{"id":2347,"date":"2009-07-18T16:39:35","date_gmt":"2009-07-19T00:39:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=2347"},"modified":"2009-07-18T16:45:07","modified_gmt":"2009-07-19T00:45:07","slug":"christian-radio-and-moral-decisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/christian-radio-and-moral-decisions\/","title":{"rendered":"Christian radio and moral decisions"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been listening with considerable enjoyment to Christian radio, mostly KBRT<\/a>, which is preset in the car I have been driving in Los Angeles.\u00a0 Despite having wasted my college education on deconstructionist literary theory, I nevertheless still believe in the value of disciplined close reading and am touched by the devotion to the words of the Bible that many radio preachers evince, even if that devotion rests on a false apprehension regarding the text\u2019s source.\u00a0 I like the generally cheerful attitude towards self-improvement and the call to self-evaluation.\u00a0 To be sure, there\u2019s plenty of whacky and contradictory supernaturalism as well.\u00a0 Todd White<\/a>, who purports to cure even \u201cHigh Priestesses of Satan\u201d of such illnesses as sciatica with Jesus\u2019 power, explained why Holocaust survivors should not have lost their faith in God: \u201cGod is not in control,\u201d he said, arriving at a perfectly logical explanation for the daily slaughter of the innocents .\u00a0\u00a0 The next day, Wiley Drake, the pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church in Garden Grove, Ca., asserted more conventionally:\u00a0 \u201cGod\u2019s in control of everything.\u201d\u00a0 How we\u2019re supposed to referee such conflicting claims is left unresolved.\u00a0 (Wiley Drake has been in the news recently <\/a>for his unapologetic embrace of \u201cimprecatory prayer\u201d to call for \u201cPresident Barack Hussein Obama\u2019s\u201d death.\u00a0 Drake argues unimpeachably that if you\u2019re going to view the Bible as the word of God, you can\u2019t edit out, as \u201csome panty-waist, user-friendly preachers\u201d do, the parts that no longer conform to our moral sensibilities, including the two dozen or so Psalms that revel in God\u2019s willingness to mercilessly slaughter Israel\u2019s enemies.\u00a0\u00a0 KBRT host Rick Buhler <\/a>agreed with Wiley that reciting Biblical death wishes had nothing to do with voodoo and cheerfully reminded him: \u201cPlease let me know if I end up on your imprecatory list.\u00a0 Bless you, Wiley.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u00a0All this is illuminating and entertaining.\u00a0 But however much I applaud the regular attention to self-inspection, nothing I have heard on Christian radio changes my view that moral reasoning is independent of, and a condition precedent to, religious injunction.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0(And, a fortiori, religiously-inspired moral preaching says nothing about whether God actually exists.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0The really hard moral challenges are not much assisted by Biblical commands, it seems to me.\u00a0 The Ten Commandments are a set of no-brainers\u2014at least those not concerned with ensuring prostration before God.\u00a0 No society would regard murder as legitimate behavior (though every society sanctions killing other human beings under various circumstances which the Bible does not spell out).\u00a0 But how do you decide, say, where your responsibility towards another person begins and ends and how best to fulfill it?\u00a0 If a friend, family member, or soul mate persists in engaging in what you believe to be self-destructive behavior, for example, how unrelentingly should you push for change, and when do you back off and say: \u201cIt\u2019s your choice, I will desist trying to change you.\u201d\u00a0 Embracing an ethic of love doesn\u2019t answer the question, which requires a nuanced exploration of our actual power over other human beings and our duty towards others, as well as a context-specific evaluation of our relationship to the person we hope to persuade and his willingness to be nudged or harangued.\u00a0 Such dilemmas have only provisional answers, however much we might yearn for a stable answer from outside of ourselves.\u00a0 Injunctions to make no idols and \u201chave no other God besides me\u201d are no help at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been listening with considerable enjoyment to Christian radio, mostly KBRT, which is preset in the car I have been driving in Los Angeles.\u00a0 Despite having wasted my college education on deconstructionist literary theory, I nevertheless still believe in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[169,292,291],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2347"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2353,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347\/revisions\/2353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}