An East-West Dialectic Synthesis
Dr. Gerry Lower, Keystone, South Dakota
One self-evident problem with western religious legalism is that all of
the guidance it offers to the people is in the form of negatives. Do not
do this, do not do that, or you will be subject to the wrath and
punishment of a vengeful God, as carried out by God's vengeful spokesmen
on earth. Without faithful believers willing and able to behave just like
JudeoRomanism's vengeful God, that supernatural god would have no power
whatsoever on earth, simple as that.
In the Mosaic Decalogue, established to help the people maintain the
societal status quo, there is not one word about how we ought behave, in
the interest of justice and fairness or in the interest of spiritual
maturation. That door has been left closed to allow the rich and powerful
to hide and do unto others as they damned well pleased. The result of this
approach has been to put control in the hands of the religious rich, at
the expense of the people, a fact which motivated the American Revolution
against the European church-states employing religious coercion to exploit
the American colonies.
Sin, in the western world, was to go against God's laws, laws that told
one what NOT to do. One had to be either obedient to law or suffer the
consequences, or one had to be willing to lie through one's teeth in order
to cover one's ass. The enlistment of negative religious law to control
human behavior has likely caused more lying in the JudeoRoman western
world than any other single factor, and to a greater extent than any other
human culture. But then the western religious approach began with the lie
of supernatural, external authority so as to keep the people for looking
to reality for the causes of their problems.
In the JudeoRoman world, there was no religious sin, however, in failing
to honor the ethical precepts of nascent Christianity. That is one of the
more obvious differences between nascent Christianity and the JudeoRoman
church which the Roman emperor, Constantine, established in the name of
Christ. Rome's unholy synthesis of Christian ethics and Jewish (God-given)
and Roman (Imperial) law provided Rome the absolutist, self-righteous
authority to conquer the western world in the name of an ethical morality
which it seldom, itself, practiced, most noteably at the top. Rather,
JudeoRomanism has provided the driving attitudes beneath western
imperialism, colonialism and the current Bush administration's religious
capitalism. The western world remains Roman after all these years, still
Catholic despite the Lutheran and myriad Protestant Reformations.
In contrast, nascent Christianity has, from the beginning, stipulated a
positive ethos, an ethical morality to guide human behavior, e.g., love of
one's fellow man, compassion in thought and action, and forgiveness as the
only intelligent solution to vengeance-based cycles of violence.
Christianity asks only that we think for ourselves in comprehending the
dark side of vengeance-based moralities, absolute legalism and penalism,
and marketplace pragmatism.
Gandhi could take this inclusive Christian ethos no further, since it
already resided firmly on dialectic human ground. But he did achieve an
east-west synthesis by addressing the causes of social unfairness and
injustice. Gandhi provided the people, for the first time, with an earth
bound place to look for the roots of their problems, as opposed to having
the rich top assign them to a lack of law and order and blame the poor
bottom for a lack obedience. In contrast to the Mosaic Decalogue of
negatives, Gandhi provided seven root causes of unfairness and injustice,
all consisting of volitional human activities in the absence of
socially-redeeming moral content.
Gandhi's Seven Root Causes
Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Knowledge without Character
Commerce without Morality
Science without Humanity
Worship without Sacrifice
Politics without Principles
Here, Gandhi, speaking from the ethical east, is pointing out that most
human activities are honest and just only if they are assigned a moral
qualifier aimed at preserving, not law, but Christian ethics. Insofar as
these moral qualifiers are not honored in human societies, we can expect
to find social pathology, e.g., corruption, exploitation, and despotism.
Welcome to Bush
