The Tenth New Commandment:

Thou Shalt Not Worship

(at least as the Religious Right does)

Listen to this: "A cultist is one who has a strong belief in the Bible and the second coming of Christ; who frequently attends bible studies; who has a high level of financial giving to a Christian cause; who home schools their children; who has accumulated survival foods and has a strong belief in the Second Amendment; and who distrusts big government. Any of these may qualify a person as a cultist, but certainly more than one of these would cause us to look at this person as a threat, and his family as being in a risk situation that qualified for government interference." [Italics mine.] --Janet Reno in an interview on 60 Minutes, June 26, 1994.

So if you frequently attend Bible studies and you distrust big government, you were looked at by Janet Reno, the United States Attorney General, as a threat, which qualifies for government interference. Or if you have a strong belief in the Bible and you home school your children, "certainly" you are a threat qualifying for government interference. Remember this was the person who torched the Branch Davidians at Waco--and who, remained the head of the law enforcement of our nation during practically his whole term. Do you wonder why I said at the beginning that Clinton was a good example of a New Moralist? (That same Bill Clinton, by the way, proposed in his last State of the Union Giveaway--excuse me, message--that the army be unleashed as an "anti-terrorism" measure to engage in civilian law enforcement. But is this part of what it means by "terrorism"? Before you laugh, think carefully about that Waco business, and call to mind the picture of little Elian looking down the barrel of a rifle. Cubans in this country, by and large, are Catholics.)

The New Morality, you see, is extremely serious about this last New Commandment, don't kid yourself. There is a genuine fear that the Religious Right is going to try to grab power and start imposing Fundamentalist Christian Morals on everybody--and undo all the "progress" the Irreligious Left has made in imposing the New Morality on all and sundry. What do you think the inquisition of John Ashcroft was all about? It's one thing to give up a New Moralist Attorney General, but it's quite another to have her replaced by a fervent Christian.

I mentioned that one of the main motives for the fanatical defense of Bill Clinton (who, one would think, alienated at one time or another his whole constituency, except perhaps for the pro-abortionists) was to prevent the Religious Right from scoring a victory by his removal from office. There were a lot of people who found him a disgrace, but if the alternative was that the Religious Right would win something, there was no contest.

It's this fear of Christians imposing Christian morality on the country is why you hear everywhere the canard that the wars and persecutions in the world all have a religious, and especially a Fundamentalist base; that it's religious fanatics who make all the trouble and who are the real threat to peace and tranquillity, just as they have been throughout history. And the Christians are the worst.

--Excuse me? I didn't know that it was the Christians who threw the Romans to the lions. And look at when this is being said: at the end of the Twentieth Century, without question the bloodiest in history. And the source of the blood? Hitler, an atheist; Stalin, another atheist; Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and our friend Zhang Zemin, good atheists all. There has been more blood shed in the precise name of godlessness than in the name of God--and the reason is that people kill people because they hate them, and hate (as we can see from the reaction of the Clintonistas to pussycats like Henry Hyde and Kenneth Starr--I hear a New Moralist scream of rage at the epithet) is by no means monopolized by those who follow the Jesus who preached love.

In fact, many of the "religious" wars and persecutions adduced as evidence of how noxious religion is to peace are as much political as religious. It's more of an accident than anything else that Catholics are fighting Protestants in Northern Ireland; it just happens that the nationalist loyalists are Catholic, and those in favor of union with England are Protestants. Anyone with a grain of sense knows this. The same is true of the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in what used to be Yugoslavia; it's as much ethnicity as it is religion.

There's also the minor point that Christianity as such is irenic, not bellicose; Jesus is the "prince of peace," after all, and he was the one who gave the command to turn the other cheek when you were slapped. So if there are wars "in the name of" Christianity--and there have been, I'm not trying to say there haven't--these wars are inconsistent with the principles the fighting is supposed to uphold.

Still, plenty of the New Moralists take the slander as obviously true, and never bother to look it in the eye. Why should they? The New Prophets trumpet it from the rooftops in season and out of season.

Permissible religion.

