If There Is A God, Is Not Everything Permitted…
14 Comments Published July 1st, 2009 in Uncategorized.Zizek said:
During the Seventh Crusade, led by St. Louis, Yves le Breton reported how he once encountered an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. Asked why she carried the two bowls, she answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them: “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God.” Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.
At the heart of the good news of Jesus lies Grace. This abundant love of God that pours out on the undeserving, on anyone who will receive it. When Christians talk about being saved by faith alone, it is not some kind of buy now-pay later marketing trick. Only the person who stands before God for reasons that have nothing to do with their own merit can love Him.
By Grace means not by human endeavour. Whether you succeed or fail at life, you can still enjoy reconciliation with your Maker. That means that Grace frees us to respond to God in love in a way that no other system could even dare to provide. You are not honouring God so as to get something from Him. You already have it. The Christian who lives in the light of Grace loves God because God is lovely.
But Zizek is maybe right. Faced with a church intent on calcifying Grace into a doctrine or rationalising it into a lifestyle choice, Atheists arguably embody this core of the Gospel better – it is no good following God to get something, life to the full would be lived if we could love God because he is lovely.
Your Correspondent, Prefers atheist writers to Christians
14 Responses to “If There Is A God, Is Not Everything Permitted…”
- 1 Pingback on Dec 1st, 2009 at 13:58
Zoomie
I don’t get it. How does atheism retain this “Christian ethical stance”?
I have just written some random thoughts on this from my first reading of some of Luther’s stuff – I would really appreciate your thoughts on sinning boldly. Perhaps what I have written is a load of balls but I was just trying to be honest. Which is a good start in any theological reflection. I think.
When do you come to Union College for “re-education”?
Yours
Steven
If im right i think the atheists are often better than us cause they are good for good’s sake alone. Of course it’s there own defintion of good…
As opposed to who’s definition of good ICFMT?
whether we like it or not good/bad (for as much as it is definable) is defined and honed generation by generation and liberal religious types search their holy books for justifications and reasons why their book said as much all along. Goodness me, scrap that… its decade by decade!! cynical? moi?
Pardon me Mr. Monkey-Who-Claims-To-Be-About-Reason-Above-All-Else,
Does the fact that people try to redefine Good in every new decade actually mean that Goodness is redefined in every new decade?
Yours Sincerely,
Mr. Z. Tard.
nice post, dunno what you’re all waffling on about in the comments but me i’m just enjoying the grace of what allows us to experience grace. love this post.
Steven, what I am saying is that Christians turn grace into a mere doctrine, a plaything, an intellectual crutch or weapon.
Today, atheists are the strongest advocates for doing good for the sake of good. That is meant to be the territory Christians occupy but we do such a bad job of following Jesus that we have abandoned that territory.
So, the woman Zizek cites is saying, I want to destroy all morality that is wound up with wanting to earn something for our goodness. Zizek gets this better than most Christians.
And wylie, the grace that allows us to experience grace: nice.
Zoomie,
Surely atheists are not immune from selfish motives even in their good deeds. The problem for the atheist is that they find it difficult to acknowledge that their “good” may not be infallible. They don’t have original sin so anyone who opposes their “good” (which has been reasoned out of human experience and logic) will automatically be “bad”.
Christians are (should be) more realistic than that and acknowledge that all our deeds, “good” and “bad” fall short of the mark and are shot with our own selfish desires. We all want to “earn something for our goodness” and destroying morality will not deal with that problem.
Which brings us back to the grace that allows us to receive grace in the first place.
Did you ever find out any more about lay ministry in PCI?
Steven
I can’t remember if I’ve said this before so forgive me if I’m repeating myself. This comment is mainly in response to Steven.
Atheist morality is a strange creature. They would say that moral truths have an existence similar to mathematical truths. These truths are objective and independent of opinion in the same way ‘2 2 = 4′ is objective and independent of opinion. But, like ‘2 2 = 4′, they are truths that follow from arbitrary assumptions that we are completely free to accept or reject. This does mean that atheists believe we are the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong, and that is a very unsettling belief, as it means morality is vulnerable to selfish motives. So I would agree that atheist morality is not infallible in that regard.
