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Christian Morality Derivation of Principles Gary Novak
Since morality is that which sustains life, sin is that which destroys life. Since life is objectively defined, morality and sin are objectively defined. The objectivity of morality is demonstrated by the "self-evident and inalienable" rights which the framers of US Constitution referred to. Only that which is objective can be self-evident and inalienable. Persecution shows the victims the objectivity of morality and sin, because perpetrators lie about the virtues of sin, while the victims know that no amount of lying turns the sin into virtue. John the Elder said sin is lawlessness (1John 3:4). He was not John the super apostle, who would certainly not be an elder in one of Paul's churches. So he made a trite statement which was not an adequate definition of sin but did describe an element of the problem. Law needed to be the first view of morality, because it describes the nature of the problem in terms which are easy to grasp. People needed to find out that there was a problem before they could determine the solution. Genesis was written in this manner. It was designed to show that there was a problem. In the stories of Genesis, people were sinning in too whimsical of a way, and there was no one to say it was wrong. So law and a law giver were needed. But low and behold, law was not enough. It only showed the problem; it did not show the answer. One of the pretexts for crucifying Christ was that he supposedly broke the law through blasphemy. Law was interpreted however the persons in power wanted to interpret it. Major forces drive sin making it an intractable problem. The forces start with psychological conditioning at the subconscious level. After the sin is expressed, social forces develop and create conflicts. Modern psychology show the characteristics of subconscious minds. Christ taught this subject with the limitations of his time. We are supposed to build upon the foundation which he created. Every time a sin is perpetrated, it creates a force in the mind of the perpetrator. If it doesn't, it's not sin. The force defines it as sin. The force never goes away until repentance occurs. The reason why is because sin defines the perpetrator, and definitions are timeless. The forces cause perpetrators of sin to conceal, deny and rationalize the sin. That reaction defines sin, and it leads to more sin. If these concept are difficult to understand or accept, look at crime. It does the same thing, because it is sin which is so obvious that even atheists accept it as wrong. Crime has to be concealed, denied and rationalized, because everyone feels threatened by it. If sin is nothing but a whim of God's, why do atheists accept crime as wrong? Crime demonstrates the objective truth about sin. Sin always has the same characteristics in all minds; only the degree of development varies. There is one basic force involved; and it always results from the same pattern of psychological conditioning. As an attitude, it is called pride. Functionally, it is the desire to dominate. Morality is most basically defined by intentions rather than actions, because decisions begin with intentions, and there is qualitative content to intentions determining the specific complexities apart from external factors which can alter the results of actions. Because sin is always the same, it is reinforced by collaboration—conscious and unconscious. For this reason, sin and conspiracy are used as approximate synonyms in the Bible. Sin is so dependent upon collaboration that it could not exist without it. If there were only one person sinning, he would commit one sin; and that would be the end of it. The realization of the consequences would end it at that point. But that's not what happens. Sin is promoted by the most corrupt persons. They encourage others to sin, often rewarding them and always creating the psychological support of security through numbers which is absolutely essential for sustaining sin. There is a high degree of psychological insecurity with sin, which must be countered with psychological encouragement, before sin can be sustained. The insecurity stems from the fact that sin puts a person in conflict with the rest of the universe—meaning objective reality and other persons. There are always victims of sin, and they oppose it. The result is conflict. In response to the conflict, more sin is generated to oppose enemies, and the result is additional forces acting upon the perpetrators. All elements of corruption are interrelated, and all elements of constructivity are interrelated. Therefore, the forces which sin creates drive the perpetrators to promote all elements of corruption and oppose all elements of constructivity. Specifically, sin creates a conflict with reality, because objective reality shows what sin is and where it occurs. The perpetrators cannot allow that result; so they must oppose objective reality. Since all elements of objective reality are interrelated, the conflict with reality generalizes. And the conflict includes the methods of handling reality, which basically involve rationality. The result is that, to some extent or another, sin creates a hate for truth, rationality and justice. The conflict which sin creates is an objective criterion for determining the existence of sin. It is particularly objective because the perpetrators of the sin are the ones who must respond to the conflicts to justify, conceal or promote the sin. Their response spells out their relationship to objective reality and the victims. In fact, the primary significance of sin is not the effect it has on the victims but the effect it has upon the perpetrators. The problems of the victims are limited and temporary, while those of the perpetrators