I would like to share one of my favorite Scriptures because, with all of the controversies surrounding the so-called “Culture War” over social issues and their effect upon the moral fabric of our society, there is a real need for us to remember the basic Judeo-Christian ethics upon which our country was founded:
1 Judge not, that ye be not judged. 2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. 3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? 5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. — Matthew 7 (King James Version)
Distinguishing Rules (Ethics) from Conscience (Morality)
The most important among America’s primary founding principles are freedom of religion and the separation of church from state. However, one needn’t be a Christian — or even believe in God — to understand that the profound wisdom in Matthew 7:1-5 is essential to our progress toward the goal of realizing the promise of liberty as it was laid out by the Framers a little over two centuries ago. And as we pursue that goal, we must be careful not to confuse universal truths with religious and other dogma, lest we forget that it is our God-given (or natural) free will that places the onus of seeking truth on human conscience, which is what should allow us to separate church from state without sacrificing our moral clarity.
America’s greatest strength is our diversity, while our pride is our primary weakness. It is this pride that causes us to forget — or in some cases to deliberately ignore — the difference between the laws that are essential to maintaining order in a free, heterogeneous society and the conscience that gives us the forbearance to live harmoniously among the diverse multitudes — or at least the ability to recognize and respect that our right to be who and what we are belongs to all of us, even if we might not all agree on the finer points of the fleeting social conventions of a continuously evolving civilization.
The so called “Christian Right” (may God have mercy upon their poor lost and tormented souls), who appear to be so proud that they believe their own wrath to be virtuous, have been confusing truth with doctrine to the point where they must now engage in the practice of intellectual dishonesty in order to justify the continued politicization of their faith for the purpose of promoting its dogma as the one and only truth. But this dynamic is not exclusive to religious fundamentalists as some secularists also appear to have a difficult time distinguishing ethics from morals. A recent demonstration of this occurred on the April 8, 2005 broadcast of Real Time with Bill Maher, in which former New York governor Mario Cuomo gave the erudite, yet theophobic Mr. Maher a little education in this very subject.
MAHER: If you disagree so much with so many of the rules, why do you need religion at all? I have a lot of trouble understanding why somebody like yourself who is a brilliant man, I have trouble understanding why brilliant people can even be religious. [applause] Quite frankly, I don’t mean that disrespectfully.
CUOMO: [overlapping] Bill—okay. No, Bill, I—
MAHER: [overlapping] But – and it seems like religion is the kind of thing where you either eat the whole wafer or you don’t eat it at all. [laughter] I mean, if you’re going to pick all the raisins out, why buy raisin bread? [laughter] [applause]
CUOMO: Well, I’ll tell you…Well, for the bread, that’s why you buy it. [laughter] [applause] But let me – Bill, let me make that point. Let me make that point again. [laughter] You’re a super – you’re a super-intelligent person.
MAHER: Well, thank you. Finish your thought. [laughter]
CUOMO: I suggest – I suggest to you that what I believe and call religion, you would believe and call it natural law. If you never saw a guy with a beard come down with a tablet, if you never read a book or heard a homily, just as a human being, if you opened your eyes to the reality of your own life and you looked around, you’d have to come to two conclusions, I think. That, number one, you and the rest of the human beings are different from the other animals because you can think, you have consciousness, et cetera. And that there’s a compatibility between you and all those other human beings. There are animals out there you eat for lunch, and there are animals out there that want to eat you for lunch.
And so you would say, look, I ought to get together with these human beings; we have something in common. That’s called, in Hebrew, sedaka, the notion of charity and commonality.
And what would you do with that relationship since nobody was there to instruct you? You’d say, look, the one value I’m sure of is the value of the next breath I draw, the value of my life. And I have this instinct to procreate. And so you’d get together with the other human beings and say, let’s make this life better. The Hebrews call that teekonolom [sp], “let’s repair the universe.” That gives you Christianity. “Love one another as you love yourself, for the love of me,” that’s Jesus. And what do we do? God made the world, didn’t finish it; let’s try to make it better. That’s my religion. That would be yours, as an intelligent man, and I’m sure it is, only you don’t call it religion. You call it raisin bread. [applause]
Tree-lovers, Meet the Forrest
The pursuit of true human freedom is a challenge that requires courage, personal responsibility and charity toward one’s fellow man. And, if we just open our minds to that, the Scriptures in Matthew 7:1-5 reveal universal truths from which we can draw the strength needed for the self-reflection that inspires our endeavor to promote the peace, understanding and tolerance necessary to the viability of our liberty as it applies to the longevity of our civilization.
