Huckleberry Finn and morality in spite of religion

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell!”

I’ve preached passionately for years about the moment when Huck Finn casts aside religion and society in order to do what only he believes is right. I maintain my belief that this moment is the peak moment in U. S. literature. I’ll give just a quick summary of the moment for those few who haven’t read the novel:

Near the end of the novel, after his trip down the Mississippi with the runaway slave Jim, Huck finds himself in a situation wherein he can “do the right thing” in his society. He can send Jim back to his owner. Huck has been to church; he knows that allowing Jim to remain free is tantamount to stealing, and the Bible is opposed to stealing. He also knows that the Bible is not opposed to slavery. In addition, Huck is from a small town where slavery is the norm. People expect slaves to behave themselves and they expect whites to respect the ownership of slaves. In effect, Huck’s religion and society have taught him to internalize the “fact” that turning Jim in is what God wants from him. And he is totally prepared to do so. Why doesn’t he turn in Jim, then? Because, despite his own internalized belief system as well as all external rules and religious imperatives, Huck KNOWS deep in his… what? Soul? – deep inside himself, Huck feels Jim’s love. And Huck’s inner self refuses to accept the limits of his society. He knows that in not accepting, he is damning himself to eternal pain and torment – and unlike most of his friends, Huck knows about pain and torment. He willingly accepts damnation rather than being untrue to his deepest moral core.

Huck’s decision is a key to existentialism: realizing that one is alone in the world and, rather than lamenting that position as unbearable, accepting full responsibility for yourself and your own decisions. Huck’s decision is made in spite of his society and his religious belief system. However, Twain never let’s the reader doubt that Huck is correct in this decision. This realization to the core of your being is what Audre Lorde calls Eroticism. It is not sexual, but it does affect the entire body as sexual activity does (rather than just the logical mind). From Lorde:

"once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe."

Huck is very clear about the fact that turning in Jim would certainly be against the grain of that “joy” of which he knows himself to be capable. In this moment, we can see his erotic knowledge become the lens through which he scrutinizes “all aspects of [his] existence” and discovers that life itself would be worse than hell if he followed the rules of his religion and his society (are they divisible?).

In Huck we see the depth of the existential system. It is a philosophy based on experience rather than logic or reason. And it is experience which sets one free from the limits of our religions, societies, and ourselves. In my upbringing, for instance, I was taught that others – women, black Americans, homosexuals, even Yankees – were less than I. These lessons were taught by my religion (Nazarene and white Baptist Christianity) as well as my society (rural South). I have fought a long battle with this upbringing and can comfortably say that I’ve whipped it; some say that I’ve whipped it too well ;) How did I do so? Only in discovering that the limits I was taught were faulty. Some were misdirected versions of Bible scripture; some were left-over resentments of my family’s class situation; some were simply ignorance on the part of my various teachers. Still, they were all trustworthy until I decided, not nearly as dramatically as Huck, that I would rather follow my own soul (for lack of a better word).

How has this played out in my actual life? Well, it constantly plays out, like any belief system. I’m constantly changing and adjusting – and I guess that’s the key. I rarely see a set morality anymore. Some things, such as intentionally harming those who are at your mercy, always seem wrong. Otherwise, I don’t accept society’s limits. And I have long ago rejected any external religious morality – certainly one based in fear – as anathema to my belief system of love and help.

I’m sure I could go one for hours (and have), but I should stop here and take a nap. I’m sure, knowing how important such self-knowledge is to me, that I’ll come back to this topic. Perhaps next, though, I’ll talk about the idea of the Autonomous Self as the key to psychological health.

How does Christ show us how to ignore our preacher?

