CHAPTER 7 – WEIGHTY MATTERS (Gluttony)

Gluttony is a different problem than greed, though the difference is subtle. Both involve an obsession with having more and an inability to say “enough is enough”. Greed, however, is a more relative thing that is based upon your position as contrasted against others. If somebody else has something, you want to take it away and have it yourself instead.¹ Gluttony is individual. If you have something good, or even something pretty mediocre,² you want more of it. Greed actively corrupts the mind and is similar to lust. Gluttony is a more passive sin, turning the mind away from its proper pursuits but not necessarily with the same kind of burning craving as greed or lust, and falls in a range somewhere between greed and sloth. Because the problems are somewhat different, they have different cures.

An English comedian observed that the American economy was brilliant in its simplicity – half of it is devoted to making us fat, and the other half is devoted to making us thin again. A drive past the miles of establishments selling high-calorie food and the huge number of health clubs in the average city or a stroll past the aisles packed with empty calories and those packed with diet foods and magic weight-loss pills in the average grocery store shows that his comment had some validity. But gluttony goes beyond food and the ever-expanding American waistline. The same phenomenon applies to all of the consumer junk with which we fill our lives.

Junk calories

I love the experience of food. I am always eager to try new things, and I spend a significant amount of time on buying and cooking food. (The eating part, sadly, tends to go by in a flash, with the dinner that took an hour to cook taking ten minutes to eat.) This is okay. Christianity does not ask us to give up the pleasant things in life and spend all our waking moments in good works. Creating and sharing food is a basic and positive way that people interact with each other. Many studies have shown that families that eat dinner together are more successful than those that don’t, and the common practice of saying grace at mealtime shows the importance that we place on the shared meal. We seek to remind ourselves of heaven’s bounty when we sit down to a meal, so that we appreciate the food before us and the company around us and think about the goodness of the world rather than just wolfing down the food. That can be a soul-enhancing experience, as much as appreciating and sharing a desert sunset or good music or art. God does not ask us to be cold and joyless ascetics. To the contrary, he works through the good things in life. The pleasure we feel when we experience love, beauty, the scent of a rose or the taste of a good meal helps us to ground ourselves, to shrug off frustration, pain, and despair and reacquire the warmth that our spirits are meant to have. By experiencing the joy of simple pleasures, by living in the moment and appreciating what we have, we can actually immunize ourselves against obsessive desires.

Gluttony creeps in when we start to crave quantity, particularly in a manner that causes us to lose sight of the experience of quality. Sinful excess involves, sooner or later, loss of real pleasure in the thing. Most of us have experienced at one time or another the compulsion to eat a whole bag of potato chips or candy, and to then feel slightly ill and realize that we did not even enjoy it. Gluttony and other obsessive desires are like that. Rather than savoring a single, exquisite chocolate truffle, we mindlessly down a pound of M&Ms and then look around for more, and more, and more. There is nothing wrong with M&Ms in their place, but when you scarf the whole bag at once you are not appreciating the experience of eating them. You are instead following a compulsion that undermines one of life’s simple pleasures.

American society tends to push people down the path of gluttony. I remember as a child enjoying what was then called a California hamburger at a drive-in, a sensibly- sized object that was generally accompanied by a little bag of French fries or onion rings. The California hamburger actually had tomatoes and lettuce and such that looked like they do in advertising pictures. Then came the marketing companies, who wanted us all to consume more and thus spend more money. They told us that if we liked that burger, surely we would be happier with one that had a full quarter pound of beef. If we liked that, then we would REALLY like a burger with two quarter-pound patties. We would like it even more if both patties were covered with a large amount of cheese-like food, and then some bacon. Since it would take us longer to eat that massive creation, we would run out of fries from that small bag as we took breaks from biting the burger. So, we needed a giant box of fries, and a big milk-like shake, and desert. The idea of settling for that little California hamburger came to seem foolish, like one was being cheated somehow. Likewise, if our urban desk-jockey’s breakfast did not include a stack of syrup-sponges, three pale eggs from battery hens, sausages, bacon, and hash browns, we obviously weren’t getting our money’s worth (which was true, because the clever marketers intentionally made a sensible breakfast cost nearly as much as the mega-breakfast, so that we would opt for excess). As we became used to giant portions, we simultaneously got used to cheaper ingredients that substituted fat, sugar and salt for actual flavor. A smaller, better meal seemed too expensive, because after finishing it one did not have that somewhat uncomfortable sense of bloat that we had become used to thinking of as “feeling full”. These habits carried over to our home-cooked meals, and we bought and ate more per meal. Manufacturers were happy to encourage this, balanced somewhat by the rise of the calorie-controlled frozen meal industry as we started viewing our waistlines with dismay. We were offered thousands of calories of relatively flavorless and non-nutritive sugared glop.³

This commercially-induced form of gluttony is unlikely in itself to destroy your soul, as opposed to merely killing you, but it is instructive. Life is meant to be lived observantly. To achieve alignment with God, we need to be aware of our fellow creatures and to want to make them happy. We need to want to make the world a better place. That involves appreciating the things that are good. Again, God wants us to enjoy love and beauty, scents and flavors, music and peace and contentment. We are to recognize that others would like to experience these things as well, and to want to help them to have that opportunity. When we see a particularly beautiful sight, we want to tell our loved ones about it and to take them to see it, too, or at least show them pictures. When we hear beautiful music, we want to play it for others. When we find a delicious recipe, we want to share it with our family and friends. This is the proper, Christian reaction to all things good, to want to increase them and share them. If you have four M&Ms and four family members, each gets one and you all enjoy the experience.

As we move towards gluttony, we start to lose that interest in experiencing and sharing the good thing. When we contemplate that bag of M&Ms, we do not think of people that we might share them with. As we eat them, we do not savor the flavor. We just consume.

It is not that the desire for the food burns in our brain. Rather, the harm comes in undermining our better sensibilities, our desire to sense and to share. Most of us experience strong cravings for junk food just as a form of withdrawal. When a bag of sweet or salty fat is opened we will absent-mindedly devour it, but we don’t devote our lives to that pursuit. However, most of us know the feeling of going into the kitchen and finding that you are out of junk food, and being unhappy about that. As this experience repeats itself, we start to pay more attention to the chip aisle than to the produce aisle in the grocery store. (The produce section, objectively viewed, is a beautiful thing. I have taken photos of produce markets on my travels and they are always pretty. I have never felt the urge to take a photo of the junk food aisle.) We lose the battle of the bulge, getting fatter than we want to be while knowing that we should be eating less and exercising more. We suffer from high cholesterol and high blood pressure, and take pills for it that have assorted nasty side-effects rather than just correcting our diet. Our eating habits, to that extent, control us, interfering with romance, health, and well-being despite the fact that we know we should do better. We know that we do not get twice the pleasure from that second slab of ground cow bits on our burger, but we order it anyway. We lose effective control over an important aspect of our lives. What was a shared family pleasure becomes a mere guilty compulsion. The family dinner, which should be an occasion of joy and conversation, becomes meaningless, and we lose closeness because of it.⁴

It can get worse, of course. Now imagine the people who eat so much that they can no longer care for their children, or work, or even walk, who find someone who will facilitate their self-destruction by continuing to feed them when they become too grossly obese to feed themselves. Such people effectively devote their entire lives to feeding their obsession with consuming (not necessarily enjoying, but consuming) food. They do not have room in their lives for healthy love, charity, or support for others, because they are consumed by their consumption. That is obsessive gluttony of a type similar to obsessive greed or lust that involves a cycle of wanting desperate enough to crowd out everything else.

But it would be a mistake to envision the primary hazard of gluttony that way. The more dangerous version is the type discussed above, which merely undermines our observant, sharing, engaging lives. As we drift away from active interaction, sharing, and enjoyment, our souls move from divine warmth towards the cold limbo of apathy. As with sloth, mindless chip munching does not lead us down a path of sinful desire so much as it diverts us from the path of virtue. Despite our high levels of obesity, few Americans are obsessive gluttons, but almost all of us allow ourselves to be diverted to some extent from the caring, mindful co-enjoyment of real food that is supposed to follow the saying of grace. Because of this we lose a part of the life that we are meant to have. This becomes a serious danger when it is mixed with the other types of gluttony discussed below.

What can we do about food gluttony? Pay attention. We feel like we are too busy to spend time making real food, but we need to find ways to de-busy our lives and make time. (Not by sacrificing more sleep, please.) Do this with someone. Look at recipes with someone. Shop together, or at least plan the shopping together. Spend time looking in the produce aisle and imagining what you could make with what looks good, or even better grow things in a garden.⁵ Cook together, or at least have a child within sight of the cook to allow for interaction. Have family dinners and family breakfasts. Have lunch with friends. Focus on making the food taste good, on adding variety, on noticing the flavors and sharing the experience. Keep in mind that a lot of restaurant and chef-type cooking is overly dependent on butter and other fat. Experiment with instead adding flavor with herbs and appreciating the flavor of fresh food and real ingredients. If you are careful you can reduce your calorie intake while enjoying the food far more and feeling happily full. While this may seem like a recipe for becoming MORE preoccupied with eating, it is a different type of eating, one that restores the appreciative, loving, sharing experience that we are meant to have. As you try to please others with your creations or to notice the creativity and love that went into the meal before you, you will move from the cold realm of the chip-eating chair to the warmth of family and friends. Volunteering in charitable food pantries and soup kitchens is a good and Christian thing to do, but we can do much, and perhaps even more, to place ourselves on the path of virtue just by paying attention to how we eat at home.

Junk possessions

Food is not the only object for which we may have a gluttonous desire. We tend to have similar problems with respect to all sorts of consumer goods and services. From shoes to home decorations to computers, we get caught up in an endless cycle of consumption that causes us to feel trapped in our jobs and occupies our attention, distracting us from the things that count. Where greed tends to throw up danger flares in the form of periodic meltdowns of the whole economy, the gluttony inherent in this deeply materialistic lifestyle is much more subtle and far-reaching in its effects on most of us.

Go to any mall and watch the people who are there just to shop. They have not come because there is something that they discovered they need. They have not come because of an ad that informed them of the availability of some wonderful new design or invention that will improve their lives. Instead, they have money in their pocket or, more likely, credit limit left on their card, and so they are out in search of something to buy.⁶

This is disturbing on different levels. First, with all of the things that need to be done, built, repaired, or assisted in the world, why does pointless money-spending make the priority list? Sure, it is commonly done in pairs or groups and so is a social activity, which is good, but there are lots of better things for people to do together. Talk with your family. Garden. Cook. Make things, whether it be useful objects or art. Fix things. Clean things. Do charitable works. Work for a political cause. Go to gardens or galleries and appreciate things, or go to student events and encourage the kids. If you really must shop, then shop with a purpose. Make a real effort to find good products at fair prices and tell others about them. Find things that are made locally. Find artists and inventors that do not know how to play the system, and help to make them known. Spending your time trolling through mass merchandise looking for something remotely acceptable to purchase is a mindless extension of the mindless gluttony of owning junk products. Cut it off at the source.

