A Question About Evidence, Proof and God
There are various legal standards of proof available, depending on the type of case and legal circumstances.:
PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE
The lowest standard of proof is known as the ‘preponderance of evidence.’ The preponderance of evidence standard comes into play when the plaintiff satisfies the burden of proof by offering evidence that demonstrates their claims have a greater than 50% chance to be true. In other words, if a claim can be demonstrated to be more likely to be true than not true, the burden of proof is met. The preponderance of evidence standard applies primarily to civil law cases.
CLEAR AND CONVINCING EVIDENCE
The clear and convincing evidence standard has a higher standard of proof than preponderance of evidence, but lower than proving beyond a reasonable doubt. Where the preponderance of evidence only requires the plaintiff to ‘tip the scales’ towards demonstrating fault, the clear and convincing standard needs to demonstrate that fault is ‘highly’ and ‘substantially’ more probable to be true than not true.
Another way of putting it is, to meet this particular standard, the evidence must establish a significantly greater than 50% probability that a claim is true. In comparison, preponderance of evidence requires a mere 51% or greater probability and beyond a reasonable doubt requires closer to 100%.
BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT
Used in criminal cases, beyond a reasonable doubt is the highest standard of proof within the American judiciary system. This standard requires the prosecutor to provide sufficient proof such that no other plausible account or conclusion is possible, except that the defendant is guilty. With the defendant assuming innocence until proven guilty, the burden of proof rests completely on the prosecutor.
While proving beyond a reasonable doubt means demonstrating the defendant is most certainly guilty, it does not mean you need to prove absolute certainty. To meet this standard, the prosecution team needs to demonstrate there is no reasonable doubt that the criminal act took place. It is up to the jury to determine whether doubts are reasonable or unreasonable.
PREPONDERANCE OF EVIDENCE VS BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT
When comparing preponderance of evidence vs reasonable doubt standards, the latter has a much higher burden of proof than the former. As mentioned, to define preponderance of evidence, the plaintiff is only required to show that the incident most likely happened. Beyond a reasonable doubt has a much higher standard since the prosecutor must eliminate any reasonable doubts to prove guilt.
Proof v Evidence
Proof requires evidence, but not all evidence constitutes proof. Proof is a fact that demonstrates something to be real or true. Evidence is information that might lead one to believe something to be real or true. Proof is final and conclusive.
In his book ‘Faith v Fact’, Jerry A Coyne raises a key question: whether the drama of ‘creation’ inevitably culminates in humans (or something like humans) who are capable of acknowledging the playwright. In what may be the most crucial and stringent assertion of the book, he contends that “if we can’t show that humanoid evolution was inevitable, then the reconciliation of evolution and Christianity collapses.”
“…Evolution is inconsistent with theism because the outcome is not inevitable but highly improbable…”
Does the attainment of a desired end need to be improbable or inevitable to point to God?
Coyne contends that “arguments for God are wanting because religion’s methods are useless for understanding reality.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson asserts that: “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.”
However, this line of thinking is much too narrow and therefore inaccurate.
Facts are true whether or not one believes in them. Science is an impressively reliable but fallible means for ascertaining facts. Indeed, facts are true whether or not science itself believes in them.
According to Coyne this is why religion does/can not contribute to knowledge…
The predictions of science are indeed based on experience. But the belief that past experience is a reliable predictor of the future — the faith that the world will behave the next moment as it has in the past — is not a confidence based on experience.
As David Hume made plain, it’s an assumption necessary for that confidence. And it is worth noting that appealing to past experience to justify such claims just begs the question.
Huxley commented, “Those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact.”
Of course, there is a danger in pathological faith that is so averse to this pain that it is unreceptive to challenge by facts or to interaction with others having contrary views.
In love, we might call this obsession. In religion, we call it fanaticism. In science, we recognize entrenched paradigms or falsification-resistant core beliefs.
The wonderful thing about science is that it entails a more straightforward (though still somewhat murky) procedure for rejecting false answers. But it achieves this, in part, by asking smaller questions.
Present to varying degrees in all domains, faith itself is not a pathology. It is a means to both apprehend and experience reality, in conjunction with other means.
So here’s the question:
As we currently understand evidence and proof, are the pandemic, climate change, slavery, the Holocaust, Putin’s War, and Trump’s Big Lie etc evidence or proof of the existence or nonexistence of an omniscient and omnipotent deity?
