JSF said:
Gilbo, I reject your implied premise that only secularists are capable of moral decisions. Secularists lack a common authority to establish a basis for morality. What is moral to one secularist is immoral to another. There is only moral chaos in such a society.
Nonsense.
What Gilbo
actually said (as I read his post) is that:
Only a person with free will can exercise moral judgement. Without free will, one cannot make choices, and without the ability to make choices for onself, one cannot act in a moral way.
Or, for that matter, in an
immoral way: without free will and the ability to make moral decisions (not to mention the courage to make and stand by moral decisions), one cannot act either morally or immorally. One has becopme an amoral actor, an individual that acts without regard for right and wrong, an individual that does not know the difference between moral acts and immoral acts.
Typically, chance decrees that some of that amoral individual's acts will be good, others bad. But that is mere chance: by abandoning (or never developing) free will, that individual has surrendered the ability to chose, and with it, the ability to act in a moral way. In the ordinary course of events, it is typical to find that the majority of that individual's acts are neutral (neither god nor bad), that some of them happen to be good, and that others happen to be bad. It is reasonable to expect that there will be, on average, more bad acts than good acts if the indvidual concerned is unable to exercise moral judgement - the world is like that.
There are many things that lead to the inability to excercise free will and thus act in a moral way. Some examples are:
- Sheer desperate necessity: concentration camp victims, starving people, and so on. (Note that some individuals of particularly strong will manage to retain and even enhance their ability to make moral judgements, even - or perhaps especially - under these extreme circumstances. Think of Weary Dunlop, many outstanding Holocaust survivors, and so on.)
- Lack of ability to reason. We do not expect moral reasoning or moral behaviour from a dog, a very young child, from anyone who is under extreme mental pressure (the jury verdict "not guilty because the balance of his mind was disturbed" exists for this very reason.)
- Deliberate surrender of the ability to reason. People sometimes abandon their claim to be human (i.e., to be able to reason in a moral way and thus be on a higher plane than mere animals) deliberately: they drink to excess, take mind-altering drugs, indulge in mindless orgies of lust or hate or any other emotion. In general, juries do not regard this as an excuse. You may get a lesser penalty for killing another driver because you were drunk, or shooting your wife because you were consumed by jealousy, but you almost never get an aquittal. Nor should you. You chose to abandon your ability to reason when you got drunk or gave in to your emotions, thus, in the court's eyes, you remain at least partially responsible for your acts.
- Semi-deliberate blindness to obvious facts. Any reasonable person would know, for example, that German people are, like American people, above all else, people: people like us, with husbands and mothers and children that they love. Yet some people more-or-less deliberately decided to ignore that knowledge, blinded themselves to the obvious, and carried out a program of wholesale mass murder between 1941 and 1945. To begin with, it may be argued, this was simple desperation on the part of Churchill (and others): they had no other way to behave if they hoped to survive and wipe out the terrible threat of Hitler's leigons. On the whole, I agree with that argument. However, from about mid-1944 onwards, these same people (a) had the technology to win the war without indulging in any more wholesale murder of non-combatants, and (b) could in fact have won the war faster by killing fewer people. But they deliberately blinded themselves to the facts, and stand condemned by history. Similarly, many German people at around the same time were perfectly well aware of what they were doing to Poles and Jews and many others, but, in exactly the same way, blinded themselves to the obvious fact that these people were, once again, people. By making up a category and dumping an entire sector of humanity into that category ("Jews", "Krauts", "Blacks", "Homosexuals", Rag-heads", "Pharisees" and so on), this sort of weak-willed person abandons reason, and with it both his morality and his humanity. Note that this category shades into the category above.
- Abandonment of free will. Humans have an extraordinary capacity to hand over their God-given ability to exercise free will and make conscious choices in life. Typically, they hand this ability (which is both a sacred right and a heavy responsibility) to someone in a position of authority. In the context of this discussion, the obvious example is a self-appointed prophet of one or another of the well-known gods: a southern Baptist fire-and-brimstone preacher, a bearded Suni iman, the difference is merely one of personal taste and local fashion.
There are no easy answers.
You cannot hand over your ability to reason to someone else, for with it goes your ability to make conscious moral decisions and thus act as a moral being. God gave
you the ability to reason, and
you must use it. You yourself. In person. This, like love, is one of the very, very few things that cannot be delegated to another person.
No-one can love for you: if you wish to love others,
you must love. Similarly, no-one else can make a moral decision on your behalf: if you cede that ability to a politician, a preacher, or a TV station, you are less than human.
Alas for the world, American fast-food, fast-gratfication Hollywood TV culture has conditioned people into thinking that there
are easy answers, into thinking that merely by belonging to the self-appointed Greatest Nation on Earth and following the herd of mass opinion, merely by handing over their ability to think and reason and weigh up evidence to the nearest Voice of Authority waving The Good Book in one hand and an F-16 strike in the other, they can act morally without really trying, that they can ignore the obvious wrong in their leaders' acts because the victims are (a) not on TV, and (b) only Muslims.
One more time: without the ability to reason
for onself, one cannot make moral judgements.