Now wait a minute! Bill Clinton is shown on TV coming out of church with a Bible in his hand. So New Moralists aren't anti-Christian. That's very true; they're not. They're anti-fanatical, right-wing, fundamentalist, self-righteous, impose-your-lifestyle-on-everyone-else, intolerant, bigoted, sexist, racist, homophobe Christians. Christians as such are okay; it's the Old Moralist Christians who are a menace. But Christianity is just fine; Jesus stood for love and tolerance and forgiveness and acceptance and environmentalism and the Right to Choose and freedom from oppression and all those nice things (though you have to do a little searching to find "environmentalism" and abortion among the parables--possibly the lost sheep or the lilies of the field or letting the tares grow along with the wheat--and maybe "if your eye is a stumbling block, pluck it out" for abortion). And, according to Luke, he really socked it to the rich and greedy. Jesus was the first New Moralist; the fundamentalists have got him all wrong.

And this, of course, is what is insidious about the New Morality; it's superficially in many ways so very like Christianity. With just a little adjusting, you can fit Christianity into it rather comfortably. And after all, the sexual stuff was beaten over the head by Paul, not Jesus--and we know that Paul was a sex-crazed fanatic, probably worse than Ken Starr. But Jesus himself had very little to say about it. (There is that uncomfortable passage about divorce; but then again, everybody knows the eye-plucking business wasn't meant to be taken literally, so we can safely ignore this--especially since Matthew provides a loophole, and so the original Jesus could have made all sorts of other qualifications. And probably did, if we know Jesus--and we do, the real Jesus, the guru, not this God-man nonsense.)

And have you noticed how many Christian churches have swallowed the sexual aspect of the New Morality hook, line, and sinker? "Sexism" is a far greater sin than sodomy in most mainline Christian denominations nowadays; they're much more interested in not using masculine pronouns referring to God (they get nervous using them, for some reason, even referring to Jesus) than they are in little details like homosexual intercourse, divorce, and adultery--at least if the spouse is kept up to speed on it--and if you bother to mention contraception, you're laughed to scorn right in the pew; and as for abortion, you're in danger of being thrown out bodily. These are the "mainline" Christian churches, the ones who regard themselves as where Christianity really is at.

In these churches, you will find that what they believe in is what Jesus "stood for," rather than those inconvenient legends about resurrection, heaven and especially hell (You know, "God loves people too much to send anyone to hell forever."), walking on water, raising the dead, and so on. Those, of course, are meaningful if properly understood, as metaphors, but you can't take them literally, for heaven's sake. All religions have things like this, and Christianity is no different; you have to see behind the imagery to what is being expressed by the hyperbolic language.

So there's no problem with Christianity; Jesus stood for the right things; and so, if you want to go to church and feel good about yourself--pardon, your "soul"--go ahead; we don't care if you do that, or whether you consult your horoscope (as long as you don't use it like Nancy Reagan to suggest policy to the President) or even if you talk to Eleanor Roosevelt. What the hell; some sports figures don't change their socks when they won the game in them either. All that's harmless; it's the values that count.

Once you say that, of course, then Christianity becomes anything you want it to be. Who nowadays holds (for that matter, who ever held) that if you looked at someone and the look tempted you to lust, then you actually should pluck out your eye and throw it away? Who today holds that once you get married, the only thing that ends it is death? (Even Matthew, who has the loophole "except in the case of whorishness," has Jesus say that anyone who marries a divorced woman is committing adultery--which leads Peter to remark, "Then it doesn't make sense to get married." They saw the implications even then.) Who will actually give his shirt to someone who takes his coat, or let a person slap him twice?

So Christianity becomes "social justice," never mind that the term that's translated "justice" really means "virtue"; the ancients had no notion of rights as we do. Consequently, sexism and racism are sins, even though Jesus himself said to the Syro-Phoenician woman, "It isn't right to take the children's food and throw it to dogs" (meaning, "I shouldn't be curing your kid, you goy"). That remark would have cost him his pulpit if he'd been a present-day mainstream Christian.

