Conservative pundits occasionally imply that other-directed human virtues, such as charity, compassion, and mercy, came on the scene only thanks to Christianity. No one has ever shown hospitality to a stranger or helped survivors of an earthquake in other cultures, it would seem.
St. Francis’s sermons to the animals must have really stuck, because our furry and feathered friends have at least one of those allegedly unique Christian virtues, according to Frans de Waal. His book, The Age of Empathy, describes “Bengal tigers that nurse piglets, bonopo apes that help wounded birds to fly, seals that rescue drowning dogs, [and] a rhesus monkey [that] will forego the opportunity for food if pulling the chain that delivers it will electrically shock a companion,” writes Andrew Stark in the Wall Street Journal. Humans’ far more complex moral sense is rooted in our self-awareness and the awareness of our place in a social order, but the evolution of that moral sense long predated Christianity.
Conservative pundits occasionally imply that other-directed human virtues, such as charity, compassion, and mercy, came on the scene only thanks to Christianity.
Name one.
James Dobson.
Got a quote?
In the case of charity, part of the reason why people are more charitable now is that we can be; we have disposable income. A couple of hundred years ago, a person could walk down the street, see a starving man, and not think much of it. We don’t let this happen today. The proximal cause was community leaders of the past founding charitable organizations (many of which were openly Christian). The ultimate cause was the increased per-capita GDP from the industrial revolution and the free market.
Well, to a Christian the news that much of human ethical behavior is hardwired is no surprise. Christianity affirms natural law, after all, and views it as a normative source of morals and ethics. Virtually all of the major Christian thinkers affirmed natural law: St. Paul (Romans 2:14, for example), St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Richard Hooker, Francisco Suarez (one of the founders of international law), popes without end — the list goes on and on. Natural law also has a prominent place in Jewish ethics (as Rabbi David Novak points out in his many works).
So, the idea that humans are hardwired for some types of ethical behavior isn’t a threat to Christianity — in fact Christianity affirms the truth of it.
And the idea that humans can learn moral lessons from the world around us is not alien to Christianity, either. “Consider the lilies of the field…”
With a stiff seriousness that inspires laughter, all our philosophers demanded something far more exalted, presumptuous, and solemn from themselves as soon as they approached the study of morality: they wanted to supply a rational foundation for morality – and every philosopher so far has believed that he has provided such a foundation. Morality itself, however, was accepted as “given.” How remote from their clumsy pride was that task which they considered insignificant and left in dust and must – the task of description – although the subtlest fingers and senses can scarcely be subtle enough for it.
Just because our moral philosophers knew the facts of morality only very approximately, in arbitrary extracts or in accidental epitomes – for example, as the morality of their environment, their class, their church, the spirit of their time, their climate and part of the world – just because they were poorly informed and not even very curious about different peoples, times, and past ages – they never laid eyes on the real problems of morality; for these emerge only when we compare many moralities. In all “science of morals” so far one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here. What the philosophers called “a rational foundation for morality” and tried to supply was, seen in the right light, merely a scholarly variation of the common faith in the prevalent morality; a new means of expression for this faith; indeed, in the last analysis a kind of denial that this morality might ever be considered problematic – certainly the very opposite of an examination, analysis, questioning, and vivisection of this very faith.
It’s good to see that Prof. Nietzsche has re-posted the remark he originally posted over a century ago (Kaufmann’s translation). Nietzsche is one of the greatest secular-right thinkers of modern times, and probably the one who most devastatingly refuted the faith-based claims of the Secular Right blog.
Some great examples of anthropomorphism!
“Bengal tigers that nurse piglets”
If the piglets are disguised as tigers.
“Officials said the reason for the experiment is to amuse visitors.”
Apprarently one tiger and one instance, not ‘tigers.’
“bono[b]o apes that help wounded birds to fly…”
Non-anthropomorphic description would be “repeatedly threw a wounded bird out of a tree.” (The ape must not have been hungry.)
Apparently one ape, not ‘apes’ and one instance/obervation.
FWIW, see http://johnhawks.net/weblog/ and search for ‘bonobo’; its status as a separate species of chimp is in doubt; low amount of observation of wild populations, etc.
“seals that rescue drowning dogs,…”
Non-anthropomorphic description would be “pushed a dog out of the water.” Maybe seals don’t like dogs in their water, and this species is known to be less aggressive than most, so they push rather than kill. Again, apparently one observation (‘Hinds’) and one seal, not ‘seals.’
“a rhesus monkey[sic] [that] will forego the opportunity for food if pulling the chain that delivers it will electrically shock a companion…”
This is apparently real, reproducible and involves more than one monkey, not ‘a monkey.’ http://www.madisonmonkeys.com/masserman.pdf
Funny how when there was one animal and one instance the article pluralized it, while when there were multiple animals it became singluar.
“And the idea that humans can learn moral lessons from the world around us is not alien to Christianity, either. “Consider the lilies of the field…””
All that demonstrates is that the authors of Christianity knew nothing about biology.