One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is enough to
make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to attempt to talk
about "divine" rules for human conduct. Regardless of any ideas you may
hold, or any wishes, you are forced at every hour of your life to apply
your reason to the problems of your life, and you have no escape from
the task of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right or
to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery upon yourself
and upon all who come into contact with you. How much more sensible,
therefore, to recognize the fact of moral and intellectual
responsibility; to investigate the data of life with which you have to
deal, the environment by which you are surrounded, and to train your
judgment so that you will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness
and certainty!
"But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves mankind without
any guide or authority. How can human beings act, how can they deal with
one another, if there are no laws, no permanent moral codes?"
The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of morality does
not mean at all that there will be no permanent laws and working
principles. Many of the facts of life are fixed for all practical
purposes--the purposes not merely of your life and my life, but the life
of many generations. We are not likely to see in our time the end of the
ancient Hebrew announcement that "the sins of the father are visited
upon the children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a
course of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down to his
children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. The Catholic Church
has had for a thousand years or more the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon
its list; and today comes experimental science with its new weapons of
research, and discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the
arteries, and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will
ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has added to
gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of alcoholic liquor for
beverage purposes; we have done this in spite of the manifest fact that
the drinking of wine was not merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New
Testament religious rite.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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