Bad Catholic posts a long text-heavy meme-studded image, which seems to tie atheists support of gay rights to a need for universal morality. But I think that BC is involved a different argument from the ones I’m used to seeing. Consider this segment:

BC rejects this, but I’m not so sure. I have no interest in policing the biases and mental states of my neighbors. I think it’s silly and ill-informed, but I’m not going to go so far as to say that a belief that homosexuality is sinful is itself immoral.

But there are two problems. The first is that I’ve never met someone who will say, “I just really hate gay people.” Bigots seem to feel they have a reason for their hatred, and a reason that you should share that hatred. Once these reasons come out the argument shifts from “Is hating gays immoral?” to “Is hating gays warranted?” And that is a completely different argument.

Second, what bothers me most is when this belief turns into action. I have homosexual friends, and I value them and their happiness. When someone attempts to harm them, it harms me. When someone attempts to strip them of a right or a privilege, it pains me. Therefor it is completely reasonable for me to oppose someone attempting to harm them, and doubly so when someone attempts to use the collective power of the state to do so. It quickly gets more complicated, but that’s the heart of it.

The short version is that I don’t see how this argument relates to a need for universal morality. Maybe I’m missing something?

For a moral code to be effective, it must be attributed to, and vested in, a nonhuman source. It must be beyond the power of humanity to change it to suit itself

Lee seems most interested in tackling the first point: it’s meaningless, because we have no “nonhuman source.” To that end, his response is much like Deacon Duncan’s Undeniable Fact: God does not show up in the real world, so everything we say about God must come from humans.

That’s a solid point, but I think it’s also redundant because Hitchens’ second point fails as well: there very little in the world of religion and culture that is beyond the human ability to change.

That means that even if we were to grant Hitchens his first point, it would still do his argument little good. Even if we had the perfect book, we are still not perfect readers. Every word in that book must be translated, transmitted and interpreted. Even if you could perfect those first two processes, that last one would prove insurmountable.

What does “Thou shalt not kill” mean? A quick survey of biblical religions will return different interpretations of those four simple words. Does it apply to killing in self defense? To killing during war? To killing during an unjust war? To killing animals? To criminals, and if not, what types of criminals?

You’ll find Christians, Jews and Muslims on all sides of each questions. So what, exactly, is the advantage of having this “nonhuman source”?

I disagree with Lee that religion makes moral ideas harder to change. From my read of history, religious morality shifts at the same rate as other forms of culturally-embedded morality. Certainly the history of Christianity has shown massive shifts in its consensus over how to live a moral life, and no doubt this will continue. “Biblical morality” no longer means living a celibate life with few possessions, but perhaps it will return to that as the centuries roll on.

Part of this is because humans are champions rationalizers; we can find all sorts of reasons to do those things that we want or that make sense to us. Convincing someone to not do something that doesn’t make sense to them is tremendously difficult, as witnessed by the Catholic Church’s failure to prevent contraception use among American Catholics. But what makes sense to us comes from our preconceptions, which are shaped by our experiences and our society, and not just by what we hear from the pulpit.

For Hitchens to act as if having a “nonhuman source” grants us an unchanging moral code is to ignore most of what we learned from the past fifty years of philosophy and everything we’ve learned from history. There is only one law that continues to govern all human morality: This too shall pass.

You may remember that the Catholic Church has blamed the “moral laxness” of modern society for the actions of pedophile priests and the bishops that covered for them. The usual version has it that the liberalism that was emblematic of the sixties counter culture has pervaded society, and we’re all now moral relativists.

I haven’t heard any representatives from Penn State use this argument, but David Brooks has stepped into the breach, offering his own pseudo-sociological take. It started on Meet the Press, where he dropped this insight:

MR. BROOKS: I don’t think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don’t have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it’s wrong, but they’ve been raised in a morality that says, “If it feels all right for you, it’s probably OK.” And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.

It continued in an editorial titled Let’s All Feel Superior, in which he hopes to knock us liberals off our high horse:

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside.

“In centuries past …” Merciful Moloch, this man has a history degree from the University of Chicago, yet he’s trying to hang a historical argument on a vague line like “in centuries past.” The only saving grace is that he was born in Canada, so the US doesn’t have to shoulder all the blame.

Alright, let’s look at this. If we’re talking about human weakness and sinfulness, there’s a definite Protestant flavor there, so those centuries must come after the Protestant revolution. And if we’re talking about rationally constructed systems of morality, we’re probably dealing with the high Enlightenment. So let’s say that “centuries past” means about three hundred years.

Have the past three hundred years been noted for their high moral tone? Quite the opposite, actually. I look at the wars, the exploitation and the genocide. If there’s a moral system that has produced all of that, I’d as soon live without it. If Brooks is going to argue that we were better off, he’s going to have provide more of an argument.

A second problem shows up in the phrase “… people built moral systems …” The people who are flawed are the same people who create, interpret and enforce those moral systems. Not surprisingly, those moral systems are flawed, their interpretation is self-serving and their enforcement tends to fall on those with the least social power.

In American history, those systems always involved hierarchies: man above woman, white above black, Christan above Jew, Protestant above Catholic, and so on. We’re all flawed, but it seems that some of us are more flawed than others, and the least flawed always seem to be the ones running the system. These systems were torn down because they perpetuated these hierarchies in the name of morality.

Unfortunately, I have a hunch that Brooks considers these hierarchies a feature and not a bug. Corey Rubin’s book The Reactionary Mind is making waves because he suggests that, “Historically, the conservative has favored liberty of the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.” I suspect that Brook’s main problem with liberalized morality is that it is decentralized, which prevents the upper class from assuming its natural position as the arbiter of what is right and good.

Here was one clever response…

(via)

But to be fair, people without gods kill people, too. The point is gods have nothing to do with it.

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