that people construct laws to settle matters that could better be resolved by praying together... and it looks to me that God is at work in that process. Human wickedness is just so clever; how could anyone deny an element of divine creativity at work in its flowerings?-- and one thing characteristic of human wickedness is the insistence that "This is good and right; this is what God wants us to do!"
Anyway, we're agreed that Jesus is key, and essentially continuing the work of earlier prophets. But we seem to be working with a double-edged Jesus, speaking for a double-edged God: blessings... and woes. He was talking about Wrath if the nation didn't repent... and to his opponents, he must have been a scary man. To them, the Right Thing was to keep things stable, so that the Romans didn't come in force 'to take away our place and our nation.' It was their kind of stability that did, in time, result in the Romans doing just that.
He wasn't trying to do away with laws; okay, he wanted them flexibly followed for human benefit rather than strictly enforced for their own sake. And this, he said, was in accord with God's basic intentions toward us.
Thanks for stirring up my mind here! (As you can see, I'm still muddling it all over!)
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Permalink Reply by Leslie Rodgers on
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I sometimes wonder if the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are the same. they seem to have different personalities.
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I think they're getting filtered through different spokespeople; the 'Old Testament' version is humane (Ask any good rabbi!) but some of the time He comes out saying things like "Divorce your foreign wives" or suspiciously akin to "Pay no attention to that priest behind the curtain."
And neither version seems unduly reluctant to yank human souls off this mortal stage.
A recent afterthought, apropos moral systems: The authorities that hand Jesus over to the Romans are sure they are doing the Right Thing, the ultimately prudent, sensible, necessary-for-the-safeguarding-of-everything-good-and-holy thing. Jesus' death could readily be seen as a judgment on all such mechanisms.
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Indeed.
The spokespeople have always been my biggest problem with God.
I like it that this is a place where we can muddle things arund in our minds without getting yelled at for it.
In my first 4 decades I was continually being told not to use my brain....either that the answers to my questions were "not pertinent to salvation" or that they were "mysteries God doesn't want us to know", and once I was advised by a minister that I should stop trying to figure out the meaning of life and go home and give my house a good scrubbing top to bottom. I have always wondered if he thought being more busy would leave me no time to think, or whether he just thought women were meant to make babies and scrub floors.
At any rate, I tried his bad advice and discovered this: If you're in a religious community that is somewhat cultlike, and a bad marriage that is bound to the religious community, and this disturbs you, it is possible to scrub the floors and think about these issues at the same time. It is also possible to think yourself right out the door of the institution that is not serving your best interests.
I remain convinced that if I'm blessed with enough intelligence to think of a question there is an answer for the question somewhere.
So I keep questioning.
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A pleasure to have you muddling with us, after all those years of discouragement!
I agree with Woody Allen that my brain is my second favorite organ, and is basically harmless provided I don't take it too serious (except when I should.) Human minds are all a little sick, and need a paradox to cure! (God has provided such, in abundance. One of the main messages I find in the Bible, for example, is: God has left some human fingerprints and stray hairs in this stuff so we'll know we didn't get it by direct divine dictation. But some people do find true messages amid the 'junk DNA' of scripture. God definitely has a sense of humor, a gentler one than people think.)
Much of the intelligence you're blessed with is a certain fearless persistence; I'm sorry you had to fight for that, but no doubt this made it stronger...
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Permalink Reply by Jeffery Agnew on
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To take this in an entirely different way: The classic divide over does God command what is good, or does God's command make it good is a how many angels can dance on the head of a pin question. I have my ideas though. See below.
Ethical systems though seem to be approximations of the world around us and like our vision these models are subject optical/moral illusion. And while I lean towards being a deontological intuitionist, I find Kant's catagorical imperative extremely elegant.
On the whole metaethics and divinity issue I favor a synthesis of a Rawlsian contract and the doctrine of the Trinity. You can do what ever you want on an island the moment someone else enters the picture...
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In case there's anyone else here for whom "deontological intuitionist" doesn't trigger instant recognition, here's what I found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics
(although I'm not sure how being "intuitionist" about it modifies that... )
The point of what Lakoff (etc.) have been looking at... is that an ethical system-- as embodied in any given person's moral judgments-- is less based on "an approximation of the world around us" than people normally think it is, much more based on "whatever metaphors said person is currently applying to the world" to form that approximation.
When it comes to forming moral conceptions, people generally pick them up first via modeling their own behavior on that of parents, friends, etc. (Friends for embarrassment, parents for guilt, maybe? Hmmm.)
So if we, as humans, are God's children, what kind of upbringing have we collectively been receiving from God?-- and can we draw, should we draw, moral conclusions from that?
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Forrest, you can get overwhelmed Googling "deotoligical intuitionism", I lean towards R.D. Ross's. It's deontological because there's something (usually more than one) that ought to be done. I believe there is an actually right thing to do in every case, however, I don't have a list of rules but a moral sense (I understand you to be more concerned with where this comes from, whereas I think of it as something like self evident mathematical principles) of what I ought to do. I think of this sense as subject to error or moral illusion on occasion so I need to walk with some humility, but on the whole it works out pretty well. -Jeff
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Oops, missed your reply in the mad social whirl... I wonder if this resembles "rule-based" computer programming: Programs that work this way use a list of "rules" to apply more or less according to how well their conditions fit the data to be responded to. The conditions may even be logically contradictory: A heating/cooling system for a building, for example, might conceivably have a range of temperatures where it would simultaneously be applying the rules for "warm day outside" and the rules for "cold day outside", only partially-- and this would make for smoother operation than something that went abruptly, whole hog to "warm day" operation at some precise temperature.
Or do you think of your moral sense as sharply directing you to rules that absolutely apply or absolutely don't apply to any particular case?
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I don't think it's so deductive as that.
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It sounds like you're saying: ~ "There are rules, but I don't need to explicitly base my conduct on them, so much as I need to intuit what choice of action they imply" ?
A computer running a 'rule-based' program might have a similar difficulty reconstructing which rules had been applied in a particular decision. (It would have a list of available rules, but would choose from the list based on how well each rule's prerequisite, conditional part fit whatever data the program was attempting to respond to.)
So we really haven't left the idea that people use metaphors in their 'higher level' thinking/evaluative processes-- without necessarily knowing that an "abstract" result was built to match some common concrete experiences.
What style of morality does God employ in the care & feeding of humans? What style of morality has been built into us, vs whatever we've picked up via being raised in bad company? What are we intended to go by?
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