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Newsgroups: alt.atheism From: cass8806@elan.rowan.edu (Kyle Cassidy) Subject: Right Action (long) Message-ID: <cass8806.603.727472350@elan.rowan.edu> Organization: Rowan College of New Jersey Date: Tue, 19 Jan 1993 19:39:11 GMT Lines: 316

Doing The Right Thing: Socrates, Piety, and 5,000 Years of Conventional Wisdom

Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls.

--Lewis Thomas "The Medusa and the Snail"

The preaching and persuasion, of course, are not without effect. We do see frequent displays of cute little children holding up for the camera crayoned posters on behalf of the whales and the earth.... It is ... a case of what Socrates called Right Belief, a condition both praised and condemned by its name.... Whence this Right Belief arises, we do not know. Surely, in the individual, it comes in part from social example and the suggestions of lore, but the origin of the impulse out of which flow those examples and suggestions is misty, and the cause of the ground in which they so readily take root is unclear. (Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian, Fall 1991, pp. 13-14)

The most profound question which Socrates brings to bear in Euthyphro is when he asks "whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the gods." Ah! but here is the crux of everything is it not? Socrates at this point has already put forth and had confirmed by Euthyphro, that what is pious is that which is loved by the gods. And of course in this day and age we might take to task some of Zeus' morality as we might cringe at various Christian doctrine. For example that which is found in Deuteronomy 21: 10-13: "When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, and seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and has a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and mother a full month; and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be." Of course today we consider this barbaric. We have words for this sort of thing, among them are "kidnapping" and "rape". Are we to believe that since these words are the words of god that these actions are pious? And that locking up those who commit such crimes is somehow impious? This of course was in part the dilemma of Socrates, who never could understand just what it was the gods were after and always sought the wisdom of wiser people like Euthyphro who did (1). Socrates had the added difficulty of belonging to a religion of pantheists. Was something pious if some gods thought it was good and others did not? As Socrates points out to his newly adopted mentor, "in thus chastising your father you may very likely be doing what is agreeable to Zeus but disagreeable to Cronos or Uranus, and what is acceptable to Hephaestus but unacceptable to Here, and there may be other gods who have similar differences of opinion." (p. 43) How easy it must be then for monotheistic Christians, who don't have these conflicts! All of the inherent conflicts of Christianity come from the same source (unless of course you count the tons of Catholic dogma which has been spewed from various and inspired saints; bishops having visitations and weird dreams; weeping statues; cabalistic cloud formations; Cardinals who bump into the Virgin in the Acme; as well as various monks plagued by stigmata, visions and other sanctimonious ailments. This information is legion and has been carefully catalogued and squrreled away in various Vatican dungeons). We can for example look at the book of Deuteronomy where in 5:17 we read, "Thou shalt not kill." but then only 8 chapters later in 13: 1-9 we find "If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder ... thou shalt surely kill him, thine hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people." Of course Christ came along later to contradict much of this himself and add further to the confusion. When Christ happens upon Mary Magdiline's stoning party one afternoon, he is confronted by a bunch of townspeople stuffed to the gills with Right Belief. They've been religiously attending synagogue and are familiar with the passage in Deuteronomy (22:21) which states: "They shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die...." These people had been dulled by Right Belief, they knew how to treat a harlot. This sort of acceptance causes us to look to the sky or into the Cathode Ray Tube for divine direction brought to us via Reverend Tilton and Liberty University. Right Belief on it's own is nothing more than a shot in the dark, a guess or a whim, gathered from some remote and immaterial confidence. The problem which arises from Right Belief goes far beyond Socrates' difficulties with it i.e., that it is only a belief. Belief is all that we have, whether it is belief in science, the pope, or mom and apple pie -- our options come only when we are addressing the source of our belief. Traditionally religions have de-emphasized Self Reliance and instead placed accent upon some pre-determined "correct" behavior which comes from some great and learned professionals usually long dead, interpreted by the contemporary clergy living far away in some great gothic pile (even the Dali Lama lives in a castle). Whether this behavior is tithing, singing Xmas carols in the direction of your next door neighbors while catching pneumonia in the snow, or growing earlocks and wearing tzizit's is inconsequential. Jesus comes at these villagers armed not with Right Belief, but with a philosophy more akin to what Siddartha called "The Noble Eightfold Path" (although he didn't say it in english) which includes:

