I\u2019m curious: how often do parents in religious households back up the command: \u201cStop hitting your brother!\u201d with the addendum, \u201cwhich a close reading of the interaction of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Commandments would suggest is prohibited\u201d? Or even with the more straightforward: \u201cbecause God said not to!\u201d Relatively rarely, my guess is, because parental authority contains its own compulsion\u2014and, hence, irresistible logic. I may be wrong, however, and will humbly look forward to being corrected accordingly.<\/p>\n
I grew up in a non-religious household, and attended a non-religious school. I never heard God invoked as the source of moral authority either by my parents or teachers. Few of my classmates, to my knowledge, attended church or synagogue. I doubt whether a believer could pick out those of us raised without religion on the basis of our moral behavior. And not because our households were parasitic on religious teachings, but because a family will descend into chaos without order and respect for others.<\/p>\n
The always emblematic Michael Novak sets out the usual case for why lack of religious belief must lead to \u201cmoral decadence\u201d in No One Sees God. I quote his arguments here because they bear on the raising of children. Without a purported origin in divine commandment, Novak says, moral codes have little purchase on human behavior. \u201cIf morality were left to reason alone, common agreement would never be reached,\u201d he writes, \u201csince philosophers vehemently\u2014and endlessly-disagree, and large majorities would waver without clear moral signals.\u201d Ethical paralysis would set in: \u201cIf God is really dead, by what authority do we say any particular practice is prohibited or permitted? In the resulting social disarray, the most urgent of all moral questions has also become unsettled: \u2018How shall we raise our children? What kind of moral example should we set?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m puzzled as to why Mr. Novak and other Catholic thinkers believe that reason can discover something as abstruse and remote as God but not a workable set of ethical principles, but I will leave that quibble aside for now. His predictions of secular moral paralysis strike me as rather overblown. Does any parent ask himself whether he must allow his nine-year-old son to run over his four-year-old sister with his bike because \u201cGod is really dead\u201d or because philosophers disagree on whether morality is consequentialist or deontological? He does not, because the value of his children is self-evident, as is the necessity of inculcating in them common decency, if only for the sake of a sane household. And his children will learn that common decency through repetition and by gradually understanding that others have the same capacity for pain and sorrow that they do. To be sure, some households remain dysfunctional, but their problems almost invariably stem from the parents\u2019 incapacity, not from the failure to invoke God as a reason to not kick your mother when she asks you to pick up your clothes.<\/p>\n
By the time an individual reaches adulthood, this self-control and basic respect for others will usually have become instinctual, but if they have not, a moment\u2019s reflection reveals the value of the golden rule. Our life and property depend on others obeying the law. Our own behavior, by setting an example, is an important bulwark of that obedience. Of the possible reasons why someone doesn\u2019t run a red light on a deserted street at 3 am\u2014sheer habit, fear of getting caught, an awareness of the fragility of social order, or the belief that he will go to hell if he guns it\u2014my guess is that the fear of hell comes up infrequently.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m curious: how often do parents in religious households back up the command: \u201cStop hitting your brother!\u201d with the addendum, \u201cwhich a close reading of the interaction of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Commandments would suggest is prohibited\u201d? Or even … Continue reading