The Honest Christian

I am almost never asked, “Right Reverend Crip Dyke, if some community leader is going to be a self-professed Christian, would you prefer that person be an honest believer or would you rather that person be a nominal Christian that clearly doesn’t believe in the actual teachings of the bible?”

However, that question is clearly asked or implied on the internet many, many times per day. Some think that the believing Christian is harder to reform because they really do believe on faith many non-sensical things that come straight out of the New Testament, the Tanakh, or the ancillary writings included in the Christian “Old Testament”. Often times this carries a presumption that I (really: the random internet atheist subject to the question) will prefer the person easier to deconvert.

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Christianity Versus Personal Responsibility

No deep insights here. Just a big, bold WTF? at the fact that so many conservative Christians continue to profess to be champions of personal responsibility.

Really?

Christians: your god hates personal responsibility. He loathes it. If you believe he exists and if you believe Christian doctrine, then this god has condemned you to torture because of something someone else did thousands of years before you were born. That’s not personal responsibility. If that god believed in personal responsibility, Eve and Adam would have taken some lumps – presumably the snake also – and, well, that would be it. They were cast out of the garden. Their children didn’t return, so no one else ate the forbidden fruit. Nope. Just those two. But the Christian god is happy to make you responsible for events in which you played no personal part.

And, of course, there’s no responsibility imposed on you for your evil acts. Sure, you have to “believe” in the Big J, but even if you don’t commit any evil acts, you’d still have to have faith in order to escape torture. To escape divine condemnation, Stalin must pay the same price (no more, no less) that any child who dies within minutes of being born must pay. No need to make amends to those you’ve wronged. No need to do something a little extra to make it back into the Christian god’s good graces if you ordered water boarding and other war crimes. No need to suck up just a little bit more if you launch a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people.

Nope. This god condemns regardless of your behavior. This god condemns regardless of the amount of evil you harbor. And this god forgives Hitler and Mother Teresa just as quickly and easily as this god “forgives” Charles Hamilton Houston, Sylvia Rivera, Hildegard von Bingen, and Woody Guthrie.

Personalized responsibility? Responsibility where it actually matters what you personally have done, why you did it, and what outcomes resulted? That’s anathema to the Christian god and antithetical to the tenets of Christianity.

And yet so many people simultaneously profess to be devout Christians and believers in personal responsibility. I sometimes wonder: do they even realize that they must of necessity be lying about at least one of those things?

Talk About a Mediocre Ethicist

In the last post all about me, I mentioned that it might be possible for any mediocre ethicist to outdo anything I have accomplished. Recently I read all too many articles published by the Christian Courier, all of which, strangely, list Wayne Jackson as their author.

And? I stand corrected. I have found a Black Swan: at least one mediocre ethicist has no hope of outdoing me.

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A Moral Caricature: Deontology

How do you make your moral decisions? I’m not asking which things you think are good and which things you think are bad. I’m asking what factors do you consider, and what is the process by which you consider them, when you are trying to figure  out what is right or wrong, good or bad?

The online comic Strong Female Protagonist stars a superhero like many others in a story unlike many others. For those who remember Concrete, SFP reminds me more of that book than any other super hero comic I know. Recently, the main character had to make some decisions that any real person would spend some time second guessing. She wondered if she made the right choices. She wondered if she could even be called a hero. And yet, she wasn’t certain that choosing anything else would have been any better. All this is good. All this is appropriate characterization. But these thoughts are thoughts that in other comics would have been dealt with, if at all, in a dramatic moment. Either the hero would mull ethics immediately after a battle while in the midst of unignorable devastation caused by the battle, or the ethics would be glossed over until the middle of the next big battle, when suddenly the hero would seize up and the drama wouldn’t be so much about the goodness of the character as the timing of the character breaking free of the paralysis.

But Strong Female Protagonist is not a typical super hero story. Our Hero ends up wrestling with these questions in the park, speaking to an old professor she ran into by happenstance. One of the themes you’ll see explored here on Pervert Justice will be meta-ethics: how do we make decisions about what is good and what is bad? The creators of SFP did an excellent job with the hero/professor conversation and so I thought I’d take the opportunity afforded by this story to begin a discussion on meta-ethics.

We’ll start just with this one story-page to get a glimpse of a number of major considerations one encounters when attempting to consciously craft a meta-ethics that works with one’s own values and perspectives and experiences. On this page, the hero’s old professor (black hair) is drawn coat-on to represent one side of an ethical debate while the professor is drawn coat-off to represent the other side of the same debate. Our Hero is drawn in the middle of this debate, focussed on listening:

A Page from Strong Female Protagonist where our hero listens to one professor play-act both sides of the Deontology vs Consequentialism debate.

This is one of the first questions we must solve in meta-ethics: will we consider results alone? Or will we consider other factors? Note that consequentialism and especially Utilitarianism (one instance of consequentialism) are not the only systems of ethical decision making that consider the results (or the ends) of an action. Deontology, which is made up of those ethical systems that prioritize following rules or adhering to duties, is frequently asserted to be a system of following rules instead of considering consequences. This, however, is a caricature. Not only are consequences considered at various points in deontic reasoning, but an appeal to consequences is frequently a justification for imposing duties in the first place.

How else would you describe the first argument on the page?

CoatOn: If the ends justify the means, then all is permitted! In the name of the Greater Good we may commit any atrocity we like.

CoatOn is arguing for considering factors other than results, but the argument is that if we fail to examine the means and not merely the results, then we will end up with bad results. This is a Deontic position, a position that ethics is best described as a set of duties and the relationship of individual decisions/actions to those duties. Yet it is not blind to consequences. Rather it asserts that we will get better consequences if we begin our ethical decision making already constrained by certain duties. These duties are different in different deontic systems. In some an important duty/value (often the most important duty/value) is obedience to some authority, typically a god. But not all deontic ethical systems are religious and not all religious ethical systems are deontic.

Consequentialism is typically seen in contrast to deontology. There are other ethical decision making systems to consider, but the most frequently debated today reside in one of these two camps. For now, it’s enough to distinguish deontology from consequentialism and to understand that deontologists don’t ignore consequences, but rather have a belief (sometimes presuppositional) that the best ethical decision making is a process that considers more than consequences alone.