And the purpose of Christianity as transformed by the New Morality? Why, feeling good about yourself, of course. Christianity proves that God loves you, which means you're worth something. (The fact, of course, that there really isn't a God is a detail; the point is the values, remember, not the legendary stuff. And here, what matters is that you matter.) And your sins are forgiven--which means, when all is said and done, that they weren't sins in the first place. You didn't sin; as Paul says, it was the sin inside you that did it; you couldn't help it, so why should you suffer for it? (The fact that Paul stresses the fact that you will suffer for it if you don't reform is, of course, conveniently overlooked.)

The idea is that once you've got into the essence of Christianity, you're forgiven because you didn't really mean it: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Bill didn't really mean to do any harm to Monica--in fact, he didn't do any--or to Hillary, or to Chelsea, or anyone else; so why should he be persecuted? He couldn't help it; it was just one of those things.

And, insofar as you're into the essence of Christianity, you're tolerant. How many times have we heard during the past year, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone," and "Judge not lest ye be judged"? And how the people who quote these lines judge the judgers! How quick they are to cast stones at the casters! But isn't this intolerance? Not at all. Intolerant people are evil and should be hated.--Oops! We've slipped on this slope all the way from pseudo-Christianity to the New Morality, haven't we?

But see, New Morality-type tolerance (with its consequent intolerance of the intolerant--that is, of the Old Morality) is Christian in this version of Christianity, because if you really get the values of Christianity, you realize that you can't condemn anyone else for sinning without having to look into yourself and maybe admit that you might have sinned too--but then, where's your "forgiveness" in the New Morality sense? You're "forgiven" in this version of Christianity only if there wasn't any sin in the first place. You can't undo the past, not really; and so if you really had sinned, if you really meant it, and it wasn't just "The devil made me do it," then you deserve to feel bad about yourself--and that's out of the question. Christianity is about love and tolerance and forgiveness, and that means first and foremost forgiving yourself.

How often have we heard that? Somebody has an abortion and then begins to think, "Gee, maybe I shouldn't have done that," and is told, "The Christian thing is to deal with it; grieve over your loss [note carefully the "your" loss], and learn to forgive yourself; you're a good person, and if you made a mistake, put it behind you and move on." Like Lyle Menendez; you're an orphan now that you shot Mommy and Daddy full of holes. Grieve over your loss, and learn to forgive yourself. You're a good kid; move forward and bring out the goodness, and put the past behind you. New Moralist Christians are quite adept at this; it only took a weekend for Jesse Jackson to put his adultery behind him.

And why do we hear "Put it behind you" ad nauseam. Because it's the New Morality way of dealing with personal sin. Put it behind you. Explain it away; excuse it; and then forget it; it wasn't the real you. Remember, according to Freud, guilt is feeling guilty; so if you don't feel guilty, you aren't. The fact that you ruined someone's life isn't important; if you don't feel guilty about it, you're home free. You're redeemed. Forgiven. Jesse Jackson's kid will get along; after all, look at all the other kids nowadays that don't have a Mommy and Daddy there all the time.

Isn't that wonderful? Doesn't it make life meaningful? I mean, we've all done things that we don't want to think about, and so forgiveness means let's nobody think about them--if I don't think about them, why should you?--and let's concentrate on the positive, and move forward and bring about the just society, where we put flowers in the rifles and copulate on the meadows, just like Woodstock. We're good, not evil; it's the Religious Right that persists in thinking that evil exists; it's the idea that people do evil that's evil.

I mean, the essence of Christianity is, "Love thy neighbor as thyself," isn't it? (Actually, it isn't. That's Leviticus. The Christian new commandment is "Love each other as I have loved you," which turns out to be very, very different; are you willing to be crucified for someone when you get nothing whatever out of it?) But if we're supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves, then isn't the first task to love ourselves? And how can we do this if we think of ourselves as evil? You see? Christianity is incompatible with sin. And anyway, Paul says that Christians aren't subject to the Law; so we can forget about the Ten Commandments (especially the one Ted Turner wants to abolish, against adultery)--and replace them, naturally, with the Ten New Commandments.

