Open Letter to Christopher Hitchens

In the Washington Post, Hitchens wanted to hear a response to the following:

Name a moral statement or action, uttered or performed by a religious person, that could not have been uttered or performed by an unbeliever.
Below is my response to him:

I don't doubt that unbelievers can make moral statements that match in excellence any moral statement made by a believer. But what is the point?

Can believers make statements that are morally bad or do morally bad things? Yes. Can non-believers make statements and do things that are morally bad? Yes.

My morality is based on a religious foundation, but I would not argue that one can have excellent moral beliefs or live a life of virtue only on the basis of religion.

I judge moral beliefs and actions on their own merit not by what their philosophical or religious basis is.

All moral beliefs rest on some set of assumptions, but good morality does not necessarily require reference to God, but it may.

I am a religious person but seldom find myself included in your objections to religion. I don't believe much of what you condemn. I am a liberal Baptist Protestant theologian, just for the record. A survey of your latest book contained no reference to any modern Christian theologian I read in seminary or ever put on any of my reading lists for courses I taught for forty years, although I found a few references to Popes and to Protestant fundamentalists.

Do you condemn all religion or just bad religion? If the latter, I am on your side and have argued against bad religion for half a century. If the former, you and I have a difference.

Kenneth Cauthen

Making Hillary Acceptable

It appears more likely every day that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination. My candidate John Edwards looks hopeless at this point. Many say he lost the day it was announced that Elizabeth's cancer had returned. (Wouldn't any decent man drop out and take care of his wife, and what about that expensive haircut and enormous mansion he built -- never mind that his policies would benefit the middle class and the poor far more than anything offered by his rivals?) Obama has reached his peak, and the magic is gone, despite Oprah. The others apparently might as well quit now, although there is great talent among them.

I don't like Hillary for reasons earlier blogs have spelled out, but it looks like she is our candidate for 08. I will vote for her without enthusiasm and hope she is elected, since any of the Republican alternatives would be disastrous. Let Hillary, Bill, and all the smart people around her figure out how to win. Once she is elected we need to torment her unmercifully in an attempt to move her left on economic and other domestic issues like health care. Her wing of the party is too beholden to business and wealth. She needs to be moderate on social and cultural issues -- not my preference but a political necessity to get and keep power. Nearly everybody with much power is beholden to the Jewish lobby, so I see no hope for the kind of radical dealing with Israel that is necessary to get justice for the Palestinians. She will be better on foreign policy than Bush-- heck, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun would be better -- but she was wrong on Iraq from the start and has changed only enough to get in tune with public opinion, never yet having apologized for her bad judgment..

John Edwards would be better for labor, the middle class, and the poor, but you have to get power before you can exercise it. He won't get the power of the President, unless I am badly mistaken.

We can only hope that the Republicans cannot capitalize sufficiently on the widespread hostility toward Hillary -- those persistent negatives -- to sink her hopes in the general election.

Maybe we can get strong enough Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress to push a liberal agenda on domestic issues. That is the best hope I see at the moment.

Please somebody cheer me up!

The Dismal Political Scene

It is hard to find something to cheer about on the political front. The dreary argument about Iraq goes on with much talk and little, if any, progress toward a unified peaceful country. The Democrats have waged a futile campaign to bring the troops home soon. Presumably, they are beleaguered by their left-wing, anti-war faction, to which I belong, who cannot come to terms with the fact that the party does not have enough votes to bring about a quick and defensible end to the war.

Obstinate President Bush is persisting in his policies and will follow the advice of General Petraeus to bring the troops back to pre-surge levels by next summer -- an outcome dictated by military necessity regardless of policy preferences. All this means is that we have to wait for Bush to leave before a drastic change of policy is possible -- assuming the Democrats win the presidency and enough congressional seats to bring it about. (See my blog of January 26, 2007 )

Meanwhile, urgent domestic issues like health care go without serious attention, not to mention the longer term crises of Social Security, Medicare, global warming, reducing our dependence on oil and finding alternative energy source, and the like. Democratic Congressional leadership is far from inspiring and, judging by results, not at all impressive.