05/27/2022 @ 1:35 am
There is no proof of God. I can tell you that as a Deist. That is one of two reasons why I will never try to persuade you that God exists. The other is that in my religion there is no reason for me to persuade you that God exists because your atheism doesn’t cost you anything. In Christianity, at least most of it, it could cost you Heaven. In Judaism it doesn’t. There is nothing to save you from, so I am not after you religiously. No Jew is. We do not seek converts.
That being said, it also means I have no burden of proof for my belief because I am not making a case to you.
You are clearly uncomfortable with religion, even though ‘religion” is very far from a monolithic category. I have an objection to it being treated as a monolithic category. I’ve watched this dynamic for years: Christians (and I guess in some places Muslims) attempt to convert atheists to their religion, understandably offended atheists respond by knocking religion, and we Jews get caught in the return fire. It’s a dynamic I’m tired of. The fact that we get caught in the return fire is viewed as insignificant. That gets annoying. We are, as usual, expendable.
I’ll address a small part of this before I continue to my main point, and that has to do with omnipotence and omniscience. Assuming that God had the ability to exercise both, which one might or might not assume and which one’s faith should absolutely not be based on, God can’t exercise both if He wants fatherhood. The only way a human being can be good as opposed to being a robot is to have the freedom to be bad. That requires a divine pulling back of control. That’s what real goodness costs.
My more central point is that atheists often make an invalid assumption about the rationality of religion. The assumption is that there is only one way for religion to be rational, and that’s for there to be conclusive evidence that it’s based on fact. However, there’s a second way: If religion produces a desirable result for the practitioner and perhaps for those surrounding the practitioner, it can be rational on that basis.
[At this point I realize this comment will be longer than an average post. So be it.]
I’ll start with two stories from college, in reverse order of their sequence. The first took place when I saw a senior teaching a fencing class to beginners. I was trying to teach a move called a lunge. How a lunge works is you start in en garde (you’ve heard of that), you extent your front arm holding the weapon all the way, you kick out your front leg, you snap your back knee straight, you throw back your rear arm for balance, you keep your torso upright (leaning doesn’t help, that’s another explanation) and you land with your front foreleg below the knee vertical to the floor. I explained this and I got all sorts of the weirdest variations, including one young lady who leaned back, landed with both legs bent a little, and threw out her front arm last. Well, explaining this isn’t working. What will? So I had a weird idea;
Imagine you’re in en garde next to a railroad track with the train facing the same way you are. There’s a rope tied around your front wrist connected to the locomotive. It will pass you and when you’re in a lunge it will break. Huh? So the imaginary locomotive goes past, it pulls your arm straight first, it pulls you off balance so you pick up your front foot, your back foot remaining anchored, and when you’re far enough forward your front foot catches you and….you just did a decent lunge. This worked. From this I learned that the shortest distance between two points is not always an analytical straight line.
My second college story is from a couple of years earlier. i took a January course in Aikido for two weeks. They started off teaching was what ki is, in Chinese called chi. Ki is a sort of energy. They wanted to show us what it was, so they did the following:
People were paired up in relatively equivalent sizes. One person held their stronger arm out directly to the side while the other person put their hands on the arm held out, trying to force that arm down while the first person tried to hold that arm up. After a few seconds the arm went down. Then the first person held their weaker arm out to the side and was told:
“Imagine there’s a white light emanating from your stomach. It goes up your arm and through your arm, your arm sort of floats on it, and it comes out your fingertips and goes off into the infinite distance. Focus on it going into the distance.” The arm is up and pretty relaxed, and now the second person is told to pull it down. That task proves to be much, much more difficult.
Does that prove that ki is real?
Not necessarily. It might. The other alternative is that ki is a lunge train, a lunge locomotive, an image that triggers a series of muscle tensing and relaxing in such a way as to hold the arm up more successfully against resistance while being more relaxed and using a lot less energy. So either it’s real or it’s what I might call a useful superstition.
If you’re trying to hold your arm up in the face of downward pressure, is it rational to believe in ki?
If that’s your task, it’s irrational not to. The belief is in and of itself helpful in an obvious way.
What I’ve just established is, under some circumstances, the rationality of faith without proof. If the faith produces more positive than negative results, faith can absolutely be rational.
