Sunday, January 30, 2005

Do Consequences Determine The Morality Of An Action? (January 30, 2005)

Maybe you have heard some version of the following medical case history. A woman suffering from tuberculosis is pregnant. Her husband has syphilis. They have three children: one blind, another deaf, and the other also has tuberculosis. Yet another child died in infancy. Should she abort her current fetus?

If you say "Yes, perhaps this is a case where abortion is justifiable," you are then verbally kicked in the head with, "Congratulations, you've just killed Beethoven!"

In fact, the real medical details concerning the Beethoven family are different. But what concerns me more than the bad history is the bad moral reasoning that underlies this pro-life argument. It necessarily looks to the future to gain its footing. We must never argue this way for at least two reasons.

First, because it is too easy to play the game the other way. In aborting the child of a sickly mother in bad circumstances it is true that we may have killed Beethoven, but then again we may have killed Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy or even Adolph Hitler. The problem is that when we suggest that abortion is bad because it may knock off some great soul before he is born, then we are defenseless against the countercharge that it is good because it may obliterate some psychopath before he’s any bigger than a tadpole. Moral reasoning by future development is guessing game that you can twist any way you want.

Secondly, we must not condition ourselves to contemplate the morality of an action in terms of its results. There is no sin, no cruelty, no atrocity that cannot justify itself by saying, "But look at the benefit!" That kind thinking makes demons of us. That thinking led Pontius Pilate to condemn innocent Jesus because the result, the pacification of an unruly crowd, was so much preferable to the
alternative, a riot.

A good action is good and an evil action is evil regardless of the consequences. Morality is never retroactive. Abortion is wrong, wrong in itself, and it does not become "more wrong" just because its victim
might have been one of history's greats. Fornication likewise is wrong, always wrong, and becomes no less wrong just because one of its products happens to become a renowned evangelist. Fidelity and selflessness, on the other hand, are good, and must suffer no diminishment in our esteem just because (as Ayn Rand liked to point
out) they sometimes lead to bad results.

As a pastor, I conscientiously resist guaranteeing either good results for godliness or dire consequences for sin - at least within the confines of this life. When it comes to moral decision-making, potential future outcomes are of no concern to us. Obey God and do what is right. That is all.

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Mob Behavior (January 16, 2005)

Be careful of crowds.

I was reminded of the fickle, driven-by-the-wind nature of crowd behavior as I studied Acts 14 recently. In verse 11, the multitudes of Lystra were ready to worship Paul as a god. But by verse 19, his opponents had "won the crowd over" and nearly stoned him to death. (See a similar circumstance in Acts 28:4-6 where people went from saying "He's a murderer" to "He's a god" in just two verses.) The same thing happened during the Passion week: on Sunday Jesus rode into Jerusalem to the shouts of "Hosanna!" but by Friday the crowds were shouting "Crucify him!" Such crowd behavior is seldom rational. Many people worshiped Paul and Jesus only because other people were doing it, just as they cursed them soon afterward for the same reason.

Maybe my bias against crowds is something God has programmed into my nature. Stadiums filled with people make me uncomfortable. When I take a vacation I go to the wilderness, never a city. Though I love one-on-one and small-group conversation, I can’t handle crowded rooms well because I can't filter out sounds - they all hit me at once.

While my discomfort with human swarm is a social disadvantage, on the plus side I think it provides me with natural immunity to crowd pressure, and supports my ability to warn those who are tempted to succumb more to fad and fashion than to reason and truth.

I'll be specific. Last year around this time I was bombarded with promotional Passion of the Christ mailings. I still haven't seen the movie, and probably never will. But my goodness, the marketing pressure to see and promote Mel Gibson’s film was unlike anything I've seen in evangelicalism. It took over churches. Some fellowships rented out whole theaters. Promotional materials told us how to work Passion themes and advertisements into church life from January through April. There were Passion sermon series, Passion banners, Passion door hangers, Passion small groups, Passion saturation mailings. You could order the "Neighborhood Bundle" of Passion aids for only $1,395.00 ("a $1,909.99 Value!") or go whole hog with the "Regional Bundle" for only $3,295.00 (a $713 savings!).

Part of me wanted to throw up, the other part of me wanted to scream, "People! It's a movie! It. Is. A. Movie." An opportunity to share the gospel with some, certainly; a valuable springboard for spiritual discussions, maybe, but good grief - the evangelical obsession with this film made it look like a "Tickle Me Elmo" fad. That which is perceived as fad will stir up media attention, but will it really advance the kingdom? What I'd like to know now, a year after the Passion onslaught, does anyone who reads this page know anyone who came to faith in Christ and is now walking with him as a result of seeing the film? I'd be thrilled for this to be the case. My prayers have been precisely toward that end. But frankly my experience has been that crowds tend to swarm around "what everybody else is doing right now" and then quickly move on to the next big thing.

