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Here’s the plot of a recent movie called Signs. Mel Gibson is this guy who lives in Bucks County Pennsylvania. He has two young children: a boy who has a very serious asthma problem and a girl who will only take one sip out of a glass of water, after which she thinks it’s contaminated. Mel has a brother Merrill who had some involvement with baseball — he cudda been a contenda — but didn’t have the drive to follow through. He lives with Mel and his baseball bat hangs on the living room wall. Mel had a wife, but she was killed in a tragic accident when a responsible neighbor driving home after a long trip at night fell asleep behind the wheel, the first in his life, on the last little country lane just as Mel’s wife was walking on it. Mel also used to have a vocation — he was Father Mel, in fact (presumably Episcopalian) -- but gave up his vocation after his wife died.
So here we have Mel and his brother living in a house where there are half-full glasses of water everywhere — nobody ever takes them back to the kitchen when they go for a new one --everyone is always running for the Albuterol Inhaler, and Mel’s brother Merrill often wonders about what his sister-in-law meant, in her dying words, when she said something about hitting something with his bat. Mel however is sure that all he heard from his wife was the last firing of random neurons.
Gads. He sounds so secular doesn’t he?
But then the crop circles appear, and the dog barks all the time, and the little boy has a compulsion to read a book about invading extra-terrestrials. And the crop circles appear all over the world. And then the spaceships appear in the sky. And then it is discovered that these are not friendly aliens. They are here on earth to beam down as individuals, buck naked, with no weapons or supporting technology, to stalk dark alleys and the backs of houses, and be very vicious. Mel is one of the first to discover this when his neighbor, the one who killed Mel’s wife, calls in a panic because he has one of them locked in a closet. Seems this advanced species can’t get out of closets. Mel drives over, finds the neighbor wounded mortally, and runs back to his house to protect his nuclear family. Sure enough, soon the lone evil alien appears. We find out that the aliens kill by breathing horrible gas on you. Probably they come from a garlic planet.
Anyway, to skip lots of sordid details and bring it to a conclusion — and I do hope I ruin it for you so you don’t spend any money seeing it — the little boy panics and goes into an asthmatic attack in which his breathing shuts down. The alien has gotten into the living room with them but they left the inhaler downstairs. The nasty alien breathes his horrible garlic breath on the poor little boy. However, just then we remember what Mel’s wife said in her dying breath, which clues Merrill the slugger to take his bat off the wall and whack at the alien. This knocks the alien into one of the innumerable glasses of water that are lying all over the place and, guess what, water burns. (Why the daughter’s name isn’t Dorothy is more than I can fathom.) So they start throwing half empty glasses of water at the alien until they eventually turn a hose on it or stuff it in the washing machine or something equally clever.
What about that poor boy who was sprayed with the alien’s garlic breath? No problem: since his breathing apparatus was all closed up he didn’t inhale any, and Mel just happens to have a big needle with epinephrine or some other magic medicine that restores the boy to rosy cheekedness.
Naturally, in the last scene the aliens, having finally figured out that this planet is 70% water (a considerable amount of which is in the air) seem to have left. And Mel is back in his priestly garb. You see, now he realizes that the death of his wife was divinely planned so that she could give the mysterious message about Merrill and his baseball bat. Merrill’s failure to make it in the big leagues was divinely planned so that he’d be around to whack the alien. The asthma of the son was divinely planned so that the boy would not be breathing at the moment he was gassed. The obsessive disorder of the daughter was divinely planned so that there would be dozens of glasses of lethal water hanging around the house when the big bad alien came calling. The guilt under which the neighbor had been suffering was divinely planned. And the fact that when they ran away from the alien they forgot to grab the kid’s inhaler was … well, you get the idea.