Right Understanding Right Thought Right Speech Right Action Right Livelihood Right Effort Right Mindfulness Right Concentration

The purpose of the eightfold path is to put emphasis on the individual to make the proper decisions and have the proper reactions through a series of self guided rationales. Living, acting, speaking, and thinking right do away with the need for merely believing right -- the burden is placed on the individual and the individual is now entrusted as a decision maker, as being able to discern the proper action as a result of proper understanding and interpretation of the events and actions which surround him. When taken as a whole we see that intelligence is useless without wisdom and that rote memorization of biblical passages will bring us no closer to the truth, or even to piety, regardless of how much you believe in them (and this is exactly how Jesus manages to run into this gaggle of stone hurling peasants in John 8:7). In T. S. Eliot's vaguely comprehensible poem Four Quartets ("Dry Salvages" to be more exact) he speaks of having "had the experience but missed the meaning." Belief without interpretation, without understanding, leaves us little more than pre-programmed robots who may be doomed to mechanically commit and recommit the same atrocities and impious acts because their blind belief makes no passage for individual action. The problem with Jesus' philosophy, is that it does not provide a solution for Socrates' dilemma. Again it shuts out the individual -- once again throwing out the vagaries of god's will, and the idea that these actions are for some higher purpose, that you are somehow pleasing some celestial being who will later reward you for playing by the rules.

In considering that which is pious and that which is impious, we are reminded of Twain's Letters From the Earth, particularly letter X where Twain is discussing the slaughter of Onan by god. Onan was of course told by god to impregnate his sister in law -- the act of attempting this didn't bother Onan in the slightest, but the actual thought of impregnating her must of bothered him, for he practiced a rudimentary form of birth control and "spilt it on the ground" which enraged god.

The Lord slew Onan for that, for the Lord could never abide indelicacy. The Lord slew Onan, and to this day the Christian world cannot understand why he stopped with Onan, instead of slaying all the inhabitants for three hundred miles around -- they being innocent of offence, and therefore the very ones he would usually slay (2).

We are indebted to Twain for his foresight and his daring, as well as his background of biblical study, which is invaluable to us. Twain of course does not stop there, but brings our attentions to bear on the books of first Kings, where in chapter 11, the people are warned by god "I will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall." We are glad that Twain addresses this issue, for it is one which always caused us concern when we were young, but it is a topic which is seldom discussed in Sunday Schools. Of course, you can't stop people from pissing against walls and so god, being mercyfull, was forced to slay them and all their relatives. Even the women, who Twain meticulously points out, are physically incapable of the act.

A curious prejudice. And it still exists. Protestant parents still keep the Bible handy in the house, so that the children can study it, and one of the first things the little boys and girls learn is to be righteous and holy and not piss against the wall (3).

Of course Twain and Socrates were searching for the same thing, and in similar manners, though instead of baiting a poor buffoon like Euthyphro because he's bored out of his skull waiting for his trial to begin, Twain baits us all because he is a curmudgeon. It is interesting to look at the ends of these two religious antagonists. While Socrates was put to death for blasphemy, Twain died depressed, angry but exceptionally wealthy and well respected. This is a good sign of progress. This is indicative of developments beyond that of Right Belief alone. The court was acting under the concept of Right Belief when they gave Socrates the cup of hemlock.

