understandingwhosetimes | Chapter 3: Ethics (Reply)

I'll tell you in advance that this chapter is going to be more theology disguised as something else. My memory tells me that there will also be a lot of discussion of moral/ethical relativism vs absolutism, with a focus on how ethical relativism is bad and wrong. We'll see if I'm correct.

Christian ethics, in one sense, is simply an expansion of a moral order that is generally revealed to everyone. Despite some disagreement regarding the morality of specific actions, Calvin D. Linton comments on the consistency of the moral code within all people everywhere: ". .. [T]here is a basic pattern of similarity among [ethical codes]. Such things as murder, lying, adultery, cowardice are, for example, almost always condemned. The universality of the ethical sense itself (the 'oughtness' of conduct), and the similarities within the codes of diverse cultures indicate a common moral heritage for all mankind which materialism or naturalism cannot explain."

I find this interesting because I don't find it at all difficult to explain within a materialist viewpoint. Basically, everything Linton lists as "almost always condemned" relates to things that make it more difficult to live in a group. Murder sucks because you want to be able to feel safe with the people around you. Lying sucks because it's hard to trust what people are telling you if everyone lies constantly. Adultery sucks because it can complicate a lot of hereditary things in situations where lineage matters, but also because if your culture's view of marriage involves promising to have sex only with your spouse, it really feels bad when someone breaks a promise to you. "Cowardice" sucks because it often involves not taking care of other people when they need you. All of these rely on a basic underlying principle of "as social animals, we want to trust each other, because if we don't trust each other, we have to be constantly alert for possible dangers, and that takes a resource toll".

Now, I don't know that all those things are universally condemned. And I suspect that Linton has not taken a comprehensive survey of all cultures, nor taken into account cultural contact (benign or coercive) as a phenomenon. But even if they are, I don't think it's necessarily true that a materialist answer cannot be found. You don't have to believe it! It's perfectly reasonable not to. I'm just saying, claiming that it's completely impossible to explain it in this framework is not true, and is in fact trivially easy to disprove.

Anyway. Noebel continues in the theme of "absolute morals exist" for some time, and I won't quote all of it. It's something I'm reluctant to engage with at length, because this is a debate that exists well outside of fundamentalism, and it's probably unresolvable. Let's move on to a new claim:

This morality is not arbitrarily handed down by God to create difficulties for us. God does not make up new values according to whim. Rather, God's innate character is holy and cannot tolerate evil or moral indifference—what the Bible calls sin. Therefore, if we wish to please God and prevent sin from separating us from Him, we must act in accordance with His moral order.

Noebel claims that sin is not arbitrary, it is that which contradicts with God's nature, i.e. holiness. But what makes a certain behavior holy? The fact that it is part of God's character. So, to sum up:

Things are sinful because they are unholy.
Unholy things are those which contradict God's nature.
God's nature is holy.
Things which contradict God's nature are unholy.
Unholiness is that which contradicts God's nature.

Do you see how this is circular? There's no term-defining outside the cyclical framework to which it belongs.

In a sense, this also makes it arbitrary from an outsider's perspective. We have to be holy because it will please god and prevent sin from separating us from him. So, we have to be holy just because God desires it.

Some fundamentalists will claim that we have to be holy because sin not only separates us from God but harms us -- along the lines of "don't have premarital sex, it causes STDs and pregnancy" but with more complicated lines of reasoning. But a) they almost always do fall back on the separating us from god thing, because b) they can't prove that all "sins" do cause demonstrable harm that can only be avoided by abstinence.

If there is no absolute beyond man's ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.

So here's my problem with this: nobody agrees 100% on how to interpret the Bible anyway. There are already conflicting opinions. There always will be. There's no way of escaping conflicting opinions in this world. There's also no way of escaping needing to ultimately rely on your own judgement, because to follow the Bible you have to interpret the Bible.

Fundamentalism, ultimately, is about a fear of uncertainty. (I think this is true of many fundamentalisms, not just Christian.)

The ethical vacuum created by relativism allows leaders to misuse their power.

Because that never happens in Christianity. The fact is, misuse of power is a consequence of power. You have to be prepared for it. Moral standards won't fix it because it's not caused by the lack of moral standards but by the existence of power itself.

We must recognize all secular ethical codes as aberrations of God's code.

This is the guy who in the intro promised he was going to give us an unbiased look at other worldviews so we could "judge for ourselves".

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian who died for his faith at the hands of the Nazis

I'd like to address it because it's such a common misconception. Bonhoeffer died not because he was a Christian, but because he plotted to overthrow the Nazis. Assuredly a laudable act, and for him quite reasonably strongly tied to his faith, but he was not executed for his faith. He was working to oppose the Nazification of German Christianity. In other words, there were Nazi-approved Christians.