This brings us to the second problem with shopping: it leads to buying things. We are addicted to stuff. This addiction takes different forms with different people. Many women seem to have a particular yen for 547 pairs of shoes, of which maybe 2 are comfortable. Men may buy inexplicable quantities of clothing as well. Other people are very big on cutesy stuff for their home. They go to stores and craft fairs and work through catalogs buying items by the score, until they no longer have room and need to give them away or throw them away. I had a neighbor who had lots of cutesy stuff for every holiday, and every year tossed half of it and bought more. Some collect movies, music, or video games, and then quickly lose interest in their purchases and move on to more. Others accumulate cars, boats, various degrees of motorcycles and scooters, and anything else with a motor, and then try to come up with ways to actually use them. Alternatively, they may buy 137 kitchen gadgets, use them once, and then put them in the back of the cabinet in a kitchen that looks magnificent because it is rarely dirtied by use.

Whatever form the addiction takes, the effects are the same. The buyer’s real appreciation for the items fades, he has to work a little harder to make the money for the next item, and his soul moves a little further out of the warmth of social engagement and into the cold realm of pointless things.

Objects can be good and have meaning. A perfect outfit that makes you feel beautiful and gives you social confidence can make your life better. A household item that you acquire on a trip somewhere or that you inherited from your grandmother that conjures pleasant memories every time you see it can echo and magnify the warm and worthwhile parts of your life. A kitchen gadget that you really use to make food that your family loves is a thing that helps to bring you closer together, sharing the bond of that really good meal that is always better at home than it is anywhere else. The movie that you watch as a family every Christmas, or the great but hard-to-find song that you discovered and like to share with friends, or the clever game that everyone in the family played and that provides part of your common vocabulary are all things that increase warmth and bring people closer together in a world of shared joy. The common theme here is that the single object has to have meaning, and preferably a meaning that connects you with one or more other people. It has to link you to experiences, to observations of your world, to the appreciation of life. It is when stuff replaces life that gluttony steps in.

A pair of shoes can make you feel beautiful. When my daughter could barely walk, she had a pair of shoes that she just loved and that clearly made her very proud and happy. That was good. The 533^rd pair of shoes, on the other hand, simply cannot have the same sort of effect. Owning that many shoes indicates one of two bad things. Either the shoes have ceased to have any particular effect and are being purchased and consumed like junk food, or else the owner feels a sort of incurable desperation that she hopes will be helped by the right pair of shoes, but which cannot really be addressed that way. As she takes home yet another pair of shoes and still does not feel confident, she reinforces her sense of failure or emptiness. The hoped-for cure instead just aggravates the disease.

The same holds true for all of the other forms of junk consumption. Rather than appreciating objects either for their unique qualities or for their connection to life experiences, we buy a bunch of things that cannot have special meaning, if only because we have so many of them. Rather than the special, obscure song, we buy everything in the top 100 and then cycle on to the next group of hits, without even associating the music with a particular, happy time in our life. (One of the great qualities of popular music is its association with a particular time, so that all of the happy things in that time can be conjured by hearing a song that we enjoyed during that period.) We buy or stream 1,000 movies and play them while we multitask, making no effort to appreciate the movie or to share it with others, instead just using it to fill the mind with noise. Those kitchen gadgets do not become associated with pleasant family meals because we do not bother with pleasant family meals. The household decorations are just disposable stuff that never become part of the scene that in our minds means home and family. It is all meaningless at best, and at worst feeds a constant craving for something that we cannot in fact obtain with money, but which our acquisitions keep us from recognizing as the desire for love, family, friends, and the goodness that is God.

Our American consumer culture encourages this form of gluttony in the same way that it sells junk food. We are constantly exposed to ads that are designed to make us want things that we don’t need. Our computer screens, grocery carts, elevator walls, and other visual spaces are filled with calls for us to buy more. In stores we are exposed to thousands of products in alluring displays. And then there is credit.

There was a time that you needed money in order to buy things. Now we are led to believe that everyone should borrow a huge sum of money and buy a house.⁷ Beyond that debt, and student loan debt, and the debt that the government is running up on our behalf, we are encouraged to run up debt on our credit cards at a 21% interest rate, or to take payday, tax refund anticipation, and car-title loans at interest rates that are higher than that. When we can’t make those high interest payments, we borrow more money against our house if we can, subsidized by the government because the government loves the banks. We spend way more money than we have, and with all that interest we may not ever have any money. As we get deeper into this debt-hole, we have to work harder and longer to keep up. Our more noble and virtuous pursuits fall away in our struggle to cope with the consequences of our purchases of things we didn’t need. As Wordsworth wrote back in 1806:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

In this way gluttony and sloth can be more dangerous than more active sins like wrath or greed. When a sinful desire fills one’s mind like a burning flame, it may be relatively easy to recognize the issue and to decide to do something about it. Gluttony sneaks up on us because the desire is not very strong. We don’t really care about the latest pair of shoes we bought, so how can it be distracting us from the path of virtue? It does so in tiny little bites that ultimately combine into a gaping maw of distraction that consumes us. All the clothes and toys and gewgaws that we bought, multiplied by the magical leveraging power of debt, force us into wage slavery, working in jobs we hate for employers who take advantage of us because we have to pay the bills. We get home without the energy to engage with our families, to do good works, or to experience and enjoy the world. We sit there among our meaningless possessions – junk that does nothing for us, reminds us of nothing pleasant, and fails to symbolize Home for our children. How can we develop the habits of mind that lead to heaven this way?

How can we defend against this form of gluttony? The same way that we can defend against food gluttony – pay attention. For those of us who are particularly strong, we can cast off our possessions like Saint Francis, the rich man’s son who embraced complete poverty. As Jesus futilely asked of the rich man in Luke 18:22⁸, we can renounce the tyranny of material possessions, focus entirely on the joys of doing good works, and take the direct path to God. Unfortunately, most of us are not that strong. We have families to worry about, and real poverty in the modern city is not a status that makes virtue easy. For those of us that are not ready to cast off everything, there is an alternative that works almost as well. Oddly, it does not involve caring less about things, but rather more, but more in a different way. We have to remove our possessions from the realm of mindless junk food and have them be carefully selected items that have real meaning.

We naturally understand this at some level. Most parents have gone through the exercise of telling their children: “Don’t just tear open all of your Christmas presents at once! Take the time to appreciate each one, and remember who gave it to you.” We know that if a child gets 50 presents and opens them in a big pile he will lose interest in most or all of them more-or-less immediately, they will mean nothing to him, and he will get little real pleasure from them. On the other hand, if he gets a few special things from special people, he will be excited about the presents, he will enjoy them for a long time, and he will enjoy knowing that this is the toy from Aunt Ellen, because it is a reminder that Aunt Ellen likes him and wanted him to have fun. We know that a child who appreciates his limited possessions will be less likely, rather than more likely, to whine for more than a child who does not appreciate his boxes of toys.

How can we apply this as adults? Consider the classic French approach to fashion. A woman bought a really nice, unique dress that made her feel confident, and she wore it to every special occasion that year. American women, in contrast, feel like they should not be seen wearing the same thing twice on different occasions if they can help it. Why? What does wearing different things each time you are seen convey other than “this woman spends too wastefully on clothing”? We equate the ability to spend wastefully with wealth, and wealth with virtue. Both links in that chain are invalid. One can spend quite wastefully on credit, and as long ago as the writing of Psalm 73 it was observed “Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they increase in riches.” What if we instead followed the French practice, trying to find one really flattering outfit and wearing it frequently until it wears out? This would communicate the message “I am someone who pays attention to the world around me and who has developed the ability to appreciate what is aesthetically pleasing, and I don’t waste money on junk clothing or fast fashion that sits rotting in my giant closet.” That’s not a bad message.⁹ That dress will then come to embody a variety of memories of special occasions from that year. Like a favorite song, it will become a hybrid of a thing you can buy and memories that are exclusively your own. It will have value not because it was expensive, but because it helps you to remember joyous times with family and friends. Instead of thirty pieces of meaningless cloth in your closet, you will have one item that helps to connect your soul to the people with whom you shared those times.

In my family, we collect and display art that was created by family and friends, and we then pass that down from generation to generation. A picture on the wall is not just a pretty object, it is a connection to people we care about or to the memory of loved ones who have passed away, and it helps to define “Home”. We have photos and objects from trips that were meaningful to us. My ancestors, who were not at all rich, bought a very few nice and unique pieces of furniture that they kept nice and passed down, so that again they connect us to our family in a meaningful way. We will allow our children to take many of these things for their own houses while their children are small, so that they will help to define the next generation’s picture of Home. We have music recorded by family members, songs picked up on fun vacations, and unique songs that are special to the family. We have some movies that few people know about, but which we really like and force everyone who becomes close to the family to watch. We have inherited kitchen tools that we use to make old family recipes, and carpentry tools that we use to try to make the house nicer. All of these things have meaning, and the meaning is not “this looks expensive – people will think we have money”. Rather, the things surround us with thoughts of friends, family, good experiences and happy times. When we are depressed or discouraged, looking around at these items restores the soul and makes it easier to snap out of the bad mood and do something positive.

The key is to not have a large number of things, and especially not a large number of things that won’t last. Be selective. When we traveled with the children when they were little, one was dying to spend her pocket money on souvenirs and bought the first several passable objects she saw. The other waited until he saw one really cool item, and that was his remembrance of the trip. Needless to say, he remains pleased with his set of tangible memories of the places he has been and the things he has done. Don’t fill your house with stuff just to fill it. Consider those blank spaces as waiting to be filled with a future pleasant memory or with your creative effort or that of someone you know. That bare bit of wall is not a gap, it is an inspiration, a call to find the further adventure that will fill it.

When you buy your things, be observant. I am amazed at the number of people who travel to a destination and disappear into the nearest shopping center, spending their time buying remembrances of a place they didn’t see because they were too busy shopping. Be in the moment. See things, do things, meet people. Somewhere in that process that one lasting, meaningful object will come along to serve as your remembrance of the occasion. If it doesn’t, you still have your memories, just not the reminder. That is much better than having a reminder of nothing but the inside of a shop.

If you are selective and focus on owning objects that attach you to people and experiences you care about, you will start to find that that this habit has the same effect on your craving for junk objects that a focus on good food has on your craving for sugary fat. You will lose interest in that other stuff. Excess junk objects in your house will annoy you. When you find nice things, you will want to share them in the same way that you want to share good food. “When we were in Pennsylvania we found this Amish carpenter who makes the most beautiful furniture and sells it for reasonable prices. See how well done this is? If you ever go there you should see his things!” Instead of surrounding you and isolating you, your select things will help to connect you to other people.

