Category: Morality

Concupiscence and the Sinlessness of Jesus

12/30/2023

Photo by Avril Wu via Scop.io
I have a bunch of ideas that have been circulating in my head for a while now, and I have been trying to find some time to write them all down. However, I've been so busy, I just haven't had the time to write about it all. Then my cousin recently told me about this voice to text app that can make things a whole lot easier to get my ideas down on paper, so I've decided to give it a try for the near future. That means that for the foreseeable future, my blog articles are probably going to have a different sort of tone to them, since I'm actually talking them out instead of writing them out. But hopefully that allows me to get more blogs out there since I have taken a hiatus due to our busyness.

I recently took a seminary class in which we discussed the idea of concupiscence. Concupiscence isn't a term that I had really heard of before, but the concept was something that had come up quite a bit in both thought and conversation. It's basically this question of whether or not the desire to sin constitutes a sin or not. And those who hold to concupiscence would say "yes, if you desire something that is contrary to God's will, or to God's creation order, then you are in sin and on some level." This makes quite a lot of sense, right? If it's against God it must be sin.

A Foundation of Would

4/19/2023

Most would call me an idealist, but not in the nice way. I'm not the loveable idealist - some pie in the sky dreamer who holds lofty aspirations that will never come to fruition. I'm the despicable idealist - the kind who refuses to advocate getting our hands dirty in order to accomplish the greater good. I advocate that one should never kill another and that one should never lie, no matter what. And that type of moral idealism just doesn't fly in the real world. I mean, look where it got Jesus?

Of course I understand the aversion to pharisaical moralism. Nobody, including me, wants a system that offers sacrifices and works up to God which are secretly built on foundations of injustice. I don't want my neighbor's ox to fall in a ditch on the Sabbath and refuse to help him out, or condemn a healer for healing someone on the day of rest. I don't want to pray for your hunger while doing nothing tangible to resolve it. Yet, as a moral idealist, many often think this is the type of vain offering I'm advocating, and I get it. Hopefully I can resolve that misperception of idealism and give you a new vision for the world which causes you to become an idealist too.

~ Kings and Presidents of Consequentialism ~

11/9/2022

Photo by Mark Jason Gatus on Scopio
*This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on.

I despise consequentialism - the idea that the ends justify the means. Many Christians say they despise it too, but we practice this ethic all the time. My go-to example is the 2016 election of President Trump by over 80% of those in my group - conservative Christians. "He's not as bad as the other candidate!" "We can't vote third-party or abstain because a greater evil would result!" "The president isn't a pastor-in-chief, he's a commander-in-chief." "The possibility of getting supreme court justices who will ban abortion and gay marriage justifies significant moral flaws." The list could go on. The ends justified the means.

In my group's mind, justifying, overlooking, or dismissing "minor" evils like sexual assault, mysoginy, racism, denigration, mistreatment of immigrants, and all that stuff - it's all ok because even if we combined all those evils, they pale in comparison to the egregious issue of abortion. Abortion has killed tens of millions of humans in the past fifty years.

One of the main problems with a consequentialist ethic is that we recognize its moral reprehensibility when we apply it to other situations. My favorite go-to example is from the book of Kings, when two mothers plan to cannibalize their children to save both of their families. From a consequentialist standpoint, murdering two kids to save two whole families sounds like the perfect moral plan. Numerically speaking, the equation is flawless. Two lives are lesser than, say, ten lives. But we recognize that such an action wouldn't be justifiable - unless, perhaps, one of the mothers was running for president.

But let's take another example here - one which would lead to infinite quantities of good being achieved. If, as most non-Reformed, and many Reformed Christians believe, children who die before a certain cognitive function are elect and go to be with God when they die, then why not allow abortion and advocate for a theocracy in which all children of non-Christians (and perhaps wayward and mediocre Christians as well) are killed? Think of all the souls who would immediately experience bliss rather than the fires of hell? What is the murder of a temporal life in comparison to the saving of a soul for eternity?

