Do You "invent New Ways Of Doing Evil"?

[Llwellyn]

Romans 1 says that atheists "invent new ways of doing evil."  But I would go further than that and say that atheists actually invent new evils themselves, and not just new ways of doing the same old evils.  The Bible assumes, with Plato, that all the logical space necessary for moral degradation is now available -- that all possible wrongs can be done in dimensions that already exist.  But I would assert that we have the possibility of not only inventing ways of satisfying old ideals, but actually inventing new ideals themselves.

 

Contemporary moral theory says that all values are values that have been created by persons in relation to one another.  In other words, life answers to life.  Where there are two or more persons in the universe, each with claims, then there will be an ethical science.  Since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world, we must make compromises.  But these compromises don't just leave old ideals intact, they can actually awaken new satisfactions.  We invent new ideals which can more harmoniously exist alongside the ideals of others.  Coexistence itself may not have existed within the prior ideals.  In the pragmatist view, paradoxically, the highest morality is in eclipsing certain values, by inventing different values that will permit a more inclusive order.  William James puts it this way:  "In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no non-moral goods;  and the highest ethical life -- however few may be called to bear its burdens -- consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case."

 

That is why imagination rather than logic is the chief source of moral improvement (or moral degradation, as Christians would call it).  Sometimes moral language does not presently exist, and human ingenuity could create it.  Novelists are especially helpful in this regard, with writers such as Dickens inventing new values that we did not previously concern ourselves with.  The problem with Platonism is that it addresses predetermined forms of good without leaving space for novel values yet to be fabricated.  The task for the moral human is to break the crust of convention, to invent new words to express new joys.  Or, viewed from the Christian perspective, to "invent new evils."  Can you happily embrace the statements that Romans 1 makes about you?

 

[Jaseph]

Interesting interpretation of that verse.

 

Ironically we invent new morals/evils, but often discover that xtians are often guilty of breaking them. For example we are learning about climate change and polluting the earth with large amounts of co2 is seen more and more as immoral, while many xtians keep denying climate change and doing nothing about their co2 pollution.

 

Another example is that homophobia is becoming a new evil (and homosexuality is accepted). Xtians are changing their morals, but most still don't approve of homosexuality.

 

However I think xtianity is just behind the secular world; they will accept these morals eventually (except from some dogmatic groups), but by then the secular world will have made further moral progress. Xtians tend to pretend that they are better, that they are an example to the world, but it's them who are copying morals from the secular world, not the other way around.

[Llwellyn]

we invent new morals/evils, but often discover that xtians are often guilty of breaking them. 

 

I see Paul describing a kind of humanistic utopia with the following words (spoken from his perspective).  Although, I have a hard time believing that the contemporary Pagan Hellenic and Roman communities were in fact so wholesome as Paul describes.  If so, I grieve what we've lost.  But, I'm not sure that I would have made such a blanket approval of those societies, but would have rather believed that there was room for the application of moral intelligence.  Moral intelligence would imagine a future which was a projection of the desirable in the present, and invent the instrumentalities of its realization.  What Paul calls "darkening of the heart," I call moral synthesizing, producing new values:

 

Romans 1:28-32.  "As they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.  They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them."

 

[duderonomy]

I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise.

[wyson]

I was reading that before religions got fixed by being written down and having institutions like monasteries to preserve and transmit them, the oral tradition was much stronger.  And so they were flexible traditions that changed according to need ie you would take the principle of what you heard, but change it to fit current circumstances.

 

I thought liberal denominations took the Bible / traditions to be historical guides that revealed an abstract truth rather than a set of laws and rules to be followed?  

 

I'm sure it might be possible, if society progresses enough, that even liberal Christianity won't be "functional" and it will become a dead end / cultural oddity like Wicca.