I have seen no evidence that the Iraqi government can bring about an effective, peaceful reconciliation among warring factions to ensure a stable, peaceful, democratic rule. Whether we stay or leave, it is difficult to find grounds of hope for anything desirable in the near term, and the long term is shrouded in mystery. It looks like a long-term de facto segregation of Iraqis into geographical subdivisions of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds is the best hope for any kind of tolerable peace, assuming some acceptable arrangement can be worked out regarding oil revenues. Too few love more Iraq more than they love their own ethnic-sectarian group to hope for a unified country that is workable and free from violence. Haddam Hussein was awful, but he did rule in maybe the only way it can be a unified country-- by coercion, brutality, and terror. Reports after World War I when Iraq was being formed predicted what has actually occurred.

The presidential campaign trudges dismally on with no excitement and nothing but the prospect of more of the same until the 2008 election. Candidates behind Clinton in the polls vainly search for some way -- any little gimmick or minor point of criticism -- to stop her steady march toward the nomination, barring some unforeseen developments. I find no excitement in any of them any more, and I pay little attention to the daily flow of news about the whole dull process. If Hillary wins, I will vote for her but without enthusiasm.The Republicans have nothing to offer but the same dreadful old stuff, whether we focus on domestic or foreign affairs. We can only hope their numbers will be so reduced by the next election that enough sensible Democrats and moderate Republicans can do some serious work on our most pressing problems.

The religious scene is about equally dismal, but that is a topic for another time.

Help! Does anyone know any reason to be hopeful.

Should Prostitution be Decriminalized: A New Look

About a decade ago I put an essay on my web site that advocated the decriminalizing of prostitution and treating it as a public health problem. The goal primarily would be to assist women, especially young ones, to find a better way of life. Force, violence, and sex trafficking of all kinds would still be prohibited and punished severely.

See:http://www.frontiernet.net/~kenc/pros.htm

I just learned that in 1999 Sweden, which long before had legalized prostitution, became convinced that this was not working. A new approach was tried in which it is illegal to buy sexual services but legal to sell them -- regardless of gender. The assumption is that prostitution is primarily a form of violence against women. Men become the offenders liable to prosecution, and women are regarded as victims who need to be helped.

Some evaluation are quite positive. See:http://www.justicewomen.com/cj_sweden.html

Some Swedish sex workers have protested vigorously that this hurts them and is discriminatory. Gone are the "good and kind" men. Present customers are more likely to be violent, refuse to use condoms, and generally made sex work less desirable. Scaring male customers away has put downward pressure on prices, etc. See:http://www.petraostergren.com/content/view/44/67/
See also:http://www.bayswan.org/swed/swed_index.html

I have not done enough research to form an opinion, but this novel approach is intriguing and deserves investigation. I am reconsidering my own previous view.

I think one original proposition I offered a decade ago still holds. There is no good solution to the problem of prostitution, only bad and worse. Perhaps Aquinas had a point when he wrote that prostitution is a necessary evil needed for the same reason that we need sewers.

Well, I actually I do have in mind something, but I have not found a way to implement it. The most nearly perfect answer would be that every time a man paid for sexual services with money, one testicle would disappear immediately while angels in heaven cheered. I propose this only for lusty, irresponsible males who only want easy sex without emotional entanglements. Lonely, shy men lacking social skills need assistance in finding healthy relationships with the opposite sex, which might or might not involve sex.

Time for a Massive Revolt Against Perpetual Compaigning

I am already tired of this election cycle. I am sick of perpetual campaigning. I do not listen to the debates and do not intend to. From news reports, on which the preceding blog was based, they do not seem to be producing much of significance. The Democrats behind Hillary are looking anything they might throw at her to block her way -- with notable failure so far. I don't really care what the Republicans do.

The main point, however, is that the whole process is insane. Starting the next campaign the day after each election is unnecessary, absurd, crazy. We have not even mentioned the amount of money that is being wasted. The only people who benefit are the 24 hour news networks that need something -- anything -- to fill the hours to help reduce the hourly repetition of the same old thing plus endless inane commentary. We can only hope that people will become so disgusted that they will rise up in wrath and demand that an end be put to it.

