John Mark Reynolds

Michael Vick, Animal Rights, and Killing People

John Mark Reynolds — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:53:29 -0700

Michael Vick tortured dogs and watched them fight for pleasure and money. This is not only against the law, but morally disturbing. Michael Vick has served jail time for his bad behavior and now is coming out.

Some people feel Vick has not been punished enough and perhaps they are correct, but the reasoning behind the anti-Vick arguments is sometimes quite disturbing. In a league where dead beat dads, drunk drivers, drug abusers, and wife beaters still play, it would be odd to deny him the right to practice his profession for his particular crimes.

Saying this does not justify what he did, but does try to put it into perspective.

What Vick did was wrong, but it is not so obviously wrong that his practices have been universally condemned in all places at all times. Fathering many children and failing to support them has been (nearly) universally condemned, because of the vast societal implications, but animal cruelty was harder to see. It would be odd for the NFL to consider the first transgression against being a “role model” forgivable, but the second meriting banishment for life.

Centuries of reflection on animal pain and what inflicting it does to people led many Christians (in particular) and some secular thinkers to begin pressing for animal cruelty laws in the nineteenth century. Traditional “sports” such as bear baiting and cock fighting began to decline earlier and passed out of polite society altogether. This was an appropriate exercise of Victorian Christian reasoning and by the twentieth century very traditional Christians such as C.S. Lewis often joined anti-vivisection leagues. Lewis’ book Problem of Pain contains an eloquent chapter on the problem of animal pain.

I think we have learned that inflicting animal suffering for our pleasure is morally wrong.

If Michael Vick had bad moral formation, it is easily possible that he could have failed to see that what was licit and legal (though still troubling) in Shakespeare’s time could not longer be done today. Christian civilizations learn by experience and we had learned that dog fighting is bad. However, this is not the sort of crime that might appear obviously bad to all people at all places at all times.

His ignorance does not justify his deeds, but it does mitigate the amount of punishment that seems appropriate to me.

Some opponents of Vick have gone very much further and equated animal cruelty to manslaughter (or argued that it is worse). See this odd SI piece:

For some Vick critics, nothing short of a significant ban from Goodell — lifetime or at least another full season — will mollify them. They would prefer the NFL be the No Felons League. They don’t agree with the second or third chances already accorded to drug abusers, drunk drivers, domestic abusers or other peace disturbers. And they see Vick as equally or more despicable, given his criminal activity was ongoing rather than an isolated moment of rage or bad judgment. Getting behind the wheel of a vehicle while intoxicated and taking a human life in a highway accident is a different category of evil from the cruelty and depravity of profiting from and taking pleasure in the serial suffering and killing of another creature.

If the rule became: “no felons need apply,” that would make sense to me, but the further notion that Vick is “more despicable” than a domestic abuser is very, very disturbing. First, it equates harming a spouse with harming a dog. Humans have greater moral worth than animals. Second, it pretends domestic violence is usually (or always?) a one time act of rage when it is not.

Critics often treat harming dogs as worse than harming other animals (say pigs), because of American and Western feelings about dogs as pets. Causing gratuitous animal pain is wrong with any animal, but critics of Vick’s should (generally) leave their sentimentality about pets out of the equation.

The critics are right that it is morally worse to plan evil and carry it out. Our laws reflect this difference in the way we treat planned murder (first degree) and murder that is done out of passion. However, it is difficult to see how manslaughter performed when a driver intentionally decides to drink and drive and the kills people does not have greater societal and moral harm, than fighting dogs. The only victim of the manslaughter is not just the dead person, a soul created in the image of God ripped from life by moral carelessness, but the vast social network of the person. The impact on the drunk who killed is also great as is the effect on his social network.

Michael Vick did a bad thing, but it is not so bad as other things. We need not develop a false moral equivalency to condemn him. I hope the NFL treats him as it does other felons who appear to be contrite. Obviously playing pro football is a privilege and not a right, but punishing Vick in a more severe way than other folk because of the Hallmark-greeting card status of dogs in America is wrong.