I hear some people saying, "Oh, come off it! As if what you're describing isn't Christianity!" Ah, but it's been transmogrified into the New Morality. Since there isn't any truth, the New Morality can define anything to be whatever it says it is. It all depends on what "is" is, remember.

Of course, this notion that Christianity's "redemption from sin" means that there wasn't a sin there in the first place doesn't mean that institutions can't sin, particularly Big Business, and any institution, really, that promotes values antithetical to this feel-good wishy-washy pap that you find preached so often in these mainline Christian churches.

But you get the picture. The values of Jesus are (or turn out to be, once they're updated to the circumstances of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries) the values of the New Morality. And so it's perfectly all right to keep the trappings of Christianity--especially in this transition period, when the unwashed still don't get it--as long as we see into its true essence, which is the New Morality. Later, when everybody wakes up, we can do away with the stained glass and the altars and the funny collars and all those other vestiges of the barbaric age Jesus so presciently foresaw the end of.

The uniqueness of Christianity.

Here's my answer to the cries of outrage against what I just said. I don't care how many people who call themselves Christians nowadays hold something like what I've been outlining. The problem with all of it is that in Christianity it's precisely that the values aren't what's primary. And that's what makes Christianity unique among religions--and it's one of the reasons why the reality of Christianity is hated by the New Moralists.

In all other religions except Christianity--at least except the Christianity that existed up to the recent past--what is important and what is believed in is the values the religious leader taught (what he "stood for"), not the facts about his life. Confucians, for instance, believe in tradition and respect for others; Hindus and Buddhists believe in getting free of the cares of the world (I know, I know, I'm oversimplifying)--and it doesn't matter whether you believe that in fact there's some kind of God or not--Muslims believe in worshiping Allah and following his moral code. But the details of the life of Confucius himself, or the life of the Buddha, or even of Muhammad, may be interesting, but are only peripherally relevant, insofar as these people were exemplars of the lifestyle the religion seeks to inculcate. (For instance, there's the slight difficulty that Muhammad had more than four wives, though the Kuran says four is the limit; but no Muslim has any real problem with this. Who Muhammad was and what he did are not of the essence of the religion, really, at all. He was a prophet of the religion, not what the religion is about.)

But if you look at the Apostle's Creed, which is a statement of the basics of what Christians believe in (or did before it became the New Morality with a pulpit, as I said), what you find is this: That there is one God, who created everything visible and invisible, and is somehow Father, Son, and Spirit, that the Son actually became a human being, that he was born of a virgin, that he was crucified at the order of Pontius Pilate for our sins, that he died, was buried, and on the third day rose again from the dead and is now in heaven, and that he will come again to judge the living and the dead, and that his kingdom will never end, that our sins are forgiven, that our bodies will come back to life on the last day, and that they will live forever.

Where is "turn the other cheek" in all of this, or "love your neighbor as yourself," or "judge not lest you be judged," or any of the other values of Christianity? The values are not what Christians believe in; what they believe in are the facts, and that they are facts; the values follow from the facts, but it's the facts that are the actual object of the belief.

As St. Paul said to Corinthian sophisticates who were doing just what the New Moralist Christians of our time are doing, and claiming that the resurrection business is meaningful but you can't take it literally, "If Christ did not come back to life, your faith is meaningless; you still have your sins, and we turn out to be perjurers before God, because we gave sworn testimony that Jesus came back to life--which he didn't do if corpses don't get up and walk around." He said this around the year 57, right at the beginning of the whole Christian movement, to nip precisely the "meaningful legend" interpretation in the bud. He said, "We saw him after he'd died; there are still a lot of us still alive who saw him, and you can ask them if you don't believe me."

On this view of Christianity, the New Morality is right in that you can't undo what you've done. But what the religion is really all about is that, instead of saying that therefore, you have to redefine what you did into something acceptable so that you can live with yourself, Christianity says that, though you can't unmess the mess you've made of your life, God will do it for you because of the willing sacrifice Jesus made for us by allowing himself to be crucified. That act, somehow or other, will, when applied to us, remove the sinfulness from the sins we have committed (though it doesn't reverse the actual act as such), and so we won't have to suffer eternally for it. Consequences of the act in this life will follow the laws of nature; the consequences of the choice in the life after death are what is erased.