YouTube Debates -- Same Old Thing?

What is the difference between having a "real person" on an amateur video ask a candidate about Iraq, gay marriage, and health care, etc. rather than a journalist? To hear all the self-congratulation going on today, especially on CNN, a great deal. But it seemed to me we essentially got the same old questions to the same old candidates standing behind the same old podium stands giving the same old answers.

It hardly seemed like the rebirth of the old town hall meeting in which grass roots democracy flourished with citizens in the same room interacting in person with their leaders.. Note that only a tiny number of American citizens submitted entries, and they were screened by a panel, and a few were chosen to go on the air. In the end journalists chose the questions. By the time all this processing took place, a great deal of selectivity had diluted the spontaneous immediacy supposedly displayed here. This is hardly the pure democracy touted in all the hype.

Yes, it was different, but did it make a difference? Were great new insights displayed in the questions and the answers? Were hitherto unknown facets of character and personality brought to light so that we have a deeper understanding of who they are and what kind of leaders they might make? Not that I could tell to any appreciable degree. To think otherwise is to exalt format at the expense of content, to assume with Marshall McCluhan that "the medium is the message." To test my big yawn at the excitement at CNN, let us ask if this events changed anything. Did one candidate win large numbers to his/her cause? Were new issues addressed in a fresh way that produced greater understanding about who the candidates are and what they stand for and how they would govern? Show me the evidence.

The only value I could see was that possibly this novel approach to a debate got more people to participate and to listen in -- perhaps among the young. Maybe we will find out whether this occurred and whether any lasting results flow from it.

The main problem is that these debates should not be occurring this far in advance in any format. There are too many of them to get very far on any issue with any of them. No gimmick will resolve the difficulties of having a debate among eight people half a year before any actual voting takes place.

No Profit from Matters of Life and Death

Capitalism is great for creating wealth. It harnesses a powerful motivator -- private self-interest -- to run its engines. Even Marx was effusive in his praise of the capacity of capitalism to produce goods and services in enormous quantities. The great drawback, of course, is the massive inequalities it creates and that are perpetuated by the money and power of the big winners. Unfortunately, we -- unlike European countries -- never developed a sustainable socialist tradition capable of winning national elections.

In general, I prefer to let the market system work (with appropriate regulation, which we now lack, to protect the health, safety, and welfare of citizens) to distribute income and wealth as long as it is done fairly, i. e., without special advantages that law can correct. We can use the tax system to produce funds for public purposes and put a steep rate on those who have enormous salaries and amass great wealth. Let the corporations decide much to pay their CEOs, e. g. We will just tax the obscenely high results at high rates.

But there are two areas that should be removed from the private profit-making arena: health care and national defense. These are literally matters of life and death. Expanding Medicare to cover everybody, e. g., will take care of the health insurance problem, and perhaps independent non-profit enterprises can be established to build weapons and produce the new drugs that scientific advances make possible. Economists can tell us how to do it and get the job done efficiently.

Health care and national defense are too important to national life to allow private interests to be in charge. Remember President's Eisenhower's warning about the dangers inherent in the expansion of the power of the "military-industrial complex?" Perhaps we should now speak of the "military-industrial-university-medical complex." Let people make money on other things, but the nation needs to make sure that the lust for money-making does not corrupt the enterprises that defend us from diseases that produce sickness and death and from the hostile people at home and abroad. I would suggest that it is not good policy to give people a reason to love wars and the the rumors of wars when the possibility of making a lot of money out of it is involved.

On the defense industries see:
http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/reports/TiesThatBind.html

See the case for nationalizing the defense industry: http://hnn.us/articles/28109.html

John Kenneth Galbraith made a similar proposal in 1969 in an article in The New York Times entitled, “The Big Defense Firms Are Really Public Firms and Should be Nationalized.”

Senate Democrats: Determined Idealists or Cynical Politicians?

Tonight the Senate will remain in session all night in the latest effort of Democrats to bring about an end to the Iraq war. Three motives may be in play:

1. They are determined idealists who are sincerely doing their best to end this tragic war.

2. They are realistic, smart politicians who are thinking not so much about Iraq now as about the elections in 2008. By trying to embarrass the Republicans who continue to support the President, they are acting in the long run interest of the country since more Democrats in Congress would be a good thing.