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
Whether or not one believes that Christ was the immaculately conceived Son of God who performed miracles and rose from the dead is not relevant to the universal truth that it is not within the purview of humanity to judge its own sins. We are simply not qualified. Even though we are sentient beings, capable of reason and invention, we are ultimately ruled by our passions and prejudices, sometimes barely able to hold onto the the self-evident truth that all people are created equally. Of course all of that begs the question of who or what actually is endowed with the competence to judge our sins, but that’s not the forest, it’s just one of the trees. Suffice it to say that whomever or whatever it is, it is certainly not us.
This is more than sufficient justification for the separation of church from state because the state is run by fallible human beings who measure virtue and sin via the science of public relations, arrogantly presuming themselves to be unequivocal arbiters of conscience as they change, create and enforce laws according to the whims of a bunch of other fallible human beings (some of whom really ought to know better than to expect that deliverance and grace will be forthcoming due to the policies and actions of the earthly institution of government).
“For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”
We are supposed to avoid judging our fellow man because of the universal truth that judgments beget more judgments without producing any results that make a better world. All of that judging is nothing more than a competition in self-righteousness in which hypocrites of every stripe proudly assert that their self-assumed superiority is justification for their wrath that stems from their lack of faith in their fellow man — and sometimes even themselves. Such contests do not make a better life for anybody, especially when they escalate into internecine conflicts like our current “Culture War,” which is unlikely to ever have a real victor — if it ever has a real end.
“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
But we really cannot help ourselves because none of us are beyond reproach. It is in our nature to examine the sins of our brothers and sisters when we, as mere flesh, often have a difficult time finding the fortitude to look inward and contemplate our own misdeeds. This is yet more evidence of our inadequacy to judge one another’s sins and good reason to err on the side of caution when we are tempted to legislate conscience, which falls within the purview of faith, not governments.
The recognition of religious freedom is what secures and guarantees our right to choose our own way from amongst the almost endless number of paths to the same basic objective truth that if we love God (or nature or life or whatever manifestation of being inspires our faith) and love one another as we do ourselves that everything else will take care of itself and we will have peace — in theory, at least.
Realistically, of course, we are limited in practice by our own nature and mortality, but we do have the quality of faith to help us to seek the wisdom that can help us to distinguish transient social conventions from the unchanging, unalterable truths of conscience so that there is no blurring of the line that is supposed to separate the organizations of mortal humans we elect to protect, serve and bring order to society from the various spiritual institutions, traditions and ceremonies in which we celebrate our faith in the mysterious natural and/or supernatural forces of creation from which we draw our moral clarity.
“Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?”
While we are busily engaged in the practice of evaluating and judging one another’s alleged sins, we comfortably avoid reflecting upon our own the detriment of truth and justice. We do not create an harmonious society by attempting to dictate that other people live by some subjective code of ethics, but rather by seeking the truth and justice in our own actions and deeds.
Courage is the human virtue that inspires our natural need for liberty, while our fear of liberty as it applies to human nature imprisons us and impedes our progress toward the goal of achieving the promise of freedom. And there is much to fear at the prospect of living in a truly free and open society — especially one whose people are so diverse — because a free people must be possessed of the self-discipline to deal with the unavoidable temptations of a free society, not the least of which is the temptation to limit those temptations via the legislation of conscience.
We must be brave and refuse to succumb to fears of our nature because such legislation only serves to defer personal responsibility to the same degree that it curtails liberty without ever actually affecting the availability if the offending temptation. This is the trap in the seemingly simple and well-intended attempts to mandate our morality and it is the source of much of the consternation within the misguided people who believe that social and cultural matters should fall into the purview of the state rather than a higher power.
“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. “
This is the universal truth that none of us ever really gets to the point where we become so morally superior that we can effectively judge our fellow man’s sins, even if our pride might sometimes fool us into believing it. True freedom requires that we manifest a great deal of tolerance, which is not so much about the acceptance of differences as it is a matter of having faith in our fellow man’s ability to deal with liberty.
Related Articles
23 users responded in this post
I must say your posts are always so well thought out.
wonderful, wonderful post-very well said.
have a good day
Thank you, Jay. Do you have anything else to add? I would really be interested in your opinion of this aspect of the church/state issue.
