Examined Christian Faith 'Cardinal Virtues' 3.3 What is Christainity

Historically writers have categorized the seven ‘virtues’ into two different types, the first four of them are called “Cardinal” virtues and the remaining three are referred to as ‘Theological’ virtues.  The ‘Cardinal’ ones are those that all people recognize; the ‘Theological’ virtues of FAITH, HOPE, and CHARITY are those that usually only a Christian acknowledges.  I will get to the ‘Theological’ ones, but before I do we must begin with the four ‘Cardinal’ virtues.   The first thing one should know about ‘Cardinal’ virtues is that the word ‘cardinal’ comes from the Latin word meaning “the hinge of the door”,  they are called ‘Cardinal’ virtues because they are hinges upon which the door of the moral life swings..   They are PRUDENCE, TEMPERANCE, JUSTICE and FORTITUDE. 

Prudence simply means practical common sense, or taking the time to think out what you are doing and the likely outcome of it.  Today rarely do people think of Prudence as a ‘virtue’.  But in fact Christ told us to be prudent, when he instructed His disciples to be “as harmless as doves” but also “as wise as serpents.”  God is no more pleased with those who choose to slack off intellectually, then any other slacker.  True Christianity is something that takes all of you, brains and all.  Fortunately, anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will discover that his intelligence is being sharpened, no special education is required, Christianity is an education in itself. 

Temperance is one of those words that has had its meaning changed.  What we think of when we think of temperance is someone who does not drink.  However, originally ‘Temperance’ mean nothing of the sort, ‘Temperance’ referred not specifically to drinking, but to all pleasures; and it meant practicing self-control, abstention, and moderation.

One of the great missteps of Christians is to restrict their thinking of ‘Temperance’ to the question of drinking.  By doing so, it helps people to forget that you can be just as ‘intemperate’ about a lot of things.  A man who makes golf, or his motorcycle the center of his life, or the woman who devotes all her thoughts to shopping, her dog, or traveling is being just as ‘intemperate’ as the person who gets drunk every night.  

Justice means much more than what we see on our televisions as we watch police and lawyer television shows, or even the actual thing.  It is the proper moderation between self-interest and the rights and needs of others, it is the old name for everything that we call “fairness”; it includes honesty, truthfulness, keeping promises, giving as well as receiving and all of that side of our life.  

Justice is that virtue that we demand and expect from others as it applies towards actions directed at us. However the modern Christian seems to want to pretend that ‘Justice’ is a quaint old fashioned virtue when it applies to their choices, and their actions.   Doing so at their own peril, the modern Christian expects ‘Justice’ before forgiveness for the sins of others, but forgiveness without ‘Justice’ for  their sins.  As I mentioned before, there will be a great many surprises when we get to Heaven. 

Lastly, there is Fortitude, which includes both kinds of courage – the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that “sticks to it” under pain.  We would describe someone with ‘Fortitude’ as someone with “guts”.  Fortitude could well describe the thousands of Christian martyr’s each year, as well as the wife who will not divorce her husband, even as he betrays her, because of her sworn marriage vow to her husband and God.  You can not practice any of the other virtues for very long without bringing this one into play.   

There is one last point about virtues that needs to be noticed.  There is a difference between doing some just or temperate action and being a just or temperate person.  Someone who is not a good golfer, may every now and then make a good shot, but a good golfer ahs trained his eyes, muscles and nerves so that good shots may be relied on.  In the same way a person who preserves in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character.  It is that quality, rather than the particular actions that virtue applies to.  

This difference is important, for we might think that if you did the right thing, it did not matter how or why you did it – weather you did it willingly or unwillingly, through fear of public opinion or for its own sake.  The truth is that doing the right thing for the wrong reason does not build the internal quality of character called a ‘Virtue’, and it is the character that really matters. 

While it is probably true that there will not be any occasion for just or courageous acts in the next world, there will be every occasion for being the type of person that we can become only as a result of our actions here.  The point that I am making, is not that God will not allow you into Heaven, if you lack certain qualities of character; my point is, that if you did not get at least the beginnings of those qualities inside you, then there are no possible external conditions that could make you happy with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness that God intends for us in what we call Heaven.  