I’m not arguing for the rationality of faith in general, nor am I arguing for the rationality of emphasis on faith. I’ve seen instances of faith where it can be quite damaging.
But this is not a global question. There is no reason to ask it as a global question. “Religion: good or bad?” is a totally unnecessary question because there’s no reason to accept or reject it as an entire category. That would be a totally arbitrary exercise or, rather, it is a totally arbitrary exercise.
What is its net result in any given case? It it a net positive or a net negative? Assuming you can answer that question. Does it produce more oppression or compassion in any given case? Does it help or hurt in other ways? Does it support thinking, knowledge, education or does it oppose them? Does it support the arts or oppose them?
I belong to a religion with a pretty good track record. We value conduct over faith. We produce compassion-based activism for people who aren’t us more successfully than anyone does. A religious emphasis on education results in a lot of academic, scientific, legal success which some people might write off as cultural but is absolutely religious in origin. We’ve helped each other survive in the face of ridiculous obstacles and we still take each other in in ways most groups don’t – Israel’s existence is based on that. Our faith certainly helps us deal with death, not just in terms of beliefs but in terms of having rituals which give us focus in the face of tragedy – something I unfortunately have extreme personal experience with. It gives us community and reinforcement for our values.
Is the case being made here that I should give this up because it’s irrational to keep faith in the face of lack of proof? That’s not a case I would find rational for me.
05/27/2022 @ 10:49 am
Kosh, here are two ‘smaller questions’:
Is the existence of, and belief in, a deity necessary components in the establishment and perpetuation of religion?
Is religion the primary or principal component of codes of moral and ethical conduct and behavior?
To put it another way :
Is it possible to be a fundamentally ‘good’ human being without being a ‘religious’ person?
05/27/2022 @ 7:03 pm
I don’t think all the Eastern religions are quite as deity based as Western religions. There are figures they venerate but I’m not sure the extent to which they are gods in the way we would typically define them.
Is it possible to be a fundamentally good human being without being a religious person? Of course, as it is possible to be a fundamentally good human being without being an atheist. This is the wrong question because it assumes that I justify my religion based on its exclusive domain over morality. I don’t. Judaism doesn’t. Nor, technically, does Islam, though this is not true of Islam to the same extent as it is of Judaism.
My case about Judaism in this area is that it is too unusually successful at producing a particular kind of moral individual to reject out of hand. And, if you look at Jewish religious practice, there are definite indications on why this is.
I find it useful to look at the Passover Seder. Have you ever been to one? It’s an evening ceremony at home with a meal in the middle. The major part of the ceremony is the telling of the Exodus story. In many Jewish households, like the one I grew up in, there are two, one each on the first two nights of Passover. In Israel and some denominations here there is one. Two was a great way to grow up because you learn and it’s reinforced. This is one of the most important Jewish rituals that is mainly practiced in the home rather than at synagogue. It can be very much like Thanksgiving with extended family.
A lot of things happen at a Seder, and let’s think about this in terms of children growing up with the tradition. It opens with the statement “Let those who are hungry come and eat.” In some communities it was obligatory or at least customary to have guests for this reason.
It’s an ancient story and in our case it’s an ancient story about us. Though this is certainly a story known from the Christian Old Testament we don’t identify with it just morally, we identify with it historically in the sense that it is specifically about our people. it resonates extra that way. We still believe that the priestly caste, which still exists for certain ceremonies, are patrilineally descended from the first High Priest, Aaron. My paternal grandmother was of this caste, the Cohenim. This is lineage we take personally. Whether or not the sea split, this is about our ancestors, and not figuratively.
There’s a section where the youngest who is capable of asking asks something called the Four Questions to the Seder’s leader. This is to a certain extent a performance, one that generates public praise for learning. Very important to little kids.
The answer starts with “We were slaves to Pharoah in Egypt.” Our belief is that all our souls were there, part of the Exodus, present at Sinai. Not “our ancestors were slaves” but “we were.” This is a perspective we are commanded to have. There is a story concerning four sons who ask questions of the leader and how to handle each one. The wicked one asks what this all means “to you.” What’s considered wicked in this context is the lack of inclusion of himself.
We eventually get to the ten plagues. For each one we spill a drop of wine. Why spill good wine over the suffering of our enemies? Because they’re God’s children and suffering is suffering, intrinsically a bad thing.
