Operating under a double moral standard

These acts by different religions across history are what I would call a double moral standard. On one hand its ministries are the depositories of goodness, love, and justice for all, and on the other hand, they are a terror to humanity, both physically and psychologically.

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by Roberto Padilla/ translated by Sue Burke.

When humans came together in social groups, we needed to create laws to make it easier to live together. In antiquity, the political structure for each group of people lay in the divine authority of a priest-king who exercised civil and religious power. He was the intermediary between gods and humanity. Worldly law was deeply linked to divine law. At that time, the idea of sin was unknown. Failure to fulfill an agreed-upon obligation was considered an irresponsible act that harmed the person who had not complied, but the cosmic order was not perturbed by this misconduct. The wrongdoer had to redress the failure, usually by a payment of money or labor.

Back then, the law was initially of divine origin; kings, as representative of divine law before humanity, slowly began to dictate their own reforms so that laws established by the gods would be fulfilled. These “pastor” kings initially intended to protect the weak from the strong. The law was synonymous with justice and equity. Violating the law brought human and divine sanctions as consequences. The law was expressed by means of cause and effect: first there was a clear and concise formulation of the offending conduct and its precise consequence, and by being set in writing, it clarified the concept of licit and illicit, of moral and immoral. Here it would be good to ask what we mean by moral.

The word “moral” has its origin in the Latin term mos, moris, moralis, which means “custom.” It could also be defined as: the sum total of knowledge acquired regarding what was the highest, best, and most noble that a person might aspire to. The concepts and beliefs about morality are generalized and codified in a culture or group and serve to regulate the behavior of its members. Morality is also identified with religious or ethical principals or values that a community has agreed to respect. Paul Faulquié defines morality as: “the informed theory of good and evil.”

I bring all this up because two weeks ago I was at home trying to rest after some difficult days that we’d gone through here in the church, and the night before, on Friday, I’d told myself: on Saturday morning I’m going to get up as late as I can, eat breakfast, and go back to sleep for the rest of the morning and the entire afternoon. But as the Mexican refrain says: God proposes, we dispose ourselves, then the Devil comes and discomposes everything. On Saturday I awoke early and could not go back to sleep no matter how hard I tried. Then, after many vain attempts, I got up, and since I was hungry, I went downstairs to eat breakfast, firmly intending to return to the comfort of my bed and sleep until afternoon the way I used to when I was a teenager.

During breakfast, with the remote control in hand, I began to search for something to watch on TV while I ate. I looked for a program where I wouldn’t have to pay attention, think, or do anything, just something to make noise while I ate. But the usual happened: my plan failed spectacularly because I found a channel with a debate about the California Supreme Court decision regarding marriage between people of the same sex, and of course I was hooked.

One of the participants in the debate was a Christian minister who said, Bible in hand, that marriage between people of the same sex was unnatural and must be prohibited because God’s idea is that marriage must only take place between a man and a woman. He opened the Bible and quickly read a couple of passages. A Catholic priest, who was also there, supported the minister, saying that these kinds of unions were immoral. In favor of the court’s decision was a leader from the gay community who said the court’s decision spoke of human rights, the rights we all must have without regard to color, race, sex, socioeconomic condition, or sexual preference.

The moderator pointed out that this country has a separation between church and state, and a legal decision cannot be disputed on the basis of religion.

The Catholic priest answered by saying that laws were made by God and our only choice is to obey them.

When the program was over, I thought that a great deal had been said about morality, about what the Bible says, about what God said and did not say, about how we must obey to the divine word, but those men of religion had not spoken about human rights.

Last Sunday I began my sermon by saying that God had told Adam and Eve to multiply, and because we humans are very obedient to the word of God, we have multiplied to the point where there are now more than six billion people in the world, which creates many environmental problems. Yes, we humans are very obedient to the word of God, but do we really obey or do we obey only when it’s convenient for us? Here’s where my mind returns to a question I’ve asked previously. Is human essence good? Or is its essence evil? Is our concept of good and evil something that should be redefined, or have we defined it according to what we are, or according to what we all want to believe about ourselves, or according to what each one of us as individuals wants to believe? Do we really function as a moral society, or do we fool ourselves with a double morality?