Nothing Happening

John Mark Reynolds — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:33:31 -0700

100 Days

John Mark Reynolds — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:28:55 -0700

On Not Living Up To Your Promise

John Mark Reynolds — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:38:22 -0700

Every once in a while I get an email from a friend facing failure. He or she will tell me of sins they have committed or bad things that happened that have taken them from “promising” to “could have been.” A marriage that began with romance has ended in divorce. A grad school career that started with the excitement of the acceptance letter has petered out in mediocrity. A friendship that started in excitement has died in acrimony.

It is bad news when you are, in the words of William Shatner, “never were” instead of “has been.”

How do you go on living when you haven’t lived up to your promise?

This is a question I have faced myself and there is no easy answer to it. It is hard to accept failure, especially when my own faults and sins have scarred me. I know the truth of the old saying, “a bird with a broken pinion never flies as high again.”

And I want to fly.

Of course, one problem is how we judge success. God wants us to become good. Anybody at anytime can start the long slow process to sainthood. There is always room at the top in Heaven and the purgation can start anywhere.

This is true, but hard to believe.

I always said that the most important thing to me was not outside acclaim, but serving God. My failures have given me a chance to see if that is true. Too often we say we want to be just and good, but are most interested in appearing to be just and good.

My failures at least freed me of that error. If I am still here, then I must go on living and give myself to God. He can transform me. I can love those around me, even if they will not love me back the way I wish.

Is it a success to demonstrate God’s amazing grace?

Of course it is, even if that will never get me on the cover of my college alum magazine.

Perhaps more difficult is when our life turns out to be so average. We were honor students, prizewinners, really great. Right? Why then do we look so much like our parents? We don’t quite realize the arrogance and stupidity of such statements and, God love them, our parents are too humble and good to point it out to us.

Frank Capra taught one generation of Americans to value the average and the steady. He reminded us of the greatness of the man or woman who does their simple duty. Sometimes we don’t achieve our goals simply because our goals were foolish.

God needed one steadier citizen, while we wished to be President. God help us, but we are snobs, but worse, stupid in our snobbery. Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, loves us, but that is not enough. We demand treats and prizes and awards. We want everyone to recognize that He is lucky we love him back.

This is silly. Our good education is not wasted if we spend it being decent and virtuous. Our promise has been fulfilled if we do our duty and love our neighbor as we love ourselves. I know this: Torrey Honors will have been a good place if it educated decent men and women or men and women sensible enough to know that they need to become decent when their “cleverness” finally fails them.

No man or woman is a failure who serves God, even if that service begins, like the Thief, as they are dying on a cross. Surely if there was ever man who failed to live up to his promise, it was that thief. He was condemned and dying. His life was a waste. Nobody knew his name, but one Man.

But what a Man!

One Man still cared. One Man reached out to him as both were dying. There was still time to become a citizen of Paradise and what is better than that?

What God has taught me in a life of “never was” is that He is a God of second and even third chances. While I may never fly again, He can teach me to sing. I am a bird with broken pinions, but He is teaching me to sing in the choirs of Heaven.

Nobody still alive is a failure. Nobody still alive is a “never was” or “has been.” We, all of us, have a chance to begin again and see God.

Really.

We think the way back is too long and it might be if our goals are still worldly acclaim, but if we simply turn around, Father is waiting. He is waiting to put a ring on our finger and a robe on our back. He rejects no repentant soul.

He can save sinners such as we are.

Thanks be to God.

Obama the AntiChrist?

John Mark Reynolds — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:30:23 -0700

Always Losing, Never Lost: Christianity in America

John Mark Reynolds — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:37:51 -0700

Every few years somebody announces that Christianity in America is doomed. This time the excuse is a survey that does show a small decline in Christian self-identification, but that this decline has pretty much stopped. A one percent decline in just under a decade in Christian self-identification in a survey with a margin of error of half a percent is hailed as the latest piece of evidence.

When extremist secularists are not paranoid of an imminent American theocracy, whether because someone is singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic or saying the Pledge, they veer into triumphalism, because “all” the smart people or young people (take your pick) are going their way. Of course, religious gloom mongers benefit by overplaying the fears of traditional Christians and joining extreme secularists in seeing the end of the religious world as we have known it.

Pardon me, but Christians should feel fine. This is not the end of American Christian dominance, though it may mark the end of the religious left.