There are more lessons than this but you get the idea. Given this, here’s my question to atheists:
What mechanisms do you have of teaching these lessons that resonate like this mechanism does? We have honed this indoctrination over thousands of years and it works. So now you make the decision to throw out religion. What are you replacing this with? Sure you can teach these lessons, but will your children teach them? Do they have a formula for teaching them? When Jews lapse and leave Judaism, what happens after a generation or two is that the statistical characteristics typical of Jews start to gravitate toward the public mean. This figures: these tools aren’t used any more. Why on Earth is it irrational to keep these tools? Because I can’t prove the existence of God? Why should that be the decider? The idea that that should be the decider is arbitrary and it isn’t necessary born of anything good. it’s in a way an insistence on one variety of rationality that pretends to negate another valid variety and in a way it’s a reaction to proselytizing, it’s return fire, but as I stated earlier it’s not in response to fire that we generated in the first place.
05/28/2022 @ 7:14 am
“Here’s my question to the atheists: What mechanism do you have…?”
This is an excellent question. It came from an excellent instruction, and I thank you for that. My answer is complicated and incomplete. Here is what I have so far.
“Atheism” is a condition that I find difficult to apply to myself, but it most closely applies, so I accept it. The problem is that my cosmology is essentially Christian, so everything I know, and the way in which I know it is filtered through Christianity. Over time I came to reject the notion of the supreme being who intervenes in the lives of humans. Whether or not such a supreme being exists, and how it is composed is an open question for me. Only within the last year have I settled on a definition of “god” for myself.
A very simplified version of my process was to take fibers of ethical principles from my Christian upbringing, and move them forward into an understanding that lacks fundamental conflicts with reality as I see it from my 20th/21st century experiences, and includes a value of humility that does not place personal motivations above the greater good. The tension between these two requirements cannot maintain balance without constant attention. There is no moral auto-pilot, as it were, so that is my personal mechanism. I lack the communal understanding of this practice that your question alludes to. It lacks the language and the experience to be easily communicated. It is isolating because it can only most easily be communicated by comparing it to other practices and describing it as what it is not. Just like “atheism” and agnosticism only fit within the cosmology that it itself does not exist in.
All of that is admittedly very fuzzy. This type of conversation requires brevity that wont get you to where I am thinking, which is already not a finished product. The last bit of explanation I can offer is that my personal philosophical construction resembles something that would exist at an intersection of existentialism, and transcendentalism. It is transcendental in its understanding of the connection of the individual to the cosmos, and it is existential in its understanding of the individual responsibility to make choices and be accountable. In a super simplified statement, this view would say, there is a god. God is everything. There is a ritual practice. That practice is being accountable for every action. There is good and evil. Good is the alignment with everything that is real and true. Evil is the departure from everything real and true.
05/28/2022 @ 10:45 am
Bitey, you and I are pretty much in the same place.
However, you do a much better job of articulating and expressing it than I can….
Thanks
05/28/2022 @ 12:41 pm
Understand that my question is meant defensively. I’m not asking it as a criticism of atheism, which I understand is not clearly defined at all because its definition is negative as opposed to positive (which is actually my problem with Satanism) – what it’s about is what it isn’t, not what it is. My question is meant as an answer to being knocked for having a religion on the grounds that it’s obviously irrational to have one, to being told (or implied to) that the rational course of action is to give it up. I don’t knock atheism. If I knock atheists it’s only in the form of complaining about atheistic evangelism, not atheism per se. I complain about atheistic evangelism because its point to someone Jewish is really the same as every other form of evangelism: We have a better alternative to Judaism so it makes no sense for you to keep your Judaism and you’re wrong to to so. Frankly the Mormons who knock on my door are more polite to me – and certainly more respectful – than a lot of evangelical atheists are. The last conversation I had with the pair of barely past teen years Mormon Elders was actually quite pleasant. Once they figure out where I’m coming from they don’t push me because I know how to explain what I am and how and why people like me are likely to react to evangelism. They appreciate knowing that if you see a mezuzah on the doorpost the occupants will typically view attempts at evangelizing them as hostile and threatening and that they have very good reasons for their viewpoint. I’ve had enough experience and I’m well grounded enough that I don’t have a problem with that conversation.
The point is that I’m not criticizing you for not developing a mechanism. I’m using one that’s a few thousand years old and tested and meets my criteria. I don’t need to come up with it. I’m not suggesting that I could.
