There are a number of patterns and procedures that persons feeling limited by mortality, but seeking human morality or a form of justice, adopt to carry through a religion of humanism. Many of these procedures can be made useful, and are sufficiently persuasive that even the church, during some periods of history, has adopted a few of them to achieve mortal rightness. The large story illustrates how moral and mortal clash, and righteous with right. Even the words, moral/mortal and righteous/right, look alike. They are related, but not always the same. Righteous emanates from God’s holiness, and right from the creations’ equality.
The concern for this Page date is related to motives for belief and action. The concept that the end justifies the means has played a large part in the forming of history and biography. It is alive and active in much of the existential philosophy that grew in popularity during the twentieth century, and played a meaningful part in the liberalization of Christian theology and personal conduct of adherents to the church. In simple terms the end justifying the means holds that any conduct or belief that brings about what is interpreted as a favorable outcome, when the absence of the means might affect a lesser value in outcome – becomes both moral and justified. Some would even say that failure to adopt the means to a presumed favorable outcome is immoral. (Just today, a reporter on television asserted that persons who did not receive a flu inoculation were morally wrong in that they are unprotected from influenza so may become carriers that will infect others with the disease.) The number of arguments in that direction is beyond our frame here. The mistress of Clarence Darrow, the eminent attorney for the damned, wrote: Bribing a juror to save a man’s life . . . . he [Darrow] wouldn’t hesitate. Those sharing the beliefs of Darrow, especially for the rights of minorities and conflicts with establishment entities forgave Darrow for his methods. They were touched by his reputed dedication to causes. They felt his lies, and various artifices may have been illegal, but accepted to protect the unprotected. There is the story of a minister who derailed a mob from a lynching by reading aloud the legal will of the man. In the will his wealth was left to the community, a consequence that would be taken away in an illegal event, as a lynching would be. The crowd dispersed. The pastor dropped the paper to the ground. His little son picked it up, and said to his father that it was not a will but a blank piece of paper. The father patted his son’s head and replied: That son was the “will” of God. That is illustrative of existential morality. (Most lies are built by the liar on the belief they will achieve good.)
We are impressed by the cleverness of the minister, of the relief of the prospective victim, of the deliverance from a heinous act by a mob. We feel that somehow God must have smiled with us on peaceful completion of the event. We miss the point. Currently there is a deep disagreement in the United States about water boarding. Americans used a system learned from other nations, whereby a person is tortured by the dripping of water on his head until he confesses. It was used during the administration of the younger George Bush after the terror attack of September 11, 2001. Many argued that it was justified in that some information was gained that served purpose against a military enemy to the benefit of America. The debate continues at this writing. (There is something that generates revulsion in us in the procedure.) The Church once accepted torture, the rack, to punish apostates, or some non-Christians in retaliation for their acts. Some were burned at the stake. The story might be continued. Means were justified by ends in witch trials in Colonial days in America. I was presumed to be wrong when I alone opposed, in a class of thirty advanced degree students, the scenario of the female prisoner in World War II who arranged impregnation by a Russian guard so that she would be sent home from the gulag. Her motive was to get back to her husband and children. All of us in the room believed that return to be a good thing, but not at all costs for me. I would not want to violate my person, a person for whom Christ died, to cause a guard to violate his unknowing wife, to abandon my countrymen who cannot gain release, or to assume my husband and children would accept the new born in the family – and so the story may proceed. The point is that God is a God of truth. His children must ever be examples of truth, sometimes at cost. With God nothing appearing in the mortal context is done until his evaluation is made for truth. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020