The End Justifies the Means

This is going to be one of those topics I don’t like writing about because it’s going to upset nearly everyone who reads this blog (if there is anyone left).  But the purpose of this weblog is to inspire people who are interested in finding truth, and what I am about to say is an important part of finding it.

About four years ago, I attended a bad church.  The pastor of this church had a problem – he constantly lied (about anything and everything) and plagiarized.  When my friend confronted him on this problem, he responded with a lot of self-centered dribble, but one comment he made stuck out in my memory:  he simply asked my friend how many people he had personally led to the Lord.  What was he implying?  That his tactics, although unorthodox, lead people to Christ.  This excuses his sermon plagiarizing. This somehow excuses his constant lying.  In other words, the end justifies the means.  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this from a Christian pastor.  My rosy-colored view of the Christian “church” began to slowly fall apart from that point on.  But this wasn’t the first time I saw this.

When I was attended collage, I decided to take a religion course.  I absolutely loved it.  I remember one day our professor introducing us to a feminist bible scholar, and had us read and comment on her take on the Genesis account of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.  Basically, she blamed the entire thing on Adam and completely vindicated Eve.  I remember at the time liking the fact that at least someone was saying that Adam was at fault, contrary to teaching I had heard prior saying it was all Eve’s fault because women do not possess spiritual discernment (an opinion I completely disagree with, by the way).  Unfortunately, her arguments were terrible (as is characteristic of most bible interpretation) and intellectually dishonest.  I remember telling our professor this, who was probably a feminist herself, and she told me that they were in fact terrible, but logical argument and intellectual honesty were not the main point of the feminist writing on most subjects.  What trumped those things was getting people’s attention through any means necessary, which manifested itself in this case in deliberately misguided logic that lead to a deliberately wrong interpretation of a biblical account.  For what purpose?  According to my professor (and not me), to get people’s attention.  I guess that means to anger men, and make women who are oppressed cheer.  In the end, you are guaranteed an emotional reaction from an audience that cares about the bible.  An emotional reaction, either positive or negative, seeds itself in people’s minds like it did mine – and they will walk away remembering what was said.  I guess the theory is that this kind of tactic used over time causes cultural change that benefits those who employ it.

After I left that bad church I talked about initially, I began to walk down a path similar to this feminist bible scholar.  I was very angry about the corruption of the Christian church, and it was personal because I had first-hand felt the brunt of it.  I went to another church that was in some ways even worse.  After I left that one,  I took a break from church for a while.  My hate and disgust for the church slowly grew stronger.  It was during this time that I  discovered something that was like a drug — reading  and writing about subjects harshly critical of the church.  The harsher the better.  I didn’t notice or care about the logic in the argument.  I began to argue with people in the same manner.  I didn’t care about the means, I cared about the ends.  What I loved about my slanted verbal debates, or the books and weblogs and essays I read, or the stuff I wrote on my own weblog and elsewhere, was that the final conclusion of the matter — that the Christian church was hopelessly and pervasively corrupt.  Non-christian organizations had more hope of moral underpinning than Christian ones.

It was this insatiable anger that drove me to start this weblog.  I needed to write to make sense of this belief system of mine in light of this new perspective I had acquired.  It drove me to seek out atheists and ex-religious people and see why they were angry (in some cases) at Christians, God, Christianity, or religion in general.  Now that I was a bad boy in a church-religious sense, I had no problem relating to others in the same situation, and having a great deal of empathy for them, more so than I would ever extend to a fellow Christian brother or sister.  Ironically, this proved to be a first step towards healing me from my anger.

While writing about my struggle to find truth, I realized one day that I had become what I had all along hated others for doing.  I was deeply employed in living out the mantra of the end justifies the means.  By this time, I had calmed down a little, but the same philosophy still guided my thinking and debating.  It hit me very hard: I was not too different from that pastor.  That piece-of-crap, worthless, stupid, arrogant, lying bastard.  So I thought at the time.  Now I can’t despise him so much for that failing of his anymore.  His failing had became my failing.  I don’t know what caused him to take the moral low road, but for me it was because I was hurt, and was very, very angry.

Intellectual life after this realization became internalized has been interesting.  I have since learned to detect ends justifies the means argument style when I see it.

A couple of years ago, I read an article in Newsweek called the “God Debate” between Sam Harris and Rick Warren.  (The full interview is available at Richard Dawkin’s website) I didn’t really care what Rick Warren though because I don’t like his philosophy or approach to Christianity.  I was interested in what Sam Harris had to say.  Then I caught him saying this in response to the moderator:

 

MODERATOR: Sam, the one thing that I find really troubling in your arguments is that I am guilty, to quote “The End of Faith,” of a “ludicrous obscenity” when I take my children to church. That is strong language, and it doesn’t exactly encourage dialogue.