America remains a very religious nation. Liberal Christian groups with little purpose in existing beyond heavy endowments from dead faithful are vanishing, but this is to be expected. It is hard to get people to go out on Sunday morning to worship their bishop’s latest new idea. Bronson Alcott’s excuse to skip divine services and spend his day with himself, the “church of one,” turns out to be much more appealing than the Church of Spong.

Signs of revival are everywhere amongst serious Christians.

Last week I spent time at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Between discussing March Madness and Louisville’s chances, intellectually serious students were planning mission trips to the deepest darkest places in Vermont. Al Mohler and Russell Moore represent the future of Church growth. They are eager for honest numbers regarding Southern Baptists who actually live their faith. This looks like bad news at first, but has provided a road map for missionary activity. Don’t bet against them.

The enthronement of Metropolitan Jonah in the Orthodox Church of America is also encouraging to traditional Christians. The OCA has been mired in a leadership crisis, but Metropolitan Jonah has the moral authority to change things. His message attacking the “de-personalization” of our age and appealing for authentic community is exactly the right one. When combined with the elder statesman of an evangelical Orthodoxy Metropolitan Philip there is great hope for an Orthodoxy in America that transcends ethnic barriers and proclaims the Gospel to the lost.

Pope Benedict is the right person at the right time to lead the Roman faithful. He is methodically confronting problems in global Catholicism and his first-rate intellect is ideal for challenging the weary secularism of Western Europe. He rightly sees that the future of humanity and of Christendom is not in the moribund geographic West, but the rest of the world. In fact, the future of Western values may come from nations that learn to embrace them through Christianity. Missionaries and priests will soon be flooding the West from Africa and Asia.

If American history is any guide to the American present, we are on the edge of a great revival of traditional Christianity. Americans will reject the consumerism, whether secular or religious, that has marked so much of the last few decades. Anyone who cannot see that money and power cannot make a man happy now is willfully blind. Groups that have always said that this is so, like Reformed Southern Baptists, will do well because they have always done good theology.

Christianity that is anti-intellectual will die. Christianity that is in the grip of trendy intellectualism will remain irrelevant. The revival of Christian philosophy as seen in the careers of persons such as Eleonore Stump or Alvin Plantinga will continue to strengthen the church. New generations of students will build on their work.

This is not the main thing, however. Christianity will survive and thrive, not because of anything people do but because it is true. God exists and He is not silent. Any system that ignores that reality will fail. The better news is that God loves humankind and sent Jesus to reconcile the way we are with the way He is.

Christianity is not, after all, fundamentally about externals or even about cultivating virtue. Many of my secular friends, not gripped by extremism, show great virtue and compassion. What Christianity offers is deep inner healing of a broken relationship between God and humankind. It is not in the end about me, but about Him. I am lonely and isolated until I find my rest in Him.

Christians fail Christ continuously, but He does not leave humanity without a witness. For every failed televangelist or hypocrite, there are men like my father who faithfully serve Christ for years without much payment and with no fame. Even if I am wrong and Christianity is to die in America, it will not die globally. Christianity is always losing, just to something new.

It never really loses.

Risking a Fearful Judgment

John Mark Reynolds — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:53:04 -0700

President Obama, through presidential fiat, decided experimenting on potential human beings will expand. Without study and by proclamation, the President has created a monstrous policy that has no precedent in American history.

It is more radical than what was allowed under Bill Clinton or George Bush. President Obama has given no reasons why such a new course is reasonable other than his statement that it is reasonable. Because President Obama is a reasonable sounding man it is difficult to realize how radical his idea is.

An embryo is a human being or, at the very least, is a potential human being. We shall now kill that embryo by experimenting on it in the hope that it might help the rest of us. Obama’s medicine first will do harm to a growing human with the dream that such experiments might do some good for a dying one.

This would give a more modest man pause, but President Obama is not a morally modest man. The rest of us struggle to gain insight from the way the world is to the way it ought to be, but President Obama sees ought in it so clearly that he sees no ideology at all in his decision.

Evidently Obama and his favored scientists are prophets to whom nature speaks without any need of an ethical interpreter.

If President Obama really wished to remove ideology from science, he would have to begin with the ideology that proclaims that science can be free from ideology. We cannot trust any group of people, including scientists, to act free from the restraints of ethics and common standards.

