Unholy Trinity

A Philadelphia grand jury today displayed the requisite courage and moral fortitude to spit in the face of United States Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa) and the Roman Catholic Church. (Thanks to Capitol Buzz, via Rising Hegemon, for the news...) The grand jury said that top diocesan officials ought not to have sheltered and concealed the actions of known child molesters, let alone assigned them to work in children's hospitals. In a 70-page report described as "blistering" (what, not stigmatizing?), the archdiocese disagreed.

Also this week in news of the Holy Roman Catholic Church...

Mexican Catholic officials, including a bishop, got a lecture on corruption from the government of Mexico. Specifically, the government of Mexico informed a Catholic bishop that he ought not be involved with laundering drug money. The bishop disagreed.

Our third story of despicable behavior comes from The Super-Sacred Extra-Special Holy Zone of Galveston, Texas, where the Magic Kingdom of Vatican-Land declared that its mightiest wizard is above the law and so can not be held accountable for his role in decades of church conspiracy to protect child molesters. And the government of George W. Bush agreed.

What's gone wrong here? A Philadelphia prosecutor and a grand jury of everyday citizens stand on moral ground, understand moral grounds, more than do the depraved local officials of the world's largest religion. A bishop in Mexico, one of the most religious (not to mention Catholic) countries on Earth, doesn't meet the exacting ethical standards of the Mexican government when it comes to corruption. The Mexican government!

Only the corrupt, religion-over-rationality government of George W. Bush bucks the trend. Why is that?

It's because government officials in Philadelphia and Mexico (intuitively or consciously) understand something that the faith-based Bush government does not: Morality is neither a creation of a magic creature, nor could it be even if there were a god. Morality is reason. Morality is logic. That's it. Every moral rule that deals with autonomy is a necessary logical parameter for the equitable interaction of independent, autonomous, intentional, sentient beings. (It's not quite, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." That's a flawed rule, one that aims at the right target, but misses such exceptions as The Missionary Example; to wit: If I were a missionary, I could justify torturing heathens because if I were them, I would want my soul to be saved no matter what).

The point behind it, though -- the logic behind it -- is that we all have the same rights, and protections. These rights and protections are the logical boundaries between my personal autonomy and yours. I can't hit you or steal your stuff, you can't hit me or steal my stuff. Lying, too, falls in this category because bad information is usually intended to deceive us into acting differently than we otherwise would, thus also subverting our autonomy.

The Catholic officials in Rome, Mexico and Philadelphia are operating under the belief that morality came from somewhere, that the rules are not intrinsically logical but merely make sense cuz the guy whut wrote ‘em is REALLY smart. Their morality is answerable solely to a god. They mustn't displease him, or dishonor him, or go against him. So why should they worry about molested children or the victims of drug-running gangsters? It’s not hurting god, it’s not violating the rules he wrote, so what’s the problem?

Now, the instinctive counter-argument, for some, will be that I’m Catholic-bashing; that the church is a flawed, human institution consisting of people who err. (Anyone wishing to defend the church is kindly asked to read these documents first). The argument might have some merit if the Magic Kingdom restricted its judgment to autonomy. Autonomy is really the only thing with which a rational morality ought to concern itself (in addition to fairness, which preserves the value of our autonomy).

We can tell that the Catholic church is flawed in its moral thinking because of how it categorizes its sins. (No, I’m not talking about cardinal v. venal sins. I’m no more interested in the distinctions regarding those rules than I am in the rules of that other once-dominant role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons). What I’m referring to is the fact that Catholicism (like, to be fair, many or even most other religions) strays well beyond autonomy in deciding what behavior to condemn.

Look at how the Philadelphia archdiocese addresses issues of consensual sexual conduct. Its web page of sex-judgment doesn’t, of course, address its own horrific failings (and sins against the autonomy of children and parents who trusted it), but condemns people for normal, consensual, safe sexual behavior for no reason (and that’s what we’re dealing with: reason) other than God doesn’t like it. Here's the proof -- the church's site explains that masturbation is wrong because, "it is a misuse of God's gift of sexuality which, in his divine wisdom, the Lord intended to be used between husband and wife." As a philosophy major, I think I'm on solid ground when I postulate that the best, most succinct refutation of this argument would be: So? Using a gift in a way the giver didn't intend isn't a sin. It's not wrong. Sorry, but it just ain't. In fact, the only inherently negative aspect of it is that the giver might not like it. As any fourth grader could tell you, "Dude, tough shit, you gave it to me."

But more tellingly, the unnamed author begins his (do allow me the presumption here!) explanation of masturbation's sinfulness with this: “The Church has consistently taught that what determines a particular human act to be sinful is not the context or conditions in which a human act is performed nor the foreseeable consequences of an act, but rather the act itself.” I wish I had explained it that way myself. The act is sinful regardless of context or consequences! Why is it wrong to hit people? Because it hurts them. Why is it wrong to steal things? Because it deprives others of their property. Consequence is not irrelevant to morality, it’s the defining factor! That's why I don't think the Catholic church actually engaged in a conscious conspiracy to conceal decades of child molestation in hundreds if not thousands of churches around the world. But if you're dogmatically opposed to the consideration of consequence, to the unthinking adherence to "divine" laws, you will become a church forbids masturbation while enabling child molestation. In other words, because the church abhors consideration of consequences, the rest of us have to pay them.