Examined Christian Faith 'Christianity vs Psychoanalysis' 3.2 - What is Christianity

Since I have now taken us into the area of morality, and since Christian morality claims to be a technique for putting the human right again, I think we should compare how it is related to another technique that makes similar claims – namely psychoanalysis.

When a person makes a moral choice two things are involved.  The first is the act of choosing, the second is the various feelings, impulses which his psychological makeup presents him with, and which are the raw material of his choice.  That material can either be one that we would call normal, in other words a feeling or emotion that are common to most people; or it is a feeling that is unnatural due to things that have gone wrong in his subconscious.   The fear of things that are really dangerous would be an example of the first, while an irrational fear of cats would be an example of the second.  Heterosexual feelings would be the first type, while homosexual feelings would be of the second; and so forth.  

Where psychoanalysis is designed to remove the abnormal feelings (to give the person better raw material for his acts of choice); morality is concerned with the acts of choice themselves.   Regardless of how much you improve the person’s raw material, you are left with something else: the free choice of the person, on the material presented to him or her, either to put his own self interest first or to put it last.  It is this free choice that morality is concerned with. 

What is important to realize is that human beings judge one another by their external actions; God judges them by their moral choices.  When a person who has been abused and perverted from his youth and taught that acts of violence is acceptable, does some tiny little act of kindness, or refrains from some violent retaliation against another, and thereby risks being insulted and ridiculed by his peers, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than I would do if I gave up my life for my daughter.

Put another way, some of us who seem to be very nice people may, in fact have done so little with a good upbringing and a godly heritage that we are really worst in God’s eyes, then those whom we regard as beneath us.   How certain are you of how you would behave if you had been saddled with  a horrible childhood, and thus  psychological scars, and then one day found yourself with the power of Stalin?  That is why Christians are instructed not to judge.

We see only the results that a person makes out of his raw material.  However God does not judge him on the raw material at all, only on what he has done with it.  When the body dies, and all that is left is that central core, that part of us that chose, that made the best or the worst of our material will be left standing before God, and we see everyone for who they really were.  There will be surprises.

Christian morality is not a kind of bargain in which God says, “If you keep a lot of the rules, I will reward you, and if you fail to, then I will punish you.”  Instead, it is more a matter of every time you make a choice you are turning that part of you that chooses into something a little different from what it was before.  If you take your life as a whole, with all your uncountable choices, all your life you are slowly turning into either a heavenly creature, or a hellish one; either into a creature that is in harmony with God or one that is in a state of war with Him.  Each of us at each moment of our lives is progressing in one direction or the other.

This then makes sense, when Christians talk about the importance of all sins, what Christians mean is that it is the action that leaves a mark on the tiny central self which none of us will see in this life, but each of us will have to endure forever.  One person may so misplace his anger that he kills another, while another misplaces his anger in such a manner that he only gets laughed at and scorned.  But the little mark on the soul may be nearly identical to both.  Each has done something to himself, which left unrepented will make it harder for him the next time, and so the cycle goes on forever.  Both of them if they turn to God and with Godly sorrow repent, can have that twist made straight, each of them is doomed if they will not.  The size of the thing as seen from the outside is not what really matters. 

That leaves me with one last point, the right direction leads not only to peace, but to knowledge.  When a person is getting better he understands more and sees more clearly the evil that is still in him.  When a person is getting worst, he understands his own wickedness less and less, a modernly bad man knows he is not very good, a truly wicked person thinks they are all right.  You see this played out in America  all the time,  the person who commits one act of adultery and repents from it knows they are wrong, the person who lives in a continuous state of adultery thinks there is nothing wrong with themselves.    

You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk.  Good people know about both good and evil; Immoral people do not know about either. 

Examined Christian Faith 'Morality' 3.1 What is Christainity

When I was a young boy, I remember our pastor calling all of the children to the front of the church to ask us what we thought God was like; my younger brother being much more vocal then the rest of us quickly replied that God must be the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is having fun and then He tries to stop it.   Sadly that is exactly the idea that the word 'Morality' brings to mind in the vast majority of adults; morality is something that stops you from having a good time.   In reality moral rules are the directions for running the human body. 

