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- Newsgroups: alt.atheism
- From: cass8806@elan.rowan.edu (Kyle Cassidy)
- Subject: Right Action (long)
- Message-ID: <cass8806.603.727472350@elan.rowan.edu>
- Organization: Rowan College of New Jersey
- Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1993 19:39:11 GMT
- Lines: 316
-
-
- Doing The Right Thing:
- Socrates, Piety, and 5,000
- Years of Conventional Wisdom
-
-
-
-
- Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons
- for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman,
- incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners,
- lacking souls.
-
- --Lewis Thomas
- "The Medusa and the Snail"
-
-
-
- The preaching and persuasion, of course, are not
- without effect. We do see frequent displays of cute
- little children holding up for the camera crayoned
- posters on behalf of the whales and the earth.... It is
- ... a case of what Socrates called Right Belief, a
- condition both praised and condemned by its name....
- Whence this Right Belief arises, we do not know. Surely,
- in the individual, it comes in part from social example
- and the suggestions of lore, but the origin of the
- impulse out of which flow those examples and suggestions
- is misty, and the cause of the ground in which they so
- readily take root is unclear. (Richard Mitchell, The
- Underground Grammarian, Fall 1991, pp. 13-14)
-
-
-
-
-
- The most profound question which Socrates brings to bear in
- Euthyphro is when he asks "whether the pious or holy is beloved by
- the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the
- gods." Ah! but here is the crux of everything is it not? Socrates
- at this point has already put forth and had confirmed by Euthyphro,
- that what is pious is that which is loved by the gods. And of
- course in this day and age we might take to task some of Zeus'
- morality as we might cringe at various Christian doctrine. For
- example that which is found in Deuteronomy 21: 10-13: "When thou
- goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath
- delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive,
- and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and has a desire
- unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; then thou shalt
- bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and
- pare her nails; and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from
- off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and
- mother a full month; and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and
- be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be." Of
- course today we consider this barbaric. We have words for this sort
- of thing, among them are "kidnapping" and "rape". Are we to believe
- that since these words are the words of god that these actions are
- pious? And that locking up those who commit such crimes is somehow
- impious? This of course was in part the dilemma of Socrates, who
- never could understand just what it was the gods were after and
- always sought the wisdom of wiser people like Euthyphro who did (1).
- Socrates had the added difficulty of belonging to a religion of
- pantheists. Was something pious if some gods thought it was good
- and others did not? As Socrates points out to his newly adopted
- mentor, "in thus chastising your father you may very likely be
- doing what is agreeable to Zeus but disagreeable to Cronos or
- Uranus, and what is acceptable to Hephaestus but unacceptable to
- Here, and there may be other gods who have similar differences of
- opinion." (p. 43) How easy it must be then for monotheistic
- Christians, who don't have these conflicts! All of the inherent
- conflicts of Christianity come from the same source (unless of
- course you count the tons of Catholic dogma which has been spewed
- from various and inspired saints; bishops having visitations and
- weird dreams; weeping statues; cabalistic cloud formations;
- Cardinals who bump into the Virgin in the Acme; as well as various
- monks plagued by stigmata, visions and other sanctimonious
- ailments. This information is legion and has been carefully
- catalogued and squrreled away in various Vatican dungeons). We can
- for example look at the book of Deuteronomy where in 5:17 we read,
- "Thou shalt not kill." but then only 8 chapters later in 13: 1-9 we
- find "If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams,
- and giveth thee a sign or a wonder ... thou shalt surely kill him,
- thine hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death, and
- afterwards the hand of all the people." Of course Christ came along
- later to contradict much of this himself and add further to the
- confusion.
- When Christ happens upon Mary Magdiline's stoning party one
- afternoon, he is confronted by a bunch of townspeople stuffed to
- the gills with Right Belief. They've been religiously attending
- synagogue and are familiar with the passage in Deuteronomy (22:21)
- which states: "They shall bring out the damsel to the door of her
- father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones
- that she die...." These people had been dulled by Right Belief,
- they knew how to treat a harlot. This sort of acceptance causes us
- to look to the sky or into the Cathode Ray Tube for divine
- direction brought to us via Reverend Tilton and Liberty University.