Coleridge's mariner had gone far beyond mere Right Belief when he advises the wedding guest in that line that we all should have to memorize before the age of four (just as little boys are wont to begin pulling the wings off of flys):

He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small;

The mariner has been granted what precious few of us have been blessed with, and this is both the time and the inclination to ponder his actions. He sits becalmed in the antarctic seas, surrounded by nothing but dead shipmates, weird fog, and this crazy bird swinging around his neck with nary a crossword puzzle in sight. While awaiting the inevitable, he reviews his actions and he transcends mere belief and begins to strain these beliefs through his actions, to filter them through his understanding. He arrives at a conclusion which is true piety -- it is not piety because god likes it, or because someone told him this, it is piety because the mariner is now able to justify his beliefs in a logical progression; he's put himself on the line this time. He now knows these things to be true after a process of internal dialectic. Like so when Arthur proposes "it is far better to be alive than dead" and eventually leads this to the conclusion that the diatribe "might is right" is impious, and rather that "might for right" is pious. He arrives at this not through doctrinal didactisim but by careful consideration of what the buddha would call the eightfold path. If we are not becalmed today, there are other difficulties which beseige us and give us cause to re-evaluate our beliefs. We are living in a renewed age of doubt, at a transition point between gods that perhaps started when Galileo climbed up the tower of Piza with some crazy hunchbacked Quazimodo of a servant crawling behind him lugging a bag of bowling balls and chains to see if Aristotle had been telling the truth. For the first time the gift horse of Right Belief is being looked in the mouth. As Huston Smith, professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Three Pillars of Zen:

There is the further fact that with the collapse of metaphysics, natural theology, and objective revelation, the West is facing for the first time as a civilization the problem of living without objectively convincing absolutes -- in a word, without dogmas (4).

There is of course, also a hearty resurgence of the "God said it, I believe it and that settles it" point of view which flourished under the past administrations, particularly that of Ronald Reagan, but this attitude is being challenged with some degree of impunity (it is certainly less dangerous today than it was for Galileo who faced a panel of people who suggested to him point blank that they would blind him with a burning stick if he didn't change his mind but quick). It is through these challenges, through the adoption of review and opinion, and internal debate, through right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration, that we will eventually be able to justify Right Belief and know that which is truly pious. That which is truly pious transcends gods and rests within the individual. Archie Bunker is of course, a paragon of Right Belief. He sits at the right hand of god and champions the true cause, believing with all his heart.

Archie. It ain't a question of sides. God is always on the side of the right. Mike. And we are always right? Archie. Well, of course we are! You don't expect them Godless Gooks to be right, do you? Mike. How can those Gooks be Godless, Archie, when God created them? Archie. God didn't create them, smart guy! It was the devil that created them.

Archie is Euthyphro in prime time. He has the answers, he has Right Belief and he is willing to share it with inquisitives, like Meathead, who in the manner of Socrates, come for his advice. Though Meathead is slightly more reactionary than Socrates, and allows himself to be easily flustered by his father-in-law, the idea is the same. I was working up towards a terrific conclusion where I was going to bring Archie, Jesus, Socrates and the Buddha into the Taco Bell across the street from my house where they were going to hash out Right Belief once and for all but I see that it's getting horriffically late and I've got a final exam in American Lit I tomorrow and I've got to go home and try and figure out how to distinguish between Michael Wigglesworth and Walt Whitman so I'll just leave them in the incomprehensible muddle into which I've gotten them and the world may never know exactly how things ought to go.

----------- NOTES:

(1) I am minded immediately of a line from a song by The Pursuit of Happiness which goes: "She's so young, she's got the answers, she doesn't need to question the world like I do." Ignorance may be bliss, but it's probably fairly boreing as well.

(2) Mark Twain, _Letters From the Earth, Bernard DeVoto ed, Harper and Row, New York, 1938, p. 50

(3) Ibid, p. 51

(4) Roshi Philip Kapleau, _The Three Pillars of Zen_, Doubleday, New York, 1980, P. xiii

(5) Spencer Marsh, _God, Man, and Archie Bunker_, Tandem Productions, 1975, p. 86

c & c welcome.

---- cass8806@elan.rowan.edu