3. They are blatant cynics who know all these efforts will fail since the President is determined to stay in Iraq until whatever objective prevails at the time is achieved regardless of Congressional action or public opinion, so they might as well get as much political advantage out of the situation as they can.

My guess is that all three are present to some extent. Option 1 is naive and futile. Option 3 abandons morality. The second, while it has its own shortcomings, is the only one that comes anywhere close to the combination of idealism, realism, and pragmatism that is needed in these perilous times. There really is not a thoroughly good policy option for the Democrats given their slim majorities and the fact that the President has the final say given the impotence of the Congress to act with sufficient power to overcome Presidential vetoes. I have argued repeatedly that there is no good policy for Iraq at the moment. That is the larger truth. Senate overnighters cannot escape this fact.

Are You as Outraged as I Am?

"A couple of weeks ago, Warren Buffett pointed out that he pays an average federal income tax rate of 17.7 percent, while his receptionist pays about 30 percent." Paul Krugman, The New York Times, July 13, 2007.

What we need are tens and tens of millions of voters to say, as Howard Beale said in Network (1976), "I'm mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore." Enough enraged voters expressing their disgust at the polls could put an end to this.

Warning to All Southerners

If you are in Rochester, NY, do not order a hot dog in a restaurant or at a concession stand unless:

1. You want it split open and grilled.

2. Grilled until it has a thick carcinogenic coat of disgusting black crust.

If you can tolerate this and order one anyway, you may be asked to specify whether you want "red" or "white."

Don't be surprised if the item is called a "hot" on the menu.

Play it safe. Order a hamburger.

Be forewarned. I can take no responsibility if you disregard my efforts to protect you from this disastrous ruining of an otherwise wonderful American treat. Eat your hot dogs at home. They may give you a heart attack, but at least you won't get cancer from the abominable Rochester version.

Gender Neutral Interactive Poem: Fill in the Blanks

Breathes there a soul with a libido so dead who has not looked at _____________
and wistfully said,
"Blessed is the one who shares ______'s bed"?

Please note: Each participant is allowed only three entries.

Now read Matthew 5:28 as applying to both sexes regarding both the luster and the lustee.

Was Bertrand Russell Right?

In Why I Am Not a Christian Bertrand Russell said that Jesus was morally deficient because he believed in the everlasting torture of the wicked. I think he is right (See Matthew 25:31-46). The burning of sinners in an eternal fire is not consistent with the idea of God as loving, merciful, and compassionate.

Medieval theologians countered the objection that an infinite punishment for finite sins was unjust with the notion that the sin was against an infinite value (God), and therefore it was just.

Most of us find that defense singularly unconvincing. But it is amusing to watch how easily modern liberals, who reject the notion of an everlasting hell as contrary to the character of the nice, kind God they believe in, combine this idea with their affirmation that Jesus is the supreme moral authority.

However, all the churches I know also totally ignore Matthew 10:8 in which Jesus sends out the Apostles and commissions them to cast out demons and raise the dead. Most churches claim their task is to continue the ministry of the Apostles to preach the Gospel and do deeds of love and mercy. Yet I know of no church that has a ministry of raising the dead. Only a few even pretend to be able to cast out demons.

I conclude from all this that all Christians selectively obey Jesus in practice while claiming in theory to obey in all matters -- or at least that they ought to. You can check this out by looking at how Christians find ways of avoiding the hard sayings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38-48). When all else fails, you can always ignore completely.

If Hitchens Is Right, Then I Must Not Be Religious

Bertrand Russell famously wrote Why I am Not a Christian. If memory serves me correctly, it was G. K. Chesterton who responded, "If a Christian is what Bertrand Russell says it is, I am not a Christian either." In any case, that came to mind while I was cheat reading Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great in Barnes & Noble the other day. What he condemns in religion is not what I espouse.

I checked the index and found not one reference to any 20th century theologian or philosopher of religion I ever read and who instructed me on what it is to be a modern Christian. I did find a few brief references to a couple of Roman Catholic Popes and to the Protestant fundamentalists Jerry Falwell, Charles Stanley and Pat Robertson!