Just in Europe more than 25,000,000 people saw this movie. Its opening weekend alone brought in $60M, E7M and £3M. I understand that some people may have liked it as entertainment, without paying much attention to the message, but I have a sneaking suspicion that many of those tens of millions of popcorn addicts went away with a warm, fuzzy "God’s in his heaven all’s right with the world" feeling. Hundreds of millions of dollars for divine manipulation, and we get the Wellesley Community Center.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to suggest that we are enlightened and that people with faith are automatically inferior. Far from it! There are people of faith who have keen minds and wouldn’t buy Mel’s claptrap any more than we would. I won’t pretend to understand how a rational person also has faith in a supernatural deity, but I also don’t understand how theoretical astrophysicists keep sane. That’s why I love the Humanist word "ignostic" — I don’t have to think about what supernatural theories to believe in order to live my life.
But, of course, there are things I do have to think about to live my life. I have to think about how to act toward others, toward things, and toward myself. We all have a sense of what kinds of actions I, or we, should choose. Despite Crusades, jihads, Inquisitions, and other faith-based initiatives, we tend to see that most societies have pretty similar takes on ethics and morality.
So if we all agree, to at least a certain level of detail, on the right way to behave, what’s all the fuss — the technical name for "fuss" is history? There’s clearly a basic level of distrust of our fellow humans. Like the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, I know the right way to behave, but I don’t trust you to behave equally well. I have a few choices. One is to strike preemptively by behaving badly toward you before you can do the same to me. Or I can whap you on the head until your beliefs match mine, in which case I can trust you. If I follow Hobbes I’ll believe that you and I must create a government to keep us both in check. We can’t just recognize the difficulty and agree to behave nicely. Hobbes said, "Covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all." A hundred years later Rousseau took the opposite tack: it is civilization that causes the discontents of society. If we could only return to the state of Nature we’d be, like the charming American savages and the pastoral demigods in Fantasia, happy as clams at high tide and able to live together in peace. Sadly, Rousseau also believed that the General Will trumps the individual — he would have been at home in Robespierre’s Republic, had he lived long enough to lose his head over it.
Both of these familiar philosophers took the view that some form of coercion is needed to keep us from killing each other. Which brings us back to Mel Gibson. Behind the kindly unnamed something that creates an entire race of hydrophobic aliens just so Mel can wear his Roman collar again, is the ultimate threat: "Play nice, or I’ll put you in Time Out for eternity. Oh, and did I tell you that Time Out is in the furnace room? And that there rats and spiders there?" Whether Time Out is called Hell as in Christian mythology or Room 101 as in 1984, this is a pretty potent threat.
It is worth knowing that threat is not the only way that the "Sky Daddy," as Rabbi Sherwin Wine likes to call the human creation of a paternal deity, affects our behavior. In theory, a Christian behaves properly out of sincere repentance, caused by the realization that her poor behavior is somehow disturbing to God, like a mosquito bite behind the knee. Even though God is so mighty and we are so insignificant, we can hurt, annoy or at least cause aggravation to God. Both motives — fear of punishment and desire to please God — can be found in Jewish theology as well, but they don’t take such a central role as they seem to in Christian thought. In the Rabbinic religion the real reason for proper behavior is that it is what God said to do. The reason need not be understood any further than that. All of the mitzvot are equally important, even though we moderns may look at the 613 mitzvot and see a fundamental difference between "Thou shalt not kill" and Thou shalt not eat a cheeseburger." I suspect that most Jews throughout time have recognized this same difference. One of the early changes proposed by the Reform Movement in the 18th Century was to forgo adherence to the "ritual" commandments, keeping only the "ethical" ones.
From the Reform movements emphasis if ethical teachings, we have come to believe that the ethical principles are devoid of the deity. But it is wrong to conclude that the ethics of Judaism are not built upon a presumptive belief in a deity. The great scholar Solomon Shechter, in railing against the Reform movements of his day (as he would have railed against us) points out
But if there is anything sure, it is that the highest motives which worked through the history of Judaism are the strong belief in God and the unshaken confidence that at last this God, the God of Israel, will be the God of the whole world; or, in other words, Faith and Hope are the two most prominent characteristics of Judaism…
It has often been asked what the Rabbis would have thought of a man who fulfils every commandment of the Torah, but does not believe that this Torah was given by God, or that there exists a God at all. It is indeed very difficult to answer this question with any degree of certainty. … But ... it would seem that the Rabbis could not conceive such a monstrosity as atheistic orthodoxy. For, as we have seen, the Rabbis thought that unbelief must needs end in sin, for faith is the origin of all good. Accordingly, in the case just supposed they would have either suspected the man's orthodoxy, or would have denied that his views were really what he professed them to be.