As far as the seperation of Church and State go…the general idea of it has been stretched way beyond what the Constitution stated. You may think this is because the Constitution evolves, but I have a different opinion. I am not about judging others for their beliefs…and we should all have the freedom to wroship or not to worship womever or whatever we want to. And the government should never intefere with an individual’s right to do so unless it has deemed an activity to be threatening to its survival…dangerous to others, etc.
That being said…I think liberals have taken this idea way to far…to the point that they have reversed the original intent of it. To many people, athiest, etc…are offended by some Christian symbol that was an expression….regardless if it by a government or not. The government is the people, and to restrict the government from expressing as individuals or groups any kind of religion is not an endorsement in any sense that the Consitutionp prohibits. Congress shall make no law that prohibits the free exercise thereof…etc. Making laws that prohibit the exercise of or promoting a particular religion…MAKING A LAW…notice those words. What the judicial branch does when it prohibits the free exercise of expression by taking down religious symbols simply because they are on public property is MAKING A LAW…that isn’t there job…nor that of Congress. Why can’t we all be free to express our religion?
Very well thought out and very interesting. Nice Job.
I do think the removal of those symbols was petty, especially those that had been in place for decades with nary a complaint until now (and don’t even get me started on the frivolous banning of Christmas-themed decorations that had been put up on city streets for many years without anybody getting offended). If some people felt excluded, then they should have made the case for the inclusion of their symbols — and anybody could have easily won such a case — giving us multi-cultural displays that reflect our diversity (which is America’s greatest strength), instead of excluding Christians when a majority of Americans are Christian.
But there are so many far more important issues than this one. After all, these are only symbols and faith is not found on a granite slab and morality is not the text that is chiseled into it. Faith is in our hearts and morality is evident in deeds, not words.
When people talk about publicly displayed symbols in the context of exercising/expressing their freedom to be Christians, I cannot help but think of Exodus 20:4, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” and Matthew 6:5, “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.”
To me, the separation of church from state is not about which symbols should or should not go where or where and when prayer and religious instruction are appropriate, but rather the idea that the state, which is made up of fallible human beings who are elected by other fallible human beings, is not qualified to be the arbiter of conscience.
Morality is not something that can be enforced with laws (this concept should not be confused with the prosecution of crime, which does fall within the purview of the state that is charged with serving and protecting the citizenry) that punish sin and/or reward virtue because, as mere mortals filled with pride and prejudice, we are not fit to judge the finer points of the subjective concepts of virtue and sin.
When the state assumes to be the guardian of conscience it strips that authority away from the churches, leaving people confused about where they should turn for moral guidance. This is the reason why the First Amendment says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” because the government is not God, nor even His representative on Earth and because we need to be free to choose our own path to the same basic unalterable truths that make a better world, that we should love God (or nature or whatever) and love one another as we do ourselves and let our faith take care of the rest.
The state cannot provide us with deliverance and grace because it is made up of people and deliverance and grace are God’s purview, not man’s. I don’t know about anybody else, but a government made up of politicians — regardless of their individual devotion to their respective faiths — is not an entity I wish to turn to for spiritual guidance.
I’ve got an article up, that I would love to hear your opinion on. I don’t k necessarily want it to get into a state church debate, or a pick something wrong with it kind of thing. I’d like an honest opinion of the article as a whole, and your opinion on the entire concept it is portraying. There may be some elements you disagree with, but what I would like to know is what you think of the concept it portrays in general, and the ideals involved. Thanks, Jay
Came via Blog of the Day and found very well written resource. Will be here more often.
Did any one ever tell you that your tag line about birds and horses is very poweful. No?
So you and your husband have published a few books?
I cannot take credit for, “Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.” It is a Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) quotation. I have a database of quotations and each page load brings up a new one at random.
Did you Google me, Jay? My husband has written many books (and magazine articles) about disaster recovery planning and data storage management and is a leading expert in those two fields. I just draw the charts and diagrams.
Oh, this is where you hang out. Awesome. How come I never clicked on your name at Blogcritics?
I shall return ….
Thank you for stopping by. Sometimes I hang out over at Blogcritics more than I do here because there are a lot more people tuning in over there and my favorite aspect of blogging is conversation. In fact, my best writing is in my comments, not my articles.
This is an interesting post that raises some interesting points. I’m new to your site, and I don’t know if you consider yourself a a practising Jew or a Christian or neither. In the interest of disclosure, I do consider myself a Christian.