Critics of religion typically ignore the cultural context in which religion occurs, seeming to have some ahistorical notion of something they call "religion," and it is always bad. This ignores the fact that religious belief is always particular and occurs in some cultural context, so that what is bad may be in fact as much, if not primarily, a cultural thing and not necessarily a religious phenomenon. Also, they give not much attention to the good that may come out of religion, e. g., opposition to slavery and works of charity and mercy like feeding the hungry and healing the sick. Somehow these things are not part of this abstracted essence of "religion."

They seem to believe that if religion were universally abandoned, the world would be better off.

I suggest that such is not the case. Apparently tthe critics assume that all these non-religious souls would be scientifically enlightened people with high morals, i. e., like the authors of these anti-religious tirades. It would be equally fallacious to assume that all would be well if everybody were the kind of Christian I am.

Efforts to attribute the world's ills to some one cause, private property, e. g. (Marxism), the rectification of which would lead to certain progress, have never been successful.

So, go ahead, Mr. Hitchens, condemn what you call "religion," but, pardon me, if I am equally insistent that whatever you are talking about, it doesn't include me.

http://www.frontiernet.net/~kenc/index.shtml

More Unsolicited Advice for John Edwards

June 26, 2007
Dear Mr. Edwards,

I like your anti-poverty theme, but I fear that your use of the "two Americas" theme may not be wise.

It is too easy a target for Republicans.

It is not precise. There are many Americans, many gradations in the class structure. There is a middle, where multitudes of Americans think they are. It will be regarded too populist, opens you to effective criticism.

I urge you to go light on that theme. I urge you to consider my earlier suggestion that strengthening families be the centerpiece of your strategy.

Around that you can stress the anti-poverty theme but at the same time help a great many Americans to identify with your aims -- health care, help for working mothers with child care, parental leave, increase in EITC, and so on through a long list.

I want to see you elected, but hope you won't seem so left-wing in order to get the nomination that you ruin your chances of winning the general election.

I am a native of Georgia, a graduate of Mercer University and taught of 40 years at the theological seminary where Martin Luther King graduated and where Walter Rauschenbusch, the father of the social gospel taught. I stand in that idealistic tradition tempered by the political realism of Reinhold Niebuhr.

When idealists enter politics they must become hard-nosed, tough-minded realists and pragmatists. That is what I hope for you.

For more unwanted advice, see my blog for Saturday, November 11, 2006. in the archives at http://johnwilfred.blogspot.com/

Best wishes,


Ken Cauthen

http://www.frontiernet.net/~kenc/index.shtml

Father's Day 2007

My Dad was born 100 years ago today. He was the kindest, gentlest, most compassionate man I ever knew. Nobody ever loved a son more than he loved me. My only ambition was to be as good a father to my children as he was to me. He left me on May, 1, 1995 a few weeks short of his 88th birthday. I think of him often, and I will never forget him. So on on his birthday and on Father's Day, I shed a few tears as I look as his picture on the wall in my study and remember with gratitude how fortunate I was to have to have this good man as my Father.

Old Keys and Cosmic Laws

When you have been living in a house five years or longer, you have them -- a collection of old keys you can no longer identify. They hang on hooks out of sight here and there or have been put in drawers, trays, or little boxes. You didn't identify them when you put them away because you knew what they were, and now you have forgotten. So periodically you try to satisfy your curiosity. You try them in in all the locks you suspect, but few fit. Here a major temperamental divide arises: the bold and daring throw them away and risk needing one that is gone -- which they will once they get rid of them. The timid and cautious put them back in the fear they may need them, but they never do, thus the pile grows.

Eventually they will have to be dealt with by your children after you die, prompting exasperated comments like, "What the hell are these keys for, and why didn't they dispose of them or at least identify them."

It's a comic law. You throw them away and need them within a month, or you keep them and never need them. Don't fight it.

