Natural Law and Pressing Down a Wildcat

“The paradox is that the natural law is both really known, and really suppressed. Among my Catholic friends, who see the knowledge, I stress the suppression. Among my Reformed friends, who see the suppression, I stress the knowledge. Sometimes people think that suppressed moral knowledge is the same as weakened moral knowledge with weakened power over behavior. On the contrary…pressing down on one’s conscience does not make it weak any more than pressing down a wildcat makes it docile. It only makes it more violent. Its claws are even sharper in a culture with a Christian past, like ours, for then people have more to suppress.”  

-J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man

Pressing Down a Wildcat

“The paradox is that the natural law is both really known, and really suppressed. Among my Catholic friends, who see the knowledge, I stress the suppression. Among my Reformed friends, who see the suppression, I stress the knowledge. Sometimes people think that suppressed moral knowledge is the same as weakened moral knowledge with weakened power over behavior. On the contrary…pressing down on one’s conscience does not make it weak any more than pressing down a wildcat makes it docile. It only makes it more violent. Its claws are even sharper in a culture with a Christian past, like ours, for then people have more to suppress.”  

J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man

If I Answered All of Your Intellectual Objections, Would You Believe?

“A friend expressed dozens of objections to the point I was making about God; whenever I shot one down, he just deployed another. Recognizing that he was merely laying down a smoke barrage, I asked ‘Suppose we took a few weeks and I answered every one of your objections to your complete intellectual satisfaction. Would you then believe?’ He answered, ‘No’—and that ‘No’ was a moment of illumination, for he realized for the first time that his real problem with God was not in his mind, but in his will.”

-J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience

Calling the Bluff of Moral Relativists

“A great many modern people cling to the protection of views which are not merely false, but incoherent. For instance, they dogmatically insist that truth cannot be known, all the while supposing that what they say is true. Once upon a time it was enough to point out the incoherency—to call attention to the obvious. No longer. Today the reply is likely to be, ‘I’m incoherent, but so what? I don’t need coherency, and I can do without meaning.’ I answer, ‘I don’t believe you, because we both know that the longing for meaning and coherency is deep-set in every mind, including yours. The real question, then, is this: What is it that is so important to you that you are willing to give up even meaning, even coherency to have it?’”

--J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience

 

It Takes a Village to Raise a Child--Or Does It?

“Collectivism hides in a forest of reassuring bromides. ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child,’ the secular intone. ‘Every child is my child,’ the pious drowsily respond. Of all these deceptions the language of ‘children’s rights’ is the most brilliant—and also the most daring, for in no imaginable world would children be competent to exercise their ‘rights’ themselves. The primary decision maker in the life of a child must always be, and always is, someone else; if not the parents, then the state. So, although most rights limit the reach of the government, so-called children’s rights increase it. They do nothing to empower children; they only empower mandarins. I am reminded of an election-year scuffle between a father, who was also a candidate, and a social service functionary. ‘No government bureaucrat could love my children as I do,’ the father said. ‘That’s not true,’ protested the functionary, ‘I love them just as much.’ ‘What are their names?’ asked the father.”

--J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience

http://www.amazon.com/The-Revenge-Conscience-Politics-Fall/dp/1608997529/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334969319&sr=1-1

Putting Her Out of My Misery

“In a society like ours, with no more frontier and hardly enough room to turn around, killing the sufferer may well be the cheapest and easiest way to make the painful sight go away. As someone said in the case of George DeLury, imprisoned for poisoning and suffocating his sick wife, I may say I am putting her out of her misery, but I am really putting her out of mine.”

--J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience 

The Truth About Tolerance

“What then is the truth about tolerance? The meaning of this virtue is not tolerating per se, but tolerating what ought to be tolerated. Practicing it means putting up with just those bad things that, for the sake of some greater good or of moral law, we ought to put up with. We are not practicing the virtue when fail to put up with bad things that we ought to put up with, such as the expression of false opinions in debate; nor are we practicing it when do put up with bad things that we ought not to put up with, such as rape. But making such distinctions requires knowing the truth about goods, bads, greater goods, and moral law. There is nothing neutral about that. It requires that we avoid not strong convictions, but false convictions; it requires not refusing to act, but acting. As Abraham Kuyper, J.B. Phillips, and C.S. Lewis have said in nearly identical words, ‘There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.’”

--J. Budziszewski, "The Revenge of Conscience" 

Calling Abortion by Name

“Most abortion-minded women pretend to themselves that they are boxed in by circumstances; they say things like ‘I know abortion is wrong, but I just can’t have a baby right now.’ One counselor I know simply asks, ‘What do you call what’s in you?’ Unless thoroughly drilled, hardly anyone calls it a ‘fetus;’ no matter what her conscious views about abortion, almost every pregnant woman instinctively replies, ‘I call it a baby.’ But then my counselor friend can say without offense, ‘Then it sounds like you already have a baby. The question isn’t whether to have one, but what you’re going to do with the one you’ve got.”