Trying to come up with what you’re trying to come up with isn’t easy. It’s so much easier to edit than to create. And there are so many parts of my own inherited system (culturally, not directly from my parents at all philosophically) that I can pick and choose or not even decide on whether to choose. I don’t care which parts of the Bible are history for the most part because that’s not what I think scripture is for. I realize that in Christianity, particularly fundamentalist Christianity – and also in a different way in fundamentalist Judaism – the discovery that some of what we read isn’t literally true is faith-shaking. Not to me at all, because I think the point of scripture is pedagogical, not historical. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a divinely inspired or divinely dictated equivalent to Aesop’s Fables rather than fact because the point isn’t the history, the point is the lesson. You get a bunch of rabbis going through the First Five Books (the Torah, which in Judaism is supposed to have been divinely dictated if you’re Orthodox – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) with a fine-toothed comb and trying to understand everything said and to resolve what appear to be contradictions and the result of their poring through it is Judaism. It’s what happens when scripture meets rabbinic lens. So you end up with questions and conclusions and priorities. And sometimes these priorities don’t seem to mesh with how social mores and scientific information have developed, and in the liberal branches of Judaism the religion adapts and in the Orthodox branches the religion mostly resists, which is oddly not how the rabbis always handled things in ancient times. For example: the Torah says that Sabbath violation is a capital crime and that you need to fast during Yom Kippur but Jewish law says that to save a life it is obligatory to break Sabbath and that if you’re sick you’re obligated to eat and drink on Yom Kippur. That to me is sensible Judaism, how it should work, as a fundamentally humanist religion, a decision deliberately made a little before Jesus in an argument between two sages named Hillel and Shammai. But now ultra-Orthodox Judaism doesn’t touch that approach and we need it now, particularly in light of what we now know about female capabilities and about homosexuality. Liberal Judaism says We have to remain Just while ultra-Orthodox Judaism says We have to remain Legal. To me, justice is more religiously fundamental and that is screamingly how Reform Judaism works – which, incidentally, is not a movement I grew up in but I would not have enjoyed growing up in it because it used to be very Church Wannabe. That I would have found culturally grating.
05/27/2022 @ 1:40 pm
“Is there proof of non existence…?” No. Nothing can prove non existence.
Is there proof of existence? No. The things you listed do not prove the existence of a supreme being.
“Is it possible to be a fundamentally good person…?” The answer to this likely depends upon the religion in question. That is an important part of determining what the religion is, more than determining the nature of the individual.
Judaism and Christianity are not both religions. The Wiki definition ends with, “…there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.” My view is that if you define one as a religion, then the other is not. It does not matter which you choose. They very generally exist for similar purposes, but they have very different goals. Christianity exists to control the individual within this life. The broad purpose for this is to project political power over nation-states. The first council of Nicaea met in 325 c.e. Constantine, who reigned from 306 to 337 c.e. chose Christianity as a means to political power in Europe, not so much as a guide to spiritual perfection. The Nicene Creed determined the essence of being Christian as a fundamentally political act, and not a spiritual/philosophical act.
Those who opposed Jesus during his lifetime were those with political state power and political religious power. The thrust of Jesus’s ministry would have democratized both in various ways. It is my understanding of the issue that Jesus would not have people be Christians. Therefore, to follow his teaching as I understand he would have you do, it is not only possible to be a good person by not being religious, it is essential. To the extent that one takes complete responsibility for their spiritual condition, (however that is defined), the more they are being ethical/moral/good. To whatever degree that they either defer to some religious authority for that determination, or that they avoid any determination or responsibility at all, they are not ethical/moral/good.
05/27/2022 @ 10:54 pm
Judaism and Christianity are certainly not equivalent. For one thing, Judaism is a small family of religious movements, Christianity is an enormous one with way more diversity. For another, Judaism has an ethnic component and Christianity does not. That’s because Judaism dates from when tribes had their own religions and Christianity is far later. So Judaism is sort of two things. Jews are a people who can be joined through conversion to our religion.
That tribal difference is also what makes the difference in terms of Christianity being used for power.
There is of course another huge current difference, though it wasn’t always a difference: Judaism does not seek converts, Christianity does.