Multiple Choice Health Quiz

If a man who has been taking one of the ED drugs has an erection that lasts more than four hours, he should:

A. Go to the emergency room immediately.

B. Call his doctor the next morning at at the latest.

C. Ignore it, unless he has an appointment to see the Pope or Queen Elizabeth.

D. Call all the loose women in the neighborhood and schedule appointments.

Objectivity and the Bible

I have read a lot of debates in recent years in which two biblical scholars on opposite sides of the gay love question squared off on what the Bible had to say about the matter. If I knew the general moral and theological outlook of the opponents, I could nearly always predict in advance the outcome of these objective inquiries. Liberals generally come out saying that what the Bible really rejects is sexual abuse and exploitation and not monogamous, faithful relationships between two gay men or two lesbians. Conservatives are sure that what those passages in the New Testament condemn is the same sort of thing we mean by homosexual sex in our time. The Old Testament, of course, raises other issues, but the outcome really hangs on what is done with those verses in Romans and Corinthians.

I suggest no dishonesty, no tricks. Somehow the objective exegesis always produced results that agree with the personal opinion of the interpreter. That's just the way it turns out. Am I right?

Objectivity functions within a general framework consisting of the total set of assumptions the exegete brings to the task of biblical inquiry. That is the human condition. Nietzsche said, "There are no facts, only opinions." Well, I wouldn't go that far, but the philosopher had a point.

A Strategy for John Edwards

I spent some time yesterday with The New York Times Magazine issue on economics, especially the piece on John Edwards, my candidate for President in 2008. He wants to fight poverty. The conclusion was that he has the personal passion , some good policies that will work, but he hasn't found a strategy to make it a winnable issue. I am a moralist who writes books on ethic, but I agree that appeals to conscience won't work very well here.

My suggestion is that he make his appeal to strengthening families, especially middle and lower-income families. This is a theme that can capture the imagination of large numbers of people because they have a personal interest in strengthening their families and need help.

He can organize a variety of proposals around this central focus, many of them designed to promote the incomes of average and low-income workers whose wages have been mainly stagnant in recent years, with some exceptions. For further elaboration of this, see my contribution dated Saturday, November 11, 2006.

Basic Errors in Theology

Theology can go wrong is lots of ways, but two approaches in particular need to be avoided. The first is to claim that "At last we've got it." The second is to maintain that "We've always had it." The first is typical of liberal theologies -- the tendency to seek change in the light of new historical circumstances. The second is characteristic of conservative and orthodox theologies -- those that think universal truth is located somewhere in the past, so that out task is to reproduce it today in an appropriate form.

Illustrations abound. The Protestant Reformers played "At last we've got it" by recovering the biblical message they thought was obscured in Roman Catholic doctrine and practice. In the 20th century Walter Rauschenbusch played the game with his claim that the social gospel was the old gospel of Jesus recovered for the first time since the early centuries. Neo-orthodoxy (Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr assumed it, although his brother and my teacher H. Richard recognized that a new generation would arise to point out the errors of the current emphases, as they pointed out the errors of social gospel and others liberalisms. Later on liberation theologies (Latin American, black, feminist, Native American, womanist, gay and lesbian, e.g.) claimed to have newly discovered that that the Gospel is a word of this-worldly emancipation for the poor and oppressed, so that at last they have recovered the true Gospel of Scripture).

"We always had it" was the battle cry of 20th century Protestant fundamentalist perspectives that insisted on some fundamentals that must be in all theologies and neglected at the cost of losing eternal Gospel truth. Orthodoxies of all sorts (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, e. g.,) guard a body of divinely certified body of truth that they have have always possessed they must would guard against all revisionisms.

The point could be elaborated indefinitely, but let it be said that it is dangerous to play either game. Humility is called for on all sides unless some new absolutisms emerge (At last we've got it.) or some old one persist (We always had it.) Holding on to what is good in the past must be balanced by the need to be open to new insights and fresh adjustments to changing cultural settings.

Theologies are human creations, and it is idolatrous to absolutize any of them or to sanctify them by claiming divine authority for what they alone possess. We have this treasure in earthen vessels, and we must be ever vigilant about losing the distinction by committing the idolatry of claiming that our own mud pots are identical with the treasure itself and not merely carriers of some version of it. We can do this by our enthusiasm for something new that has at last got it or something old that has always had it.