But in order to believe this, you have to believe that it's a fact that your life will go on after death, and because of the mess you've made of it, that afterlife is going to be unendingly miserable, and there's nothing you can do about it. So you also have to believe that there's a God, and a God who is willing to undo the mess, at least as far as the afterlife is concerned, and that the evidence of this is connected somehow with the miraculous return to life of Jesus after he had been crucified. If, as Paul says, he didn't come back to life, then the whole thing is a waste of time, because "redemption from sin" just means the New Morality sophistry of explaining the sin away as if it's really not so bad after all. Redemption in Christianity is not therapy; it's a miracle.

Christianity has its appeal because there are too many people who can't adopt the First New Commandment, who think there are such things as facts, and who know that in fact they've done things that are reprehensible, damaging, and, irreparable by any human agency. Evil is not confined to institutions; people commit evil; and anyone who has an ounce of objectivity knows that he's done evil, evil that he can't undo.

But the New Morality is seductive, of course, because, like the serpent, it claims that if you buy into it, you are like gods, knowing what good and evil really are (or rather, being able to decree what's good and what's evil--what else does "autonomy" mean?); and it sounds so much like what Christianity preaches that if you leave out all the stuff about God and his miraculously erasing the sinfulness of sin because of a crucified man who stood up and started walking around scaring people by showing them holes in his hands and side, then you can have it all and not be bothered by sin.

Which leaves only the insignificant problem that the sin's really still there, and didn't go away.

That is, Bill Clinton might have been able to bamboozle the lawyers and the Senators with his definitions of "alone" and "is," but can he really believe that what he did was okay, and all the damage was because of the System? Maybe he can, at that. It's amazing how much guilt the System can absorb; the Jewish scapegoat is nothing in comparison. He did want the Republicans to apologize, after all.

But this is why, of course, you can't be a New Moralist and live in the real world. Remember how I talked about a nation in denial. New Moralists say that they're the ones who live in the real world, but they can't look realistically at their lives and still feel good about themselves--and you have to deal with your feelings, after all, or what's the point of living?

Exactly. What's the point? When you analyze evolution and its moral code, the New Morality, there is no point (it's all chance, remember)--and therefore feeling good is all these people have. Which is why, for the New Moralist mentality, meaninglessness is the meaning.

Why Catholicism is especially hated.

Which brings us to the real enemy of the New Morality: Catholicism. Other versions of Christianity aren't anywhere near the problen Catholicism is. They may talk about the truth, but when all is said and done, they're not as committed to a determined set of facts as Catholicism is. What was behind the Protestant reformation was that Scripture alone would lead you to heaven, and it was your own interpretation of Scripture that was guided by the Holy Spirit to get you there. You didn't need some priest or Pope to tell you what Scripture said; the Holy Spirit spoke through the Word of God directly to your heart.

Now granted, there are plenty of Protestants who hold to the death the factuality of what they believe; but still, in the basis of sola fides, sola scriptura (faith alone, Scripture alone), there's the implication of personal interpretation as the guide to heaven. After all, if Scripture is the only thing outside ourselves that we've got to go on, and there's no institution telling us what the words of that book are supposed to mean (which is what removing oneself from the control of the organized church implies), and Jesus in his Holy Spirit is supposed to be with us "all days until the end of the world," then each of us has a hot line to the Spirit himself (faith).

So if two Christians contradict each other about whether the Communion bread is really the Body of Christ ("Do this to remind yourselves of me," "Don't you realize that if you eat this bread without recognizing that it is the body you are eating your doom?" etc.), or is a symbolic reminder of the sacrifice of Jesus, who is to decide between them? Evidently, the Spirit is guiding one through one interpretation, and another through another.

--Which means, as I said, that objective truth doesn't really matter; it's whether you're saved or not that matters. And it's all too easy to make this mean that you're saved if you feel saved.