There are of course a whole lot of doctrine differences but you’d expect there to be. Where the differences become important in a conversation like this one is where one is so exposed to Christian doctrine and so unexposed to Jewish doctrine that one assumes that Christian doctrine covers both, and so Judaism gets judged in ways that are inappropriate for judging it. Oddly enough I ran into this issue back on Open Salon in talking with Jan Sand. Jan hated any association at all with religion, he was ethnically Jewish, and what it took me years to discover was that he knew little enough about Judaism that he assumed Christian things about it.
Here are a few quick differences, and they’re not about Jesus per se:
* Judaism values conduct over faith. Most Christianity values faith over conduct except for Catholicism where Faith and Works have roughly equivalent importance.
* In Christianity and I think Islam life is essentially an audition for Heaven. In Judaism life is the main event and the afterlife gets a lot less attention.
* Judaism does not seek converts. This is in part because Jews don’t hold that you have to be Jewish to enter Heaven. There is nothing to save you from. Judaism actually discourages conversion because we can only afford the committed. Conversion takes as lot of study, a little like American citizenship does.
* Judaism ignores a Satan figure almost entirely. Among the ultra-Orthodox there are sometimes some shadowy references that don’t get much attention but in the rest of Judaism Satan and Hell are ignored and not really believed in. Because Judaism is so based on responsibility, Satan doesn’t work because he’s a vehicle for avoiding responsibility. As Flip Wilson’s Geraldine put it: The Devil made me buy this dress.
*In Judaism, God does not forgive people for what they do to one another, only for what they do to Him. He does not take that authority. That you square yourself. “God has forgiven me for what I did to you” is a non-sequitur In Judaism.
You’ll notice that none of these differences have anything to do with Jesus or of any definition of Messiah. (Another difference is that in Judaism the Messiah is a human agent of God and not a human manifestation of God.) Judaism is not Christianity Without Jesus by a long shot. Though we share most of the text of the Old Testament, we do entirely different things with it. Judaism is Torah through a rabbinic lens, and the lens is absolutely critical. Incidentally, Jesus was Jewish all his life. He was not seeking converts from outside of Judaism, just trying to reform Judaism from within.. In fact, he expressed surprise whenever anyone not Jewish did anything good or kind. The idea of reaching out to Greco-Roman pagans to join Christianity comes from Paul, not Jesus.
05/27/2022 @ 3:29 pm
wake me up 21June22
1-800-FLOWERS
05/28/2022 @ 2:04 pm
Ron, there will never come a day when I can articulate it better than you can. I thank you for the compliment though.
05/28/2022 @ 2:15 pm
Kosh, I didn’t take anything you said as a criticism. It was all very informative, as usual. My views are a work in progress, and I am in no hurry to have them finished. Those are just a simplified version of how I understand the broad issue.
05/28/2022 @ 3:56 pm
Ok. You don’t have an easy task starting from scratch.
It also helps to know what Christian is your influence. I find Jesus personally very compelling, very Jewish, and kind of Reform Jewish nineteen hundred years early though Reform Judaism doesn’t follow him but reaches some similar conclusions with some common source material. I am not a fan of Paul.
05/28/2022 @ 5:51 pm
I discovered very late in life how the world actually works. Talking about it always takes more words than anyone would care to read, so I endeavor to be brief without taking away from the depth and breadth of the process. I offer that as an introduction so that some of my odd metaphors and allusions may be more easily understood.
My view of Jesus is much like you described him. I strip away the hocus pocus, and focus on the ethics and humility. I do not believe that Jesus wanted to create a religion. I think he wanted to simplify, if not abolish, his own. Like I mentioned to you some months ago, I see the use of power as the abeyance of ethics (justice). When I mentioned it previously, I had not worked it through as much as I have now. I think it is absolute, like a see-saw. Zero sum.
That portion is important because I believe Jesus’s view was entirely ethical, and devoid of power tactics or solutions. Most of how we learn about right versus wrong as children is an ethical course, or set of teachings. Power tactics are typically left for young adulthood, unless egalitarian ethical construction is ignored from the start. (Racism is one example of what I consider a power tactic in abeyance of egalitarian ethics. Misogyny is another. You get the point). Now, in our society, we generally teach with a double set of ethical books. All would claim propriety, but few actually commit to it to the extent that Jesus meant when he claimed that “the meek shall inherit the Earth.” (Matthew 5.5).
