Dear Steve,
YOU WROTE:
I very much like your idea of trying to isolate the good in each religion. Certainly there are good things in all religions, and the JW fight for religious freedom is to be applauded. Having said that, though, I think we owe it to those who may not know to add that the JW's are preaching of a time when God will destroy all other religions (and their members) in a great blood-bath!
MY REPLIES:
(Sandwiched between quotes. Forgive me running on at the keyboard/mouth, I just feel I have to express some of this stuff to somebody who understands. If you find it too long, just scan and comment something like, "condensed reply" and I'll get the hint.)
Keeping the positive JW activism for religious liberties in mind, I find it bewildering to talk to present JWs lately. The shifts in dogma are so extreme as to be unrecognizable as what I grew up with. I'm not sure if they are actually changing the doctrines or if they are just getting better at "Spin Doctoring" and obscuring their real agendas and beliefs. I suspect the latter. So you see a press-release and a non-JW reporter reads it and takes it literally and writes an article "Hey those quirky JWs have accepted blood transfusion products now!" or "They now outright reject 1914 as a significant date." I haven't been able to get a straight answer out of any JWs on what they believe now, so I just assume it will be a lot of nonsense painted to look sensible in their "rationalizing" manner.
Similarly, history shows us that various religions have caused many wars and acts of violent intolerance...
Religion may be the second most-divisive force in history aside from Race, right up there with Culture and Heritage, Creed, Color, Class, Family Line, Divine Rights of Kings, or Sectarianism. We face a factionalized world and a history of bloody factionalism. The Middle East is still a hotbed of hatreds that have seethed and boiled for 5,000 years with no end in sight. I see ominous parallels between the rhetoric we hear out of the Balkans and what Canadians like me are hearing out of Quebec and have been hearing for thirty years. Separatist movements take on those qualities of racial and factional discrimination so easily. But the churches have always had a strain of Xenophobia and Extro-Xeno-Hatred. It just depends on how literally they take their Special Status. So you have the JWs who won't marry an Outsider, and compare that to Unitarians or United Church who try to accommodate everybody including Jews, Muslims, Aboriginal Peoples and even Atheists. Same bible, different viewpoint.
The common good in them (and in secular ethics) is what we need to concentrate on, as you say. Where you and I might differ is that I think it would be better (in general, but not yet for every individual) to remove religion entirely (retaining their quaint myths as interesting cultural artifacts) and get down to those basic common ethical precepts. I think ethics are too important to be BASED ON fairy tales (though using fairy tales as fairy tales to illustrate the concepts is fine).
I spent considerable time redefining my ethical/moral standards because the JWs and others had done such a number on me. (I believe the JW "conscience" roughly approximates what the modern secularist would view as a "Controlled Obsessive Sociopath" or even a "Psychopath", probably due to a sect-entrained strain of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a narrow focus of the definition of "human".) My definition (a "Flexible Ethical/Moral System" instead of a "Rigid Rule Book" or "Law Code") focuses on two aspects: harms-reduction and prevention and as well, the doing of active goods. A third aspect is flexibility, the ability of the conscience to respond to new situations, things not covered in the "User's Manual".
ETHICS: stopping or prevention of deception coercion manipulation intimidation degradation dehumanization or the causing of miscellaneous harms most obvious of which is overt physical violence but including mental emotional and psychological "abuse" "neglect" or "assaults" disrespect for the concept of "adult informed consent with sound mind" AND a stubborn refusal to accept responsibility and accountability for one's actions.
MORALS: active doing or promotion of honesty liberty fair-play mutuality of free-will interplay respect and dignity fullest development of human potential and the causing of miscellaneous goods most obvious of which are charity and compassion but including mental emotional and psychological "supports" "good deeds" or "kindnesses" full respect for the concept of "adult informed consent with sound mind" AND full acceptance of responsibility and accountability for one's actions.
I arrived at the split between Ethics and Morals for convenience, using the terms idiosyncratically in order to clarify the two-tiered aspect of conscience-initiatives. I could as easily have called them "Red" and "Blue" or "Finger" and "Toe". But the different terms seemed to suit for my purposes, although one might find them not being contrasted in other literature.
Law is about Ethics, prevention of identifiable harms. If you can't identify or prove it, you can't apply law to it -- which is why the concept of Reasonable Doubt and Innocence until guilt is proven work so well to encourage the most justice for the most people, by and large with some exceptions.
You can't legislate Morality well, it's like trying to coerce somebody into donating to charity. You can only model it, encourage it, teach it. A poor job is being done of either by modern society. If we assume that conscience is the highest and most complicated function of the citizen, it is not hard to see how a public school system that achieves 40% functional illiteracy could overlook the training of the subtle nuances of conscience and human dignity. In modern society, most conscience training is left to random chance or the video game and Hollywierd movies. So we've got several generations of kids who don't make effective conscientious decisions.
In the past the churches were the backbone of the community, teaching conscience and applied relationship and communication skills. As long as society agreed to conform, it worked reasonably well. Now everything is in turmoil and the churches are just starting to be responsive to the idea that they've failed people in teaching some lasting workable concept of right and wrong. They scramble to use old tools to teach new skills that they themselves struggle with. You can't teach what you don't have yourself.