Put these two together, and you get a bias against accepting an objective truth that's true for everybody, plus feelings as the guide to finding out whether your truth is really the truth for you. This, in fact, with its consequent tolerance of other sects as "just as good," is a remote source of the New Morality--and since in America, various denominations had to live together, this kind of accommodation, all too easy on Protestant principles, is fertile ground for the New Morality to sprout in. You go from one church to another, depending on what you "feel comfortable with," what you "get the most out of," and so on. What the church teaches doesn't matter half so much as how you feel about God and yourself and your salvation. So there's no real problem for the New Morality here. You decide whether what this or that church teaches is true; and so you're not learning, you're sitting in judgment on the facts, and it's you who make them the facts, in the last analysis. They're "facts for you," and we're right smack in the middle of the First New Commandment.

But when Catholics go to Mass, they believe that they're participating in the crucifixion: making it present, as it were, to our age, so that it can apply to those here and now. It's not a question of "what I get out of it," but "what I have to put into it." And Catholics have from the beginning held that the religion consists of a known body of facts, and that these facts can't change, because they're what happened, what is, and that the church Jesus founded was founded with the precise purpose of seeing to it that the facts, while maybe better understood over time, never got distorted or contradicted by human interpretations and investigations of them.

I'm afraid I have to qualify this, because even Catholics, as opposed to the Catholic Church, have been heavily affected by the New Morality. There are plenty of Catholics who are for practical purposes Protestants and who still show up for Mass when they feel like it (and who think that that Commandment that you go to hell if you don't come every Sunday is something that can be safely ignored. God loves us too much to send us to hell for sleeping late). There are plenty of Catholics who directly repudiate what the Catholic Church teaches, because they "feel comfortable with" the ritual and so on. But these aren't Catholics, because Catholicism is a "community of believers," and the believers are believers, as I said, in a set of facts, not a set of values, except as following from these facts.

Catholics--that is, those who do submit to the teaching of the Church--also hold that what is true is in fact true, and true for everyone, Catholic and non-Catholic alike; and if someone doesn't believe something that is in fact true, he is mistaken--often sincerely mistaken, but objectively mistaken. People might be saved in spite of sincere adherence to a mistake, but that doesn't make it not a mistake; it's just that God takes into account our human fallibility.

But what they have never held is that, in spite of this, the truth (in the sense of what the fact actually is) doesn't really matter, or that something can be true for one person or system and false for another person or in another system. This was really a large part of the Galileo controversy. The Church was investigating, among other things, whether Galileo held that it was "theologically" true that the sun went around the earth, and simultaneously "scientifically" true that the earth went around the sun. The Church put its foot down. One or the other of these is false; they can't both be true.

That is, the Catholic Church holds that what is known as true by faith is always somehow compatible with what is known by any other method of investigation; and so the Church has never shied away from scientific investigation, and has a whole body of rational thought and empirical study that, while not "canonized," so to speak, by the Church, has met with the Church's approval, and which has been used by Catholic theologians to show how Catholicism and science are not incompatible and in fact mutually reinforce each other.

Sure, the science the Church adopted has been mistaken over the years, and sure, the wedding of theological interpretation to what seemed to be scientifically established fact has led occasionally to pig-headedness (and yes, even persecution); but the point is that the Church holds that what the Church holds by faith as true is compatible with what science knows from investigation is true. If there seems to be a conflict, then it's only apparent, and deeper study of both the science and the religion will reveal that there isn't any real contradiction.

To a non-Catholic, all this is idiocy. The Pope sits up there on his throne decreeing X, Y, and Z to be the truth, as if the truth could be established by decree; and based on this, he decrees that certain things are moral and others are immoral--and that everyone, Catholic or not, should agree with him because he's got this divine insight into the real reality of things, and is right because he's infallible, not because the facts say he's right. For instance, Pope John Paul II says that women can't be priests (not that they may not, but that they can not; that is, that it is a physical impossibility for them to be), and declares that he can't change this edict, because it's out of his hands; it's part of the "deposit of faith," and there's nothing he can do about it. If he were to attempt to "ordain" a woman, he wouldn't be able to carry it out.