Beware of crowd behavior. It is famously fickle. The kingdom of God, on the other hand, is eternal. Nothing in the universe must be more permanent, more crowd-proof, more whim-proof, than our steady devotion to Jesus Christ.

Sunday, January 9, 2005

The Tsunami and Faith - Part 2 (January 9, 2005)

I emailed to Tribune columnist Eric Zorn last week's Pastor's Page and he wrote back, "It seems to me that what you talk about is hope, which is fine." He wrote similarly to someone else who had sent him my page, saying that my perspective involved "the triumph of hope over experience and observation."

I appreciate Zorn responding at all (he must have gotten a thousand letters from dismayed Christians!), but I cannot accept his gracious attempt to characterize my position as a hopeful one. The fact is, I care nothing about hope in itself, and I positively despise a hope whose object is false. The only thing that matters is truth. If someone believes a falsehood, I'll try to persuade him to believe otherwise - and if I believe a falsehood, then by all means let him who knows the truth reason me out of the lie. But please let’s all dismiss the patronization that masquerades as grace, that says things like, "I am glad your faith gives you comfort and support." No, let's be grownups and face facts. To a Muslim I will say frankly, "Mohammed was a war criminal"; to a Mormon: "Joseph Smith was a fraud"; to certain charismatics: "Benny Hinn is a snake charmer"; to Buddhists: "There is no reincarnation"; and to atheists, "There is a God." I don’t care that someone can live his life happily (or even morally) by depending on convictions anchored in illusion. Truth reigns, and if your happy hope must lean on a lie, then screw it.

It is common today for people to find value in hope that is anchored in nothing. In his review of the film Virgin, for example, Roger Ebert writes, "Is it not possible that faith is its own reward, apart from any need for it to be connected with reality?" No, it isn't, Roger. What would such a faith mean for anyone who has actually had to suffer for it? Would the Sudanese boys who were burned alive for refusing to convert to Islam be content that, for them, "faith is its own reward?" The apostle Paul considered such thinking to be nonsense. He who experienced many beatings and imprisonments wrote, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men" (1 Corinthians 15:19). If it were proven to Paul that there was no resurrection, he would not say, "Well, I found that my faith carried with it its own rewards," but rather, "What a pathetic moron I've been."

I believe in the resurrection, which for me is the main reason why the great tsunami, though troubling and tragic, does not disturb my belief in a benevolent God. There is a life after this one. In the resurrection, wrongs will be set right, justice will be perfectly rendered, and many of the last shall be first, and the first last. A poor man like Lazarus, having endured a miserable, tragic earthly life, may find himself basking in sweet delight for all eternity (Luke 16:19-25). The righteous will have no complaint, and the unrighteous will have no legitimate complaint.

For those who question the existence of a benevolent God (because the universe is so unfair!) I challenge them to think hard about a question that confounded former atheist C. S. Lewis: "Just where did you get this idea of 'unfair'?" In a remarkable passage from Mere Christianity, Lewis writes,

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of "just" and "unjust"? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?...Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too - for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies.

Lewis concluded (and I agree with him!) that the very concepts of fair and unfair, just and unjust, benevolent and cruel, have no meaning in a universe without God. Without God, you are just a complex configuration of atoms, and if that is what you are, then on precisely what grounds do you denounce other complex configurations of atoms (whether tsunamis or Hitlers) as "bad" or "wrong" or "cruel"?

Goodness exists, as does cruelty. Some day, good will triumph. That is not a mere hope, but a truth of awful and wonderful consequence, a truth that demands that we go to the side of goodness and remain there no matter what it costs us, and no matter how much we are tempted to depart from it.

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

The Tsunami and Faith - Part 1 (January 4, 2005)

Eric Zorn has written a column in today's Chicago Tribune (January 4) that questions the legitimacy of religious faith in light of the recent tsunami. I would like to respond to some of his points.

1) Zorn is troubled by those who pray to God for deliverance and who thank him when they get it, because he feels this suggests "that those who suffer have it coming - that God was insufficiently praised and begged on their behalf - and that those who thrive are singled out for divine favor."

I think it is a bad logical jump to assume that asking God for deliverance (and thanking him when it comes) implies a judgment on those who do not. We ask people for help all the time, and when we get it, we say "Thank you" because it is bad manners not to. Whether others have asked - even whether they have received help without asking or been denied it despite pleading - affects neither our tendency to ask nor our good manners in giving thanks afterward. There is simply no connection to the evil thought that hard luck cases who did not ask "had it coming to them."

I believe that Zorn is aiming this charge at the wrong religion. His column seems to have in mind the benevolent God of monotheistic religions (Christianity in particular), but it is Buddhism, not Christianity, that teaches the karmic balance of good rewarded and evil punished. For example, when Professor James Beverly asked the Dalai Lama if he thanked the Buddha for the good things in his life, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism said:

"Frankly speaking, my own happiness is mainly due to my own good karma. It is a fundamental Buddhist belief that my own suffering is due to my mistakes. If some good things happen, that is mainly due to my own good actions, not something related to a direct connection with Buddha" (Christianity Today, June 11, 2001, pp. 69-70).

