The Problem With Morality From Above

torture, waterboarding, hitchens, christophers, christian, protestant, evangelical, religion, morality, morals

A new CNN survey proves exactly the atheist concern with morality from above.

Morality from above is the religious view of morality: if god says it's okay, no matter how horrible it is, I'm okay with it. God says that oppressing homosexuals is good, then that's what I'll do.

The atheist perspective on morality is a little different. We have nowhere to go for our morals other than ourselves, so we naturally go to golden rule morality: would I want this done to me? Should I oppress gays? Hmmm . . . would I want to be oppressed? No. Then I shouldn't do it to other people.

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

Christopher Hitchens actually had himself waterboarded to determine if that qualified as torture or not. (Note: that video is disturbing.) I think that anyone who isn't sure if waterboarding is torture or not, should do what Hitchens did. I've already drowned once, so I know the answer. It is.

If you think torturing people (and yes, terrorists are indeed people, bad people, but people) is okay, you might want to consider two things: it's very hard to take the position that captured USians should not be tortured when we run around torturing people, and torture produces unreliable information. People being tortured will say anything to make it stop. Anything at all.

It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

Think about that for a moment. We (and we all must take responsibility for the actions of our government) tortured a human being in order to obtain unreliable information. I'm pretty sure just asking would have produced that result. At least then we could have maintained the moral high ground. Now, here we are, down in the muck, and 60% of white evangelical protestants think that's a fabulous place to be.