Saints are, of course, very special people. We admire people like Mother Theresa and tend to think that anything that you can’t picture her doing must be a distraction from the ideal Christian life. Perhaps so, but she was a nun, not a mother. For ordinary Christians living ordinary lives, the path to virtue does not involve separating yourself from this world and just concentrating on the next. If God wanted us to just concentrate on the afterlife he would have skipped the messy thing we call life. Our lives and our world are a training ground. In life we learn to love, to help, to appreciate, to experience earthly bliss, to learn to feel true joy in doing good and to dislike obsessive desires and junk distractions. Devoting yourself to doing good works is great if you are able to feel real joy in doing them, but if you are doing it just to earn credit in the afterlife, then you are doing the right thing for the wrong reason and it won’t work. Instead, you need to back up and prepare yourself by a different path until you are ready for that level of devotion. We can find heaven by abandoning all material things, but we can also find it by using material things as anchor points and connections. One should not be anxiously focused on acquiring them or regard them as important in themselves, but rather one should be focused on living a good and happy life, with the objects being things that one runs into along the way and chooses to bring along for the rest of the journey.

The effect of this approach to objects will normally be to reduce consumption. As you lose interest in junk possessions and grow used to wanting each item to evoke a memory every time you look at it, the idea of spending your time shopping for random additional stuff should become uninteresting. As you spend less time spending, you should start to emerge from debt and reduce your family stress. Eventually you should be able to spend less time and effort earning money and devote more time to family, friends, and those in need. As you become less tired and stressed, your evenings and weekends should become richer. You will do more, love more, experience more. You will have more happy memories to attach to that limited group of friendly objects that occupy your home. Over time, you will wish to share that happiness with others, and will turn your attention to making others happy. That is the path back to virtue and to God.

1 Again contrast envy, which is even more relative. If you have a Barbie doll and I don’t, and if I would be about equally pleased either to get a Barbie doll myself or to have you lose yours, that is envy. If you and I both have a Barbie doll and I want yours, that is greed. If I have a complete Barbie set and want 27 more of them without regard to what anybody else may have, that is gluttony.

2 The show The Good Place had a nice observation on this, which sadly I can’t find as an exact quote. Michael tastes some frogurt and says “I love humans. You take something and make it a little bit worse, so that you can have more of it.”

3 Read jars of spaghetti sauce and notice how hard it is to avoid added sugar. Your Italian grandmother probably did not add sugar to her sauce, but was fussy about which tomatoes she used.

4 The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University conducts periodic studies on family dinners in America. Only 57% of teens report having dinners with their family at least five time a week. Those who do not have family dinners are 3 ½ times more likely to say it is okay for teens their age to get drunk, and over 32% more likely to report high stress levels.

5 I garden largely with seeds from a supplier of Italian heirloom vegetables and herbs. The Italians know how to live, and there is no comparison between what those seeds produce and what you buy in the store.

6 Sadly, this shopper may be a person who loudly proclaims his concern about climate change and shouts that we should all get the government to do something, without thinking that he could do much by just not buying so much unnecessary stuff.

7 Given that Americans move an average of every 5 years, that we spend over 8% of the price of the house on closing costs, and that a large portion of landlords rent for less than they pay in mortgage, taxes, and maintenance, it is no longer clear that this is a good idea, but that is outside the scope of this book.

8 “sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.”

9 I realize that that proposition will be a hard sale with a teenage girl. This is a realm where gluttony interacts with vanity. One must work simultaneously to address both. We should not care if the mean girls in school say “look at her – that’s the same dress she’s worn to every party this year!” A girl should strive to have the confidence to respond “quite so, and I look good in it rather than looking like an over- consuming, wasteful clothes-rack.” The odds of success with a 15-year- old are low, but a parent’s job is mainly to plant the seeds that flower by the time the child becomes an adult, not to create the world’s second perfect teenager.

All persons of faith should oppose US stoking of the Ukraine war

Brief review of the origins of the war

The war in the Ukraine is a product of aggressive US imperialist policy. Others have written about this and I recommend reading their work for further detail using the links in this text, but the short summary follows. (This history is not the point of this post, so I don’t want to go into an overly detailed explanation here.) When the Soviet Union collapsed because its economy could not keep up with the arms race with the US, the inner groups driving each of the US major political parties became enthralled by a vision of the world in which America, together with like-minded wealthy members of the global financial-industrial elites, called the shots unopposed. This new US Empire of the World would be created not through direct conquest of the sort attempted by Napoleon or the Nazis. Instead, America would simply topple the government of any significant state that opposed – or did not slavishly serve – our will. The neocons who controlled the George W. Bush administration developed a plan to topple Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. They managed to eliminate Saddam Hussein (after getting us into a deadly war there through egregious lies), though not with what one would call good results for the Iraqi people. Somalia and Sudan were fundamentally dysfunctional, and in Lebanon we managed to establish a situation in which the US militarily props up the unstable Lebanese government. When Obama took over, the neolibs, fronted by Hillary Clinton, picked up this shared agenda. Gaddafi in Libya not only controlled oil, but was working to launch a gold-backed currency to compete with the dollar and the Euro. Hillary managed to destroy his government and gleefully laughed about his brutal violation and murder by the “freedom fighters” we supported. That little achievement left Libya in a state of violent anarchy in which it became a staging ground for terrorists and a new home for black slavery.¹ The Obama government strongly backed the “Arab spring” movement across the region, hoping to replace all independent or semi-independent governments with US servants. That didn’t work well for the neolibs overall. The Egyptian protestors that the mainstream media adored turned out to include a significant number of nasty rapists and supported the party of a Muslim extremist organization that the US regards as a terrorist group. However, with US stoking the Arab spring led to a bloody civil war in Syria, which the US viewed as a great opportunity, but which in practice led to the rise of ISIS without toppling the government. We did not, of course, seek to topple the Saudis or their friends. You remember the Saudis – the ones who funded and planned 9/11, have been running a genocidal war in Yemen, and who cut the reporter for a US newspaper into little bits in their embassy? They are viewed as allies in US dominance, so their government can do no wrong.

Against this background, we can now turn to the Ukraine. In a close election, the Ukrainian people had elected a president who favored continued close relations with Russia. Broadly, he had the backing of ethnic Russians, the eastern provinces, people in industrial areas, and people who didn’t want trouble. The opposition had backing from ethnic Ukrainians, especially neonazi ethnic extremists, people in the western provinces, and youth who wanted to be able to emigrate to the EU and get jobs at higher wages (but, by their availability, thereby suppressing wages for native Europeans) just as the Poles had done. Hillary didn’t like the pro-Russian victory, and wanted to put in place a pro-US government that would seek to join the EU and NATO, so that we could effectively capture Russia’s vital warm water port in Crimea (then in the Ukraine but still used by Russia) and put more missiles on Russia’s border. Russia, understandably, did not want to lose the Crimean port. The Crimean War of 1853-1856 was fought in significant part to protect that port in Russian Crimea (which Britain and France were attacking on behalf of Turkey). Russia also understandably didn’t want the Ukraine joining the hostile NATO alliance.

Despite knowing that Russia would have to react strongly to such a threat, Hillary and the neolibs planned to undermine the legitimately elected pro-Russian government. They encouraged protests in Maidan Square in Kiev, and they recruited the media to cover the protests heavily and adoringly. You may recall it was weird at the time that you had these initially peaceful protesters in the Ukraine, a country that most Americans couldn’t find on a map, getting heavy daily coverage in the news at the same time that, for example, Palestinian protesters getting shot or other serious and legitimately highly aggrieved protesters elsewhere in the world were essentially ignored. CNN spent hours of TV time showing pictures of people standing around with basically no analysis, which made for very dull television. The Maidan protesters were the equivalent of Trump loyalists, basically people who didn’t like the fact that their candidate had lost a fair election. The news media didn’t make much effort to indicate any reason for the protests, but reported them with the general air of the protestors being heroes of democracy who were fighting an evil government. The US then escalated its incitement and propaganda operations, the protests turned deadly, and the coup followed, with the US then installing a government friendly to the neolibs. The new government accused the former one of corruption while engaging in wild corruption itself, and together with rich Ukrainian oligarchs started lobbying the US for support and cash flows that could be diverted into their pockets. This ultimately included attempted interference in the US presidential elections, and buying the Vice President’s son to get access to the Vice President. Putin reacted to the coup as anyone paying attention would have expected. He secured the Crimea, annexing it. There followed a prolonged period in which the new government made noises about joining the EU and NATO, while allowing neonazi militias to attack ethnic Russians in the eastern provinces, escalating to full scale separatist rebellions and full scale army suppression.

During this whole period Putin expressed his concerns and needs very clearly to western leaders, and repeatedly warned “you’re not listening – there will be bad consequences if you do not listen”. Given that the Soviet Union, and mainly Russia, lost an unimaginable 27 million lives in the Nazi invasion of WWII,² there was every reason to believe that Putin had a deadly serious concern about a hostile alliance being extended on his border under a government that was put in place specifically to be unfriendly and that had military brigades composed of admirers of the WWII Nazi invaders. He gave the US every chance to resolve the situation peacefully, but the US thought that a proxy war in the Ukraine would be advantageous to the US by harming Russia and giving the US a chance to act as the dominant world power. It was clear that a war would be a terrible thing for the Ukrainian people and that anybody who cared at all about their interests should do whatever was necessary to prevent it, rather than provoking it. Regardless, the US ramped up its propaganda machine and managed to get the European governments and press to play along.

While truth is always the first victim of war, this time it seemed particularly egregious in terms of all governments and press organs reading from the same script with the same buzzwords and utterly suppressing alternative views. Putin was portrayed as the master villain seeking world conquest and the fabulously corrupt Zelensky as the honest angel protecting his people. Even when the US, with help from Norway, blew up Germany’s Nordstream pipeline (creating a huge climate change disaster) and wrecked the economies and government budgets of our European allies, everyone politely ignored that fact. Those who remember the US rationale for invading Iraq in the first Gulf War are familiar with the stories, repeated as truth by politicians and eagerly recited as truth by the lapdog press, of Iraqi soldiers dumping newborn babies from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals. The story was, of course, a complete fabrication, a lie of convenience. (Of course, the Israelis have since done essentially that in Gaza – sadly governments continue to do things that were rightly unimaginable in prior times.) Human Rights Watch considered the story to be obviously false from the beginning, and said so. Nonetheless, we invaded Iraq for America’s own purposes, just as America had entered WWI on the basis of lies and had escalated the Vietnam War on the basis of lies and would undertake the second invasion of Iraq on the basis of the weapons of mass destruction lie. This has not prevented global politicians and the lapdog press from repeating all kinds of allegations regarding Russian troops as facts.