Of course such a thought is reprehensible because we recognize that it's evil. Regardless of the good that would be brought about - the infinite good for billions of people - we can't justify such good by participating in evil. Despite an Augustinian view one might take which justifies actions through motivations, we can't justify evil with any intent, even the best ones.

What strikes me as particularly revolting about Christian consequentialism is that it is fine trading on other sins and evils for an unguaranteed "greater good," yet it refuses to trade on sins and evils for a known good. We can compromise morality in voting to obtain power which may or may not lead to the short and long-term goals we have in view, yet we refuse to embrace evil for a known infinite good we could accomplish for billions. If Christian morality includes consequentialist ethics, we're novices who are refusing to do great good. But if Christian morality doesn't include a consequentialist ethic, we're unfaithful subjects to the King who are determining good and evil for ourselves because we don't think our Lord is able to produce good results out of mere faithfulness. We have made ourselves kings, and in doing so, have exposed ourselves as fools.

Alpha and Omega

8/1/2022

Photo by ahmed shraf on Scopio

About 10-15 years ago, I wrote a sci-fi book focused around some ethical conundrums. It is intended to raise a lot of important questions we need to deal with considering where technology is going, but is also intended to delve into the foundation of the abortion discussion.

d._kreider_book.pdf
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His Stripes and Our Stripes

7/26/2022

Photo by Brandon Harrell on Scopio

For a podcast version of this with some revisions, follow this link.

It is easy for each generation to look at social changes and view them as negative changes in morality. Whether it is the development of more revealing clothing, more open use of swearing and crude words, the legalization of pot, or any other number of changes - it can seem to an older generation that the sky is falling. But at the same time, there are changes which happen socially that clearly fall within the moral realm. Loosened sexual ethics, sentimental spirituality refusing to plug into a church body, or the increasing acceptance of certain birth control methods, like the day after pill, are all examples of social changes which, from a historical Christian standpoint, clearly cross the threshold of immorality. While I could harp on any one of these issues and bemoan the degradation of modern, liberal Christianity, I instead want to point fingers at my own group and ask for our personal reflection as I highlight what I think is a troubling trend which undermines our ability to critique modern culture.

Why I Am a Moral Regressive: Because it's 2017

4/13/2022

[*Written in 2017 and archived for a rainy day when I needed an article to plug in.]

If you have ever had the pleasure of browsing a Facebook feed for any extended length of time, you have likely seen a new, sophisticated moral argument for a variety of issues. Why are women still receiving less pay than men for the same work? Come on, folks, it’s 2017! Why is there still racism? Come on, people, it’s 2017! Why can’t we let any two people who love each other get married? It’s 2017!

It is, indeed, 2017. However, I find this fact to be largely irrelevant to my moral ethic. It seems strange to me that women should receive equal pay for the same reason I should not wear socks with sandals – because it’s 2017. Providing the same reason for my moral code that I provide for my dress code waters down the weightiness of morality and injustices. Is the abolition of bell-bottoms really on par with the abolition of sex slavery? When we say that the year has any correspondence to our moral position, what we are really saying is that our morals, like our trends, are really just a matter of wavering preference. That is a very scary thing.

The Free Will Theodicy's Implication for Nonviolence and Christian Anarchism

11/30/2021

Photo by Adinarayana rao Rayavarapu on Scopio

I find myself returning to contemplate the problem of evil time and time again. Maybe millennials (of which I barely make the cut) have a bigger hang-up with the way evil's existence seems to encroach on the possibility of a good God's existence, but I think the problem is much broader than one generation. Whether it's the death of a daughter leading Darwin to embrace his religious doubts, or the holocaust of a whole race which is remembered and lamented in the works of Elie Wiesel - each generation seems to have its own works and workers who wrestle with the reality of evil's existence. Evil is hard to stomach, and especially so if one is a Christian who proclaims the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God who supposedly despises evil.

