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January 10, 2006
Confused Americans for Truth - The Very Important Line Between Morality and Holiness
This story from Freedom Folks just popped up on the Ping Festival feed and I decided it was a good excuse to discuss the difference between morality and holiness.
People use those two words in many different ways, but I'm using them here to draw an important distinction between two different types of rules in a religious belief system: rules that maintain your relationship to God (holiness) and rules that define your behavior toward others (morality).
The Freedom Folks article describes an incident in which a group of Muslim youths in Oakland committed mayhem against a pair of liquor stores, and the vandals were caught on tape asking store clerks why they were selling liquor to people of the Muslim faith. This is a profound misunderstanding of the difference between holiness rules and moral rules: it doesn't make me closer to God if I've stopped drinking because somebody has burned down all the liquor stores. Furthermore, vandalism is a moral fault: it involves actual harm to other human beings.
Many people are vaguely aware of this distinction. Young children who must memorize the Ten Commandments are given the hint that the first four are about you and God and the last six are about you and other people. When Christ is challenged by a group of religious leaders to name the greatest commandment, he presents exactly two, the holiness commandment (love your God) and the morality commandment (love your neighbor).
Most religions agree on moral principles (few churches favor murder or adultery) but differ widely on issues of holiness. For this reason, freedom of religion has come to mean freedom to seek your own style of holiness. In a perfect world, that concept would define the wall between church and state. It's not a perfect world, however. For example, MJ of Freedom Folks sympathizes with the vandals because she sees the damage a proliferation of liquor stores has done to Chicago neighborhoods. Her argument, however, is entirely secular. The relation between liquor stores and the crime rate is independent of whether the God of Abraham is a Shiite, a Catholic, or a Reform Jew. So in actual fact MJ has no agreement with the vandals at all.
Some people want the distance between church and state to be even larger than that. Americans United sees traditional marriage as a religious issue even though church groups are pushing it on the same sort of secular grounds that MJ uses to condemn liquor stores.
In times of trouble, it's easy to assume that God is punishing your country for being insufficiently holy and you can regain his favor by conquering the wealthy infidels across the border. This never made sense to me: if God is upset that the Muslims are insufficiently holy, he should be really pissed off at the Jews, who are not holy at all. Instead, the Jews live in happy prosperity while the Palestinians starve.
Cats have a much simpler scheme. According to our religion, you achieve holiness by doing something nice for a cat. In return, the cat provides you with genuine affection piled on top of the warm feeling that your life is benefiting another's. We do not ask that doing nice things to cats be made mandatory, and we are not proposing war with countries that aren't nice to cats. Plus, you can be holy to a cat without disturbing most of the competing religious belief systems. This is because our whole way of life is designed around knowing the difference between what's holy and what's moral.
See, if you don't know that difference, you're just begging for an unholy mess.
Respectfully submitted,
Ferdinand T. Cat
# At Tue 6:43 PM | Permalink | Trackback URI | Comments (1) | More Confused Americans for Truth
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Also the new commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself -What you do for the least of these you do for me tends to merge the commandments into one.
Suicide-for example is not revealed law but natural(moral) law and can just as easily separate one from God as violating the Commandments.
Posted by: DL at January 17, 2006 7:35 AM
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