There is no science without scientists and scientists are humans and not gods. They are no more immune to hubris than any other social class. Scientists have no more insight into the ethics of a thing than anyone else.

The twentieth century was the most barbaric in the history of humankind partly because of perverted science. Numerous evils were done in the name of “science” including experimentation on human beings. Secularists in the Soviet Union tortured thousands of religious believers in the name of psychology. Disfavored races and ethnic groups were sterilized, experimented on, and butchered by men in white lab jackets who called what they did science.

Just because scientists can do a thing does not mean we must allow it to be done or that it ought to be done. We ought not to experiment on human beings, or even potential human beings, without their consent.

Why?

People have never shown the ability to restrain themselves once certain lines are crossed. The bright line of refusing to experiment on humans or potential humans is easy to maintain. No other moral line will be defensible.

When society allowed doctors to create embryos for infertile couples we were assured that this would be the end of it. Now we are told that “extra” embryos would be destroyed anyway and so should be used in experiments. This too will not be the “end” of demands on our conscience.

Secularists and the left may have idealistic fantasies of human restraint, but conservatives have bitter experience of the emptiness of those promises. Ours is the hard realism that places checks on every human institution. We don’t trust churches, states, business, or the mob with total power and we don’t exempt scientists from our caution.

Nation after nation has committed ever more monstrous crimes once the basic line of involuntary human experimentation has been crossed. This is not a “slippery slope” we might slide down, but a canyon into which we are falling, certain to hit the moral bottom.

When he lifted the ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, President Obama said, “As a person of faith . . . I believe we have been given the capacity and will to pursue this research . . . and the humanity and conscience to do so responsibly.”

This is a dangerously Utopian vision and Utopian visions nearly destroyed humanity in the twentieth century.

President Obama has a misplaced faith in humanity that is blind to history and to the crimes of the twentieth century. Capacity is not permission. We might learn many things by any number of risky and barbaric experiments, but the foundational God given rights of life and liberty prevent us from doing them.

A desire to do a thing is not a good reason to do it. Our desires are easily manipulated and the loudest suffering too often draws our attention. It is so easy to do small evils, which accumulate to great wrong doing when we hope to benefit.

Tenderness to human life is in short supply in this age. We abort millions of children in the name of convenience. Socialist nations in Africa pursue policies that destroy their economies and starve their peoples. China engages in the brutal suppression of whole people groups and runs slave labor camps. Sudan practices slavery and terrorists blow up buildings in the name of God. This is not the age to be sanguine about our compassion.

The conscience is a frail guide when tempted by a desire to help others. Compassionate men like President Obama are particularly apt to do wicked things when they intend to do great good. Stem cell research might cure horrible disease and so everyone wishes it was moral. Any good man would wish to help, but only a wise man would restrain from evil to do it.

For a man of faith President Obama seems strangely sanguine about so momentous a decision that breaks with all the ethical traditions of the West. He risks a terrible judgment.

Fortunately, God’s judgments are tempered with mercy. No president has been immune to the temptation to allow short term good to cloud his judgment. President George W. Bush allowed the torture of terrorists and this assault on human dignity was a grievous wrong. This new presidency, however, was particularly marked by promises of hope and change and so the fall from grace is bitter. Sadly, the Obama presidency is now permanently tarnished by a rejection of moderation and a Frankenstein’s confidence in science.,

Obama Amazing: Discovers Morally Neutral Science!

John Mark Reynolds — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 12:31:29 -0700

I have underestimated President Obama.

Today he announced that we can experiment on human beings and even create new humans for our experimentation.

The good news is that he made this decision based only on science. Politics, vile nasty politics, had nothing to do with his decision.

Evidently President Obama has discovered a way to derive ethics from science! This is amazing and only confirms the main stream media sense that President Obama is a Special Person.

Most thinkers have believed that from “is” or “can” (”It is the case that people want to do x” or “It is the case that we can do x”) it was hard or impossible to get “ought,” but Obama has done it!

We can experiment on humans so we should! We want to experiment on humans so we should!

How simple! How convenient! How non-political! There are NO philosophical assumptions at play here what so ever. Praise be we have entered a non-ideological age.

Praise Moloch we have entered a new age where scientists will no longer have to think about ethics before they do experiments. They will get to do whatever science tells them to do and science (without any politics or ethics!) will magically speak to them about what should be done.

Over the petri dish the experiment will say, “We are good and noble, please continue this experiment!” and the scientist will know vox science, vox dei.

I see no possible problems with this! Do you?

If so then you are divisive, political, and a wing-nut.

Love Your Neighbor and Don’t Tax Him

John Mark Reynolds — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 08:29:12 -0800

Moral men have a duty to help their neighbors, but nobody has the right to force other people to help.

Jesus told a story of a Good Samaritan who crossed difficult social and cultural barriers to provide relief to an injured man. This is a good model for our own behavior. We should help the hurting neighbor even if he is a pariah in our community. The mortgage broker who has lost his job is also my neighbor and, when he is hurting and repentant, should receive pity, charity, and care—not just sermons about his errors.

Moral behavior is most valuable when it is not easy to do. The temptation is to avoid doing our moral duty by ignoring it or passing off the dirty work to somebody else.

The Scroogish Samaritan ignores his moral duty to help his neighbor. He assumes everybody should care only for self and destroys common culture by his selfishness. The Statist Samaritan forces everybody else to help the injured man and so gains a cheap feeling of virtue, but undermines any real virtue.

The Scrooge believes that it is enough for “a man to mind his own business” and forgets that he is tied to the fate of everyone else in his common culture. History shows prosperity cannot last when it is dependent on the hopeless poverty of others.

It is immoral to allow such an unjust system to survive. Even in a perfectly just society, it would be useless to lecture the hurting about their mistakes before dealing with their pain.

Telling a hungry mother with starving children about the virtues of liberty without first feeding her is cruel and breeds revolutions. The moral man must deal with the blinding pain in the hurting before he tries to show the victim a way to avoid future hurts.

It is true that you should teach a man to fish and not just give him a fish, but before teaching him to fish he has to be fit to learn. You cannot teach a starving man to fish. First, give him a fish. Second, teach him the skills that will give him the ability to become a giver of charity and not just a receiver. The goal of any charity is to allow the man who receives it to also be able to gain the astounding blessings of being a giver.

Sadly, it is so much more blessed to give than to receive that the Statist Samaritan tries to give all the blessings to the state. He loves the state and so wishes to turn everyone’s appreciation for charity to it.

Not surprisingly charity that is coerced does harm to everyone. The injured party may be helped at first, but only at the cost of doing injustice to others. Taxing Peter forces Peter to help Paul, often does little for Paul, and almost certainly will make Peter resent Paul. Peter should help Paul, but making him do it will teach both men bad lessons. The taxed feels resentment as the object of his charity lacks a human face—he gives his coerced taxes to faceless bureaucracy—and the recipient becomes the ward of government.

When we pass our moral duties over to the state, we lose the power to do charity ourselves, turn an act of charity into coercion, and give the state too much power. People are habituated to look to the state to meet their needs and not their communities, churches, and family. This weakens every non-state institution and risks tyranny.

Forced charity is inefficient because it rarely distinguishes between worthy and unworthy attempts at charity. By cutting everyone a check or putting everyone in “one size fits all” programs it is radically inefficient and often harms the giver and the recipient. The government takes a slice of the money in order to maintain the program. Often the program itself will outlive its usefulness, but keep using tax money. The closest thing to immortality ever created by humankind is a government program.

Forced charity is bad for us because in removing our liberty to choose between goods it makes us perpetual dependents. No good person wants to be perpetually dependent on his neighbor, because his neighbor has a face and knows him. It is much easier to become a perpetual dependent on the government, because the government is faceless.

Of course, in some extraordinary circumstances the community itself has been devastated or is so dysfunctional that the state must act. A horrific natural disaster can leave too few neighbors left to help. A deeply embedded racist culture can use local state power and cultural institutions to practice injustice. In such horrific cases, federal power may be necessary to solve gross problems.

Christianity and natural law teach that good men and women should help each other. This charity is best when it is private and not coerced. American popular culture would be wise to celebrate the Samaritan and stop holding up as heroic the conspicuous consumers, Scrooges, or Statists.

Rush's View of Obama

John Mark Reynolds — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:23:51 -0800