I am as disgusted as Zorn by such a doctrine. It strikes me as heartlessly cruel to those who suffer, and it seems to offer a self-justifying guilt-free conscience to those who have simply had good luck. But this kind of teaching is completely foreign to a religion whose Messiah was tortured to death despite his innocence. In the world of Jesus and his followers, it has long been understood that the innocent suffer all the time. Just read the gospels. When news reports came that Pilate had slaughtered worshippers, or that a wall had collapsed in Siloam, killing 18, Jesus made a point of saying that the victims were no worse than anyone else (Luke 13:1-5).

2) Zorn seems to feel that the sheer number of fatalities - the scope and degree of the tragedy - is enough to justify speaking up at last about the challenge such suffering offers to faith. He writes, "[M]y silence has its limit. And well over 150,000 victims in one ghastly upheaval is well over it."

But why? Tragedies such as the Indian Ocean tsunami may bring sudden awareness of human suffering, but didn't we already know that unbearable suffering is going on all the time, every minute of every day? In the time it has taken me to write this page, I know that 4-year-old girls have been raped, children orphaned by AIDS have starved, accident victims have been paralyzed, despairing souls have taken their own lives, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have groaned in physical pain. But I have always known that - haven't you? The fact that we are not constantly attentive to the background noise of human pain (who could be?) does not mean that we have not till now factored it into whatever view of the universe we hold. I am not saying that since suffering is so ubiquitous we should regard it as inconsequential - I am just saying that the tsunami crossed no threshold that has not already been crossed a thousand times over in the minds of thinking people.

Zorn quotes the title of a column in a foreign periodical: "Waves of destruction wash away belief in God's benevolence." Did they really? If people believed in God's benevolence while knowing full well (as everyone does) that countless children starve, but stopped believing in it as soon as killer waves hit the shores, then I contend that their original belief was so shallow and unthinking that it is hard to see how they ever truly believed in God's benevolence at all! I do not recognize the validity of a faith that calmly swallows a thousand holocausts a day but stops suddenly at a 150,000-casualty tidal wave and says, "Now that's going too far."

3) Zorn asks, "[W]hat does it mean to trust God or have faith in God when in seconds on a sunny day a crushing wave from the deep can snatch a loved one literally from your grasp and drown him? Trust that it's all a part of some bigger plan that mere mortals cannot begin to access or comprehend? Faith that, in the words of the old gospel song, 'we'll understand it all, by and by'?"

Well, to answer the rhetorical question, yes, it means precisely that, and other things as well. Trusting God means trusting him in matters of life and death - your own and others'. I would say that any faith (Christian, Hindu, atheistic, Islamic - whatever) that has no place for understanding that your little boy can be ripped out of your arms and drowned is a faith not worth having. Because such horrible things do in fact happen, and everyone has to deal with it. Zorn's question needs to be put the other way: "What does it mean to trust that there is no God when a wave can suddenly snatch away your loved one? Trust that it is all a part of the grand universal meaninglessness? That there is no reason, and that there never can be a reason for hope and comfort - no future redemption, no joy at the end - just a fear that fate can snatch you just as suddenly, and some day certainly will?" I do not doubt that it takes emotional courage to maintain faith in such meaninglessness. But I cannot find it less sensible to believe in Ultimate Reason (despite constant suffering) than to believe in Ultimate Chaos (despite our instinct for purpose.)

4) Zorn seems to regret a sarcastic comment he made to a tsunami survivor who had thanked God, confessing that he himself was "viewing this staggering tragedy from the safety and comfort of a desk nearly 9,000 miles away." The fact that Zorn himself was not directly affected by the tsunami is a point worth dwelling upon.

A friend of mine grew up in a Jewish neighborhood with a number of Holocaust survivors. He saw that, contrary to expectation, the older generation that had actually lived through the horror of concentration camps still believed in God, while many of their children, raised in suburban comfort, were atheists. While this observation is strictly anecdotal, it does confirm a paradox I have noticed myself. It just isn't the case that those who have suffered terribly lack religious faith while those who have easy lives embrace it. If there is any correlation, it works the other way - and perhaps understandably so. True victims must believe in God; those who suffer relatively little can afford to dabble in the luxury of unbelief. Many such unbelievers seem to express a self-styled noble sympathy for all those great masses of suffering humanity. It is as though (pardon the uncharitable thought) they regard it as a brave and moral thing to refuse to believe in God - it's the least they can do to support their poor suffering brothers. But given their privileged position, they may want to think twice about proselytizing for an atheism (or Zorn's "indifferent agnosticism") that, if embraced, would rob those who truly grieve of the only hope they have.