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What’s Your Basis for ‘Reason’ and ‘Morality?’
A Catholic cathedral in France taken by my nephew Luke Renoe. This visual art hangs in our home, a marker of transcendence.
Now those who follow me on social media, my websites, and teaching videos know that I have deep respect for other points of view. But everyone who knows me also realizes that my first response will always be to ask straightforward questions. So here are the questions I would ask Kate Cohen.
“How do you define ‘reason’ and ‘morality?’” “What is the source or origin of those concepts, ‘reason’ and ‘morality’?’” And most important of all “Who gets to answer these questions, then, apply them?” Again, those who know me know that these are questions I ask everyone all the time, whether in high school, undergraduate, Ph.D. studies, or casual conversation.
And my answer will always be the same: the standard for ‘reason’ and ‘morality’ must have a transcendent source. If there is no outside, supernatural origin for decision-making about right and wrong, then we are left with human definitions, sources, and decision-makers. And if we are left solely with humans at the helm we are left with a haunting question, “Who will decide which humans decide and how will those decisions be made?”
Published in General
So it’s wrong for my parents to punish me because it’s wrong for my little brother to punish me? That would follow on your principle that the morality of actions is independent of the actor. Also, I understand even less now why you think boiling babies is only probably immoral for a CEO when it is definitely immoral for you.
where did I endorse God killing infants and children? I wish you would at least take the time to read carefully what I write before condemning me.
How often would you say you ideate on killing infants and children? A round number will do just fine.
Hey, no attacking HW’s strawman. That’s his gig.
Before the Mid-20th century Jesus Christ was the probably the most potent moral figure in the western imagination. Now, we really don’t know how Jesus lived and what he said because the gospels might not have accurately recorded how Jesus lived and what he said. But still, in terms of imagination, until 1945 Jesus was the western world’s most potent moral figure.
Goodness was defined by our imagination regarding what Jesus was like (or is like, if you think of Jesus as still being “alive”). And this was true whether or not you were a believer or not.
But since 1945 the most potent moral figure has been Adolf Hitler. But rather than being the apotheosis of goodness, Hitler is the apotheosis of evil.
So, we now have a secular definition of morality and a secular iconography of evil. The power of the story of World War 2 has captivated the western world.
Since 1945 the western world has had a new kind of morality that thinks of religion as a moral enterprise and sets morality apart from its religious origins.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, known in Catholic theology as the “Angelic Doctor” and traditionally held in singular honor by the later Catholic church for his orthodoxy, unabashedly taught that the spiritually wayward should be executed after a third instance of heretical belief. Continuing a sentiment from the early Church, Aquinas also thought that being “allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned” would be a cause for joy in heaven.
For centuries Christians persecuted non-believers and heretics, killing Jews and confiscating the property of Jews.
Martin Luther penned On the Jews and Their Lies where Luther laid out reasons for the burning of synagogues, the confiscation of Jewish property and religious writings, the denial of safe conduct for travel, forced labor, forced exile, and the death penalty for the teaching of Judaism in public.
We have stepped away from a religiously defined morality where the worse thing you could do was to commit blasphemy to a secular defined morality were the worse thing you could do was to persecute non-believers or heretics, where reducing suffering is of primary importance.
There is more than one way to approach the great saints and philosophers in the Western tradition. The first is to suspect that the reason they have endured for centuries and even millennia is that they had something profound to say about the human condition. Even if we might not agree with everything they wrote, we believe a deep encounter with their thought can only enrich us.
The other is to cherry pick a few things they wrote (or, more likely, just repeat what others have cherry picked), as a quick way to dismiss them without making any real effort to understand them. This latter approach has lately become very popular.
My response to this isn’t anger so much as sadness that people would so cavalierly throw aside the greatest bequests of our ancestors. Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas don’t need me to defend them. Their work will long survive whatever internet critics are carping about them, when our culture has finally deteriorated to the point that people’s minds once again become open to the great figures who inspired our civilization.
This approval of oppression and cruelty by stalwart and even foundational Christian figures is not just an exercise in the airing of dirty laundry. Truly weighty questions arise.