- Right Belief on it's own is nothing more than a shot in the dark,
- a guess or a whim, gathered from some remote and immaterial
- confidence. The problem which arises from Right Belief goes far
- beyond Socrates' difficulties with it i.e., that it is only a
- belief. Belief is all that we have, whether it is belief in
- science, the pope, or mom and apple pie -- our options come only
- when we are addressing the source of our belief. Traditionally
- religions have de-emphasized Self Reliance and instead placed
- accent upon some pre-determined "correct" behavior which comes from
- some great and learned professionals usually long dead, interpreted
- by the contemporary clergy living far away in some great gothic
- pile (even the Dali Lama lives in a castle). Whether this behavior
- is tithing, singing Xmas carols in the direction of your next door
- neighbors while catching pneumonia in the snow, or growing earlocks
- and wearing tzizit's is inconsequential.
- Jesus comes at these villagers armed not with Right Belief,
- but with a philosophy more akin to what Siddartha called "The Noble
- Eightfold Path" (although he didn't say it in english) which
- includes:
-
- Right Understanding
- Right Thought
- Right Speech
- Right Action
- Right Livelihood
- Right Effort
- Right Mindfulness
- Right Concentration
-
- The purpose of the eightfold path is to put emphasis on the
- individual to make the proper decisions and have the proper
- reactions through a series of self guided rationales. Living,
- acting, speaking, and thinking right do away with the need for
- merely believing right -- the burden is placed on the individual
- and the individual is now entrusted as a decision maker, as being
- able to discern the proper action as a result of proper
- understanding and interpretation of the events and actions which
- surround him.
- When taken as a whole we see that intelligence is useless
- without wisdom and that rote memorization of biblical passages will
- bring us no closer to the truth, or even to piety, regardless of
- how much you believe in them (and this is exactly how Jesus manages
- to run into this gaggle of stone hurling peasants in John 8:7). In
- T. S. Eliot's vaguely comprehensible poem Four Quartets ("Dry
- Salvages" to be more exact) he speaks of having "had the experience
- but missed the meaning." Belief without interpretation, without
- understanding, leaves us little more than pre-programmed robots who
- may be doomed to mechanically commit and recommit the same
- atrocities and impious acts because their blind belief makes no
- passage for individual action.
- The problem with Jesus' philosophy, is that it does not
- provide a solution for Socrates' dilemma. Again it shuts out the
- individual -- once again throwing out the vagaries of god's will,
- and the idea that these actions are for some higher purpose, that
- you are somehow pleasing some celestial being who will later reward
- you for playing by the rules.
-
-
- In considering that which is pious and that which is impious,
- we are reminded of Twain's Letters From the Earth, particularly
- letter X where Twain is discussing the slaughter of Onan by god.
- Onan was of course told by god to impregnate his sister in law --
- the act of attempting this didn't bother Onan in the slightest, but
- the actual thought of impregnating her must of bothered him, for he
- practiced a rudimentary form of birth control and "spilt it on the
- ground" which enraged god.
-
- The Lord slew Onan for that, for the Lord could never
- abide indelicacy. The Lord slew Onan, and to this day the
- Christian world cannot understand why he stopped with
- Onan, instead of slaying all the inhabitants for three
- hundred miles around -- they being innocent of offence,
- and therefore the very ones he would usually slay (2).
-
- We are indebted to Twain for his foresight and his daring, as well
- as his background of biblical study, which is invaluable to us.
- Twain of course does not stop there, but brings our attentions to
- bear on the books of first Kings, where in chapter 11, the people
- are warned by god "I will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth
- against the wall." We are glad that Twain addresses this issue, for
- it is one which always caused us concern when we were young, but it
- is a topic which is seldom discussed in Sunday Schools. Of course,
- you can't stop people from pissing against walls and so god, being
- mercyfull, was forced to slay them and all their relatives. Even
- the women, who Twain meticulously points out, are physically
- incapable of the act.
-
- A curious prejudice. And it still exists. Protestant
- parents still keep the Bible handy in the house, so that
- the children can study it, and one of the first things
- the little boys and girls learn is to be righteous and
- holy and not piss against the wall (3).
-
- Of course Twain and Socrates were searching for the same thing, and
- in similar manners, though instead of baiting a poor buffoon like
- Euthyphro because he's bored out of his skull waiting for his trial
- to begin, Twain baits us all because he is a curmudgeon. It is
- interesting to look at the ends of these two religious antagonists.
- While Socrates was put to death for blasphemy, Twain died
- depressed, angry but exceptionally wealthy and well respected. This
- is a good sign of progress. This is indicative of developments
- beyond that of Right Belief alone. The court was acting under the
- concept of Right Belief when they gave Socrates the cup of hemlock.