Fundies really like to trot out Bonhoeffer as proof that the Nazi regime was "godless". This is because it gives them a sense that Christians were victims, not aggressors, in a horrible, awful, incredibly disturbing and destructive historical event. They get to evade any reflection on how Christianity not only can but has been used for destructive ends. And therefore they don't have to reflect on the fact that being Christian doesn't mean you're automatically behaving morally without any extra work.

Obviously there's a whole other topic of discussion we could go into about how this shifts the focus off the genocide of millions of Jewish people in order to focus on gentiles.

As Christians, we cannot claim that our faith in God exempts us from worldly concerns such as feeding the hungry or caring for the sick.

Yet, any attempts at government policy that would ensure fewer hungry and better-cared-for-sick are generally opposed. Hm.

"When a person makes up his own ethical code," D. James Kennedy says, "he always makes up an ethical system which he thinks he has kept. In the law of God, we find a law which smashes our selfrighteousness, eliminates all trust in our own goodness, and convinces us that we are sinners."

This is a central tenet of the fundamentalist Christian worldview: you are not enough and you never will be, no matter how much you do. It's not implication. You could ask any fundie preacher and they would gladly admit it. It's seen as a good thing. On the one hand, yes, it theoretically keeps you humble. On the other hand, I grew up with absolutely no sense that it was healthy to have self-confidence of any kind. I still struggle to feel that liking myself in any way, or being proud of myself in any way, is not sinful. It absolutely destroys you.

There's some more in this vein. We have to depend on God because no one else can get it right, etc. It very much does rely on viewing God through a lens that, were humans involved, tends to have been created by abuse. You know, "You're nothing without me, you have to depend on me, you can't function without me, you're worthless, you're fundamentally flawed."

Such Christians are those who are willing to treat God's moral order with the same respect they show His physical order; who love God with their whole body, soul, spirit, mind, and strength; who treat others as they desire to be treated. They may be in the halls of government, standing firm against tyranny and slavery, or in the mission field, sacrificing everything for the sake of the gospel.

Bear in mind that Noebel's view of tyranny involves things like "not being able to force other people to follow your religion". The mission field is "convincing other people to follow your religion". I sound bitter because I am. Fundamentalists tend not to, for example, fight for laws that oppose uncompensated prison labor, which is basically slavery. They also tend not to oppose exploitative policies that allow undocumented farm workers and disabled people and even just servers at restaurants to be paid less than minimum wage. They don't fight for the marginalized -- like unhoused people and sex workers, both of whom often face incredibly high rates of violence, especially if they're people of colour. So I have to ask myself, what is this imagined tyranny and slavery?

It's hard to overstate how common this rhetoric is, or how deeply disconnected it is from real-world fundie politics. It's almost like they see two different realities and have no way of connecting them. This world where they're champions of justice and mercy and caring for the poor and sick, and a world where they oppose any policies that might remotely lead to an alleviation of suffering.

This is what caused me to leave. I saw all this real suffering, and I just saw these alleged Christians mocking and hating the sufferers and doing everything they could to punish them. I'm on my high horse, but it was an enormous source of distress to me and I couldn't reconcile it.

Then we're onto Islam. Right away Noebel gets nasty and personal.

The Prophet is caught as it were in the ordinary acts of his life—sleeping, eating, mating, praying, hating, dispensing justice, planning expeditions and revenge against his enemies. The picture that emerges is hardly flattering, and one is left wondering why in the first instance it was reported at all and whether it was done by admirers or enemies. One is also left to wonder how the believers, generation after generation, could have found this story so inspiring.

No citations or examples given. Just ad hominem.

The answer is that the [Muslim] believers are conditioned to look at the whole thing through the eyes of faith. An infidel in his fundamental misguidance may find the Prophet rather sensual and cruel—and certainly many of the things he did do not conform to ordinary ideas of morality—but the believers look at the whole thing differently.

The fucking HYPOCRISY here. Ordinary ideas? Whose ideas? I'm guessing your ideas. It's bad when Muslims look at their text differently because they believe in it, as opposed to when Christians do it, because uhhhhhhhh Christians are right? Am I following?

To them morality derives from the Prophet's actions; the moral is whatever he did.

That's the same relationship Christians have with God, but it's bad because [checks notes] Noebel doesn't believe Muhammed (peace be upon him) was holy.

Then there's some more stuff about the Pillars. Again, it's okay until they get to jihad, and the same issues present in the earlier chapters reoccur. In fact the phrasing is exactly the same so I suspect he copy and pasted it.