are unlimited and endless. This concept is not as tautological as it looks. What causes the forces to go away? They last as long as memories last. And what sort of response must the perpetrators produce? Their response is open ended and unlimited, because they can never succeed in opposing objective reality. Corrupt persons condition themselves into assuming that they can defeat objective reality by coercing everyone into supporting, or at least ignoring, the sin. The assumption is extremely irrational, but nothing about sin is rational; it is driven by psychologically conditioned and subconscious force. So the driving force of sin in subconscious minds needs to be analyzed further. First, the characteristics of psychological conditioning need to be reviewed. This subject entered the scientific domain about a century ago, when Pavlov did his classical experiments by psychologically conditioning a dog to respond to bell sounds producing the physiological effects of eating food. The procedure was to feed the dog food and ring a bell and then repeat it over and over. Eventually, the bell sound without the food would produce the physiological responses related to eating. The mental effects are quite obvious. The memories contained both the bell sound and the stimuli of food, since those realities were acquired at the same time. Through repetition, those memories would overlay earlier memories of a similar type. Stimuli then contacted the memories causing them to produce physiological responses. The memories could be contacted by a bell sound, because they had the bell sound within them. Humans are not psychologically conditioned in that manner as easily as animals, because they have more awareness, which controls memories more completely. Awareness is highly corrective in minds in that it dissipates subconscious force. Awareness, however, is relative; and it cannot totally remove all subconscious influences from minds. Therefore, sin can overtake minds through subconscious forces. Sin enters subconscious minds repeatedly creating cycles of regeneration. The cycles occur as follows: In relating to other persons, the sinner finds that a problem occurs because of his inadequacies. He isn't consciously aware of what is occurring, but he subconsciously assumes that if he could prevail against the other person, it would solve his problems. That assumption is the starting point of the conditioned response of sin. The sinner loses his ability to objectivize the situation, when encountering problems in relating to other persons. He then subconsciously steps off the objective track and onto the subjective track of assuming that he would be better off if he could prevail against the other person. The key point is that the person's abstract awareness is not good enough to differentiate between objectively relating to another person and subjectively wanting to prevail against the other person. Wanting to prevail against the other person is the basis of all sin. One of the problems is that there is no absolute line to be crossed. A person must oppose sin, because it destroys life. One must therefore oppose the persons who are perpetrating sin. Determining when that should occur is highly evaluative. Christ taught where that line is better than anyone else ever will. Doing so was the primary focus of everything he did and taught. The traditional analysis is that the basic cause of sin is pride. Pride could be defined as the attitude of wanting to elevate oneself above others. The reason for doing so is to prevail against others. So it is the same analysis as described here. What then happens when a person decides to prevail against someone else? Usually, there is more determination than results; but there are small ways of expressing the motive in nearly all circumstance, which first and foremost involves making degrading statements such as mockeries and insults. The real problem is that the motive does not turn off so easily. If the person lacks the abstract awareness to avoid the attitude, then he also lacks the awareness to abandon it or overcome it; and it becomes somewhat permanent. Over time, the attitude becomes a part of the person, all the time being expressed in various ways which create habits. Are humans free from habits? Not hardly. Habits are psychologically ingrained patterns which function on a stimulus-response basis. So the habits of degrading other persons to prevail against them develop over time into all of the reactions and forces which create sin. The outward manifestations are put into major categories including jealousy, bigotry, envy, lust, hate, etc.; but they are all one force with various manifestations. Jealousy is the feeling of threat from the betterment of others. It is not rational; but if one puts himself in opposition to others, then their betterment becomes threatening. Bigotry is, most basically, the subconscious assumption that power is virtue and powerlessness is corruption. It stems from the positive reinforcements of power in prevailing against other persons. Power is needed to prevail. Hate is a justification mechanism, as evident in its application. It is applied like a tool. Most basically, it is a method of accusing. It makes the statement that the other person is doing something wrong, or else he would not be hated. Of course, no specifics are included, which is what gives it so much mileage. Sin is irrational in that it functions on a stimulus-response basis in conflict with objective reality. Its irrationality is often used as a denial mechanism, because supposedly a person would have no reason to sin. But sin never has a reason; it is always irrational. Power is the positive reinforcement which creates corruption. One might assume that the abstract nature of power would make it a weak reinforcement. But