US support for prolonging the war is ungodly and should be opposed

The above narrative is all to make the point that this war is not a Just War in the Christian sense. It is not an effort to throw the murderous Khmer Rouge out of power in Cambodia. The only Nazis involved in this one are on the side of the Ukrainian government. There is not an urgent need to kill or maim soldiers or civilians in order to prevent a larger number of innocents from being killed. This is an imperialist proxy war, set in motion as an effort by the United States to hurt Russia’s ability to act as an independent power center that could interfere with American supremacy over the planet. At the same time, Biden is hoping to break the Russian economy. If Biden had been willing to address Putin’s legitimate security concerns up front, Russia would not have invaded. Sure, despite the background discussed above, Putin should not have launched a military invasion. Nobody should start wars, and although Russia’s initial strategy sought to minimize killing and destruction, it is still inexcusable. The point is, it was both entirely predictable (and, in fact, Biden announced in advance that he expected the invasion) and preventable. As it stands now, to stop the war Putin will need to be allowed to demand that the eastern provinces currently held by Russian troops be allowed to hold free elections to determine whether they wish to stay in the Ukraine, join Russia, or be independent. They will vote to join Russia for the simple reason that that is now the genuine preference of the majority of their citizens. The remainder of the Ukraine will have to agree to a pledge of neutrality supervised by the UN or some other party in which Russia has a voice. Presumably, responsible negotiators would seek permanent demilitarization of both the Ukraine and the eastern provinces. While the US government hates these ideas, they are objectively reasonable in themselves.

That is where we are. The war continues to rage, with huge loss of life and limb among Russian and Ukrainian draftee soldiers and Ukrainian civilians, as well as the occasional Russian civilian killed in Ukrainian terrorist drone attacks and cross-border raids. (Wartime efforts to kill civilians, like the Nazi blitz of London or the US firebombings of civilian areas and nuking of cities in WWII, are terrorism by definition, meant to create terror rather than to defeat the opponent’s military.) A couple of years ago, any of us meeting most of the Russian soldiers while traveling would have been pleased to meet them and have a drink or dinner with them. Now the press celebrates salaciously every time they are killed or maimed. Is that what Jesus, or Mohammad (the actual Mohammad who regretted war, as opposed to the warped version of the Saudi-funded Wahhabis) or Buddha would have approved? Is it consistent with Hindu or Taoist teachings? Is making choices that cause Ukrainian draftees and civilians to be killed or maimed by the thousands when we could quickly arrange a truce that would let everyone get back to their peaceful lives consistent with the teachings of any of these religions? Even for pure non-religious utilitarians, no parent raises their child to be killed or maimed in a needless war to satisfy the vanity and lust for dominance of politicians. A quick peace offers the greatest social utility.

If such death and destruction are ungodly on their face, then, they can only be justified if they are needed as the only available means for preventing a still greater wrong. The propagandists assert two attempted justifications, but each fails when one thinks it through. These are: 1) the claim that Putin, not Biden, seeks world domination and will start conquering NATO nations unless we feed the war in the Ukraine; and 2) that Russian soldiers are routinely committing atrocities in the war zone. Let’s look at each in turn.

The “domino theory” argument³

The claim that Putin is a would-be world conqueror is entirely inconsistent with the facts. Putin had Prigozhin killed precisely because the volatile former Wagner Group commander was threatening to molest NATO countries. Putin may be bad guy, but he is not stupid and he is not a nut. He knows that he could not win a war where he was trying project force into a NATO state against the full fury of the alliance, and that even if he did preliminarily succeed in such an effort it would result in a nuclear war that everyone would lose. Russia does not traditionally try such invasions. Yes, the Soviet Union tried to invade Finland (a Russian possession before WWI) in the Winter War, but that did not go well for the Soviet Union. Russia excels at an aggressive form of defense. Russia ultimately had its way within Napoleon’s empire after crushing Napoleon’s invasion. The Soviet Union had its way in Eastern Europe after defeating Hitler’s invasion (sorry, America, it was the Russians who beat Hitler, not us). They are tigers on defense. The Ukraine invasion has been telling. Russia might have been able to take the whole country in a blitzkrieg if they hadn’t been trying to minimize death and destruction, but that was not their plan. Instead they punched in far enough to be able to set up defensive lines around the provinces they actually wanted, then retreated to allow Zelensky to attack. The Russians then started doing their normal thing – they bend and let Zelensky’s forces come forward, then they crush them. Putin sought to control the friendly provinces, not to take and hold hostile territory. He knows his strengths.

Further, Putin has no motive to engage in such an invasion. Initiating a full-on war with NATO clearly would not operate to protect Russia from NATO. Even the one-time Russian territories in Poland and Finland don’t hold a particular fascination for him. He would not gain anything that is useful to him by acquiring such territory. The one thing that Russia did need has been handed to him on a silver platter by the Biden administration. Putin had long been frustrated in his efforts to get the oligarchs to bring their money back into Russia and to invest domestically in building up Russian industry. Biden’s sanctions left the oligarchs with no choice other than to satisfy Putin’s ambition. They have brought their money home and have been investing in all of the opportunities opened up by western companies abandoning their Russian businesses. Russia is becoming increasingly self-sufficient while the US is trying to figure out how to play tough with China at the same time that we still acquire most of the stuff that we relentlessly consume from them (largely essentially on credit, since we don’t produce that much that China wants).

But suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Putin did have an interest in trying to invade Poland. Now imagine two scenarios. In the first, the US keeps stoking the war in the Ukraine. Zelensky will not succeed in expelling the Russians. His big offensive has utterly failed without even a real hint of success. If he did succeed, then that would demonstrate that any NATO fears of Russian conquest are ridiculous. If the Ukrainians could really defeat Russia, then clearly NATO could do so easily. The other possibilities are: 1) that Russia ultimately gets tired of the war and, after rope-a-doping the Ukrainian forces into a prolonged slaughter, just conquers the rest of the Ukraine, leaving substantial Russian military might near the Polish border; or 2) that the war settles in where it is now, with Russia having reason to have major military forces in the Ukraine. Either way, that means a lot of Russian might near Poland.

In the second scenario, the Ukraine negotiates peace now, the eastern provinces currently occupied by Russia freely vote either to join Russia or to be independent, and the rest of the Ukraine agrees to be a neutral state under UN supervision that is banned forever from joining NATO, with Russia agreeing likewise to demilitarize the eastern provinces. That would be quickly achievable in negotiations. Russia would then have no ability to assemble forces near Poland without giving NATO warning to counter-mobilize. Which situation would be better in terms of avoiding any Russian ability to launch an effective attack? Having a demilitarized buffer state is better for everybody, including the demilitarized state. Hence, prolonging the war does not enhance the security of the NATO countries, and so NATO security is not a justification for further death and destruction.

Those who parrot the argument that Europe’s appeasement of Hitler encouraged WWII, and that by some loose analogy we must therefore encourage war to act tough with Putin, are historically ignorant. The “appeasement” line is a big lie that has been used to justify needless wars ever since. In fact, Hitler’s rise was only made possible by the WWI allies’ abuse of Germany and violation of promises that President Wilson made during the armistice negotiations regarding self-determination votes for former German territories. In making those greedy and arrogant errors, the allies set the stage for what followed, and no amount of non-appeasement or tough posturing would have improved the outcome. It may be noted, however, that the Biden administration has indicated that it would like to treat Russia in the same way that the Allies treated Germany after WWI, imposing reparation payments at the same time that we continue sanctions that make it difficult or impossible to acquire funds to make the payments. One suspects that they want to do this precisely to replicate the effect that it had on Germany, driving the hardship and hyperinflation that the right-wing propagandists try to attribute to the policies of the Weimar socialists. Biden and the neolibs, just like the neocons, want to break Russia as a independent force in the world capable of resisting US dictates. That type of policy created Hitler. It is foolish and irresponsible in the extreme. Oddly enough, citizens of powerful nations don’t like being oppressed. Particularly when those nations have nuclear weapons, pushing them past the breaking point cannot end well, and certainly would not enhance anyone’s security except for that of the arms industry.

The atrocities argument

As an initial matter, it should be noted that all allegations of atrocities in war that are reported by the press of countries opposed to the alleged perpetrator should be regarded with heavy skepticism. As noted above, many a war has been sold to the public based on lies about supposed atrocities committed by the soldiers that the government wants to convince people to kill. Governments know that people of faith (as well as sensible atheists) have a natural aversion to going out and killing someone else’s sons, husbands or fathers just to serve the desires of some corrupt politician, so the politicians work hard to demonize the soldiers of the supposed “enemy”, and the press routinely cooperates. In the first Republican presidential debate, Chris Christie repeated atrocity allegations from Zelensky as if they were the gospel truth. That is naive. That said, in the early stages of the war the lead Russian forces were the Wagner group mercenaries led by Prigozhin, the bloodthirsty zealot that Putin recently had killed. The Wagner group drew forces from Russian prisons and other groups not known for civilized behavior. It seems quite plausible that some of them did some very bad things, and we should accept as a given that very bad things happen to civilians in any war. So assume for now that there are atrocities in the war, but don’t assume that everything you read alleging such atrocities is true.⁴

Well, such atrocities were not being committed by Russian soldiers in Russia before the war. So, the soldiers (the regular soldiers, the Wagner mercenaries having been disbanded) are not walking atrocity machines. Any atrocities arise thus under the circumstances of war, potentially including armed occupation. What is the best way to stop such atrocities from happening? If one feeds and perpetuates the war and armed occupation, one should assume that the atrocities will continue for the duration of the conflict. If one ends the war, lets the eastern provinces have free and fair sovereignty elections, and so withdraws the occupying forces, then the atrocities will stop. The more you believe that atrocities are occurring in this war, the more you should push for the war to end immediately in a ceasefire and a negotiated peace with the terms that are clearly needed (the eastern provinces have a free sovereignty vote, western Ukraine becomes a demilitarized neutral state under UN supervision, Russian demilitarizes the eastern provinces, and everybody drops the reparations talk, with the Europeans sending aid to the Ukraine and Russia sending aid to the eastern provinces instead of everybody spending money on killing people in the Ukraine and hosting refugees). That is the ONLY way to end any such atrocities quickly. Taking Chris Christie’s assertions as true, then the US should stop all aid to the Ukraine war effort instantly and push hard for an immediate cease fire and fast peace negotiations on realistic terms. Choosing to feed the war is choosing continued atrocities.

Feeding the Ukraine war is ungodly on its face. It cannot be justified on the grounds that the warmongers assert as justification. It is therefore ungodly for any person of faith to fail to raise their voice in opposition to feeding the war. It is our duty to push for peace and the end of the ongoing death and destruction. If you aspire to be an instrument of God’s love, then you must speak up against feeding the war and in favor of pushing for immediate peace. Similarly, if you are a utilitarian atheist it is your responsibility to speak out against the foolish and corrupt enterprise of feeding this war. It benefits only arms merchants, politicians, and undertakers.