My comments are very long, though I think on subject. However, I don’t want to be rude, and if you want to cut this off here and just refer to my site, where I will (later today) post on this, I totally understand.
I don’t think that it is accurate to say that the “basic Judeo-Christian ethic upon which our country was founded,” can be summarized by this one (or any one) passage of Scripture. There is a whole, complex understanding of the roles of God, the Church, the civil government, the family, and the individual which can be derived from the Scriptures (both Old and New Testament, but mostly OT). It is this whole system of government(s) that I believe the founders applied to the establishment of our government, even though some of them agreed to it because they considered the Scriptures authoritative, and others agreed to it because they felt it was the system that Natural Law also revealed.
There are many aspects of this overall system, such as the people calling their leaders in church and state based on their qualifications and holding them accountable, rule by councils of leaders rather than vesting overall power in individuals, etc., but in regards to your post, I want to comment on a distinction between judgment and discernment, and also between crimes and sins.
All people are called upon to discern. Only those with authority are called upon to judge, and then only within the defined bounds of that authority. Individuals, for example are warned in Proverbs 20:19 against getting involved with talebearers and flatterers. How can this be done without discerning who qualifies as a talebearer or flatterer?
The verse you quoted is addressed to individuals and warns them not to judge, but not to not discern. Judging is what the gossip and the talebearer, and those who listen to them, do. They listen to gossip, and in an unjust way, weigh that evidence and pronounce a judgment on that person. Calling someone damned or lost is judging. Saying one ought to avoid dealings with this person, or not call him or her as a leader because of his or her character or morals flaws is discernment.
That being said, however, judgment is within the authority and responsibility of the Church and the state governments. The church is to judge its people (voluntarily bound to the church by vows or covenant) for sin, and the state is to judge all people within its borders for crimes. In so doing, these church and state officers are given the authority to call for and examine evidence, place witnesses under oath and compel testimony, etc. These are powers that seek to assure that the judgment will be as just as is humanly possible. The judgment of an individual could never hope to be just, because these powers are lacking.
The difference between judging and discerning is that judgment carries with it an official declaration of someone’s state as either (in the case of sin), lost or in rebellion against God vs. saved or blessed, or (in the case of crimes) either a criminal or not a criminal. Also the authority to judge also bears with it the authority to sentence. The church can excommunicate (or declare them to be outside of Israel in the OT,) and deny the sacraments, and the state can execute, require restitution, etc., as appropriate. These judgments were considered binding because of the God-given authority of the church or state.
So someone is in the church if the church says they are and someone is a criminal if the state says they are. Both types of judgment are subject to human error. No individual, (that is, not vested with official authority) as the verses you quoted say well, could ever be qualified to judge as an individual unless he or she was without sin. (First take the log out of your own eye…) Only one person ever qualified on that score, and He is the judge of all, under whom all human judges serve.
In medieval Europe this distinction between church and state had become blurred. The officials of the states were ruling state churches, appointing church leaders, and compelling people to worship there and/or not worship elsewhere. All this was counter to the Biblical system and it was one of the main political issues of the Reformation.
This is the problem the Establishment Clause was addressing. Our government was clearly and precisely prohibited from taking any powers of the church, including regulating worship, judging sin, etc.
However, this does not mean that the state does not have the authority to judge crimes, or that that judgment cannot be based upon a Biblical definition of those crimes. For example, the Scriptures define the degrees of manslaying our system of laws uses, premeditated murder, unpremeditated murder, and manslaughter. And these are definitions of crimes, not definitions of sins. The definition of murder as a sin is much broader, and even includes hateful thoughts, though the state is not given the authority to judge those kinds of lesser cases.
You speak of a free will. If you mean that in the sense of a freedom of conscience, I heartily agree with you. This concept, too, is entirely Biblical. Biblical government (both church and state) is very limited on what areas it can judge. For example, coveting is a sin, but no church or state authority is ever seen in Scripture to have the authority to find someone guilty of it. That is a matter of individual conscience and God will ultimately judge. Also, the founders recognized that different churches had come to differing conclusions on issues of worship, however, they chose not to interfere with them, but to allow individuals to decide which church, if any, they would bind themselves to, and leave it to the church authorities to judge those things.
However, just because the conscience is left free to discern in some areas, does not mean it is free to discern in all areas. We are not free to murder or rape, for example. I think most people would agree on that whether they are coming to that from a Sciptural basis or not.
