People are raising their children without knowledge of the crucial (no need to excuse the pun) message of redeeming love; without faith in God - in fact they are actively discouraging it. That's putting faith in the knife rather than God
I'm cutting this one oddly ... just because. What strikes me, I hope, is simple to express.
• I agree that without a message of love, they are putting the knife in, and the difference of God-related metaphors aside, it's purely a matter of faith. I intend to raise my daughter to respect other people, daresay love them as she loves herself. And here I won't bother with the digression of
What if one doesn't love oneself? until we really need to, and I don't think it's vital to this particular portion of the discussion. But who are we to say we're right about that? P.J. O'Rourke once expressed, and here I'm paraphrasing, that some parents might find it best to toilet train their children by simply letting them run around without a diaper and shit all over everything, thus preparing them for a successful career in business. (The original quote involved a successful career as a talk-show host.) It may be true that by teaching my daughter social compassion I'm handicapping her future performance in the "real world."
- what, other than the Word of God, will stop an arm that sincerely believes it's doing the right thing?
Depends, I think, on how broadly we intend to define God. Obviously, limiting the "Word of God" to the Bible would constitute a cultural arrogance, as other cultures speak against murder.
I could digress here about the symbolism of the cinematic first scenes of
2001: A Space Odyssey. And mutter some about how "murder" entered humanity at some point; the recognition of deliberate will in killing. I could spend a few words on the unnatural conditions under which rats will murder seemingly arbitrarily. And I could spend an awful lot of words tying in primate studies in which they did all sorts of "vaguely cruel" things to chimpanzees, like herd them into the space of a freight elevator; they do the same thing humans do--draw up close to themselves and stay quiet. And in doing so, I could try to paint an impressionistic literary picture of the notion that murder is so unnatural that something else has to be wrong first. It is not sarcasm that moves me to discuss what I could do but won't, but rather recognition that people are bitching about the length of my posts, an acknowledgment that I'm not up to it, and also a hope to allude to the factors that come to mind in response to the issue of what other than the Word of God.
There is a metaphysical point at which I would agree with you that only the Word of God stops people from murder, but I sincerely doubt that we would agree on what God is or what constitutes Its Word. (Nor should that be construed to nitpick the Bible specifically.)
But I'm one of those that combines fear, greed, and sympathy (the latter two being complex forms of the simple former) and can have enough reasons not to kill someone unless I absolutely have to in order to preserve my life.
(For instance, one of the reasons I'm a pacifist is that I've seen myself fight before. Someone's going to get killed the way I go about it. That's just not a good thing for anyone. Period.)
Any other authority, whether it's a law, your own reasoning or conviction, would have gone through with it, as mind-boggling as it sounds. Because that's exactly what the world is doing
Well, not exactly, else the gutters would be thickly red. But I get your drift. I think you're being a little esoteric, and while I generally appreciate that--especially in Christianity, as my prejudices beg--what becomes the
practical effect of that belief?
Truly, by Christian standards, we are all sinners, for the last can't wait to be first, and the first certainly don't want to be last.
My lucky strike in the world is the odd fact that I've managed to keep myself worth very little in the labor market. My partner is worth more, so I get the "good job." But one of the reasons I had quit my job--the primary reason, in fact--was that I was sick of being a paid fraud. Sure, it might have been the callous inefficiency of the company--I'm on my way out the door in the end and now I find that my entire backlog and nearly half of my current stuff is supposed to be going through another office, another desk, another person? Maybe we would have gotten along better if I'd been told seven months before, when I took the position. But by the time it came to that, my walking out the door had nothing to do with the callous inefficiency, and everything to do with the idea that in addition to breaking state and federal laws routinely, in addition to lying on a daily basis, and in addition to not being allowed by law or company policy to beat the holy living shit out of the moron who single-handedly shattered a staff that worked reasonably well together and thereby sank the department into a ridiculous mire ... you wake up in the morning and you lie to people.
That's no way to live.
I can't imagine what it must be like for the folks who have God lording over them. I'm convinced it's why a number of my friends are godless.
But will I, in the end, let my daughter starve on such a point of honor? No. Of course if I decide to whore myself for money, I'll just do it for real. I mean, think about this ...
I ... that's right,
me, Tiassa, won't sell drugs to pull it off. (Which is apparently a point of contention 'twixt my partner and me, but you just don't make a whole lot of money dealing pot, definitely not enough for the people and behavior you have to put up with, and certainly not enough to justify the risks of what happens if the Law finds out; and I'll literally get down and suck people off for twenties on the streetcorner before I deal coke or speed or smack.)