Deference to facts, reason, and truth are ethical principles. Gathering facts, acquiring sophistication, and deference to truth or reason when truth can not be known…and only when beneficial to oneself, is the general way in which power is amassed, and used. Power, as an ethical vessel, lacks integrity, both metaphorically and literally. Ethics, as a power vessel, has the easily discovered vulnerability of predictability, and the unwillingness to nullify itself for self preservation. Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and others like them, were ethically strong, or noble, and in being so were politically or power weak. Jesus chose not to declare himself whatever he needed to declare in order to save himself. Ethically strong. Power weak.
The double set of books in ethical teaching in our society says to Christians, be like Christ. The streetwise Christians know be be otherwise. Even Peter denied Christ…3 times. That’s the way of the world. I was very late to understand that. This idea has a common thread through every accepted, valued institution in the Western world that must do an ethical two-step to even exist. Things like slavery, misogyny, capitalistic exploitation, etc, etc…all must be justified because people everywhere value the power that can be derived from it over the clear impropriety of the many, many practices.
“The meek shall inherit the earth” is another weak of saying, “the arc of history bends toward justice”…or vice versa. I believe Jesus meant what King said millennia later. Whether or not that is actually true is not the point. I think they both meant that ethical power is the higher power. To say that I know how this will work out is like saying I know whether or not a personal god exists. I do not know. What I do know is that my ethical training lacked the power principle to such a degree that I failed to see that most people do the two-step. It led me to believe that “truth will out”, and “good conquers…”, etc. Upon that is built the principle that no person is above the law…etc.
Recent history has shown that these are obviously not true. Not only is our government not functioning that way, worse yet, it is not set up that way. We are using a double set of books. We tell ourselves certain platitudes, but the power principle is how things actually work. Powerful idiots can rise, and ethical giants are slain.
05/29/2022 @ 12:08 am
Right now that’s playing out in a partisan way because one party has basically given up ethics for power. The way power and ethics work, and this is also true in business, is lowest common denominator. The least ethnically actor sets the floor and because the floor brings a competitive advantage others are forced to follow.
05/29/2022 @ 3:01 am
Right. And it is fascinating how ethical issues are handled when it comes to money. There is no regulation like the regulations surrounding those with a fiduciary responsibility. Every bubble of nonsense is squeezed out of banking and investment. Science and medicine have loopholes as wide (and absurd) as a non medical, non scientific President prescribing commercial cleaning products, and veterinary medications, and millions followed him in denial of medical science. Conversely, if a bank offers a .65% interest rate, and at the end of a year it delivers a .64% yield, someone is going to prison.
Wealth is the purest, most fungible form of power possible. A nickel collected by a progressive spends with the exact same value on reactionary projects. No one doubts the value of a nickel, (or of a billion of them), but with 5ml of vaccine, the value depends on how you vote. Accountability has plausible deniability in everything we do as a society, with the exception of money. When it comes to money, accountants do the accounting, and every penny matters. Every fraction of a penny matters. When it comes to life, it begins at conception, and it ends in second grade, of course, that depends on how you interpret the second amendment.
05/29/2022 @ 7:51 am
“When it comes to life, it begins at conception, and it ends in second grade, of course, that depends on how you interpret the second amendment.”
Bitey, unless you wish to explore the Declaration of Independence and the Second Amendment as examples and manifestations of the White Supremacy which is rationalized and justified ecclesiastically in Christian canon and liturgy as being ordained by ‘God’, let’s try to avoid this as a meaningful line of discourse in the context of this post and thread:
Fear of slave revolts and indian insurgencies was an element of the primary motivation for the Declaration of Independence and the Second Amendment:
“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
In the context of the 18th century, “domestic insurrections” refers to rebellious slaves. “Merciless Indian savages” doesn’t need much explanation.
05/29/2022 @ 4:14 pm
Apologies, Ron. It was only meant as a flippant, broad criticism of conservative justifications for guns and against abortion.
05/29/2022 @ 6:42 pm
No need for an apology here.
I just don’t want the thread to morph into something that is tangential and somewhat off base…
There is, however, something to be said for the substance of your remark…
I simply prefer that such an exchange not occur in this thread.
05/29/2022 @ 5:35 pm
I understood that
05/29/2022 @ 6:28 pm
I understood the comment to be inadvertently and unintentionally the stuff of rabbit holes and weeds….
05/29/2022 @ 8:10 pm
Understood.