If we really took the words of God seriously, as many Christian ministers and Catholic priests boast, human history would have been very different. For example, our politicians lie to us with words that are as pretty as they are cynical. The Bible tells us: Thou shalt not kill nor bear false witness. If we always obeyed the word of God, George Bush wouldn’t have accused Saddam Hussein of possessing weapons of mass destruction or having links to the terrorist group Al Qaeda. To this day, Bush’s declarations remain unconfirmed, along with the supposed imminent threat to all humanity. But what has resulted from this lie are the deaths of thousands of Iraqis and American soldiers. Is Mr. Bush’s conduct really moral and in keeping with the laws of God?

Well, all right, but this is politics, a worldly concern — many religious leaders would say who oppose marriage between persons of the same sex — and we’re talking about religion, about what’s good for society, what’s moral, what God tells us we must do.

The Bible also says: Thou shalt not commit impure acts. I wonder about this. If the Catholic Church were really as obedient to the word of God as they want us to believe, it wouldn’t be paying many millions of dollars in hush money to all the children and adolescents who were raped by pederast priests, those custodians of truth, morality, faith, rectitude, and divine law. And what can be said about the many Christian ministers who have become rich overnight thanks to donations from their congregations, ministers who are actors truly worthy of an Oscar, who use faith to lie, steal, and mislead their congregants merely to obtain personal economic gain.

If we tried to bear witness to the influence of religion on human lives, we wouldn’t have to look far. The history of religion, especially monotheistic religions, is the history of continuous and multifaceted crimes against humanity. The spectrum of outrages committed in the name of God is spectacular: from the call to faith itself to genocide, including all kinds of deceit, abuse, persecution, intolerance, theft, xenophobia, rape, fraud, martyrdom, complicity with tyrannies, and campaigns to shame the human body, pleasure, humor, and individual differences. Religions have been able to emerge as the principal bearers of hope only because they have been the principal promoters of terror. They really are the all-time terrorists. Divine violence has been manifest at every level, from domestic to historic, but in all cases the nucleus of religious atrocity is the same.

These acts by different religions across history are what I would call a double moral standard. On one hand its ministries are the depositories of goodness, love, and justice for all, and on the other hand, they are a terror to humanity, both physically and psychologically.

We Unitarian Universalists have our defects, too. We can’t escape that. But we are aware of our failures and don’t hide behind a double moral standard. The Unitarian Universalist faith asks no one to be, think, or believe in a certain way. Here we can be, believe, think, and present ourselves the way we really are without the fear of being criticized or judged. Unitarian ministers don’t enrich themselves selling eternal pardon because we don’t believe in sin or Hell. We believe that we all have the ability by ourselves, just as we are, to achieve salvation. Unitarian Universalists do not exploit people by means of faith. For Unitarian Universalists, “power” isn’t in ministers or in religion, “power” is in each one of us as human beings.

We have seven principals that we believe in, and we believe in them not because we are obliged to or extorted by the terror of damnation to Hell. We believe in them because we are a thinking people, we are a people who believe in justice for all, regardless of color, sex, economic or social status, language, or sexual orientation, and because we believe in the worth and dignity of every person, as the first of our Unitarian Universalist principals tells us.

It’s true that we Unitarian Universalists make many mistakes as persons, but we don’t hypocritically proclaim throughout this world that we are the gateway to Heaven and the depository of absolute truth.

If two people of the same sex wish to marry and be protected by law like heterosexual couples, this is not an issue for religion, it’s an issue of equality, it’s an issue of social justice, it’s an issue of human rights. God does not operate under a double moral standard; only we humans do. God does not condemn love; only humans condemn it by means of certain religions.

Dr. Roberto Padilla is a member of the First Unitarian Church of San Jose, California.