--J. Budziszewsi, The Revenge of Conscience

Sexual Immorality: The Downward Spiral of Our Rationalizations

"Consider sexual promiscuity. The official line is that modern people do not take sex outside of marriage seriously any longer; mere moral realists say this is because we no longer realize the wrong of it. I maintain that we do know it is wrong but pretend that we do not...

...Another tactic is inventing private definitions of marriage. Quite a few people 'think of themselves as married' although they have no covenant at all. Some even fortify the delusion with 'moving-in ceremonies' featuring happy words without promises. Unfortunately, people who 'think of themselves as married' refuse the obligations of real marriage, but demand all of its cultural privileges. Rationalization is so much work that they require other people to support them in it. Such demands make the cultural protection of marriage more difficult. 

Yet another ruse is to admit that sex belongs within marriage but to fudge the nature of the connection. By this reasoning I tell myself that sex is okay because I am going to marry my partner, because I want my partner to marry me, or because I have to find out if we could be happily married. An even more dangerous fudge is to divide the form of marriage from its substance--to say 'We don't need promises because we're in love.' The implication, of course, is that those who do need promises love impurely, that those who do not marry are more truly married than those who do.

This  last rationalization is even more difficult to maintain than most. Love, after all, is a permanent and unqualified commitment to the true good of another person, and the native tongue of commitment is, precisely, promises. To work, therefore, this rule requires another: having deceived oneself about the nature of marriage, one must now deceive oneself about the nature of love. The usual way of doing so is to mix up love with the romantic feelings that characteristically accompany it, and call them 'intimacy.' If only we have these feelings, we tell ourselves, we may have sex. That is to say, we may have sex--if we feel like it. 

Here is where things really become interesting, because if the criterion of being-as-good-as-married is sexual feelings, then obviously no one who has sexual feelings may be prevented from marrying. So homosexuals must be able to 'marry;' their unions, too, should have cultural protection. At this point suppressed conscience strikes another blow, reminding us that marriage is linked with procreation. But now we are in a box. We cannot say 'therefore homosexuals cannot marry,' because that would strike against the whole teetering structure of rationalizations. Therefore we decree that having been made marriageable, homosexuals must be made procreative; the barren field must seem to bloom. There is, after all, artificial insemination. And there is adoption. So it comes to pass that children are given as a right to those from whom they were once protected as a duty. The normalization of perversion is complete."

--Jay Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience

 

The Cost of Sexual Immorality

"We can find a good example of such further penalties [for violating the natural law] in the consequences of breaking the precept that confines sex to marriage. An immediate consequence of their violation is injury to the procreative good: one might get pregnant but have nobody to help raise the child. Another immediate consequences is injury to the unitive good: one misses the chance for that total self-giving which can develop only in a secure and exclusive relationship. And there are long-term consequences too, among them poverty, because single women must provide for their children by themselves; adolescent violence, because male children grow up without a father's influence; venereal disease, because formerly rare infections spread rapidly through sexual contact; child-abuse, because live-in boyfriends tend to resent their girlfriends' babies and girlfriends may resent babies that their boyfriends did not father; and abortion, because children are increasingly regarded as a burden rather than a joy. The longer people persist in violating the natural law, the heavier the penalties for violation. Provided they do not refuse the lesson, eventually even the dullest among us may put the clues together and solve the puzzle. Over the course of its history a culture may have to relearn the timeless truths many times over. It may of course refuse to learn them and be destroyed."

--J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know 

Ramming Our Heads Against the Law

"For breaking the foundational moral principles that we can't not know, one penalty is guilty knowledge, because deep down we can't help but know the truth. For breaking any precepts of the natural law..there are other penalties, too. Those who cut themselves bleed. Those who give offense to others are hated. Those who live by knives die by them. Those who betray their friends have none left. Those who abandon their children have none to stroke their brows when they are old. Those who travel from bed to bed lose the capacity for trust. Those who torture their consciences are tortured by them in return. Those who suppress their moral knowledge become stupider than they intended. Those who refuse the one in whose image they are made live as strangers to themselves. We see that the principle that God is not mocked, that whatever one sows he reaps, is woven into the fabric of our nature. Not all our disobedience can unravel a single stitch. Some penalties show up within the lifetime of the individual; others may tarry until several generations have perished in the same wrongdoing. But the penalties for defiance are cumulative, and eventually they can no longer be ignored."

-J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know (2011 A.D.) 