Footnotes:

1. The neolibs continue to claim this was unpredictable, as they always do when they do a stupid thing based on lies. Back when the US was arming the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, I was teaching a class in which I pointed out that the Russians were backing the nonsectarian elected government in Afghanistan against jihadist rebels because the latter were a real threat to other countries in the region, which then included Soviet republics, and that if we continued to arm the jihadists eventually they would turn around and directly bite us, too. You will recall that the Mujahideen included the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. But, neocons and neolibs alike will claim that nobody could have predicted that our gleeful funding of the jihadist rebellion could result in terrorists attacking the US. (OK, maybe I am a nobody, but still it was obvious to me at the time.) In like vein, even a southeastern college newspaper student editorial predicted that our military backing of the Libyan rebels would end poorly. Willful blindness to the truth is very different from the bad outcomes of evil policies being “unforeseeable.” Commonly, as with the 2008 financial crisis, normal people foresee and actively discuss looming disasters that the “experts” choose not to see.
2. I once had a conversation with a very nice woman who had survived the siege of Leningrad and described her entire extended family being wiped out one by one. Americans (or at least non-indigenous Americans) have no real conception of that level of suffering.
3. Readers may recall that the Vietnam war proponents sought to justify that brutal fiasco by arguing that if the Vietnamese nationalists under Ho Chi Minh were permitted to succeed, then all of Asia would fall to communism like dominoes, which became known as the domino theory. In fact, of course, while Cambodia and Laos did fall to communist rebels due to American destablization of those countries, the remainder of Asia was unaffected. As to Vietnam, I have been told by a man who was in the OSS with involvement in the conversations that Ho Chi Minh approached the Americans and told them that he admired our revolution and constitution and would like to follow our model and be a friend to America if we would help to persuade the French to leave his country. We refused, and so he found support where he could get it. We then engaged in a stupid and terrible war to try (unsuccessfully) to achieve a result that we could have achieved just with a little good sense and diplomatic capital.
4. In particular, disregard the ridiculous contention that Russia has been kidnapping children to terrorize the Ukrainians. Russia moved a large number of children out of the potential war zone, much as the British sent a large number of children to safe areas in North America and elsewhere during the blitz. While the US government opined that the acknowledged death of over 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of US sanctions was “worth it“, the Russians fortunately take a more charitable approach to the weakest and most vulnerable persons affected by their decisions. If only Israel had the same regard for the lives of innocent children, things would be better today.

Christ’s Death for Our Sins – His Humanity Displayed His Divinity

Why would the son of God be born as a mere flesh-and-blood human?  Why would he be permitted to be subjected to doubt and indignities, to torture and death? Why would a divine being ask God to take away the cup of poison, or cry out to God “why hast thou forsaken me”? Why would Christ, who must above all others have had no reason to fear death, have nonetheless been afraid (though undeterred) as the hour approached?

The answer lies again in the concepts of alignment with God and free will. If God spoke to each of us from a burning bush and told us to do X, Y, and Z or else suffer the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, most would comply, but we would do so out of fear, not out of true alignment with God. If Christ had been in the form of a shining, glorious divinity free from fears or temptations many people would have listened to him, but would not have understood his message.[1] It is all very well for a God to say how to behave, but how can mere mortal humans follow such a standard? God does not need faith, but we must depend upon it.

But Christ did not come as a shining divinity, or even as a perfect man.  He came as a man with perfect faith, not perfect certainty. He feared pain.  He suffered from humiliation. He feared death, and apparently even had doubts about what would actually happen when he died. (Again, true Christian faith is not faith in the specifics of doctrine, but rather faith that one should try to do the right thing whether it results in reward or not, so His doubt regarding the afterlife actually affirmed his faith in doing the right thing.) He did not smile upon the cross and delight in the thought that he would shortly be back in heaven. Despite all this, he did not have doubts about what his own actions must be. He had faith that he must do what was demanded of him, whatever the consequences. It is only because he was so human, because he had human doubts and fears, that he could serve as an example to all of perfect love and faith. His example taught a lesson that mere humans could follow.  The apostles and other Christians did follow it. Many suffered humiliation, torture, and gruesome deaths. Yet, guided by the example of a human of perfect faith, they found near-perfect faith themselves. They chose to accept their unpleasant deaths over the alternative of abandoning their convictions.  They died knowing that they were doing the right thing, and that conviction was more than compensation for their sufferings. They did not need to be able to see exactly what lay beyond death’s curtain, for their faith was not dependent upon certainty of eternal reward – it was enough that they were certain that they could not be content doing less than standing up for their convictions, whatever the cost.

It is a part of Church doctrine, at least in some sects, that the Original Sin of Adam and Eve prevented humans from having access to salvation until the coming of Christ, and that Christ died for our sins in the sense that his death was somehow magically necessary to cleanse the stain of Original Sin from our souls. This seems like an unnecessary and unlikely construction.[2]  Why would God let the human race flounder along hopelessly until the death of Christ? If Christ’s death was needed to perform some sort of salvation spell, why wasn’t it arranged sooner? It makes far more sense to accept that Original Sin, in the sense of the ability to choose not to follow the path of alignment with God, as required by the concept of free will, placed all of us under a dangerous threat of failure, but not a condemnation of certain failure. Christ’s example of perfect faith served as a beacon to guide us out of danger. It came at a time and in a place where mankind was ready to hear, accept, and communicate the message, a message that was given to other people in other times by various prophets with varying degrees of success. Christ died so that our sins may be forgiven through our repenting of our sins in the light of his example, not because God was otherwise incapable of forgiving our sins if we were willing to repent. Mystifying the death of Christ serves only to obscure its true significance to us. Jesus proved to us all that each of us, mere humans all, with all of our fears and weaknesses, are capable of achieving perfect faith, as he was. We are all the children of God, and God has always loved his children.

[1] The Bible teaches that in the old days God was prone to demonstrate his presence and power with impressive miracles, yet people consistently went astray and started worshiping golden calves about eight minutes after the last such demonstration. Being impressed by power is not as effective as true understanding.

[2] Here I am flying directly against what most Christian sects teach, so I do not expect general agreement on this point. That does not matter, since the rest of what I write here does not depend on this point. However, my book is intended to help people who are struggling with the hard questions where the official doctrine does not seem to make sense, and on this point I can only say that I think the official doctrine has it wrong. Christ’s life and death are no less important for being less magical. News of this perfect example has spread across the planet and endured the centuries, leading millions and billions to salvation and freedom from deadly sin. The fact that Christ died so that our sins could be repented and forgiven by his divine example, an example given to us in a form that we can understand, is, in my view, more wonderful than the notion that Adam turned on a magical sin-switch and Christ turned it off again.

Why we can’t have nice things: liberty, rights, and wrongs

I am a big believer in liberty. I don’t like the application of the term “liberal” to the Pelosi types because they don’t really believe in liberty, but rather seek to suppress anyone who disagrees with them or seeks to point out inconvenient truths, going so far as to try to prosecute Snowdon and Julian Assange. But liberty, properly understood and as intended by Jefferson, is the ability to do that which does not harm others and the right to be left alone. It is not a license to impose on other people or to be obnoxious. Civilized society is founded on a combination of freedom and good manners, in which people do not seek to use their liberty in ways that make life worse for other people. In recent years, though, many millions of Americans have come to accept a view of liberty that is defined approximately as follows: “If you actually speak and act in a manner that you know will be unpleasant to others, and if nobody punishes you for it, then you are free, but if you exercise good manners and try to make life pleasant for those around you, then you are oppressed.” This is not freedom. It is a juvenile exercise of power. Nasty little bullies will be unpleasant to other children just to show that they have the power to do it. Men with Napoleonic complexes will act in obnoxious and abusive ways because they convince themselves that the fact that others politely refrain from squashing them like bugs means that they have the power to push people around and thus are somehow superior to their victims. Nonetheless, it is clear that a huge part of the population now feels compelled to behave badly – or to have some sort of tribal affiliation with other people who behave badly – in order to feel good about themselves.

This has been highlighted by the Covid mask wearing and social distancing issues. Not wearing a mask has been widely and loudly touted as a human right and a basic freedom. So, let’s think about that. The scientists tell us that wearing a proper N95 mask reduces the chances of infecting others and thus slows the spread of the virus to give time to deploy an effective vaccine. So, not wearing a mask in public increases the danger to others. Do I have a right to endanger other people? There shouldn’t be any debate about whether the government has the power to require me to wear a mask, because as a decent human being I should be wearing one without anyone making me do it. (Jesse Ventura noted that those who felt that wearing a mask was overly burdensome were wusses. One should suck it up and do the right thing.) That right – the right to behave properly – is one I clearly do have, and if anyone tries to take it away from me they should be suppressed. On the other hand, if I refuse to wear a mask and get in someone’s face breathing on them and thus threatening them, their parents and their children, then I am not exercising a right: I am exercising a wrong. If I use obnoxious language and overtly sexual behavior in a family area I am exercising a wrong. If I drive aggressively and cut other people off, I am exercising a wrong. If I go to a nice restaurant where some couples are having a treat they can afford maybe once a year and I get drunk and loud, I am exercising a wrong. If I show up at a protest and brandish a firearm to try to feel tough (as if possessing a weapon of violence somehow made me physically superior), then I am exercising a wrong. None of us should feel liberated by exercising a wrong.

This yahoo culture, the belief that it is necessary to abuse others in order to feel good about yourself, prevents us from having many nice things. The internet was supposed to open a forum for intelligent discussion in which useful information would be shared and different viewpoints would be explored so that we could be independent of the corporate media. Instead we have forums in which people jump on each other in mindless attacks in order to feel like a tough person that some fantasy admirer would ooh and ahh over, eliminating any chance for useful discussion. On TV we see people driving their Jeeps out to pristine wilderness areas, and then doing their best to track up and tear up the landscape in order to leave their mark. During Covid people have been taking advantage of the reduced supervision in our state and federal parks to go in and trash things. The same basic attitude prevails in business, with many “businesses” having crossed the line into criminal enterprises making largely fraudulent junk calls. Other supposedly legitimate businesses intentionally do their best to make everything high friction, cheating customers and then making it very time consuming to do anything about it. We can’t just make a contract and rely on the business to do the right thing. We need to be very careful and monitor them, and we still get cheated. The businesses, however, evidently feel good about themselves because they are making money and nobody arrests them, so they think they are just smarter, better business people than anyone who tries to act honestly. As a result of all this, our lives get worse.

What would society be like if, instead of seeking the freedom to exercise wrongs, we all tried to focus on exercising our right to do right? What would happen if we tried to conduct ourselves in a way where we didn’t impose on other people? We could exercise good manners and confine our overt sexuality, whatever variety it might be, to the privacy of our own homes. We could be honest in our business affairs and we could demand that the authorities stand up for consumers and require businesses to be fair as a matter of course. We could wear proper masks during a pandemic, at some inconvenience to ourselves, because we wanted to be extra careful to avoid doing anything that could harm others, without anyone having to tell us to, and we could have reasoned discussions so that people could learn that cloth masks are basically useless and so that we could figure out how best to address small children. (Remember, people, Covid is not the Big Bad. It is the mild warning pandemic. The Big Bad will come, likely in the foreseeable future, and if we are not ready for it then figure out where to dig the mass graves and who will do the digging.) We could try our best to ensure that the environment and our parks are kept at least as nice for the next person and for our grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren as they were for us. We could keep our individuality and respect the individuality of others without defining our individuality as requiring us to be offensive or disrespectful. We could recognize that, just as Jesus did not show His power by oppressing others or His freedom by attacking others, the best way to show our strength is through generous kindness and the best way to exercise our freedom is by regulating our own behavior to improve society for everyone. Wouldn’t that be a happier world? If we reformed our own hearts to want to do right, wouldn’t we be more free to then all follow our hearts?

