The Church dwells little on justifying its ethical teaching. It tends to just give commands. The time spent on prayers is wasted when it could be u sed to help people really make a difference in the world. Priests spend hours every week reading the breviary, a book of prayers and readings. The breviary like the Bible giver people no help in forming moral decisions. They just preach. We need the tools to work out what is moral for nothing is simple or straightforward. It is evil to tell somebody they should to commit adultery . What they need to be told is why its wrong or inadvisable. Christians worship with the rubbish in the breviary and the Bible and they think they feel more virtuously after doing so. That virtue is really too inner. Its selfish. What about applying that virtue to difficult moral situations? Virtue when preferred to developing and promoting the tools of discernment of real morality is really a vice and the more one adores it the more hypocritical one becomes.
If the Devil makes a religion, he will make it give good commandments but they will prompt them in such a way that there will be little success. The poor obedience among Catholics is shocking. Ponder on that! Satan has to make his religion look good but its poison is insidious.
The Church opposes today's moral permissiveness. Permissiveness might be seen as bad if society does not believe in God or sin. But if it does believe, then its permissive as far as intention goes is worsened. To do wrong while not believing in God is not as bad as doing it while believing in God. That is because the intention to
The Church opleny and with great vehemence conedemns todays berlief that choice matters first and foremost.
The Catholic Church does not have a coherent ethic. There are only two kinds of ethics, that
which considers only consequences and that which considers the action without
regard to the consequences. Yet the
Church has picked what it likes out of both.
Should we consider both the act itself and the consequences? Can we do that? But that could mean that apostasy or
blasphemy or homosexuality could be right in some circumstances or at least in
principle if not practice. But the
Church is clear that they are never right and they are forbidden in principle
and in practice.
To say an act is wrong in itself means that you can’t do it even if it is
for the best. So the two theories cannot
be mingled. Nor can you keep hopping
from one to the other.
So one ethic considers the consequences and the other doesn’t.
If the first ethic is right then the second is wrong. And vice versa.
The Church says that even a single discreet act of artificial birth
control is wrong no matter how much good it results in. Then it allows harmful actions like war so
that they may result in good things.
Jesus said that divorce was always the sin of causing the wife to commit
adultery (meaning that if you give somebody the opportunity to sin you make
yourself a sinner – so you must report workers who pretend to be unemployed to
gain support from the state) when the Jew asked him about the right grounds for
divorce. Yet he told his disciples to
flee from the missionary territory if the persecutors turned up. If consequences are irrelevant then it is
never right to leave those who need the gospel.
The Law of Moses orders that we are to kill people who leave God for
other gods. It doesn’t even hint that this is allowable under certain
circumstances. Unmistakeably, it is
saying that no matter what the results will be if we obey, we should obey. The doctrine that we are to love God alone
which is in the same Law and in the law of the false Christ tells us that we
must love God even if it destroys us for the Law says that killing and murdering
is a part of what you have to do to love God for you cannot love God unless you
keep his commandments. The pious say
that this will never happen knowing fine well that it could kill a person who
has the wrong belief about what loving God entails. This would be a person who believes the Bible
and feels duty bound to slay gays and adulterers. And a person who has some religious neurosis
that makes him or her quake with irrational fear at the thought of opening up
to God will be destroyed by the Law. Yet
God never mentioned exceptions so there are none. He said that he made all people to love
him. Yet, the Law does command certain
things for the sake of their consequences such as the people being told to
destroy pagan idols and pillars in case they get tempted to adore them. The Church may say that love is the basis of
morality but it says that only God can tell us what it is and that is dangerous
for most of the people who have got communications from God have been
communicating with their imagination.
The reason for denying that consequences should be considered is that we
never know what the results will be and if we will be able to control
them. This reason proves that any
religion that mixes the two ethics is misleading us.
The purpose for the mixing is that consequentialism is required in a
sufficient amount to capture the hearts of the people and its opposite for
controlling them by convincing them that “sins” like abandoning the faith or
neglecting Sunday Mass are never tolerable. It is all about power.
It is funny. Those who detest
consequentialism still talk and get concerned about what is likely to happen!
There are three different basic approaches to morality made in the Roman
Catholic Church today.
Deontology. This supposes that
eight things, life, play, speculative knowledge, the experience of beauty,
honesty, religion, friendship and reasonableness that is put into practice are
good and that it is evident to us that they are and that if we strive for as
many of these as possible we are doing right and that to turn away from one of
them for an insufficient reason is immoral.
It says that any indirect attack on one of them that is not intended is
fine but any direct attack that is intentional attack on one of them is always and
everywhere wrong. For example, murder
and contraception attack the life one.
This philosophy has been adopted by Pope John Paul II in Veritatis
Spendor.
At least it implies that if you follow religion and go against your
reason to do it you are doing wrong.
The theory has been condemned for not worrying enough about motives but
it does for it says you must work for as many of the eight goods as possible
and be open to the ones you can’t work for which requires having the right
motive. The fact that honesty is one of
the goods implies that it is your duty to be what you seem to be and so to have
the right motive.
The theory is used to condemn lying and wilful contraception under all
circumstances. But it cannot do this at
all for one could argue that by lying one is justifying reasonableness and
friendship and cannot have the honesty.
If you want to be a deontologist you simply have to say that x, y and z
are wrong because somebody says so and reason is no help.
Revisionism. Revisionism teaches
that an action is right if it heads for the right goal and says one has to do
what has the least evil or harm in it which is why it rejects the doctrine that
there are actions that are always and everywhere evil. Its supporters believe in abortion when it is
the only way to save the mother’s life.
Revisionism is incompatible with Roman Catholicism for Roman Catholicism
says the ultimate goal is God. What if
we are all destined to have eternal happiness without God? There is no need to have God to have a brilliant
goal. When God is introduced into
revisionism you end up saying that God should be the goal and it is immoral
under all circumstances not to make him the goal which is nothing more than the
idea that certain things are wrong all the time because somebody says so and
not because reason says it. Yet this is
the type of philosophy that it seeks to avoid.
So when it accepts it how can it be confident that lying and abortion
are sometimes right? How can it be
confident that we can lie to save a life?
It cannot be. It ends up being
guesswork and hypocrisy rather than morality.
Virtue ethics. This says that
morality is about what we are and not just what we do and what we want to be
and how to be it. The kind of person you
are shapes what you do. This philosophy
does not focus on whether or not abortion is right or wrong but on what the
acceptance and practice of abortion say about us. If what they say is bad then abortion should
be banned. Motive is very important in
this view. It comes dangerously close to
saying that if people believe that abortion is good and is a sacrifice to God
their growth in virtue by carrying out abortion is acceptable. We need reason to tell us what right and
wrong are and it cannot do this for it is best that reason tell us what is
right and wrong and then we live according to reason which is virtue.
Only fools adopt Catholicism imagining that it is going to educate them
morally.