Indeed, Muslims who die in jihad are guaranteed entrance into Paradise, where men have access to scores of perpetual virgins. Women, however, are not told what awaits them.

Look, I'll just give you this. It's not a scholarly article but it's an actual Muslim voice responding to this misconception. Also, the person who wrote up the coverage included some links, so there you go.

Some more stuff that's basically copied from theology. Told you they were going to just do more theology. Couldn't even be bothered to ferret out some actual facts about Muslim ethics as separate from the five pillars.

Onto secular humanism. Noebel starts off talking about how secular humanists differ on their view of ethics as though this is a sign that secular humanism is somehow foundationally unstable. Again, discomfort with uncertainty.

This lack of consensus about the foundation of ethics is problematic for the whole concept of Humanist ethics. Without a God who sets forth an absolute moral code. Humanists must believe either that the code is subjective and should be applied differently to changing situations, or that an absolute code exists, somehow outside of ourselves, but within the whole evolutionary scheme of things.

Yes. So?

A serious problem is created, however, by Humanism's desire to wed ethics to biology— this view allows Darwin's concept of the struggle for existence to become the absolute on which moral decisions are based.

Christ. I mean, yes, social darwinists exist, and I disagree with them wholeheartedly, but that's not what Darwin's ideas even really meant, and it's not an obligatory feature of secular humanism.

We can reason our way to the good and to happiness because evolution is constantly improving things, even humanity.

Misunderstanding of how evolution works (it doesn't "improve" things, it just changes them). This isn't just a fundie thing, Star Trek does it all the time, but it vexes me sorely.

Moral relativism consists of little more than experimenting with ethics in every new scenario.

What's bad about that?

The biggest problem with ethical relativism is that anything can be construed as good or bad under the assumption that the judgment is relative to the situation in which we find ourselves. Even if we are striving to do the right thing, we may honestly disagree among ourselves what the right thing is if there is no absolute standard by which to judge.

Still happens even if you believe in moral absolutism. Liberation theology Catholics and conservative Protestants rarely agree on the right thing for policy, for example.

But the real problem, Noebel says, is in the "area of human sexuality". Yep, we're onto the first queerphobia and anti-choice bit.

Alfred Kinsey concluded that homosexuality is biologically determined at birth. Pedophilia (man/boy sex) and incest may also be biologically determined according to Vern Bullough, historian of the homosexual movement.

Ooh we skipped right to associating queerness with pedophilia, huh? Note how this is defined -- man/boy, not adult/child. There's no such thing as straight pedophiles, apparently. Notice how closely Noebel ties these two things together. The very first paragraph where he mentions homosexuality, three sentences in, he finds a way to define pedophilia as an inherently gay practice, and to associate it with sexuality between same-gender adults.

Then there's some stuff about how Planned Parenthood is bad because it gives teenagers safe ways to have sex before marriage. No explanation given for why this is bad -- it's assumed you'll agree if you're reading this book.

Sanger's involvement with the eugenics movement to create a master race. This illustrates how the ethics of Secular Humanism is enmeshed in the evolutionary concept of survival of the fittest. We should note that many of her fellow humanists distanced themselves from this project.

This makes me so angry because it basically claims that secular humanism inherently breeds eugenics because Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist even while noting that a lot of humanists are not eugenicists. There were Christian eugenicists. I'm autistic, so this is a very personal topic for me.

Then there's a final mic drop that's like "secular humanists don't have a unified view on ethics!" again as though that's a serious failing and not, like, pretty natural for a large and diverse group of people.

Next onto Marxism-Leninism. Noebel claims that Marxists do have shared ethical values, unlike secular humanists. It mainly relies on the idea of the dialectic etc. His main issue is that Marxist ethics necessitate an awareness of change and that they're mean to rich people:

Unless members of the propertied class became proletarian, anything they do, no matter how moral by their standards, will be contemptible to Marxists.

This is kind of funny because if you said "unless non-Christians become Christian, anything they do, no matter how moral by their standards, will be contemptible to Christians" that would be broadly uncontroversial. The situations are obviously not parallel, but the idea that Marxists rely on ~dogma~ whereas Christianity is rational is a wild one because you can easily find so many lines where Noebel is describing Christianity but swapping the terms.

Blah, blah, "communism is violent", again pretty typical American coverage. I don't want to pick it apart because I'm American, and my viewpoint on global communism is extremely limited by the situation in which I grew up. It's a topic that needs nuance. Suffice to say, though, that Noebel feels that any affiliation with Marxism ultimately leads to murder.