A bratty three-year-old’s vision of freedom, i.e. freedom to be selfish and demanding, is a flaw to be corrected; it is not a correct vision for society. Let’s all grow up and encourage everyone else to grow up, too. Let’s realize that responsible adults use their liberty for the benefit of all, and then do the right things to earn our freedom. If we can do that then we will have a society worth fighting for.

End of the series/back to work

I have to get back focused on other things now, so no more posts from me.  If anyone found the prior posts useful and would like to see the rest, you can read it for free in the kindle library , or if you like paper I published at the minimum allowed price. Especially in these times, when so many people seem to be citing God as the sponsor of hatred and violence, I think it is important to counter the nonsense that confuses people into accepting that sort of thing, and bring all of what Mohammed called “the People of the Book”, his approving term for anyone who followed an uncorrupted version of  Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, back to an understanding of God as a loving being who gives us all what we need generously and freely if we will only take the time and focus to find it, asking nothing in return, but who cannot force us to be good. We must each work to learn to feel pleasure in doing the right thing, which is to do good for all God’s creatures and to participate in the love that is God. The message is simple. It only needs a book full of explanations because people have been so determined to complicate it and distort it to serve their own ends.

Love and peace to all.

Loving Your Neighbor – Love Works No Ill to His Neighbor, Therefore Love is the Fulfillment of the Law

The great commandment to love your neighbor as yourself should be understood in the light of the above discussion of virtue and the concept of connectedness. The words of Jesus at Mark 12:31 were carefully chosen.  He did not say to love your neighbor as your child, or spouse, or brother, but as yourself. Most of us, at least, do not feel particular affection for ourselves, but we tend to be highly concerned for our well being, and seek to avoid harm to ourselves. We should view our neighbors in the same light, not necessarily with any feeling of warm affection, but at least with concern and caring. We must realize that we are all connected in the community of God’s creatures, and that we should seek to guide, comfort, and protect one another.  Following this principle will go a long way towards leading us to virtue.  Since God loves all of his creatures, treating his creatures with love will bring us into alignment with him.

It is important to make this distinction between affection and concern, for it is not possible for at least most of us to feel affection for our neighbors.  Out of the 9,000,000,000 or so people on Earth, a great many are unpleasant or irritating individuals, and some are evil beyond imagining.[1] Faced with a command to love these beings, one is inclined to just ignore it as an unreasonable proposition. Yet, we do not have to like them to treat them with love in the sense of the commandment. If they do harm we may try to stop them. If they are irritating we may try to guide them towards better behavior, for their own sake as well as ours. If they are selfish and imposing we need not allow them to take advantage of us, but rather we should try to help them to see the error of their ways. We must not ignore the commandment out of misunderstanding.

As I write this, there is a man who can be found sitting in a wheelchair every morning on the Wabash Avenue bridge over the Chicago River. He holds a cup which he shakes a bit as people pass buy, hoping they will drop in some small change. He never asks for money, but simply says “good morning” as each stranger passes.[2] I don’t know why this neighbor finds it necessary to make or supplement his living this way. He is up bright and early and is a man of regular habits, so one would suppose that either private enterprise or society’s social service mechanisms would provide for him. Be that as it may, I am somewhat glad to see him out there, for by his presence he provides a social service to those of his neighbors willing to avail themselves of the opportunity. He does not stand reeking of alcohol and ask passersby for money for a “cup of coffee”. He does not defraud people by asking for the fare for a bus trip he never intends to take. He does not try to intimidate anyone into giving, or curse them if they pass him by. Sitting quietly, saying his “good mornings”, he lets those so inclined give him a small contribution just because they want to. No contributor will be featured on the society page in an article celebrating their benevolence. No one will be pressured by her employer to boost the office contribution rate to 100 percent by giving him a check. Any contribution is a strictly private matter, just between this neighbor, the donor, and God. This is the way that charity should be.

It is unfortunate that in our society the charitable impulse has suffered greatly both at the hands of fraudulent practitioners and institutionalized extractions. The noxious beggars who claim to have been caught without bus fare perform a great disservice, replacing the good feeling of giving with the self-accusatory regret of having been defrauded, and eventually teach people who would be happy to help out someone who really had been caught short to ignore every plea. The United Way campaigns, while admittedly providing a great deal of money for good works, likewise tend to replace the joy of giving with the same emotions that surround a tax. As discussed previously, pressure at work makes the donation less than voluntary, and people come to resent it.  State welfare, while providing a more comprehensive safety net than traditional charities, forces the “donor” to provide the funds on penalty of imprisonment, and encourages recipients to view state-sponsored benevolence as a “right” to be enforced rather than as a nice act producing warm feelings of gratitude and faith in one’s fellow humans. Even the somewhat abstract good feeling that taxpayers may get from knowing that they support a society that tries to let no one go hungry fades if the welfare system comes to support work-capable people who prefer to claim the entitlement. Thus, we become increasingly unpracticed at caring for our neighbors. We grow in solitude, aloof from everyone outside of our little circle of family and friends, as the remainder of humanity fades under a cold frost of indifference.

It might be a step in the right direction to recall that for most of us, loving ourselves depends upon feeling that we have done our best to demonstrate responsibility, to do what we can to solve our own problems and help ourselves. Indeed, we are reminded that the Lord helps those who help themselves. America has been tending to drift towards the responsibility-free society. In the early 60s, serious student activists spoke of “student rights and responsibilities”, viewing the two things as inextricably intertwined. One could not claim any right, save perhaps the right to be left alone, unless one exercised certain related responsibilities. The responsibilities part of that phrase soon fell away. Now people claim that all kinds of things are rights, and that the possessors of those supposed rights have no responsibility to do anything to earn them. For example, we are told that everyone should have a right to infinite medical care of the very best sort, but that nobody should be required to do anything to look out for his own health in exchange.

Do you feel good about yourself if you ask a friend for financial help when you have not made any real effort to avoid or address the problem yourself? We should assume that our neighbors are the same. Asking them to exercise responsibility is not an insult. It is not arrogant or dictatorial. It is recognition that people who properly recognize the principle of connectedness do not want to impose on the goodwill of others. I do not advocate having an advanced society rely exclusively on private charity to avoid poverty or disease. However, a return to the notion of intertwined rights and responsibilities can help the recipients of government help to feel better about themselves at the same time that it helps the taxpayers to feel better about supporting a generous society. Do your neighbors the honor of assuming that they want to do their part. Do not contribute to their corruption by undermining the sense of connection we have to each other. Support a system that you, as a generous, hardworking person, would want to have in place for your protection, that asks the same of others (to the best of their abilities) that you would ask of yourself. A society of infinite “rights” is not the same thing as a loving society. If we clear up that confusion and focus on what connectedness means, we can help love to prosper.

[1] See my book for considerations regarding prisoners and the death penalty.

[2] I note that he is quite different from most of the younger beggers in Boston, for example, who aggressively demand money as their right and are fond of insulting the passers by. They make it difficult to feel good about giving them anything, and they make it hard to believe that any contribution would be used for good purposes. I know for a fact that one of them lives with his parents in a well-to-do household. He either does not think of the effect of his fraud upon persons with real needs or he simply does not care.

Virtue – The Good and the Misguided

If we are to pursue virtue, we need to have some idea of what it looks like. A man may believe himself to be virtuous, while another person thinks him to be a monster. Is virtue in the eye of the beholder, or is one person right and the other wrong? It does not make sense that we could not determine whether or not an action truly is virtuous, or that the virtuousness or evil of an act is just a matter of opinion. God would not leave us that exposed. The task of determining virtue is not always easy, but we do have a basis for discovering the answer.

To do so, again we must look to the principle of connectedness. We are in a world with other creatures beloved by God. God wants what is best for all of his creatures, collectively. Therefore, if a given action helps one or more of his creatures without harming another, it must be good. If another action harms a creature without helping another, it must be bad. If an action does some good and some harm, then it must be judged in light of the relative degree of harm and good and, most importantly, in light of the available alternatives. (As discussed below, this should not be confused with simple-minded utilitarianism. Christian virtue requires people to make a sincere effort to improve their desires so that the crowd does not derive pleasure from the suffering of another. This avoids most of the intuitive dilemmas of utilitarianism.) You cannot claim to have acted virtuously just because your action did more good than harm if you could have instead acted in a way that produced just the good without the harm. This is simply the Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, with the important qualifier that they are not you, and that therefore you must be considerate of their situations in determining how best to act.

This is not complex or difficult in theory. There are few who would argue with the proposition that acting in a way that makes people happier and avoiding acting in a way that makes people unhappy, all things considered, is a good thing to do. The difficulty comes from the complexity of the workings of the world and its creatures. If a child hits her playmate it is generally good to scold her, despite the fact that it makes her unhappy at the time, in order to try to prevent her from making her playmates unhappy and also in order to try to keep her from being unhappy later when her former playmates avoid her. If a child wants something it may sometimes be best to say “no”, even if you can afford to buy the thing for the child, because it is important to teach children that getting material things is not the road to true happiness.  Arresting a degraded drug addict and putting her in a non-punitive work camp of some sort where she can dry out and learn basic life skills may be a good thing, even it is entirely against her will and she insists that she wants to go back to the vile life she was leading, although there are people who will vehemently argue that this is wrong. If a country is having a civil war, with horrible slaughter by both sides, perhaps it is good for a country like America to send troops who will do enough violence to persuade both sides to stop, even if that means the Americans will necessarily kill innocent civilians along with the guilty combatants, or then again perhaps it is best to let the combatants kill each other until they discover it is a bad idea (though, sadly, usually both sides find it more amusing and safer to kill civilians and avoid contacting the armed troops of the other side). Once a war has started, alternative interventions, such as offers to arbitrate and the like, seem to have limited success in dissuading armies that have not yet tired of war. The objective is clear, but the best means of getting there may often be very difficult to determine.

To some extent this is why advanced societies have chosen to separate political authority from religious authority. If the most virtuous course of action was clear in every complex situation, we could simply seek to find a very good person and make her supreme dictator. In reality, however, any one person will make mistakes; no ordinary human is qualified to be the supreme oracle of virtue. So, we look to the collective wisdom and virtue of the population to keep political leaders in check and let them know when they have made mistakes. When political leaders are forced to explain their actions in simple terms of right and wrong, of harms and benefits and alternative choices, rather than claiming to act under divine guidance or through some other form of special knowledge, the chances of choosing a course of action that is pretty close to the right one are increased.[1] The greatest benefit of separating Church from State lies not so much in preventing the State from imposing religious rituals on unwilling participants, but rather in preventing the State from wrapping itself in the mantle of the Church in order to claim that its actions are beyond question.[2]  Virtue grows and blooms under questioning; sin shrivels.

