“When devils will the blackest sins put on, they do suggest at first with heavenly shows.”

– William Shakespeare

Recently, in the same week a group of lay Catholics for reform called for top bishops to step down in light of sexual misconduct, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops rejected a request from 55 House Democrats for room to disagree on the issue of abortion.

On the surface, these two stories may seem connected only inasmuch as they might highlight the oddity that a body of synods connected to the sexual abuse of children still claim to have the moral authority to prescribe absolute ethical injunctions to their religious followers. Beneath the surface, however, these stories clearly illustrate the hypocrisy of a Church that clings to anachronistic sexual prohibitions, which lead to both celibate priests using young boys as an outlet for their unhealthy sexual suppression and to young adults whose failed attempts at premarital abstinence and avoidance of contraception end in unplanned pregnancies.

These parallels reveal the fundamental failure of Christian ethics: that it attempts to determine absolute right and wrong from actions totally divorced from their social consequences. In short, Christian morality could work only in a world in which no one actually resides.

Think about it: why did Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews later inherited by Christians and Muslims, decree that murder was wrong? Why, if murder is wrong, was the belligerent slaying of neighboring tribes, who happened to be inhabiting land promised by this god, divinely ordained? Why did this same god command his creatures to be fruitful and multiply when doing so must eventually involve the killing, and often murder, of other creatures in a finite world with finite resources? Why was the murder of certain tribe members, such as gays and “witches,” also commanded?

If we remove Yahweh from these questions, the answers become much clearer. Human beings, congregating in monadic social systems, discovered early on that murder within the ethnic tribe was not healthy for the society. They discovered that murdering outside the social system, i.e. in wars of conquest, could be very healthy for the social system in the short term because it produced wealth by both taking the wealth of other tribes and reducing population. Human beings also found that offspring, within a certain limit determined by resources, produced wealth. Finally, gays and witches were believed to be threats to a well-functioning society. In other words, it all came down to living the good life – the very thing in which most human beings alive today are interested.

Approached in this light, the past writings emerging from Judeo-Christian sources are neither authoritative nor absolute. Worse, they repeatedly propose standards of conduct that are prescribed without consideration for their social consequences. Claiming, for instance, that a savior’s suffering frees us of our mistakes may be psychologically appealing on the surface, but how can teaching such a thing be ethical or even true when it has historically led to gross misconduct? Wouldn’t it be better to offer a savior who, like Gandhi, said that when any human being suffers, he suffers — instead of one who suffered for our ignorance so that we don’t have to?

Today we live among human beings who simplistically cling to archaic moral systems despite the fact that they cause untold guilt, sexual repression, misogyny, violence, and wars of aggression. “Morality” is called upon not because it leads to any good in society but because it a certain group of human beings a sense of superiority – one that is artificially produced, inasmuch as it requires no depth of thought or investigation into the phenomenon of human life on this planet. Which generation will have the spiritual courage to challenge itself and reject the ignorance of the past? For example, when will Catholics finally admit that the Catholic Church, considering all its claims, must be morally bankrupt if even one child is hurt by it, let alone after centuries of crimes against humanity?

Unfortunately, strict monotheists are difficult to move from their ethical stance because their very sense of identity is bound to it, meaning to question it implies calling into question their concept of self. To let go of their irrational moral ideologies means admitting to being duped, so generation after generation is successfully indoctrinated into supposedly God-given beliefs that belong in the Dark Ages. Yet if the Catholic Church is really divinely ordained as it claims, then that fact should be obvious to everyone on the planet. If it was indeed instituted by God, there should be no question about its validity in anyone’s mind, or at least no room for doubt in any sane mind. Why would God institute anything unless it completely and utterly represented the absolute beatitude in the universe? The fact that there is any hint of anything less than that means something is wrong, and the atrocities that continue to emanate from the Catholic Church prove it to be an utter fraud.

If people want to good works in the world in the name of an organization, that is all well and good, but to call that organization the one and only true door to salvation and then commit flagrant crimes against humanity is both arrogant and despotic. More to the point, it reeks of the heavenly pretense devils put on to conceal their crimes.

Sankara Saranam is the author of God Without Religion: Questioning Centuries of Accepted Truths.
 
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