But this also means (and I think this is the point zoomtard was making) that a compassionate act made by an atheist is a compassionate act made without any hope of a reward or approval from a higher power. Atheists, despite knowing that compassion might be something as mundane, unimportant, and fragile as an animal instinct, can still be good for the sake of compassion and nothing more.
And in that sense, Atheists have a morality closer to Christ than the church.
Surely God and God alone knows who is good and who is not? My impression of atheists is that very few are philosophical atheists – that is logically consistent. Most are fideistic – it’s an act of ‘faith’ or ‘anti-faith’ – often based, as with most people, on complex psychological and spiritual foundations. The atheist moral thinking I have come across is just unconscious Christian morality imported from the dominant culture and undigested. If one takes atheism seriously then there is no morality and anything ‘good’ is not done for the sake of doing ‘good’ (it can’t be) but to meet some more or less hidden drive (e.g. survival of the individual/family/species) that is rewarded and re-inforced by positive emotional feedback. One question to ask atheists is whether they would do a good deed if there were no form of reward – that is if it were totally repugnant to them and devoid of all satisfaction? I think of Mother Teresa spending forty years with the sickest and most needy, daily facing filth and disease and dreadful poverty while all the time her prayer was devoid of any and all consolation (she would spend two hours on her knees in the morning praying!). Where are her atheist equivalents? Atheist philosophers have a real problem giving coherent accounts of any moral imperative that makes sense and is acceptable to society and that inspires true altruism.
As regards ‘Atheists have a morality closer to Christ than the church’ (taking this to apply to atheists who choose to do good) that if this is so it is only because their morality is Christian – they just don’t know it. As regards the ‘church’ perhaps its best to distinguish between official moral teaching and the actual behaviour on the street. Motivations are usually complex but surely even if people avoid evil out of fear of hell and do good in the hope of heaven that may not be the end of their journey. With grace and guidance such motivations can be left behind and the person can mature to doing good because it is the good thing to do.
Interesting and thought-provoking post.
The comment by Br. Tom Forde OFM Cap raised a lot of interesting points. I will try to respond to as many as I can.
First, the boring abstract stuff: You (Br. Tom) say that most atheists you have come across are fideistic, rather than philosophical or logically consistent. This might be true for many atheists, but atheism itself is consistent. But that’s for another time perhaps. For now, I’ll focus on atheist morality. You say that, if we take atheism seriously, then there is no morality. If you mean that there is no morality associated with atheism then I agree. But atheism and morality are still compatible, even if morality is not a property of the universe. I would argue, for example, that murder is wrong, but I would not argue that “murder is wrong” is necessarily true. “Murder is wrong” is derived from a set of assumptions concerning compassion that I cannot (and will not) say are true. In other words, I have no faith in my morality. I have a set of assumptions, implicit and explicit (which I have by no means formally written out or explored), and a set of moral ‘theorems’ that follow from these assumptions.
You also effectively say that, for atheists, there is no such thing as a selfless act (Or at least this is what I have inferred). If we define acts motivated by unreciprocated feelings of love and compassion as selfish because they are emotionally driven then I agree that there is no such thing as a selfless act. But wouldn’t that mean everyone is branded as selfish? Mother Teresa presumably, for example, tended to the sickest and most needy because of unreciprocated feelings of love and compassion.
Would I do a good deed if it was completely repugnant to me? If this can be rephrased as “Would I do a compassionate deed if it was completely repugnant to me?” then the answer is a definite no. My ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are defined by feelings of compassion, and I don’t think this is an exclusively atheist quality. If the Christian god was a dispassionate, cruel god then I would wager that what Christians consider to be good and bad would be quite different.
Definitely thought provoking, but I think there’s a flaw. It assumes that atheists are moral with no hope of reward, not so sure. I agree that theists have an added incentive for following the moral rules of their chosen deity, in that there’s a promise of good things in an afterlife as well as the promise that following the advice of god and getting in his good books will result in a happier/blessed life… (breath) but… the rest of us subconsinsly do good because we think it will be good for us. We nurture relationships with family ,friends , community and world that we think will be good for us. If no one else in society keeps to any ethical/moral conventions then maybe we’d need to get some religion back in our lifes as a carrot/stick. Just a thought.
bum. just read Morbet’s better answer