I should say, however, the flippant remark referred to the “double book” ethics that I spoke of within the context of the question and answer. The subject of “goodness” and spirituality involve truthfulness, as I previously stated. Positions on abortion, while ignoring the deaths of children by assault weapon, is an ethical inconsistency. It was not meant as an opening of a discussion of abortion. It was an example of unethical conduct in pursuit of power.
05/31/2022 @ 5:30 am
Pursuit of power is, in and of itself, unethical.
05/31/2022 @ 12:00 pm
Power provides the force to accomplish anything that needs to be accomplished, whether that is combing your hair, or moving an army. The physical world demands it. The way I see it, the ethical value of power is in how it is used. The part I have not worked out is the subjective value that I place on freedom. My view on power works as a principle with the context of free individuals as a constant. If you remove the free individual from the equation, my system breaks down.
The exceptions made within my view of power involve minors, and those without to capacity to be accountable for their freedom. So, power used in their best interest by their caretakers is not unethical. All other uses of power, presumably against the wishes or interest of the free individual, whether force or intimidation, is unethical.
So, “pursuit of power”, makes for an interesting wrinkle. Power in and of itself, in my view, is not unethical. It is when it is leveraged against free choice. Incidentally, working for wages is power. So, $7.00 to buy a box of cereal is power. Is that effort to earn $7.00 unethical? Admittedly, I have only just now begun to consider that part of the question, and I am inclined to say no, but I am open to a good argument for it. If it is, that is a massive statement about ethics.
05/31/2022 @ 12:54 pm
Bitey, ‘power’ in and of itself is neither ethical or unethical. It is the pursuit of power without an ethical or good purpose that I find to be less than honorable….
Hence, working for wages to stave off hunger is ethical i.e. the pursuit of power with an ethical or good purpose.
05/31/2022 @ 3:57 pm
Power is special. It has only two states. Those states are either stored (contained), or expressed. Power will naturally move or emanate from a level of high potential to a level of low potential, acting on the environment and the subject of low potential. This is true both in physics and in a social dynamic.
Power from a machine like a car, or a gun, or a light can provide power when used as they are intended to be used, but can be switched off, or locked away, and not affect a situation where an ethical question would require otherwise. This first form of power can not be switched off or removed, or rendered a non effect. A superior can not ethically date, or proposition a subordinate because the power dynamic can not be removed. A car can be parked. A gun can be unloaded, or locked away. A light can be turned off.
A diplomatic credential which allows the bearer to ignore the local laws within which that diplomat works or resides is inherently unethical because it allows the bearer to cause injury or loss without accountability within the mores of society that everyone else is subject to. It creates an imbalance. It is allowed to happen because it allows a more powerful government to conduct its business without worry of being hindered by incidents at a lower level. It has its practical value, but it is fundamentally unjust by design, and therefore unethical.
Pursuit of any of those things, a car, a gun, a chandelier, a diplomatic passport, or ordination as a priest, are not in and of themselves unethical. It depends on how the power from those things is either used, or not constrained. Power is naturally corrosive to freedom because it creates an imbalance, and from the imbalance is the potential for corruption. However, if it is used in the interest of the many, and not used in the interest of the one with the power, it is not unethical.
05/31/2022 @ 6:38 pm
We’re in agreement on the essential elements of this exchange….
05/31/2022 @ 9:08 pm
It seems to me that the missing variable here might be accountability.
06/02/2022 @ 9:45 am
Kosh, within this context, accountability is an externality that may be employed in the valuation or evaluation of the exercise or use of power.
Power and the pursuit there of cannot fall within the penumbra of accountability unless and until some action is taken in the acquisition or exercise of power.
06/02/2022 @ 1:11 pm
Accountability is a function of distribution of power. It is also a function of the distribution of responsibility. Responsibility, however, relies in part on a self-limiting of power. That failure is exactly what has infected the Republican Party.
06/02/2022 @ 1:28 pm
Accountability, as a function of the distribution of power, remains an externality unless and until some action is taken in the acquisition or exercise of power…
08/25/2022 @ 2:53 am
THU. AUG 25 AT 5:30 PM C.D.T.
Play and Pray in the Park
Haberman Park – Lodi, WI
[Password for my bus to Crazy Horse Mountain, SD:
HOOTENANNY]
Student and me had our ears cleaned.
We’ll be free, no?