Shechter also points out, however, that Judaism ascribes no saving power to belief. "The belief in a dogma or a doctrine without abiding by its real or supposed consequences (e.g. the, belief in creatio ex nihilo without keeping the Sabbath) is of no value."
So while belief is not sufficient, as it is to some degree in Christianity — hence the disputes over the efficacy of faith versus good works — it must be the cornerstone of righteous action in Rabbinic Judaism.
For many of us, this message, sometimes overt and sometimes unconscious, was a barrier to feeling comfortable as Jews. We were thus intrigued at some point with the famous formulation by Blaise Pascal, usually called Pascal’s wager. We should all believe in God, he argued, since not believing can cause us to go to Hell if we’re wrong, while believing is harmless if we happen to be wrong in doing so. This was pretty persuasive for while, although it is much less interesting than Zeno’s Paradox, or the question of who shaves the barber who shaves everyone but himself. I suspect that many of us had our own defense against it. Mine was Empiricist: as soon as I see evidence, I’ll believe. Besides, I figured that if I was going to be punished for failing to believe in the absence of evidence, this was not a god I wanted to hang with for any period of time.
While Pascal’s wager was a step up from the usual Proof of the Existence of God, it suffers from the same kinds of illogic. First of all, as you probably noticed long ago, it isn’t a 50-50 choice. There are hundreds of God stories, which do we choose? And, after all, you can’t choose to believe — you can pretend, but any god worth believing in would see though that in a microsecond, or maybe a thousand years before the fact. Or, as Ed Buckner at secularhumanism.org asks,
What if "God" in her almighty wisdom only wants to have in her heaven (to keep her company and entertain her) curious, skeptical, intelligent beings? People who are wise enough to not accept her existence without good reasons or evidence? Then, of course, all of us secular humanists and freethinkers will be "in" while […] Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson will only make it if they are in fact charlatans who don’t really believe any of the baloney they peddle.
The same website discusses the direct appearance of Pascal’s Wager in another show, Touched by an Angel, of which the author of the review states: Once again Christianity has provided us with a reason to proclaim, "Thank God I'm an atheist!" The rather convoluted plot under review involved Kirk Douglas as a smart but abrasive, financially successful Jew who abandoned his religion as a child but is being asked by his more frum dying son to don tefillin and daven once for the Gipper. The son happens to be a philosophy professor, and gives a lecture on Pascal’s Wager in which he tells his father "If you behave morally, as if God exists, and he does, then you win everything. If you behave immorally, as if God does not exist, and you're right, you win nothing." The option of "not believing in God and behaving morally" is not presented. Of course, since Pascal never said anything about moral behavior, but wrote only about the logic of believing in a god whose existence, he had come to understand could not be known, the kid was probably not going to get tenure anyway.
Incidentally, although Pascal is sometimes seen a supporter of established Christian religion, in truth his supposition that the existence of God could not be known, so that a leap of faith was truly needed, was at odds with Christian doctrine. In this he was taking a stand more consonant with Jewish philosophy, in which the ineffability of God is a central tenet.
Enough slapstick. The question remains, if we have no big sky daddy to tell us what’s right, how do we know. One approach to this question is that of the professional ethicist — these are philosophers who got tenure and now consult to CEO’s who only got probation. Among the issues they deal with are subjectivism and cultural relativism, both of which are used as weapons against the possibility of a humanist morality. Subjectivism claims that what makes an action right is that the actor approves of it or believes that it's right. This is hard to take seriously as an ethical theory, and we can easily ignore it. Cultural relativism is more commonly used as an argument that a god is needed for there to be a universal ethics. For, the argument goes,
1. People in different societies make different moral judgments regarding the same action.
2. If people in different societies make different moral judgments regarding the same action, they must accept different moral standards.