So when Christians say rape is wrong and a crime, and cite a Scripture to support that assertion, most people wouldn’t object, because they agree with the conclusion, if not the source. However, when someone says unborn life has legal standing and quotes Scripture for that, suddenly the Christian is said to be foisting his or her morality on someone else or blurring the line between Church and State. Because one disagrees with the conclusion, one attacks the source, rather than admit that in both cases the Christian relied on an authoritative source outside of him- or herself, and the non-Christian relied on their own self-defined source. Somehow, the person with the Biblically-informed opinion is to be considered less than the person with the self-informed opinion. Yet both are opinions, aren’t they?
But I think people who do not view the Bible as authoritative fear large groups of people who do, because they see the Bible as conflicting with their way of life. Likewise, those who see the Scriptures as authoritative fear what will happen when they see large groups of people who do not share that conviction, because they fear that rights their Creator has endowed may not continue to be protected by a godless state. There is a mutual mistrust or fear, and if we are not careful, that mistrust can become bitterness and hatred, neither of which is helpful in solving the issues we need to settle in order to live with one another. (I believe that happens on both sides.)
Let me finish by criticizing my own. Christians sometimes err by attempting to legislate, in both the church and the state, where God gives freedom of conscience. One historical example comes to mind in our countries prohibition days. The move to prohibit alcohol was driven by Christian groups. However, though the Scriptures prohibit drunkenness, they do not prohibit alcohol altogether. The law violated the liberty of conscience we spoke of before, and Christians, in my opinion, would have been wise to reject the legislation on that basis.
On Judgment vs. Discernment and Sin vs. Crime
Today I visited a blog I hadn’t visited before, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, written by Margaret Romao Toigo. She had an interesting post called Traditional Judeo-Christian Morality. I left comments there, but I wanted to post my thoughts here…
137th Carnival of the Vanities
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Ever wonder how much money goes out of your pocket and into the clutches of the government at the gas pump? Ironman at Political Calculations has the tool to find out.
Dave at Logical Meme writes about re-reading Madison’s Feder…
[...] per reverence” to those who have gone before us. Margaret Romao Toigo writes about Traditional Judeo-Christian Morality at Land of [...]
[...] per reverence” to those who have gone before us. Margaret Romao Toigo writes about Traditional Judeo-Christian Morality at Land of [...]
137th CotV // Welcome
Welcome to the 137th edition of The Carnival of the Vanities!
This week’s CotV is hosted by Fresh Politics, a student-run political blog based out of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
School’s out – I finished finals yesterday… …
[...] Romao Toigo May 5, 2005 1:13 am About a week ago, I wrote an article called, “Traditional Judeo-Christian Morality,” [...]
On the separation of church and state issue: I am sure I am not going to say this very well, not least because I am sick, but also because it is hard point to get across to the current generation, who, born in this wonderful country, take their freedom and material prosperity for granted.
But to keep this precious heritage alive so that we can pass it on to our children and grandchildren, it is essential to appreciate how rare, and how costly, a thing it is.
To those who haven’t experienced absolute poverty, not as a local and temporary situation, soon remedied, but as a universal and world-wide situation with no imagineable earthly remedy — like the third world today, but with no first world in sight — it is almost unimagineable the effort, want, and privation required to escape it. It took generations and required religiou faith, not only that the world could be made better, but that those who undertook the task, with no hope of seeing the results in their lifetime, would receive their just reward in due course nonetheless.
Belief in God and in the promises of Jesus, as described in the Bible, are what supplied that faith and made the whole project possible.
Of course, this requires a world of demonstration, which is why I think it should be one of the major topics in the history classes our children attend as part of their regular secular educations.
Whether or not we should believe in God today is none of the government’s business. But an understanding of the idea of God, and the role which belief in that idea played in inspiring our ancestors to lay the foundations for the modern world we enjoy today — that is another thing altogether. I think such knowledge is indispensable if we are going to maintain this inheritance, and fully appreciate its worth.
Defining Crime and the Limits of Civil Government
Below are links to a conversation between Margaret Romao Toigo of Land of the Free, Home of the Brave and Dory Zinkand of Wittenberg Gate. Margaret does not state her religious affiliation. Dory is a Reformed Evangelical and a member of the Presbyteria…
[...] to re-think a few things. Here is the history of it thus far, in chronological order: Traditional Judeo-Christian Morality by Margar [...]
Leave A Reply