This drives New Moralists so far up the wall they crash into the ceiling. Who the hell is he to say that women aren't worthy to be priests, and to declare, "I have spoken, the case is closed forever"? His answer is, "Who am I? Nobody. Who am I to say that the earth is not flat? Nobody. But in fact the earth is not flat, and I can't say it is and make sense. It's out of my hands. Who am I to say that women can't be priests? Nobody. If you don't believe that this is something analogous to the earth's being round, I'm sorry; but that's the way it is. I simply can't declare the opposite. I mean, if you want to be a priest and you're a woman, then don't be a Catholic. You can be saved in spite of your mistake; I'm not sending you to hell. But facts are facts, whether you like them or not, and I simply can't change the facts to suit your preference or even your sincerely mistaken belief."

It's because of this attitude that Catholicism is The Enemy. It claims to have a grasp on some facts that no one will ever be able to prove aren't facts--and that goes directly counter to the First New Commandment. You can't be sure of anything; anything is subject to refutation. (Even "You can't be sure of anything"? Even "Anything is subject to refutation"? If it is, it isn't.) And to say that moral absolutes follow from these "facts," means that moral absolutes apply to everybody, even the "sincerely mistaken," whether they realize it or not--which implies that the "sincerely mistaken" should be educated out of their ignorance into--Catholicism! God save us!--I mean, Evolution save us!

(I might remark that as a philosopher, I have spent a good deal of my life trying to show that one or another tenet of the Catholic Church is a contradiction and therefore impossible; and I haven't been able to do it. I certainly can show that you can't prove by observable evidence that many of them are true. But by the same token, I haven't been able to prove that any of them can't be true. And some things, like that there is a God, can in fact be proved from observable evidence.

I also did a study to try to establish if the Biblical stories about Jesus could be explained as legendary accretions to the life of a remarkable man. The problem with this hypothesis is that it predicts that the earliest view of Jesus would be the guru who taught wise things, and only after several generations would people begin to believe the fantastic tales of multiplying bread, walking on water, getting up from the grave, and so on. But when you look at the documents, the earliest ones--the letters of Paul--are all about the "Christ of faith," with almost nothing about the enigmatic statements like "turn the other cheek," and these documents are known to be written in the Fifties, far too soon for legends to be believed as facts. And Paul is adamant that they are facts, and that he has eye-witnesses to prove it.)

But, of course, New Moralists have lots of company in their reaction to the arrogance of Catholicism. Protestants absolutely bristle at the notion Catholics have that they're "sincerely mistaken" (though not as mistaken as, say, Buddhists or even atheists). The hubris! Ecrasez l'infame! Besides, the Catholic position is stupid. I mean, to say that Jesus has got a gag that he's going to shove into some Pope's mouth as soon as that Pope tries to say something contrary to what Jesus holds is true--I mean, what is Jesus, some kind of God or something?--Oh.

And look at them, walking around in skirts that aren't even plaid, and wearing their collars backward, and having those funny hats and then on Sunday getting all dressed up like Superman in silken capes and things and doing hocus-pocus and claiming that they made a piece of bread into a living human being (though it still looks and feels exactly like bread, surprise!), and hearing people tell them all their sins and claiming they can forgive them, and all the rest of it. I mean, how could anybody believe this?

Exactly.

But there's still that inconvenient little fact that if Christianity isn't true--and, certain Evangelicals notwithstanding, Catholicism is a form of Christianity, even more "fundamental" in many ways than the Fundamentalist version--you still have your sins, and so you should either kill yourself or mentally do the same thing and redefine yourself and your world into the New Morality feel-good dream world.

Put it this way: Catholicism is what you would logically expect if Christianity is objectively true, and isn't just a "way of life." And it is this that makes Catholicism the Great Satan for the New Morality; it must be ridiculed out of existence; and if it can't be destroyed by ridicule, then in the last analysis, we'll just have to get rid of it any way we can.