This may say something about the way I think: it was very easy to come up with the list of Ethics, the negative things to fight against. It started out with expanding the Libertarian concept of freedom from coercion and fraud, fleshing it out with more detail. Then I looked at modern law, particularly sexual assault's definition. I realized that the things that make sexual assault wrong are what make any negative interaction wrong, and modern law tries to grapple with the essence of what it is to do a wrong act.
It was very hard to come up with opposite concepts for each Ethic. I also found that there seemed to be no single English word for some concepts, I had to create a phrase that roughly approximated an opposite of a Negative.
CONSCIENCE: Ethics and Morals in harmony revealed in experience to promote the most good and stop or prevent the most harms. A mature or highly developed conscience does good as a servo-correcting system, because it enjoys contributing to the Greater Good. Fear of negative consequences is only a secondary motivation for a well-developed healthy conscience. Fear-based conscience will do in a pinch to prevent riots and looting, however in the long run it will fail to reveal maturity and fullness of humanity. The goal of conscience-development will be the citizen who loves doing good for the sake of doing good and the subtle intangible rewards of contributing to a decent and functional society. This requires long-term thinking, ability to defer gratification for intangible rewards, a willingness to forgo some things for a higher purpose.
It would be like telling a child he must be good because Santa Claus will reward him, but never giving the child any other moral instruction. When the child reaches an age of understanding and realizes there can be no Santa Claus, he may just abandon the idea of "being good" along with it!
I think that JWs have effectively forced their people to socially coerce a belief in Santa and the Bogeyman, and they use Shunning to enforce their myth/fable. Jehovah satisfies the needs personified in Santa and Satan personifies the Bogeyman. Problem is, in modern mainstream society it is expected that children will begin to doubt Santa and the Bogeyman at around age six or seven, the beginning of the phase of reasoning and ethical/moral conscience. So much of the nuttiness and neurosis of JWs is due to the fact that they are adult in body but forced to mouth lip-service and functional obedience to a dogma crafted for a five-year-old mentality. The JWs think it is so "cruel" for Outsiders to "lie" to their kids and encourage a belief in Santa or Spooks before age seven. What JWs fail to realize is that "LOSING SANTA AND BOOGEYMAN" is a necessary and useful transitional crisis, and the parent encouraging a child to embrace childish belief is just giving the kid a rich mythological or fantasy life and is nurturing the ability of the child to someday spontaneously differentiate between fantasy and reality. Nuff said, I think Santa can be cool for kiddies and most kids also doubt God or the Devil at the same time they challenge Santa and the Tooth Fairy and Ghosties and Goblins. This kind of doubt is healthy for later adult "faith" because one cannot have faith in that which one has not doubted and challenged, tested and come to reason out effectively.
I think in the future society as a whole will gradually move away from religion (I think this has already started happening). Eventually it will be studied much as we today study Greek mythology. Along the way, however, it will be very important to make a separation between ethical conduct and religion. Not that religion doesn't promote some ethical behavior, but that people must realize that religion did not invent ethics, and has no monopoly on them. In fact, religion is at its most dangerous when it dictates a society's ethics (think of the crusades, the inquisitions, and the witch burnings...) I think ethics is far too important (and potentially dangerous if twisted!) to leave it in the hands of religion! It must be based instead on reason, compassion, and empathy.
Many people are still under the impression that the bible is the source of all modern law. The bible laws are about the same level as Hammurabi's Code, including the Ten Commandments and the Talion and Social law involved in the Old Testament. Our laws all descended from that original pool of material -- which was originally intertwined with the "Church State" "City-State" and the God-King or Priest-King. However we owe more to Greek Law, which began to come up with concepts of democracy, human rights and dignity entrenched in a law code, "reasonable doubt", "cross examination of argument to reveal truth", and "presumed innocent until guilt is proven". Much of this comes from Aristotle and Socrates/Plato.
A rather interesting idea lately is that the bible's (often overlooked) emphasis on "Recompense", "Reconcilliation", and "Restoration of Relationships" could be applied in the modern setting. For example, blending talion law and criminal law so that a person stealing a hundred dollars had to pay back the victim directly or through a mediator. This would both give restitution to victims but also allow the offender to heal his/her relationship to society and the victim. If every criminal conviction had an automatic talion conviction and sentence for restitution, what would this do to bring factions closer together, humanize both victims and previous offenders, and give offenders a chance to really "pay the debt to society or the victim" incurred by the harmful act? Would this be unfair? Could a criminal hope to pay back something like a million dollars stolen or extorted? That would certainly add "deterrent" wouldn't it? How much deterrent is there for car-thieves, when the stolen car is covered by insurance, the thief never has to make good the damages incurred, and there is no connection between the crime, the punishment, and the payment to society? Make people fully accountable and responsible and we might see a drop in crime. We would also give criminals a chance to truly make up for their deed, pay back the debt, and "clear their name". Thus when you earned a "pardon" under my hypothetical system, you could say "I paid back every cent I stole directly to the little old lady I stole it from, plus an extra $500 for court costs." This kind of thing would make "forgiveness" possible in all but extremely violent cases where no amount of penance could hope to repay a lost life or the violation of a rape or attack. Still this is an intriguing idea.
--G.B.
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