3. If people in different societies accept different moral standards, there are no universal moral standards.
4. Therefore, there are no universal moral standards.
This may seem persuasive on first hearing, but there are three premises, and while the first — that different societies exhibit different behaviors — is incontrovertible, the other two are not so easily swallowed. Premise 3 states that if people disagree about what makes an action right, there can be no correct answer to the question, "What makes an action right?" But this doesn't follow. From the mere fact that people disagree, we can't conclude that none of the parties to the disagreement is correct. Premise 2 says that whenever people disagree about the morality of an action they must accept different moral standards. But this equates the standard with the judgement, and the judgement takes into account the standards and the facts. According to many ethicists and anthropologists, differences in judgement reveal not different standards but different facts. Solomon Asch, for example, says that people in different cultures arrive at different moral judgments, not because they have different views about the nature of morality, but because they have different views about the nature of reality.
I’m personally suspicious of any attempt to determine universal standards. I’m not saying it can’t be done, only that if it is I probably won’t be able to follow the arguments. When Russell and Whitehead set out to put mathematics on a firm logical basis, they were quite successful — but it took hundreds of pages to show that 1+1=2. If you’re trying to decide whether it’s ok to point your garden hose at your neighbor’s boombox, you need some quicker approach than an ethical theory.
So as Humanists, without the authority of deity, dictator or dogma to lead us, we must look elsewhere for ethical principles. Happily, we need look no further than the Internet. The American Humanist Association has recently issued Humanist Manifesto III. Like its predecessors in 1933 and 1973, it states the principles that define Humanism and bind us together as seekers after a better life for all. On the subject of ethics it says
Put differently
We base our ethical decisions and ideals upon human needs and concerns as opposed to the alleged needs and concerns of supposed deities or other transcendent entities or powers. We measure the value of a given choice by how it affects human life, and in this we include our individual selves, our families, our society, and the peoples of the earth. If supernatural powers are found to exist, powers to which we must respond, we will still base our response on human need and interest in any relationship with these powers. This is because all philosophies and religions are created by humans and cannot, in the final analysis, avoid the built-in bias of a human perspective. This human perspective limits us to human ways of comprehending the world and to human drives and aspirations as a motive force.
Does this mean that we always agree? Of course not, but the careful discussions in the Talmud and other Rabbinic literature show clearly that while God may be ineffable, the devil is always lurking in the details. Often, because the Rabbis, and before them the prophets, had the real lives and concerns of real human beings in mind, we find that Humanistic principles come into play. While that comforts us about our Jewish traditions, we don’t want to go so far as to say that Rabbinic Judaism is a Humanistic religion.
For Humanists, ethical behavior is something to be learned and reasoned about. As Corliss Lamont states in The Philosophy of Humanism, our ethical system is one "in which conscience does not merely play the role of a vetoing censor, but is creative in the sense of bringing to the fore new and higher powers."
By relying on ourselves, and not waiting for God to lay the lessons out in front of us or manipulate the lives of others just so we might catch on, we work toward a better life for all. Religious ethics breeds a negative defeatism that, despite being largely invisible because of its prevalence in the culture, sometimes shows itself as truly abhorrent. During the Depression, Pope Pius XI wrote in his encyclical CARITATE CHRISTI COMPULSI (On the Sacred Heart)
And let the poor, and all those who at this time are facing the hard trial of unemployment and scarcity of food, let them in a like spirit of penance offer with greater resignation the privations imposed on them by these hard times and the state of society, which divine Providence in its inscrutable but ever-loving plan has assigned them. Let them accept with a humble and trustful heart from the hand of God the effects of poverty, rendered harder by the distress in which mankind is now struggling; … let them take comfort in the certainty that their sacrifices and their trials borne in a Christian spirit will concur efficaciously to hasten the hour of mercy and peace
And we can pass quickly by those of today’s religious Jews who argue that God sent the Holocaust as punishment for straying from his ways.
So by choosing a Humanist approach we take a less clear path, but one that we can live with and learn from. And as in ethics, so in movies. No more Mel Gibson movies for me! In fact, I think God arranged for that terrible movie to be made just to confirm me in my Humanism.