the opposite is true. It is a pervasive reinforcement, which causes it to permeate a large amount of reality and to produce a very significant cumulative effect over time. Another important fact is that since power is abstract, its corruptive influences easily escape awareness of the unwary. Once it escapes awareness, it does its destructive things to the mind without the corrective effects of awareness. Awareness is corrective. Awareness can only exist as a perfect thing. It cannot exist if it is not perfect. It can be corrupted, which is what sin does, but it then is not awareness. In other words, corrupting it destroys it, which is why it is a perfect thing. Corrupt persons lack awareness, because their awareness gets corrupted. What this means is that the most abstract concepts, which most easily escape awareness, are the most inclined to be corrupted. Moral concepts are abstract, which causes their corruption to get quite entrenched. Power is viewed as good by corrupt persons, because they need it to overwhelm their victims. They assume that morality is bad, because it is a threat to their power. Large categories of human corruption evolve over the millennia for the purpose of promoting corrupt power structures, which all fall under the umbrella of one large power structure. Satan controls it, but most persons don't know that, or they deny it. Those persons who promote the world's corruptions are exploiting satan's power structure. Criticism of such corruptions is nowdays called conspiracy theorizing, which is portrayed as if it were a corruption in itself. But the Bible uses the words conspiracy and sin interchangeably, because all sin is conspired, and satan's power structures are conspiracies against life. The purpose of material life is to overcome sin. The purpose is evident in Christ's teaching and the obvious logic of life in the context of moral truth. The escapism of spiritual type religions is not enough to overcome sin, and it defeats the purpose of material life. Christ said the goal of humans should be eternal life (John 5:24). The goal is to be found in "the world to come" rather than this life (Mark 10:30). To acquire eternal life, Christ said people need to overcome sin (Mat 25:46)(Luke 10:25-28) and believe in God or Christ (John 3:15, 10:28, 17:3). Overcoming sin is the only thing Christ taught, and material life has no other purpose. People are not to store up earthly treasures but heavenly treasures (Mat 6:19,20), which demonstrates that material life is not to be an end in itself. People must reform (Luke 13:3-5). A person cannot serve God and mammon (Mat 6:24). Christ chose the believers out of the world (John 15:19). The usual implication of fundamentalist preaching is that God tried to create a garden of Eden, but satan turned it into a world of sin. And they refer to an all-powerful and all-knowing God. Why is material life such a mess if it started out perfect, and God is all powerful? They don't believe a word of their own preaching. Sin existed before material life was created. In Genesis, satan was thoroughly corrupted by sin when he tempted Adam and Eve. The story is an allegory, but literalists try to read the origins of sin in it. In human life there is a continuous gradient of degrees of corruption, from persons who are similar to satan to saints. It takes millions of years to get as corrupt as persons similar to satan. It didn't occur in the human society. Less corrupt persons did not acquire their corruption in one life-time either. They brought their corruptions with them when they were born. There is a half-truth to the concept of original sin in that people bring sin with them when they are born; but the claim that it began with human ancestors is mind bogglingly irrational. The most obvious reason to assume molecular life was created to overcome sin is because overcoming sin is what it does and needs to do. It stabilizes objective realities, so persons can learn to relate to reality properly as the medium which defines life. Yet it is so problematic that it only has a temporary purpose. God did not change his mind when he decided the world is a corruption. He had temporary and limited purposes with the material world. Since the entire concern of God and Christ is to overcome sin, there would not have been any other purpose with material life. Atonement did not end sin. Offering blood is a paganistic corruption. The demon gods required murder as a test of loyalty, and then they would provide some protection or something. It's like the Mafia requiring extortion money. When Christ referred to offering his blood, it was not payment to anyone. It was self-sacrifice for advancing truth. The same is true of martyrs or military soldiers. The Christian martyrs were not paying Nero to please him. The soldiers at the Battle of the Bulge were not paying Hitler to please him. In other words, not all offering is an attempt to please extortionist such as the demons who created the paganistic religion of ancient humanity. God is not a pervert like the demons who required murder as a test of loyalty. Christ had to be martyred to prove the truth about sin, because corrupters claim sin is so trivial that nothing needs to be done about it. So Christ showed that innocent persons and moralists are being destroyed because of the characteristics of sin. When society murders God for doing good deeds and teaching morality, then the nature of sin is demonstrated. It is a major problem which requires a major effort to overcome it. The truth about sin also says Paul (the self-admitted murderer of Christians) was not fixed with a flash of light. If he were, no religion would be needed. His false theology and disgraceful communication standards demonstrate that he was not fixed by a flash of light. To Chapter 4. |