Using Suffering to Promote Moral Goals

This past July, Dottie and I attended Summer Celebration at Lipscomb University in Nashville. One of the sessions was on the "Status of the Church of Christ." The speaker said we do not need the Bible nor do we need Jesus to:

• do no harm;
• do good (especially when it does not cost you much);
• tell the truth;
• practice fairness;
• keep your promises;
• respect autonomy;
• make reparations if you can.

His point was that being a Christian means more than those attributes.

He asked:

• Have you voluntarily reduced your standard of living in the past year and given the savings to help someone?
• Have you had the poor in your house?
• In the past 10 years is the church more diverse?

In his book “Letter to a Christian Nation”, Sam Harris writes “Christians believe that unless the Bible is accepted as the word of God, there can be no universal standard of morality But we can easily think of objective sources of moral order that do not require the existence of a lawgiving God.”

The speaker at Lipscomb was making a similar point.

One of the effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human suffering. Religion allows Christians to imagine that our concerns are moral when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation or when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why we expend more “moral” energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide and why we are more concerned about human embryos than about the life saving promise of stem cell research and it explains why we preach against condom use while millions die from AIDS each year.

We direct our efforts to constrain the sexual behavior of consenting adults---and to discourage our children from having premarital sex--- are almost never geared toward the relief of human suffering. Relieving human suffering seems to rank low on our list of priorities.

Christians are not principally concerned about teen pregnancy and the spread of disease. That is we are not concerned with the suffering caused by sex; we are worried about sex.

I have noticed that people who say they are “pro life” are really “pro unborn life.” We do little for life once it is born. Handicapped, abused, genocide, orphaned, children of incest or rape, are categories in which we show little interest. Our President is against stem cell research that offers to improve the lives of the citizens of the United States and of the world but he is willing to sacrifice the lives of our citizens for people who do like us and in reality hate us as their religion approves the killing of those whom they label as “unbelievers.” We permit our government to sacrifice our fellow citizens on the altar of politics.

Various sexually transmitted diseases effect a large number of our citizens. One of which is HPV, which is believed to cause cervical cancer; the CDC estimates 5,000 women in the US of A and 200,000 women worldwide die each year. Tests show it appears to be safe and effective. Some Christian Conservatives in our government have resisted a vaccination program on the grounds that HPV is a valuable impediment to premarital sex. They want to preserve cervical cancer as an incentive toward abstinence, even if it means sacrificing the lives of thousands of women each year. I imagine some of those women are on the prayer list of some congregations, somewhere.