[Vision2020] Religion and Morality (Was Seeking Some Defintions)

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Dear Chris:

I welcome you to this list and address you personally because so far you have been decent and civil.  This is not, however, the role that you played on Dale's blog, where you have essentially been one of his thuggish umpires who weigh in with insults, calling the strikes, and declaring anyone "out" who dares to challenge the Wilson party line.

I will proceed with caution hoping that you don't turn into a Lemmo Doug, who thankfully keeps his insults away from the Vision these days.

I will rejoin your most recent rebuttals below, but I kindly request that you do two things while you are on the Vision.  First, tell us all how a Calvinist such as you can also be a libertarian.  The basic contradiction I see is that one cannot support the absolutely sovereign self of libertarianism and the absolutely sovereign God of Calvin.  (My essay on this issue is at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/libchristian.htm.) When Wilson and I once taught theology together, he declared the unity of truth, so I will not accept a response that separates political and theological sovereignty.  A "two-truths" doctrine is evasion pure and simple.

Second, since you have reaffirmed the future necessity of a trinitarian oath, I want to know if you can defend the Trinity better than Doug Jones has.  One would think that Christians who make so much of the Trinity could at least give a coherent defense of the doctrine.  My essay on this subject and Jones' meager responses are found at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/trinity.htm.

Returning to the issue of morality and religion, here are the figures that I tried to quote from memory in a Spokane motel last night. In 1881 British India the ratio of crimes broke down this way by religion:  one of 274 Christian Europeans committed a crime; one of 799 Christian Indians; one of 1,361 Hindus; and one of 3,787 Buddhists.  

With regard to the native Christian count, an English official made the following observation: "It appears from these figures that while we effect a very marked moral deterioration in the natives by converting them to our creed, their natural standard of morality is so high that, however much we Christianize them, we cannot succeed in making them altogether as bad as ourselves"(quoted in J. Head and S. L. Cranston, eds., Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery [New York: Julian Crown Publishers, 1977], p. 69).  So much for Christian missionaries making Asians morally better.

I would like for you to tell us which Asian countries have legalized child prostitution, infanticide, and caste discrimination.  The latter is proscribed by the Indian Constitution and federal laws setting aside jobs for Dalits (politically correct word for "untouchables") have been in place for over 20 years.  Furthermore, Indian families who encourage widows to perform "sati" (self immolation on funeral pyres) are rigorously prosecuted.  Individuals in countries all over the world commit atrocities every day but this anecdotal evidence says nothing about the general morality of any particular country.

One of the main points of your posts on morality is that Christianity has improved the moral actions of humankind, but now you seem to be backing away from this position by saying, for example, that America's relative lack of morality is the result of insufficient evangelism.  This appears to be a very weak response especially since post-Christian Europe has much better crime statistics, much lower abortion rates, and far fewer teen STDs.  I challenge you to prove your absurd response that Europeans somehow cheat on their crime rates.  

If you have lived so many years around Buddhists you must know how strong the law of karma is for them, and how it is not something illusory in their lives.  If though some of their philosophers tell them that there is nothing but undifferentiated nothingness, they certainly do not act that way. This is roughly equivalent to Calvinists who claim to believe in predestination but never live their lives as if it were true.

For one who follows the pastor who wrote "Southern Slavery As It Was" to decry the sad state of American race relations is really quite remarkable.  How much sadder would those relations be if we condemn President Lincoln and follow Pastor Wilkins and the League of the South?! The mind reels from the cynicism of such a position! 
 
Yes, it is really "nutty" to do an end run around the empirical truth that Jesus was 500 years late on the Golden Rule by saying that Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity was there before Confucius!  You are just like Wilson and all his top males:  never concede but always evade, which is actually not a very manly thing to do.  

Chris: you need to do some more reading from the most recent scholarship on Zoroaster.  You've not mastered the "bulk" of it. Contrary to your incredible claim, no scholar I know ever claimed that Zoroaster came after 586 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar took the Jews of Judah to Babylon. The dates for this great Persian prophet are being pushed back to at least 1,000 BCE, long before the Babylonian captivity.  Cyrus the Great was a Zoroastrian and he is called "Messiah" for letting the Hebrews to return from captivity in 537 BCE (Is. 45:1).  
 
Thanks for the dialogue,

Nick Gier 

----Original Message----- 
From: Nicholas Gier wrote: 
 
[[ Using the example of the Ik people, who lived under extreme 
circumstances, is a tad misleading. ]] 
 
Is it really? I was only trying to show that the Golden Rule is not truly 
universal. Even if they lived under extreme circumstances, it makes my 
point. Also, it behooves us to ask whether their morality resulted from or 
caused the extreme circumstances under which they lived. 
 
[[ Only very few schools of Hinduism or Buddhism following the theory of 
absolute monism, so that generalization is false as well. ]] 
 
I have been living among Buddhists most of my life, so I think I know a 
thing or two about Buddhism. I grant it would be false if I tried to apply 
it indiscriminately to everyone who is a Hindu or Buddhist, but that's not 
what I'm trying to do. "Only a few schools" establishes my point quite well. 
 
[[ Hindu and Buddhist societies are generally more moral if one takes crime 
statistics as a basis. For example, a census taken in the 1880s in British 
India founded that one in 3,000 odd Buddhists, one in 1,700 odd Hindus, but 
one in 700 odd Indian Christians had committed a crime. . . . How does 
Witmer account for the fact that the most evangelical Christian society in 
the world (the US) has the highest crime rates, and a post-Christian Europe 
has very low crime rates and a general incarceration rate that is is 
generally ten times lower than the U.S.? ]] 
 
When child prostitution is legal in a society, I don't call that moral. When 
baby girls are killed by their parents because they are girls, I don't call 
that moral. When caste discrimination is built into a society, I don't call 
that moral. When helping people who are suffering is declared to be a 
criminal activity because it violates the law of Karma, I don't call that 
moral -- regardless of what the official crime statistics might be. I would 
turn the question about the most evangelical Christian society in the world 
suffering from a high crime rate and ask, does anyone seriously believe that 
the more people emulate Jesus, the more the crime rate will tend to 
increase? Does anyone believe that the huge numbers of people in America's 
prisons are there because they were emulating Jesus? That's what 
evangelization is all about, and it means that America has a long, long, way 
to go with regard to evangelization. By the way, I strongly suspect that 
most people in American prisons are there for drug-related crimes, and an 
awful lot of people are in prison because they are black. That last 
statement has a number of possible meanings and many if not most of them are 
probably correct to varying degrees. I don't paint blacks in American 
society purely as victims, but as a group it is true that they were 
victimized by chattel slavery and they have also continued to be victimized 
by their "emancipator" dishonest Abe Lincoln and the statist American 
society that steadily emerged in his wake -- a society that has come to 
actively encourage black dependency, which might be thought of as just a 
different form of slavery. The failure of race relations in the USA is the 
single greatest failure of our nation, and as a society we are nowhere near 
to properly identifying the cause of the problem, let alone solving it. I 
see it as a failure to complete the evangelization of American society. 
Jesus is the answer. God does not want to settle for a nation of halfway 
Christians. If you go halfway and falter, God is going to deal with that, 
and it seems to me that He has been dealing with that, and it has not been a 
bed of roses but we are, as a nation, proving to be slow learners. 
Apparently God has got all the time in the world to keep teaching us until 
we finally get it figured out. Finally, with regard to European crime 
statistics, we can point out that a lot of actual crime never makes it into 
the official crime statistics in Europe. In some supposedly civilized 
countries the negligence of the authorities in this regard is notorious. 
Statistics can prove just about anything . . . 
 
[[ Jesus was very late in declaring the Golden Rule. It is found in 
Confucianism, Buddhism, and Socrates, all pre-Christian sources. ]] 
 
Yes, Jesus arrived out of breath and he apologized for not arriving sooner 
before everyone else had already stolen his thunder, relegating him to the 
role of copycat . . . Seriously, some nutty folks (folks who talk about 
pre-babelic this and pre-Noahic that) actually believe that the second 
person of the Trinity created the world and gave man special revelation 
(i.e., the scripture that eventually became the 66 books of the Bible) from 
the very beginning of history. In which case the Golden Rule would certainly 
predate Confucius, Buddha, and Socrates. For example, the Golden Rule is 
codified in Leviticus, which precedes all three of those personages. Since 
the second person of the Trinity is the divine author of Scripture, that 
means He beat them to the punch after all -- not that I expect you to agree 
with that, but it is certainly the perspective of Trinitarian Christianity. 
 
[[ I also object to Witmer's very objectionable thesis that a small number 
of Jews in Babylonian captivity had that much effect on the general morality 
of the region.  He leaves out the profound influence of Zoroastrianism, 
which was the first monotheism religion based on personal responsibility. ]] 
 
Sorry, it was just me believing what's written in the Bible again. I keep 
forgetting that it's all mythology and not to be regarded as fact. And 
please don't take my silence on Zoroastriansim to be a dismissal of its 
significance or influence. But when you consider that the general consensus 
is that Babylonian Captivity predates Zoroaster, by now you've just gotta 
know how someone like me is going to account for it. And if you want to take 
the positon that it is much older -- conservative Zoroastrians would say 
their religion dates back to 6,000 B.C., which according to my 
understanding, predates the creation of the world by about 2,000 years -- I 
might be willing to accept that it represents at earliest a post-babelic 
corruption of the true global religion that came to an end at Babel. Going 
back much farther than that would be a bit of a problem since I don't think 
Noah and his family were Zoroastrians, and they are the only ones who 
survived the flood. But in any case the bulk of scholarship seems to be in 
agreement that Zoroaster postdates the Babylonian Captivity. 
 
Best regards, 
 
Chris Witmer