If you were like me and when you were first learning to drive a car, the instructor  kept saying, “No, don’t do it like that, do it like this”; because there were all sorts of things that looked all right and seemed to me the natural way of driving the car, but do not really work.  That same idea applies to the moral rules; every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain in running the human body.  That is why these rules at first glance seem to be constantly interfering with our natural desires.  

Morals are not an ‘idea’, and certainly not an ‘idealism’ that we should aspire to, no more then rules about driving a car are.  If while driving a car, I elect to ignore the rules, and drive without my lights on at night, eventually there are going to be consequences, in the same manner every moral failure is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself (even if you do not realize it for a very long time).  By talking about rules and obedience instead of ‘ideas’ and ‘idealism’ we help to remind ourselves of these facts. 

There are two ways that a human can go wrong, one is when the human individuals drift apart from one another, or collide with one another and do one another damage.  The other is when things go wrong inside the individual – when the different parts of the individual (his or her different desires, wants, etc. either drift apart or interfere with one another.   To give you an idea of how this works, if you were like me, as I was growing up, I learned how to play an instrument (the French horn); so think of all of humanity as a large band playing a song.  To get a good result two things are needed.  Each member of the band individual instrument must be in tune and each must also come in at precisely the right moment so as to combine with all the others.

But there is still one thing that we have not yet taken into account, all of the instruments might be in tune, and they might all come in at the right moment, however if the band was suppose to play the Christian hit song “I Can Only Imagine” by Mercy Me, but instead played George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone”; regardless of how well they played, it would be a disaster. 

Morality then is concerned with 3 things, first – with fair play, and harmony between individuals. Second – with cleaning up (keeping things in harmony inside each individual) and lastly, the general purpose of human life as a whole; what man was made for: or in other words, what tune the conductor (God) of the band wants it to play.

If you look about you, you will notice that everyone is nearly always thinking about the first thing and forgetting the other two.   Even when Christians talk about striving for moral standards, they usually mean that they are pursuing kindness and fair play between individuals, classes of people, and nations; all of which is concerned only with the first part of morality.   Not that it is entirely bad, as it is quite natural when we think of morality to begin with the first thing.  For one thing, the results of bad morality in that area are so obvious and press down on us everyday; lies, poverty, war, graft, adultery, and thievery.  There is very little disagreement about morality as long as you stick to the first thing. Almost everyone agrees (in theory anyway) that everyone should be honest, kind and helpful to one another.  However if we stop there, we might have not have any thought at all.  Unless we move on to the second thing – the cleaning up inside each individual- we are only deceiving ourselves. 

What good is it if all of the members of the band are coming in at the right moment, if they are each horribly out of tune?  What is the good of drawing up on paper, rules for behavior, if we know that in fact, our selfishness, greed,  anger, and cowardice are going to prevent us from keeping them?   What I mean is that all the thinking means nothing, unless we realize that noting but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make society work properly.  You cannot make me good by law; and without good men you cannot have a good society (including the society within the church).  That is why we must move on to the second thing; the morality of the individual. 

We could stop here, but if we did, while there would not be much disagreement, we still very well could be playing the wrong song.  This is the hard part, for religion involves a series of statements about facts, which are either true or false.  If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right song, if they are false quite a different conclusion will follow.   For example, if a person says that a thing can not be wrong unless it hurts some other being, he understands that he must not play his instrument when he should not, but he honestly thinks that if he keeps his own instrument in tune or not is his own business.  But does it make a difference if his instrument is his own property or not?  Does it matter if I am the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord?  If somebody else made me, for His own purposes, then I have a lot of duties that I would not have if I simply belong to myself.

If I only live for 80 to 100 years, then a city, a state, or nation that may last for a thousand years is more important then I am.  However, if Christianity is true, and all human being are going to live forever (either in Heaven or Hell) then the individual is not only more important, but incomparably more important, for he or she is everlasting, and the life of the state or civilization for that matter , compared to his is only for a moment.  

We must then think about all three areas when we think about morality; relations between man and man, things inside each man, and relations between man and the power that made him.  We can all cooperate (at least in theory) in the first one.  Disagreement’s always begin with the second and become very serious with the third.  It is the third that the primary differences in regards to morality, come out between Christians and non-Christians.  For the rest of this series I am going to look at the entire picture as it is seen from Christian point of view, as it will be if I am correct and Christianity is true.