Then on to Cosmic Humanism. Basically this worldview's ethics are defined as "do what feels right to you". Noebel immediately goes to:

Whether you choose to be homosexual, bisexual, monogamous, polygamous, etc.—any choice you make is acceptable as long as "It's right for me" or "It's done with love, and no one's hurt."

Thereby highlighting how much of panic about "moral relativism" is really panic about lack of controlled sexuality, especially queer sexuality.

Gawain, in fact, absolves Adolf Hitler and every other human being of moral responsibility by claiming that everyone is following the shortest path to higher consciousness and is, therefore, acting morally

Did she actually say this? Did she specifically say "Adolf Hitler was acting morally"? I can't find a quote to that effect (Christ I'm having to google some dreadful things this chapter). If not, this strikes me as likely to be a distortion of her argument. She may have actually said it, so I don't want to assume, but fundamentalists do have a tendency to go "but what about HITLER" in a way I find quite upsetting given that they were not the victims of the Holocaust. It feels in a very distressing way like dragging out someone else's trauma to use for your own point.

Noebel talks some more about how Cosmic Humanists don't really believe that evil and good are separate forces, and says:

Such a skewed worldview leads to drastically skewed thinking.

So much for presenting these worldviews neutrally and on their own terms.

Onto postmodernism. I've been thinking about postmodernism as Noebel presents it and I've realized he doesn't mean the critical movement of postmodernism really, although he quotes from postmodernists scholars. What he means is something more specific to fundie jargon, much like "atheist" doesn't mean "someone who believes there is no god" but rather "someone who isn't Christian".

Instead, in this context, "postmodernism" refers to what Christians view as a particular kind of secular culture where everything is relative and nothing is real and there is no truth and no falsehood. It's not just an academic movement, but a social one. So technically I'm not critiquing him correctly when I say that postmodernism is a critical framework, but I'm not going to stop because he jumbles up the critical framework and the general social attitude with no differentiation whatsoever and pretty much blames the critical framework for all the ills of society.

Anyway. Moving on. He claims that Postmodernist ethics are very different from Secular Humanism, Marxism, and Cosmic Humanism.

Oh god. Before I get into this. I have to address something in the Pop Culture Connection, which talks about Match Point, a Woody Allen film. I would like to preface this by saying that I think Woody Allen is a horrible human being who sexually abused a child under his care, and so I'm not defending him. But:

After Chris kills Nola and successfully makes it look like a drug killing, he muses to himself that 'you learn to push the guilt under the rug. The innocent are slain to make way for a grander scheme'. . . . Odd, this is exactly how the Nazis thought, and would have cremated Allen himself were he around Germany at the time.

IT IS NOT FUCKING OKAY to go "Woody Allen thinks like a Nazi and they would have killed him because lol he's Jewish." Using someone's culture's trauma about genocide in this way is really really fucked up. It doesn't matter who they're talking about, it's antisemitic. I can't get over how incredibly cruel this is. (Also, I'm not sure that psychological thriller Match Point was meant to be a moral guide to life, but I digress.)

Noebel says that Postmodernists are "not comfortable" with "abandoning ethics entirely" and instead search for morals within their culture, "cultural relativism". He talks about this at some length, and once again brings up the Nazis. This chapter has basically just been "Nazis, Nazis, gays, pedophilia, gays, Nazis." So I guess that gives you an idea of fundamentalist's idea of what pressing moral issues look like.

To demonstrate that moral standards are both set by culture and evolve with society, consider the example of abortion. In the past, most civilized Western societies, under the influence of Christian persuasion, detested the practice of abortion. However, in our current society, secular government and its citizens are more comfortable with this practice.

Note "civilized" and "Western". It doesn't matter if ~other~ societies (nonWestern, uncivilized, or both) historically found it moral. Anyway, the history of Christian thought on abortion has actually been pretty complicated and it's not as easy as saying it ways always condemned.

He talks a lot about Richard Rorty. Like, basically that's most of what he does this chapter. He doesn't care about other postmodernists, and just mentions them on the side. This is not an amazing way to show the diversity of postmodern beliefs on ethics.

He then finishes up by quoting a passage from Theodore Dalrymple about how "If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass."

So that's pretty fucking classist, and again, it highlights the fact that what Noebel really cares about here is making sure that sexuality is restrained. He keeps talking about ethics, but what that comes down to in the end is sexuality. His examples are "Nazi Germany" (an extreme, obvious example of a situation where almost everyone agrees that ethically bad things happened) and "sex that doesn't fit my definition of morality". This highlights what he really cares about with ethics: not how we behave towards each other, not even how we interact with God, but social control.