Virtue does not consist of pious enforcement of a book of rules. This is illustrated by the story of the woman taken in adultery. While she had broken the moral rules, the virtuous member of the crowd was not one of the ones who sought to punish her under the law, but rather the one who protected her and sought to lead her lovingly to a better life. Virtue lies in examining the world about you and looking for opportunities to help others to achieve happiness. In one case that may be through helping a delinquent youth to reform. In another it may be through catching a more vicious young criminal and locking him up so that the children of the neighborhood may play together in peace. In either case, all of the consequences of the action must be considered to the best of your ability, and a course chosen that will best serve all of God’s creatures.

This is not quite the same as the utilitarian formula of choosing the course that does the greatest good for the greatest number. Philosophers have been fond of attacking that formula by suggesting that it can be used to justify slavery or other wrongs that inflict an injustice on a minority for the benefit of the majority. The Christian formula for virtue, in contrast, is rooted in the notion that the greatest good for anyone is the achievement of divine bliss, not material well-being. Viewed in that light, the “beneficiaries” of slave labor receive a harm, not a real benefit, because they will be unable to reconcile the duty to love their fellow creatures with a system that harms any set of those creatures. Under the Christian formula, a harm may be inflicted only when there is no other way to prevent a greater harm from being suffered. A child should only be punished when reasoning and explanation fail, and then only because it is necessary to help the child to learn to avoid behavior that will harm it (physically or socially or spiritually) or harm others. A sin should only be punished as a crime when it harms others. A nation should go to war only to stop the army of another nation from inflicting great harm (more on this later). The Christian has a duty, whenever possible, to seek a loving, helping solution to problems, for that is the solution that will best help all involved to achieve alignment with God. When one assumes that all of the parties love and want the best for the others (while keeping in mind that really they may not), it substantially changes the math in determining which course does the greatest good.

The above discussion should not cause the reader to believe that finding a virtuous course of action is too difficult for the average person in our complex world. While coming up with the clear right answer in a given situation may be difficult, the process of reasoning through the problem is based on just the three simple principles outlined above. The chapters of my book illustrate how these principles may be used to address some very difficult problems. Most importantly, though, the key to success in the pursuit of virtue lies not in always finding the “right” answer, but rather in making the effort to try with love in your heart. Indeed, as the discussions in my book  illustrate, in the most difficult problems the solution may not lie so much in the action as in the spirit in which the action is performed. You cannot ask yourself to do more than your capabilities permit, and you may feel the divine joy of virtue so long as you do your best. In this respect, think of a young child who “helps” his mother with the housework. The fact that the child is likely to be more hindrance than help does not alter the fact that he is trying to help to the best of his abilities, and so he will justly feel good about it and his mother will love him for it just as much as if he was really able to assist her. God is no less generous than that mother. To God, the sincere desire to act in a virtuous way, so long as it is in fact attempted in a loving manner, is the only important thing.

[1] This model of democracy assumes that the political leaders are making a good faith effort to find and do the right thing in the spirit of cooperation. Sadly, politicians increasingly are just focused on trying to make the other party look bad, which makes harvesting the collective wisdom impossible.

[2] Many will disagree with me about this, but it makes me gag when a politician invokes the name of God. Politicians should speak in terms of good and evil actions and be forced to explain why a proposed action is good in terms of its specific effects on people and the world. They should not be permitted to speak as though they are God’s chosen and act as though that gives their (usually corrupt) actions, without real explanation, God’s approval.

Sin and Repentance – The Deadly Desires and Their Cure

Greed, envy, lust, wrath, gluttony, vanity – all are sins of Wanting, of non-virtuous desire.  Sloth is a sin of a somewhat different sort, one of lack of virtuous desire. By examining these we may understand more complex varieties of sin.

To understand sin we need only recall the above discussion of the nature of heaven and hell. Those who allow themselves to be preoccupied with material desires become incapable of experiencing the bliss of heaven, and instead fall into the self-feeding torment of insatiable Wanting. They actively follow a path to hell. Those who simply are too lazy to develop virtue, who waste their lives merely earning a living and finding amusements to fill the dreary hours of their lives, also fail to develop the ability to experience the bliss of heaven. They may not be punished by the gnawing hunger of Want that the more active sins involve, but still they do not achieve the bliss of virtue. Both types of sin, if engaged in to excess without repentance and reform, involve a choice on the sinner’s part not to follow the only path that leads to divine bliss, the path of developing alignment with God. It is for this reason that they are sins. Thus, sins are not arbitrary rules that God has set up just for fun. Rather, sin is something that inherently, in the nature of things, prevents the mind and soul from focusing on virtue.

It is important to understand that sin is not a matter of making God angry by breaking the rules. God does not look down upon a rich and greedy man and think “he must be punished for that after he dies”, any more than a good parent would decide to punish their child for something years after the fact, when the punishment couldn’t any longer be expected to help the child to improve her behavior and avoid future mistakes. God does not have the angels taking names of teenage boys who see an attractive girl and think about having sex with her. Sin is a disappointment to God, not an offense.  It is a disappointment because it is a distraction from the process of alignment with God. If the rich man remains so concerned with earning his next million that he cannot learn to find joy in taking time and wealth to help others, then he will fail to develop the habit of mind that leads to eternal bliss, and God will not be able to help him. If the teenager, after he grows up and his hormones calm down, still spends his days and nights looking for new and more extreme sexual gratification rather than finding true love and learning to regard sex as a way of giving pleasure and affection to his wife, then he will become increasingly obsessed with desires that cannot satisfy the soul. If a woman spends her whole life watching videos and staring at a computer screen to stave off boredom, she will never develop the ability to feel the joy and excitement that flows from love and virtue. God does not banish these people from heaven as a punishment for breaking the rules. They keep themselves from heaven by choosing paths that can only lead elsewhere.

This fact, that God does not become angry with us for sinning, but rather that we lead ourselves to unhappiness through sinning, makes it easier to understand the process of repentance and “forgiveness”. I have often heard people express puzzlement over the Catholic rite of confession. Their statements go something like: “Boy, Catholics have it good. You can be the worst person in the world, but if you confess it to the priest before you die and say a few Hail Marys it’s all okay.” In reality, confession and repentance are not that easy. Confession, for those who practice it, is not about revealing your sins to the priest. Rather, it is designed to force you to think about your actions and reveal your sins to yourself. Once you have reviewed your behavior and found your errors, the next step is to repent of the sins.

Repentance is not a matter of telling God that you are sorry. It is a matter of being sorry. Many parents will at some point have been through the following little drama. Brother hits sister, making her cry. Parent tells brother to say he is sorry, which he does. One minute later, brother hits sister again.  Upon seeing parent’s look of displeasure, brother voluntarily says “I’m sorry!”  Parent then explains to brother that just saying he is sorry isn’t enough, when obviously he wasn’t really sorry or he wouldn’t have done it again.  This same simple understanding of the true nature of repentance applies to all sin. True repentance involves thinking about the nature of the action, realizing that it is wrong, and developing an intention to avoid doing it again.  It is a process of moving away from sin and towards alignment with God.  Without this sort of repentance, no amount of confessing or apologizing will do any good. Likewise, if the sinner truly does repent of his action, if he truly is sorry for what he has done and has resolved to improve, then no particular act of repentance or granting of forgiveness by a priest or anyone else is required to heal the soul of the sinner. The rite of confession is merely an aid to true repentance.[1] Likewise, the acts of penance prescribed by the priest are not a form of reparations to God, but rather are a way to help lead the repentant sinner to further contemplate his error and strengthen his resolve to avoid repeating the sin. Unfortunately, too many people regard them as a form of payment for the sin, to be gotten out of the way before going and sinning some more, rather than taking the opportunity of the prayers to improve their resolve and make real progress in their alignment with God.

Can major sinners be redeemed? Yes, but it isn’t easy. It is hard to change a habit of mind. A person immersed in greed, lust, or vanity will have a very hard time getting away from those desires and finding pleasure in virtue. It is, however, possible, in the rare case that something happens to cause the sinner to make a real about face and realize the error of his ways.  Is it fair that such a person, if he successfully repents and reforms, should be able to achieve heaven, just as a person who has been good all her life can do? Yes, for two reasons. First, again the main reason why sins are sins is not because they involve breaking rules, but rather because they involve a distraction from virtue. A person can be immersed in greed or lust his whole life without necessarily ever harming anyone except himself, so if he then succeeds in seeing the error of his ways and turns around to pursue active virtue, why shouldn’t he achieve bliss? Secondly, to the extent that the sinner has harmed others in his career of sin, if he truly repents and reforms he will suffer in his own mind in proportion to the amount of harm he has caused.  If a wrathful person has gone about beating people up for years and does not greatly regret those actions, feeling real pain of heart for it, then he has not really repented and reformed. Thus, we should not think of the reformed sinner as going unpunished, for he will be punished in and through his own repentance. Indeed, if a formerly grievous sinner claims to have seen the light and adopts a serene and peaceful attitude, one may guess that his reform is far from thorough. Have you ever kicked yourself for days over some fairly minor insensitive or ill-conceived action of yours? Imagine how you would feel, as a normal good person, if you had committed the offenses of the grievous sinner; the truly reformed person will suffer at least that much from the arrows of his own conscience. Indeed, Dante envisioned purgatory, the afterlife waystation where some sects believe reformed sinners go before being admitted to heaven, as a place where the sinners rather gleefully jumped into searing fires of purification. Having truly repented, they are so aghast at their own sins that the pain of burning away the taint is a relative comfort. Don’t try this at home, of course, but Dante’s vision helps us to visualize how true repentance inherently pains the sinner in direct proportion to the degree to which others have suffered from his sins, which should satisfy our sense of fairness. Further, we can be assured that there is no way to get around this. Anyone who truly repents will feel that pain, and anyone who does not truly repent will not be saved.[2]

This brings us to the distinction between sin and crime. People have often been tempted to make all sins crimes, but the two things are different.  If a man steals a loaf of bread because it is the only way that he can feed his child, he has technically committed a crime but he has not committed a sin.  His action does not lead him away from the path of virtue, for he is risking punishment out of love and concern for his child. If consenting adults choose to spend their evenings in a sex club pursuing their sexual desires, they are committing a sin but not a crime. By feeding their wants they lead themselves away from the path of virtue, but they are not hurting other innocent people. If a person, on a sudden whim, shoots someone dead just to see what it feels like to kill someone, then he commits a terrible crime but not – by the act – such a terrible sin. Since the action itself was short and impulsive, it was not a great distraction. The terrible sin came earlier, in developing the depravity of mind that made the murderer so concerned with feeding his own desires that he considers the satisfaction of a whim of his own more important than the very life of another person. Sin is internal, a process of inflicting harm on one’s own mind and soul. Crime is external, a process of inflicting harm on others. Crime can be controlled by governments through punishing and locking up offenders, though they should bear in mind that virtuous people rarely intentionally hurt others, and that investments in stimulating virtue may thus be very effective in lessening crime. Sin, on the other hand, cannot be effectively controlled by putting offenders in prison, for such punishment is unlikely to cause the misguided sinner to reform his mind and soul. The concept of prison as a penitentiary was never notably successful.