 

HARRIS: To some degree the stridence of my writing is an effort to get people’s attention. But I can honestly defend the stridence because I think our situation is that urgent. I am terrified of what seems to me to be a bottleneck that civilization is passing through. On the one hand we have 21st-century disruptive technology proliferating, and on the other we have first-century superstition. A civilization is going to either pass through this bottleneck more or less intact or it won’t. And perhaps that fear sounds grandiose, but civilizations end. On any number of occasions, some generation has witnessed the ruination of everything they and their ancestors had built. What especially terrifies me about religious thinking is the expectation on the part of many that civilization is bound to end based on prophecy and its ending is going to be glorious.

Hey!! It’s the ends justifies the means tactic!!  He saying stuff that isn’t intellectually honest or true, but he’s trying to get people’s attention.  He can defend his tactic,  (to lie and deceive) but not his statements (lies and deception) because his mission is so important. I’m quite familiar with that.  I used it too.  I read the rest of Harris’ book, and it was filled with it.  He employed a lot of stereotyped descriptions of Christians to a degree that I wonder if he actually ever knew one personally.  I used to think stereotypically of atheists the same way until I started to read what they write and talk to them and got to know them personally.  I found out that they are immensely more complicated then my stereotypes.

At this point, I must mention a book that was often checked out in the library of my university.  It was very popular.  It was called “How to Lie with Statistics“.  It was popular then an still is now for a purpose.  It is an important convincing tool when the end justifies the means, to “appear” scientific and objective in our agenda-soaked arguments about our pet truth claims.  I would also like to point to Michael Crichton’s CalTech commencement address on how to lie with science as well.

So where is this all leading?  This is where I piss off everyone.

This leaves the person who is seeking truth with a problem.  If you are angry or have an emotionally-charged agenda because you have been hurt, you are going to have a hard time hearing or communicating anything truthful regardless of your worldview, Christian or Atheist or otherwise.  To a person trying to hear truth from people and organizations like these, I’m going to have to disbelieve most of what they claim to be true.  This is why I do not believe nearly anything that comes out of the gay/lesbian or feminist activist organizations.  I believe that these groups have something true and great to say (such as people who are homosexual or female are awesome people and in every way equal their counterparts and discrimination in any form against them is morally wrong), but besides that basic message, much of what else they say or try to prove is untrue.  Christian end-times organizations and their writings are most often wrong.  Truth claims by Atheist activist organizations (who have similar endeavors as Sam Harris has demonstrated) are untrue.  A lot of truth claims from the interpretation of news events by the media is slanted and untrue.  A lot of ecological /global warming activist initiatives are highly suspect.  In my limited experiences with Christian movements, such as the Charismatic, Emergent church, and Social Gospel movements (just to name a few), some/a lot of what they believe is based on poor logic because they have a greater goal in mind in which they are more passionate about than the foundational truths that underpin it – which could not possibly hold it up to the level of grandeur that they see it as having.  Most of what they say is untrue too.  I’m not trying to point fingers at the liberal/secular organizations. I’m trying to say that all emotionally-charged agenda organizations, no matter what the underlying world-view, have highly suspect truth claims.

So I guess we are left to deal with these people and organizations with a huge grain of salt.  Even though what they have to say is highly suspect, it is possible and really important for a person seeking the truth to read between the lines to hear them.  Behind the misinformation and deliberate lies, there are real people who have real hurts and real concerns that decided one day like me that deception and lying were the ways to make the world hear clearer what they had to say.  In my humble opinion and experience, only when we actually get to know the real people behind these movements personally does the truth of their causes become clear.  Aside from that, there is too much deception and misinformation to find much truth in these places except from small bits and pieces.  Please don’t think I am saying to form friendships solely for philosophic purposes.  I’m saying when the opportunity comes, don’t be shy to be friends with people who think very differently than you do.  Share life with them, cry with them, laugh with them, love them, encourage them.  Christians, atheists have a lot to say and are fascinating people.  Atheists, Christians are amazing people and have a lot to say too.

One might criticize me and say that all religion and Christianity fall into the category of the other movements I’ve mentioned. I would agree with you. Why am I still a Christian then? Because I decided long ago to go to the source, to God himself, and get to know him personally. Just like I did with a feminist friend, just like I did with a gay friend of mine, just like I did with a friend who was crazy about Christian end-times mythology. By knowing God personally, I was able to cut through all the human religious garbage and lies that people invented and instead found the truth from the source – from the Person that started that Movement in the first place.