Getting Stupid: Why I Became a Nihilist

In case you're wondering, let me give you a definition of nihilism. Merriam-Webster defines nihilism as " a belief that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless;" as well as "a doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth,especially of moral truths."


I as privileged to hear the excerpt's author, J. Budziszewski, lecture in Nashville a couple of years ago when my buddy Michael Poore invited him to speak at the Humanitas Forum. (Poore is the guy who hosted the Ted Kluck lecture in Cookeville a couple of weeks ago.) The lectures were great, and can be accessed here:  http://humanitas.org/forum/archive/2010_budziszewski/2010_budziszewski.shtml  


I certainly wouldn't endorse everything Budziszewski says (he moved from Episcopalianism to Roman Catholicism several years back), but, as the excerpt below will show, he is a penetrating thinker and writer.  

"...How did I become a nihilist? Why was I so determined? What were my real motives? 

There were quite a few. One was that, having been caught up in radical politics of the late sixties and early seventies, I had my own ideas about redeeming the world, ideas that were opposed to the Christian faith of my childhood. As I got further and further from God, I also got further and further from common sense about a lot of other things, including moral law and personal responsibility.

That first reason for nihilism led to a second. By now I had committed certain sins of which I did not want to repent. Because the presence of God made me more and more uncomfortable, I began looking for reasons to believe that he didn't exist. It's a funny thing about us human beings: not many of us doubt God's existence and then start sinning. Most of us sin and then start doubting his existence. 

A third reason for being a nihilist was simply that nihilism is what I was taught. I may have been raised by Christian parents, but I'd heard all through school that even the most basic ideas about good and evil are different in every society. That's empirically false--as C. S. Lewis remarked, cultures may disagree about whether a man may have one wife or four, but all of them know about marriage; they may disagree about which actions are most courageous, but none of them rank cowardice as a virtue. But by the time I was taught the false anthropology of the times, I wanted very much to believe it. 

A fourth reason, related to the last, was the very way I was taught to use language. My high school English teachers were determined to teach me the difference between what they called facts and what they called opinions, and I noticed that moral propositions were always included among the opinions. My college social science teachers were equally determined to teach me the difference between what they called facts and what they called values, and to much the same effect: the atomic weight of sodium was a fact, but the wrong of murder was not. I thought that to speak in this fashion was to be logical. Of course it had nothing to do with logic; it was merely nihilism itself, in disguise. 

A fifth reason for my nihilism was that disbelieving in God was a good way to get back at him for the various things that predictably went wrong in my life after I had lost hold of him. Now of course if God didn't exist then I couldn't get back at him, so this may seem a strange sort of disbelief. But most disbelief is like that. 

A sixth reason was that I had come to confuse science with a certain worldview, one that many science writers hold but that actually has nothing to do with science. I mean the view that nothing is real but matter. If nothing is real but matter, then there couldn't be such things as minds, moral law, or God, could there? After all, none of those are matter. Of course not even the properties of matter are matter, so after while it became hard to believe in matter itself. But by that time I was so disordered that I couldn't tell how disordered I was. I recognized that I had committed yet another incoherency, but I concluded that reality itself was incoherent, and that I was pretty clever to have figured this out--even more so, because in an incoherent world, figuring didn't make sense either. 

A seventh and reinforcing reason for my nihilism was that, for all of the other reasons, I had fallen under the spell of the nineteenth-century German writer Friedrich Nietzsche. I was, if anything, more Nietzschean than he was. Whereas he thought that given the meaninglessness of things, nothing was left but to laugh or be silent, I recognized that not even laughter or silence were left. One had no reason to do or not do anything at all. This is a terrible thing to believe, but like Nietzsche, I imagined myself one of the few who could believe such things--who could walk the rocky heights where the air is thin and cold. 

But the main reason I was a nihilist, the reason that tied all these other reasons together, was sheer, mulish pride. I didn't want God to be God; I wanted J. Budziszewski to be God. I see that now. But I didn't see that then. 

I have already noted in passing that everything goes wrong without God. This is true even of the good things he has given us, such as our minds. One of the good things I've been given is a stronger than average mind. I don't make the observation to boast; human beings are given diverse gifts to serve him in diverse ways. The problem is that a strong mind that refuses the call to serve God has its own way of going wrong. When some people flee from God they rob and kill. When others flee from God they do a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex. When I fled from God I didn't do any of those things; my way of fleeing was to get stupid. Though it always comes as a surprise to intellectuals, there are some forms of stupidity that one must be highly intelligent and educated to achieve. God keeps them in his arsenal to pull down mulish pride, and I discovered them all. That is how I ended up doing a doctoral dissertation to prove that we make up the difference between good and evil and that we aren't responsible for what we do. I remember now that I even taught these things to students. Now that's sin."

J. Budziszewski, "Escape from Nihilim"