Understanding that sin is, in essence, distraction from virtue can also help in understanding a class of actions that are, for want of a better term, “sin-like” without being in themselves something we would think of as bad.  Even the finest of emotions, such as the love of a parent for a child, can go wrong. The infamous Texas cheerleader mother is an example. She was obsessed with wanting her daughter to do well and get whatever she wanted.  This obsession grew to the point where she tried to hire someone to kill the mother of her daughter’s rival for a position on the high school cheerleading squad, in the hopes that the death of the mother would cause the rival to be depressed and drop out of contention. Clearly, trying to have someone murdered is a crime. The more interesting fact here, though, is that the normally good impulse of loving and wanting to help one’s daughter had been warped into a sin-like obsession that was itself a bad thing. As far as the press reports revealed, she had no hatred for the intended victim of the crime, but her obsessive devotion to her child’s wants had the same poisonous effects as sinful, seething hatred.

How can you tell when this line has been crossed? To find the answer, we should recall the principle of connectedness. All actions must be viewed in the context of our place in a world filled with other humans and animals.  Our devotion to ourselves, our families, and our friends must be evaluated in light of its effects on others. Charity begins at home, and it is right to spend extra effort looking after the people who, by virtue of being family or close friends, are your special responsibility. However, when serving the apparent interests of family and friends results in harm to others, the interests of everyone must be considered. God does not play favorites, and those who wish to align themselves with God must be willing to take that broader perspective. A mother who finds that she has great devotion to her child but no sympathy at all for other children has gone astray. A parent who fights for the unrestrained liberty of a child who has proven himself to be an incorrigible danger to other children has also gone astray; the parent should continue to love the child and try to help him reform, but should not fight for the child’s freedom to continue to harm others. We are all creatures of the world, and we must try to be good citizens of the world, promoting the web of good behavior that will help all of God’s children to have the best life possible.

If an act, viewed in isolation on the basis of its individual facts, would normally be seen as evil, then chances are that it is not any less so just because it is performed from a misguided surplus of family loyalty, patriotism, or religious fervor. Using a bomb to blow up a person on the street who has committed no particular offense is evil, even if that person happens to be a member of a religious group that has tended to treat the perpetrator’s religious group unfairly. The religious tribalism that underlies the act is sinful, and has taken the place of real religious devotion. A soldier who intentionally injures a noncombatant citizen of the enemy country acts, at best, out of a sinful excess of anti-foreign hatred that has dispossessed the type of good patriotic pride that causes other soldiers to be careful always to act with honor, even at danger to themselves. People who act as an accomplice to a criminal boyfriend or girlfriend act out of a sinful obsession that masquerades as love. All such obsessions are just as harmful as conventional sin in preventing alignment with God.

[1] For avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that Catholics not bother with confession. To the contrary, my point is that they should take the process seriously, and that persons of other faiths without this rite should seek an equivalent means of repenting and steering away from their sins. Also, in fairness, Catholic doctrine would dispute that the rite is not strictly necessary, noting that Peter was delegated power to forgive or not forgive sins. However, I believe this is a matter of how one views the nature of the delegation. One cannot think that God intended to give Peter arbitrary power to deny forgiveness to a good and truly repentant person on a whim, so one must suppose that Christ’s meaning was “Peter, you understand how true repentance works – if you and your followers say someone’s sins are forgiven, it means that they have done what is needed to repent and cure the sin.” Similarly, though the church may not say this, I think most Catholics would be convinced that if a man dies alone after confessing and repenting of his sins in the presence of only God, it will still work. Priests are intended to be a help, not an impediment

[2] In my own unsupported opinion, I think this is the reason why Catholic doctrine really puts a strong emphasis on having a priest perform the Last Rites and grant forgiveness. Even a mundane sinner, upon having her mind focused by impending death, may feel such anguish over her relatively minor sins that her soul will be heavily disturbed not only despite but because of her true repentance. The priest may calm this disturbance and help the soul to depart in peace.

Good Works – Doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reason

Different Christian sects differ on the importance of doing good works in the process of salvation, but I believe this is due to a lack of common understanding as to the nature and purpose of good works. Can a person do good and charitable things throughout their life and still not achieve heavenly bliss? Yes. Can a person achieve heavenly bliss without doing good and charitable things? No. Good works are a symptom of faith, so that any person who has faith and virtue will do them, but good works are not in themselves virtue. It is possible, and indeed common, to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

How can there be a wrong reason for doing a good act? Again, one must recall the nature of heavenly bliss and of faith. To achieve bliss you must have enough faith to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing, not because you expect any kind of reward. If I give hours each day and much of my earnings to charity because I will be fussed over and admired by other people, then I am acting like Contracting Connie. I will not be enjoying the acts themselves, but rather will be suffering through them in order to get an external reward from other people. The character of Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens’s Bleak House, who devotes herself to prominent charitable causes while seriously neglecting her own children, is a notable example of this breed. If I give ten percent of my earnings to the church because a minister has told me that unless I do I will be cast into a lake of fire, then I am just trying to avoid punishment rather than receiving enjoyment from the knowledge that I have done a good thing. Doing the right thing for the wrong reason is better than doing the wrong thing, but it will not lead to the ability to feel heavenly bliss. We must learn to feel enjoyment just because we have done a good thing, even if we receive no gratitude or admiration at all.

Should you encourage your children to do good works even if they don’t (at least at first) want to? Helping someone just to avoid being scolded by your parents is doing the right thing for the wrong reason, so a child cannot necessarily be expected to achieve virtue this way. However, being persuaded to do a good act can help the child to achieve real virtue by giving them a chance to experience the good feelings that flow from good actions, so that at some future opportunity they may be more inclined to do the good thing simply because it is good. The task for a parent, then, is to try to help the child to enjoy performing the good action. The child must understand why it is good, and should be helped to see the beneficial effects of the action on the person or animal that they are helping. The act should not be referred to as a “sacrifice”, but should be celebrated as an enjoyable activity (“wasn’t it nice to see how she cheered up when you helped her?”). Such little steps, though they may be initiated by the parent rather than by the child’s own desire to do good, can help to lead a child to the point where she no longer needs the parental prodding. Of course, if the parent performs good works and discusses the good feeling that they produce, the lesson will likely be more convincing than if the parent simply sends the child off to help a neighbor while the parent watches a football game.

Should a grownup force herself to go out and do good works? Perhaps, but just as with a child it should be done with a view to learning to do the right thing for the right reason. If you think back over the past year and discover that you have made very little effort to help others, then you should use your prayer time to examine your priorities and to seek the degree of faith that will enable you to want to spend time helping others. Then, forcing yourself to overcome your inertia by simply making up your mind that you are going to go and do some good deed will help you to put that faith into action. In this way, you will be doing the right thing for something pretty close to the right reason, and you will likely find that you rapidly begin to take real pleasure in doing good deeds. On the other hand, if you simply feel embarrassed because you feel that people expect you to be doing some good deeds, and so you look around for some easy ones to satisfy the obligation, you will be unlikely to progress in virtue. The key is to keep in mind the goal of doing virtuous actions for virtue’s sake, and of learning to draw pleasure from the act of doing good itself.[1]

Should adults be pressured by others to do good works? We need to be very careful here. Consider the effects of the typical American United Way campaign. Most Americans are generous, and unless they are desperately poor (and often even if they are desperately poor) they will seek to donate to worthy causes without prodding. Employers and organizations, though, like to boost their reputation in the community by harnessing the giving of their employees or members into a campaign in the organization’s name. If the company or organization does that the right way, it’s a great thing. They can make it easy for employees to give by payroll deduction, they can increase the power of giving by providing matching gifts, and they can make it easier to spend time on charitable works or provide funds for charitable endeavors. The problem comes when they have “100% participation” campaigns where employees are pressured to give. This taints the charitable impulses. Gifts that were freely and anonymously given just for the pleasure of giving now become an obligation where one’s name is checked off on a list. Similarly, celebrating givers, rather than celebrating gifts, can shift a selfless impulse into a selfish one, replacing simple joy in giving with pleasure in being recognized and admired for giving. Corruption is a subtle thing, and we must be ever-vigilant to keep it from undermining virtue.

[1] It is interesting to see, as I write this, that Word’s grammar check thinks that I am unlikely to mean “doing good”, but does not raise any question on the phrase “doing well”. Apparently we spend much more time discussing our competitive performance than we do discussing doing good works. That should not be true.

Conversations starters in the media – In addition to Bleak House, an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati called Jennifer and Johnny’s Charity does a nice job on this one. More generally, Buffy the Vampire Slayer does a great job of illustrating doing the right thing for the right reasons; our heroes get no thanks or respect from their peers and get in trouble with the adults, but do the right thing simply because it needs doing.

Difficult Concepts 9 – The Enjoyment of Goodness

While the general good feeling that comes from having done a good thing is not normally thought of as a grace, since it lacks a corresponding sacrament, this earthly version of divine bliss may in fact be the most important form of grace of all. If I find a spider drowning in the sink and put her safely outside, I know that the spider will feel no gratitude, and nobody else will know what I have done. I don’t think that this small act will get me into heaven, or earn me any other kind of reward. Yet, I am rewarded for the act by feeling good about it. This is not the earned reward of a laborer, a thing expected as payment for a task performed. It is a grace, a gift freely given to anyone with faith enough to believe in the virtue of doing a good thing just because it is good. Like the other forms of grace, it is a gift that can only be received by a person who is prepared to receive it. If I do the good deed because I am forced to, or to avoid embarrassment, or to impress someone, I will not receive the feeling of bliss. To receive the gift, I must see the chance to do the good deed as an opportunity, a thing to be enjoyed, not as a task. It is only by seeing the opportunity to help as being in itself a gift, rather than as a job to be gotten through in order to receive the reward of feeling good, that the good feeling may be received. By recognizing and accepting this gift, then, we help to bring ourselves into alignment with God, and prepare ourselves to receive the gift of heavenly bliss.

The nature of free will prevents God from forcing us to learn to align ourselves with Him, but He freely gives us every chance to find that path ourselves. All that we need to do to receive these gifts is to open our hearts and minds to the grace that is offered to us. We do not earn them, for they are truly gifts, but we must prepare ourselves to receive them. The joy that flows from these gifts is not the fleeting pleasure of material recreations, but participation in a divine joy that builds upon itself, leading us upward towards the perpetual joy of heaven.

Conversation starters in the media:  A scene that springs to mind is the Tuppence a Bag sequence in Mary Poppins. Using your tuppence to feed the ungrateful pigeons rather than  putting them in the bank has no obvious utility, but the movie helps us to feel that it is a superior choice in terms of embracing giving for its own sake.  Charlotte’s Web likewise show’s that Fern’s kindness is proper, even if others don’t immediately understand it.