(Just to give closure to the consideration, going to work later this year in order to afford child care and my partner's substance habits, thereby creating a situation we did not wish to create, with both of us working, is quickly becoming the preferable--read "less-damaging"--option.)
However ... what of those folks who have God lording over them? Even they
adapt. Most of them better than I.
When it's just my sanity, I'll stand purely on abstract principle if I so desire. But how the hell could I justify that in court?
What God told Abraham before he went to sacrifice his son:
There is a point at which I wouldn't argue against that.
But frankly, humanity's not smart enough right now to figure that out.
And that's where it gets difficult. With Christianity, I could easily go Jerusalem-megalomaniac and burn myself out in well under three years. But through nobody's fault but my own, there are other people I would end up dragging down with me into the hope of eternal life.
• . . . . perfect submission to it means laying down your life
• And every one who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life. (Matthew 19.29, RSV)
• Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life." (Mark 10.29, RSV)
• And he said to them, "Truly, I say to you, there is no man who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive manifold more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life." (Luke 18.29-30)
Now, I'm not going to give you the usual crap you can get from a two-penny skeptic. Rather, I think it's a great idyll, but ... you're kidding me. Compared to practical demand?!
Life is. It's a little like raising productive citizens from the outset:
You must teach a child to read and do basic math before you can teach a young adult to read a technical manual and perform complex calculations.
I said before that I don't think humanity is smart enough to figure out something that seems rather apparent in its own way to you or I. Part of the problem seems to be reacquainting humanity with the ideas underlying the literary manifestation--e.g. The Bible. Right now it could be reasonably argued that to carry out such a mission, from my position, with my chosen obligations, could cause cruelty.
To reach into an obscure comparison: There is an odd stigma that comes with rape. The dramatic way to phrase it is the idea of a young woman apologizing that she wasn't a virgin for your first time together. That kind of pressure is ... ridiculous. She doesn't need to live with it. But it is values within the culture around the rape survivor which can highlight those ideas and aggravate their station in one's conscience.
Likewise, if my daughter becomes the human being I would hope, she would certainly have a grounding in the values that would justify a life of service which requires such a dedication that focuses away from the family. But I can't guarantee that. And without those values in place, such a devotion can constitute a cruelty to those who give up a certain portion of their expected experiences--e.g. my daughter.
What are my responsibilities to my child? To educate her? Certainly. To socialize, civilize, standardize, or otherwise cause her conformity to common standards? A much more difficult question. She would certainly be statistically deviant to be accustomed to the forfeiture of family bonds in the name of greater humanity, God, or whatever flag I wave at that time.
And I have the luxury of going about it under the impression that I have no worries about heaven and hell; these are human issues to me, for this world. God can judge me or evaporate into nonexistence. There are more immediate concerns. I'm
not answering to God in the same way Christians do.
In an effort to bring this around, I would hope to at least suggest, if not demonstrate reasonably:
(1) These questions aren't exactly simple--much less if you happen to be psychologically unsettled.
(2) The standards of faith present realistic challenges in meeting unrealistic expectations; this burden can itself become a neurosis, or even a psychosis.
There are no easy answers. And while it is worth reiterating here that insane or not, Deanna Laney acted within certain parameters that happened to be determined by religious faith.
One of the big challenges for me is answering directly Jan's issue about the tie between religion and the crime. Ten years ago I actually would have taken pleasure in raising the heavy-metal suicides as an argumentative issue: if something so inconsequential can be alleged to have such dire effects, what of something so vital as to tread on the soul, on the essence of the living experience? And somewhere in there does the obscure connection lie.
For me, Christianity is largely extraneous horsepucky. The whole of what it "should be," as I've mentioned somewhere around this board recently, is summed up in two passages from Matthew (Chs. 5 & 25).
So I do think that Christians have certain obligations to examine their faith. In my early days at Exosci/Sciforums, I was much more adamant about this, but Christians have been having less and less of a substantial effect on my life, and have undertaken a macabre public drama ranging from televangelistic abuse of Islam, lesbians, and freethinkers to God telling George Bush to bomb Iraq. It's not the ballot box; the climate has changed--the teeth of the Christian political mechanism can still gnash, but they've lost the sharp points. I am fortunate enough to live in a time when one of the world's most significant influences becomes archaic and falls into retreat; it's a fascinating process. (And if the US goes down the crapper, then I get
two palaces breaking down; more than most in human history have witnessed. What an odd time to be alive!)
But if, in reassessing those obligations, I can connect them to Deanna Laney's illness, then I will finally have justified this topic to my own satisfaction.
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• The Bible, Revised Standard Version: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/rsv.browse.html