Notice how New Moralists turn the other way at reports of religious persecution, especially Catholic persecution, throughout the world. It's like the loyalist Argentines during the period of the "dirty war," when people just disappeared. It's unfortunate, but it has to be done somehow. So Catholics are getting killed and enslaved in Africa and China, it's not really happening, and if it is, it's not so bad as people make it out to be, and anyway even if it is that bad, it's only self-defense against what would be far worse if these people ever got into power (as you can see from the atrocities inside Vatican City, for example?). A world in denial.

Notice one little thing before I leave this. Isn't it interesting that the Catholic Church is practically the only institution that hasn't budged an inch in its official position on sexuality? In fact, Pope Paul VI predicted in that encyclical Humanae Vitae that dealt with contraception that if contraception caught on, the ills that are so manifest nowadays would inevitably ensue.

Of course, since sex is the very essence of the evolutionizing organism, then that's the main reason why Catholicism has to be destroyed. But it does make you sit back and think, doesn't it, if you happen to hold that all sex all the time in as many forms as possible might have something in fact wrong with it, that this institution, which claims to have a lock on what the actual facts are, is about the only one which hasn't leaped onto the New Morality bandwagon to a greater or lesser degree.

To sum up.

But before we get into the epilogue, and talk about the real issue that emerges from all of this, let's take stock of where we are.

If you're going to accept that human beings evolved just by chance because the organisms best adapted to their environment were able to reproduce more, then logically speaking you have to be a New Moralist. You have to believe that reason isn't something special that's oriented toward the way the world actually is (the facts, or truth), but is merely the device which makes us reproductively efficient.

Hence, you hold the First New Commandment, that there's no truth anyhow, and so no one (least of all Catholics) should lay claim to it. You also necessarily hold the Second New Commandment that no one should force his morals on anyone else--and you have to ignore the fact that this very Commandment violates itself when you try to force others not to force their morals on anyone else when they believe they have an obligation to do so. And from this follows the Third New Commandment, that we must be tolerant of all lifestyles--except that of fundamentalists and Catholics in particular, or of anyone, like Bill Gates, who violates some other one of the New Commandments.

And, of course, since the driving force of evolution is sex, then sexual activity must not be restricted in any way, and we have the Fourth New Commandment; and the Fifth immediately follows, that the only thing that is to be curtailed in sex is the inconvenient consequence that it tends to result in that great polluter, a child, if you don't do something about it. And, of course, this implies the Sixth New Commandment, that the environment is bigger than we are, and we must, like good organisms, cooperate in advancing the environment first and ourselves as members of it.

And since we are really nothing special, we must not extol reason as if it made us distinctive and "superior" to everything else, because that would be discriminatory, and thus the Seventh New Commandment follows. And making a profit is one of the most discriminatory things that can be done, and so we have the Eighth New Commandment, not to be greedy. And the cord that ties all this together is the Ninth New Commandment, not to do what is unhealthy, because what are we but living organisms just like every other one? And so violation of any one of these New Commandments is merely to do what is unhealthy in one way or another.

Finally, there is the temporary New Commandment, to avoid worshiping in a Christian, and especially Catholic, way, because that supposes an absolute truth, spirit, reason as supreme, and all the other evils that go directly against the real truth that there is no truth and no spirit. This is, however, only a temporary commandment, because, once the real truth is understood, then Christianity will be revealed as the laughing-stock it really is. (I might remark that Auguste Comte held this same view some hundred and fifty years ago; it seems that those traditionalists die hard.)

If, on the other hand, you hold that there is such a thing as truth that can be known by reason, then--however reason appeared on the scene--it is superior to unreasoning instinct, and we are something special; and with a little further investigating, you're on the way to accepting that there is such a thing as spirit, and that conscious life may not in fact end with death. Whether that leads you to Christianity or not, it definitely leads you away from the New Morality, because it means that we have to be consistent with a self that is governed by reason and the facts, not feelings, and that we are not subordinate to the environment we find ourselves in, even though we are part of it.

--But in all of this, and no matter what view of humanity you take, it's still the case that you can often fulfill more of your reality if you violate some aspect of it that doesn't matter to you. And since it's human to look to your own advantage, that means that it's often human to do what is inhuman. But that doesn't make sense.

And that's what the next chapter is about.