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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[1], 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.


This work is available here free, so that those who cannot afford it can still have access to it, and so that no one has to pay before they read something that might not be what they really are seeking.  But if you find it meaningful and helpful and would like to contribute whatever easily affordable amount you feel it is worth, please do do.  I will appreciate it. The button to the right will take you to PayPal where you can make any size donation (of 25 cents or more) you wish, using either your PayPal account or a credit card without a PayPal account.

 












[1] George Washington, Farewell Address. The Avalon Project at Yale Law School; http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp