One of the trump cards many atheists think they carry in the on-going god wars is the argument from moral governance. If, as has been asserted even here by me, God is love, why is evil permitted? The famous/infamous theodicy question is often used as an argument against the existence, at least of the "omni" God discussed below. It is also used to discredit the Biblical account of God because of divine complicity in everything from genocide to child murder (Elisha praying for bears to come out of the hills and kill children who had insulted him). Either way the argument from moral governance goes, it would seem God (god?) is found wanting.
Two things concerning this argument. It has become most popular in the modern era (although the ancients and medievals were aware of it), with the archetypical moment coming in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake when, seeking an explanation for the deaths of thousands, some enterprising persons put forth the proposition that those who died must have been guilty of some sin or other, otherwise they wouldn't have died. Never mind that the Book of Job discredited such simple-minded retributive justice, it would seem Voltaire's disgust was more popular than the fact that even some Christians thought the idea absurd. Since then, wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, floods, mass murders, and of course the genocidal insanity of the previous century - all seem to tally againt God.
What is the alternative offered? Why, rationality, of course. Let us look at the first consciously and conscientiously rational government - the French Revolutionary governments from 1789 until the Bonapartist coup. As more and more rational control was sought, then demanded, from redoing the calendar to the standardizing of clothing, to thinking thoughts - real freedom became more and more attenuated, because officially defined freedom was the norm. As the understanding of freedom applied was rationally determined, and rationality is open to all people, it can only be willful evil to resist the rational truths. Thus, these people are not only wrong, they are purposely wrong. There is nothing that can be done with them. Through such logic and thinking, perfectly rational, thousands died, the alst sight very often being their own beheaded bodies as their severed heads were shown to the crowds.
All one needs to do is read Lenin's works - especially The State and Revolution - to see the debt he owes to the French for his ability to rationalize away human life in pursuit of the revolutionary goal. He doesn't "faith" it away, or "believe" it away. He rationalizes it away - he reasons it away. How many millinos died as a result of such rationalization?
So much for rationality as an alternative to religion for moral governance. Or is it? The arguments are so familiar, and rehashed so often, that we tend to forget that, behind the words lie human lives, human bodies broken, burned, and buried in the name of some rational Truth. More than any "argument" that can be made concerning the question of the superiority of one set of moral values for governance over another, I am appalled at the lack of seriousness, and the refusal to acknowledge the reality that Reason's hands are no less bloody (and, by some reckoning, quite a bit more) than those of "unreasoning" faith. I say lack of seriousness because, as long as we continue to treat evil and its consequences as a problem to be solved, rather than a reality to be faced in new guises each and every day, we shall never get passed the "My argument is better than your argument" phase, and nothing will change and more and more people will die, or worse. In the endless pursuit to be right all the time, we forget that what is at stake is human life - human life that quite possibly could be saved if, rather than sit around and try to prove who is right and who is wrong, we actually did something about it.
In the end, any argument about the supriority or inferiority of one set of moral principloes for moral governance will fail because - human beings will fail. Rather than figure out beforehand what is and is not the correct way to order human personal and social life, perhaps we had better figure out how to fix the probelms we have, then fix the problems those fixes generate, and so on, and so on. We have to content ourselves with contingency, with limits, with the inevitability of failure and error. We have to be bold enough in the face of these realities to keep struggling, keep fighting to save just one life at a time, or maybe two, or maybe a hundred - it all depends on circumstances, I suppose - but we have to stop trying to be Right and start trying to live together.