In response to the problem of evil Christian history has produced a number of defenses for God. These defenses are known as "theodicies." A theodicy doesn't claim to prove that God exists or that its explanation for evil's existence is the correct one, but it merely offers what is a possible explanation for evil's existence alongside a good God. If the theodicy's explanation is logically possible, then evil's existence is not incompatible with the existence of God, even if this particular explanation doesn't end up being the correct one. The goal is simply to show that the existence of a good God and evil aren't logically incompatible. At the moment, the most broadly accepted theodicy on the market is the free will theodicy as refined and presented by Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga argues that for a God to create a world in which his creatures loved him in a meaningful sense, then those creatures would need to have the choice not to love him. God could have created robots that would have never disobeyed him or done any evil thing, but in creating such a world, he would have created a world where true love was impossible. So while it is true that evil exists, it's only in a world where evil is possible that love can exist, and God deems that the existence of love is worth the price of allowing evil.

The Free Will Theodicy (FWT) is a beautiful defense because it makes a lot of sense. Everyone would love a world without evil, but we recognize that we'd all likely prefer a world where we make meaningful choices to love than a world where we were programmed robots - even if the price of love was the existence of evil. Love is such a beautiful and powerful thing that we recognize evil pales in comparison to it. The FWT is a fantastic defense of God, though as with all arguments, there are some problems. But it isn't in the scope of this article to expound on this theodicy or defend it. Suffice it to say that this is the going theodicy in Christianity, particularly Western Christianity. With the acknowledgement of this broad Christian adherence to the FWT, what I want to do, then, is actually draw out some implications this theodicy has for two other Christian positions: nonviolence and Christian anarchism.

A Morality of Being

9/27/2021

Photo by Mariyah Khan on Scopio

Click here for an audio/podcast version of this article.

CONVERSION AND TRUTH
Everyone's an evangelist whether they know it or not. You may not be an evangelist for some large, organized religion or cult, but I guarantee you’re an evangelist for some belief. You are likely affronted by my calling you an evangelist because the term has taken on some very negative connotations in our age. The fervor, pushiness, judgmental nature, and self-righteousness of many evangelists likely fuels our aversion to the term - and rightfully so. Nobody wants to be evangelized because nobody wants to be objectified, and objectification is exactly what many evangelists do to potential converts. The evangelist's subject (or victim) is often merely seen as malleable gray matter - a fertile host into which the evangelist (or parasite) can inseminate their ideas.

As an evangelist for Christianity, I take exception to these negative connotations of evangelism, though I certainly understand and agree with their application most of the time. Such an acknowledgement of evangelism’s misuse is a sober warning to me that even in my noblest of desires, my self-centeredness may be the overwhelming motivation with which I lead. But potential egoism isn’t the only way in which I might err. When evangelism fails to be a good thing, its failure must be seen as in one of two areas: the objectification of another (which simultaneously entails the self-centeredness of the evangelist) and/or the untruth of the message - the "good news" being preached.

The Unnatural Nature of Unnaturalness on Atheism

7/14/2021

[I wrote this article around 2010, and the thoughts and writing style may represent some of my early thinking. Nevertheless, I needed an article for this month and thought this may be worthwhile, and something to build on in the future.]

Perhaps one of the greatest problems the atheist worldview faces is the issue of the natural versus the unnatural. All of their subjective basis for morality and action (epicurianism, survival, or whatever they select) is based on nature. Nature causes us to feel pain, and pain is a feeling most would choose to abstain from. Likewise, pleasure is a feeling that humans tend to enjoy, so pleasure is generally accepted as a good thing. Morality, for the atheist, is based upon these natural things. This may not seem like an outright problem, but considering that evolution of our species is defined as a change over time, one begins to see that what is valued or valuable today may not be the standards and morality of tomorrow.

Moral Chemistry

1/13/2021

Photo by Joseph Lipari on Scopio

Ethics has always fascinated me. While morality seems very clear to a large extent, it's easy to find conundrums and paradoxes when you look for them. I have no doubt in my mind that gray will always exist, but I also believe that we tend to do a bad job reflecting on morality. We often invoke mystery too easily, or we land on the side of whatever our moral preferences are in our given culture. I think we can often do better than either giving up or caving in to self-interest.