I read recently that Harvard has appointed an atheist "humanist chaplain" (I put it in quotes because the humanities, like all university education, came to be under the auspirces of the Church) as head chaplain over a whole staff of them (of various faiths and creeds) at Harvard. I mention it not because I think it all that newsworthy (his job sounds mostly administrative to me; that was the bane of my pastoral career, such as it was), but because his previous claim to fame was what sounded like a watered-down version of Sartre's "Existentialism Is A Humanism." His book, he explained in the article about his appointment, was an argument for being a good person, without a god to make you so. It's a lame argument based on a poorer form of Christianity which posits that without god we'd all be beasts and brutes, and we need God in our lives to civilize us.Criminal defense attorneys will tell you that in America “liberal” — even famously prominently liberal — usually still means “carceral.”
— OneHitPopehat (@Popehat) August 28, 2021
There is no anti-carceral party, unless you count the Libertarians, which I don’t because they’re dominated by sticky-futoned shitlords now. https://t.co/sbkm804SiY
And I mention it here because while the argument against the atheist's argument is a bit abstruse and requires more information about his argument in order to make mine, examples like this from Laurence Tribe point out to me that we need a bit more awareness of God in our understanding of morality, if only to raise us from our own self-centeredness. Mr. Tribe may or may not consider himself a Christian; the point is irrelevant to me here. But the idea that justice requires punishment, even unto death 53 years after the crime, is an argument from a morality that recognizes no higher authority or purpose than one's own satisfaction.
I'm not sure how you craft a morality that rises above this level of selfishness without appeal to a higher authority, even if, as Graham Greene wrote, “You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.”
Justice without mercy is not justice. Where that mercy comes from, has to be from somewhere other than human caused.
(And yes, based solely on Jesus pronouncing in Luke that he had come to bring freedom to the captives, which I don't think was a metaphor or a "spiritual insight" (that's always the easy way out of Jesus' hardest sayings, to say he didn't mean it "literally"), I am of the anti-carceral persuasion. No, there are not nearly enough of us to constitute a party. And if it had to be a libertarian one, I'd agree with Groucho Marx that it was a party I wouldn't join because it would have me. I certainly wouldn't have it, anyway.)
If it's the guy I looked into a few years back I wouldn't entrust him with anything that required a rigorous level of logical thinking. Paperwork, maybe I'd trust him with, putting money where it is both needed and productive, maybe, maybe. "Humanism" became a degraded category when the "Humanists" finding they couldn't really manage to keep their club afloat sold out to the trustfund Stalinist Corliss Lamont, where they do things like give "Humanist of the year" to Hollywood figures and sociologists who advocate the abolition of age of consent laws.
ReplyDeleteI'm a lot less impressed with Lawrence Tribe than I used to be, especially when he gave the expense of his late in life divorce for the reason he took work from the coal industry to pollute, etc. on the basis of their "Constitutional rights." I would like to know on what basis he believes the old man is a danger to society, if he actually has something to base that in.
I have found that the more I learned about Bobby Kennedy the less I believe his presidency would be much more than his brother's was, which seemed to me to be far less in hindsight than it was sold as the time. Of course that has nothing to do with the terrible wrong that his assassination was but it was Tribe who brought his speculation on what would have been into it, not me.