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Democracy, Religion, and Moral Leadership
Rick Garlikov
If you need religion to let you know that you should be kind
to others, and particularly if you need religion to know that it is wrong to
murder innocent people, than you are a moral moron and there is no hope for you
anyway. If the only reason you do what
is right is to be spared the wrath of God or to be given Grace, then you are
not any better than a common criminal who only abstains from crime when he
thinks he will be caught or a kid who thinks being good two weeks before
Christmas will be sufficient. If your
only concept of God is an all-knowing policeman, judge, and eternal gatekeeper
of hell, then heaven help you because you have no ethics here on earth, just a
greedy ego, seeking to curry favor and avoid punishment. And if you have to ask “What would Jesus do?”
instead of knowing what you, as a decent human being should do, then you are
not likely going to be able to divine the right answer. You can’t understand
the message and the spirit of Christ if you are morally deaf and blind to begin
with and so devoid of understanding that you don’t know to be nice to others or
what would be nice.
George Washington made a point in his farewell address,
which if it were true, which it is not, would be very sad:
“Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property,
for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths
which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us
with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without
religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on
minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect
that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Unfortunately,
too many people seem to think it is true, or they pretend it is. But people can
know better, do know better in most cases, and should be held accountable for
knowing better. Fear of eternal
damnation is surely not the only motive for being civilized, loving, and kind,
and for wanting to do the right thing. And you don’t have to belong to
organized religion to know what is right and that you should do it.
Moreover,
those that do belong to organized religion don’t always know nor do what is
right. In the aftermath of the most recent mass murder, as if murder alone no
longer deserves our attention unless it occurs in large numbers and its victims
are the most beloved, many people are turning to religion for solace and
calling for the country to return to it for sanctuary. They say America was founded on religious and
particularly, Christian, principles. And
yet those principles enslaved blacks and sentenced women to second class
citizenship. And it allowed both to be
mistreated morally when they were recognized legally to deserve the rights of
male whites. Our laws, even when based on the Bible, have never been the most
moral, and our behaviors, even when conforming to the minimal requirements of
law, have not been the most admirable.
We worship wealth, enshrine greed, confuse social responsibility with
self-reliance, morality with legality, compassionate assistance with enabling
of weakness, and then wonder why people are selfish, insensitive, and material,
sometimes to the extreme when they have the power and ability to be that way. And then only in the most obvious tragedies,
and only after they occur, do we lament and seek change. We should know better from the beginning. How blind did one have to be not to
anticipate that assault weapons or bombs would someday be used on elementary
schools, when they have been used almost everywhere else! Do you think that those who believe it
justified to kill innocent people would spare innocent children? Were the
children killed in Oklahoma City’s bombing of the Murrah Federal Building not a sufficient sign that
children would not be spared just because they were congregated in a school!
So suddenly now some members of Congress and some
members of the NRA are for the first time seeing the light they should have
seen years ago. But, as CBS News
reporter Scott Pelley told New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, many people don’t
want gun control or even bans on “assault” rifles, in seeking Bloomberg’s
rationale for overriding their wishes.
Bloomberg claimed a majority of people, particularly now do want some
sort of restrictions on the ability to buy guns, but that is the wrong answer
to this dumb question, since if representative democracy has to wait for legal
change based on a majority of voters’ ethical enlightenment stemming from
egregious catastrophic acts, there will never be moral leadership, at best only
moral lag, coming from Congress. And not
that there is moral leadership anyway, but there should be. You don’t want it to be a requirement of
government that those who make laws are the last to know what those laws should
be. You don’t want the moral status quo to be systemically permanent when it is
clearly not perfect; you don’t want to have to wait for those with no moral
foresight to lead those with no desire to use the little they might have. In matters of ethics, Congress should not
reflect the will of the ignorant, but educate, transcend, and transform it. Otherwise ethical ignorance just leads
ethical incompetence, indifference, and ignobility down the road to unnecessary
tragedy.
Speaking
of which, the law that exempts manufacturers of assault weapons from
prosecution or liability in cases where those guns are used with disastrous
consequences in ways that should have been easily predicted and prevented by
those manufacturers, is one of the more egregious and stupid failures of
Congress, particularly in those cases where gun manufacturers purposefully
worked around the spirit of the previous assault weapon ban by finding
descriptive loopholes. That exemption
needs to be rescinded and gun manufacturers and dealers need to be held contributively
negligent for showing reckless disregard for human life, for the use of any
weapons they make, sell, or make available that easily allows mass carnage of
the sort we all understand. There doesn’t need to be an easily evaded
technical description of the sorts of guns now manufactured or that could allow
easy rapid firing of bullets, especially many bullets. No one should be able to make guns or perhaps
anything available to the general public, through the market place, that are designed
and built primarily to be destructive and easily used to destroy the lives of
human beings.
And
there should not be games and entertainment designed to exploit immature
enthrallment with violence and brutality through the clearly gratuitous use of
it under the guise of freedom of speech.
Murder and brutality are not a game and should not be the basis for
entertainment. In the December 20, 2012
NY Times owners of automatic rifles said it was a great stress reliever to fire
them. They need to find a more mature,
acceptable and less destructive way to relieve their stress.
Getting
rid of assault weapons and brutally violent pointless entertainment will not
end murder, but if it prevents some murders, shouldn’t that be enough? Not that it should matter whether it is your
life or your child’s or someone else’s that is saved, but what if laws against rapid fire assault weapons and
gratuitous brutality were to save your life, your child’s life, or that of
someone else really important to you. Is
that not worth the loss of entertainment and the thrill of massacring targets
on the range or decimating (not just hunting and shooting) deer in the
woods? And if you won’t do it to save
those you love, do it to save the lives of those whom others love. Jesus would probably do that. And even if He wouldn’t, you should.
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