-
- Coleridge's mariner had gone far beyond mere Right Belief when
- he advises the wedding guest in that line that we all should have
- to memorize before the age of four (just as little boys are wont to
- begin pulling the wings off of flys):
-
- He prayeth best, who loveth best
- All things both great and small;
-
- The mariner has been granted what precious few of us have been
- blessed with, and this is both the time and the inclination to
- ponder his actions. He sits becalmed in the antarctic seas,
- surrounded by nothing but dead shipmates, weird fog, and this crazy
- bird swinging around his neck with nary a crossword puzzle in
- sight. While awaiting the inevitable, he reviews his actions and he
- transcends mere belief and begins to strain these beliefs through
- his actions, to filter them through his understanding. He arrives
- at a conclusion which is true piety -- it is not piety because god
- likes it, or because someone told him this, it is piety because the
- mariner is now able to justify his beliefs in a logical
- progression; he's put himself on the line this time. He now knows
- these things to be true after a process of internal dialectic. Like
- so when Arthur proposes "it is far better to be alive than dead"
- and eventually leads this to the conclusion that the diatribe
- "might is right" is impious, and rather that "might for right" is
- pious. He arrives at this not through doctrinal didactisim but by
- careful consideration of what the buddha would call the eightfold
- path.
- If we are not becalmed today, there are other difficulties
- which beseige us and give us cause to re-evaluate our beliefs. We
- are living in a renewed age of doubt, at a transition point between
- gods that perhaps started when Galileo climbed up the tower of Piza
- with some crazy hunchbacked Quazimodo of a servant crawling behind
- him lugging a bag of bowling balls and chains to see if Aristotle
- had been telling the truth. For the first time the gift horse of
- Right Belief is being looked in the mouth. As Huston Smith,
- professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of
- Technology wrote in his introduction to the 25th anniversary
- edition of The Three Pillars of Zen:
-
- There is the further fact that with the collapse of
- metaphysics, natural theology, and objective revelation,
- the West is facing for the first time as a civilization
- the problem of living without objectively convincing
- absolutes -- in a word, without dogmas (4).
-
- There is of course, also a hearty resurgence of the "God said it,
- I believe it and that settles it" point of view which flourished
- under the past administrations, particularly that of Ronald Reagan,
- but this attitude is being challenged with some degree of impunity
- (it is certainly less dangerous today than it was for Galileo who
- faced a panel of people who suggested to him point blank that they
- would blind him with a burning stick if he didn't change his mind
- but quick). It is through these challenges, through the adoption of
- review and opinion, and internal debate, through right
- understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right
- livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right
- concentration, that we will eventually be able to justify Right
- Belief and know that which is truly pious. That which is truly
- pious transcends gods and rests within the individual.
- Archie Bunker is of course, a paragon of Right Belief. He sits
- at the right hand of god and champions the true cause, believing
- with all his heart.
-
- Archie. It ain't a question of sides. God is always on
- the side of the right.
- Mike. And we are always right?
- Archie. Well, of course we are! You don't expect them
- Godless Gooks to be right, do you?
- Mike. How can those Gooks be Godless,
- Archie, when God created them?
- Archie. God didn't create them, smart guy! It was the
- devil that created them.
-
- Archie is Euthyphro in prime time. He has the answers, he has Right
- Belief and he is willing to share it with inquisitives, like
- Meathead, who in the manner of Socrates, come for his advice.
- Though Meathead is slightly more reactionary than Socrates, and
- allows himself to be easily flustered by his father-in-law, the
- idea is the same.
- I was working up towards a terrific conclusion where I was
- going to bring Archie, Jesus, Socrates and the Buddha into the Taco
- Bell across the street from my house where they were going to hash
- out Right Belief once and for all but I see that it's getting
- horriffically late and I've got a final exam in American Lit I
- tomorrow and I've got to go home and try and figure out how to
- distinguish between Michael Wigglesworth and Walt Whitman so I'll
- just leave them in the incomprehensible muddle into which I've
- gotten them and the world may never know exactly how things ought
- to go.
-
-
- -----------
- NOTES:
-
- (1) I am minded immediately of a line from a song by The Pursuit of
- Happiness which goes: "She's so young, she's got the answers, she
- doesn't need to question the world like I do." Ignorance may be
- bliss, but it's probably fairly boreing as well.
-
- (2) Mark Twain, _Letters From the Earth, Bernard DeVoto ed, Harper and
- Row, New York, 1938, p. 50
-
- (3) Ibid, p. 51
-
- (4) Roshi Philip Kapleau, _The Three Pillars of Zen_, Doubleday, New
- York, 1980, P. xiii
-
- (5) Spencer Marsh, _God, Man, and Archie Bunker_, Tandem Productions,
- 1975, p. 86
-
-
-
- c & c welcome.
-
- ----
- cass8806@elan.rowan.edu
-