How can we trust the spiritual guidance of the great heroes of the Christian faith, knowing that their moral sensibilities were at times so profoundly and gravely warped and mistaken? Can prominent Christian leaders like John Chrysostom, Augustine, Cyril, Aquinas, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin be trusted on questionable and unverifiable theological doctrines such as the revelatory character of the Bible, the nature of God, the reality of miracles, the means of salvation, and the existence of the afterlife when they failed to understand that the persecution or even murder of others for supposedly mistaken theological opinions is profoundly immoral and misguided?
Why should anyone, including you, accept yours? You’ve already said yours is subject to change. It was either mistaken then or it moved into error. As guidance, it is therefore unreliable.
Now, if we can just convince you to not kill infants and children …
Just tell me that God has commanded me to kill infants and children and my disobedient nature will compel me to reject God’s immoral command. Easy peasy.
Once again, you’ve assumed that since I don’t dismiss Aquinas entirely must mean that I approve of everything he wrote. That is a non sequitur, and one that Aquinas himself avoided. Aquinas read deeply and fruitfully of Islamic philosophers with whom he disagreed on profound matters, but for that reason didn’t assume they had nothing to teach him. Would that Aquinas’s modern critics read him as charitably.
I understand your reason for dismissing them. I won’t try to convince you otherwise. Nonetheless, I am confident that people will still find Aquinas and Aristotle worth reading decades and centuries from now when Ricochet is long forgotten. I see no point in reading only philosophers who already think exactly as I do. That’s just a way to learn nothing and only be confirmed in my prejudices.
I mentioned Megan Phelps-Roper’s de-conversion from Christianity and her leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. Westboro is an extreme church.
But the Saint Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther aren’t fringe Christians. They are central figures in Christian history.
Kids meet a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan Phelps-Roper
The Westboro Baptist Church isn’t Baptist, or a church. It might be associated with Westboro, but I have no idea where that is.
Tiresome. Y’all have more patience for this than I do.
Saint Augustine (not the original one, the guy who participates here on Ricochet) didn’t think my references to the Westboro Baptist Church were relevant to the religion he subscribes to.
So, that’s why I decided to mention the writings of Martin Luther and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Luther and Aqunias held views very similar to those of the Westboro Baptist Church and radical Muslims in terms of their willingness to persecute those who didn’t subscribe to their religious beliefs.
Luther and Aquinas shared one other trait: neither of them wrote Scripture.
That’s not exactly what I said, but close enough.
So did you want to talk about what Aquinas and Luther said, and if so what precisely is your objection to Christianity?
Or did you just want to mention them in passing to illustrate some general point about religion?
He means, I think, that you can’t rely on the moral sentiments of people – while relying on his own.
And imagining that any of us between Aquinas, Luther, you, and me rely on moral sentiments?
He apparently thinks that at any moment we may start slaughtering children.
This is what I wrote at comment # 187
And is this something you want to talk about? You want to evaluate that very issue?
Or is this just an illustration of a general point, and you don’t actually want to investigate whether there really is a serious problem here for Christianity?
Yes. Let’s evaluate that very issue.
Let’s start with the basics. Do you think we actually trust them?
I have no idea who you put your trust in.
Put not your trust in princes, Nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
— Psalm 146:3
So . . . why are you asking your question?
Let me put it this way:
Someone reads of the way Christian Europe persecuted heretics and non-believers.
Someone reads about the religious wars between various factions within Christianity, Christians slaughtering Christians in Europe.
Someone reads about Martin Luther’s writing “The Jews and Their Lies,” where he calls for the persecution of Jews.
Someone reads about Saint Thomas Aquinas, who said that the spiritually wayward should be executed after a third instance of heretical belief and that being allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned would be a cause for joy in heaven.
Does that make this person think, “Wow. This must be the One, True, Faith?“
Maybe this person will think that there is something rotten at the core of Christianity if Christianity produces such awful “fruit.”
It’s sort of like when you confront a Socialist about the failures of Socialism. What do they say? “True Socialism hasn’t been tried yet.”