One of the fundamental messages, if not the fundamental message of Christ is that no human has the right or ability to judge the morality of any other human. Certainly humans can look at the actions of others and find those actions unconscionable and even fight against those actions. However, no one has the right to judge another’s morality. Even assuming that another shares your morality is a falsehood. Luke gives us the parable of the Good Samaritan in order, in part, to show how external limits can cripple us. A good friend of mine likes to talk about the drunken bum she once saw in a ditch in Boone. This bum was being ignored or laughed at by those in the street; even the ones helping him were suggesting that he shouldn’t have gotten into the shape he was in. However, she wondered, what if he were actually Christ? Wouldn’t he be exactly where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there. What would give her or anyone else the right to speak for Christ? What if, in fact, Christ would judge that bum as unworthy if he weren’t drinking himself silly in a ditch in Boone, and the bum knew that.

There is no doubt that most preachers have a strong sense of morality. However, much of that morality comes from outside themselves – from what they read, often, as if Christ would have superseded one set of scriptural texts which he didn’t write for another set which he didn’t write. Many of these preachers, for instance, will look at the words of Paul and, ignoring the fact that Paul himself says these words come only from him and his experience, will take those words as the word of the divine creator or of Christ. Such will lead preachers to make really stupid statements like “Homosexuals will burn in hell.”

Why is this a stupid statement? It’s supported in the Old Testament and the New, right? Of course it is. And that’s the problem. Those scriptures set external limits. They ignore the very fact of the gospels – that no one, not even his closest associates, ever understood what Christ was saying or doing. No preacher knows if a lesbian is going to burn in hell. For all any preacher knows today, Christ could love homosexuals best – could, in fact, only want to bring gay man with great hair to Heaven with him. Any other assumption by any preacher limits the power of Christ or god. Why would preachers seek to place such limits on Christ? The simple answer is because limits are easy. They are easy to preach and easy to understand. They allow the people on one side of the limits to look with disdain (or pity) at those people on the other side of the limits. The message of Christ is the opposite: only pity those who require such limits.

How would this play out in your actual life? First and foremost, it would mean that you realize that you don’t ever have the right to judge another’s morality. You can judge action, mental health, etc. But you can never question that any person may be closer to fulfilling the will of Christ than you are. Again, perhaps Christ loves gay people best. Won’t Fred Phelps be sad?

My comments don’t only go for homosexuality, though that is a hot-button issue. Any time you hear a preacher condemn any action as sin, you can immediately ignore what the preacher is saying. Claiming to know what is “sin” is claiming to know the mind of a god. That’s not knowledge of which a human is capable. So what should the preacher say instead? He should say that he, personally, with a lifetime of service to Christ behind him, sees such an action as wrong. Built into this statement is, primarily, the FACT that the preacher may be wrong. He can only ever be right for himself when he condemns an action, never can he speak for a god.

Never can he speak for a god, but like Christ, he can believe (and should, if he’s preaching about a god) that he gets his moral compass from a god. It is only when he demands that others adhere to the same moral compass that the preacher fails miserably at being a moral teacher.

I’m reminded here of a rebellious youth in Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” yelling at his rabbi about the fact that the rabbi kept limiting God’s abilities: “Why can’t He make anything He wants to make!... You don’t know! You don’t know anything about God!” It is unfortunate that in order to make small-minded, hate-filled people feel better than others, many preachers will happily condemn Christ himself to hell. The end of Roth’s story has everyone yelling that he will “never hit anybody about God.” And there’s the key. No preacher knows the mind of the unknowable; not preacher has any better knowledge about what sin really is than anyone else. Claiming to know sin is prideful – something we might not want in our sinners.

Next: Huckleberry Finn and morality despite religion.

What do I mean when I claim to be existentialist?

What do I mean when I claim to be existentialist?

From Philosophy textbook:

“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on Earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this Earth.” Sartre

“My duty as an intellectual is to think, to think without restriction, even at the risk of blundering. I must set no limits within myself, and I must let no limits be set for me.” Sartre

From Wikipedia:

“Kierkegaard's knight of faith and Nietzsche's Ubermensch are exemplars who define the nature of their own existence. These idealized individuals invent their own values and create the very terms under which they excel.”

At this point, I’ve had several people ask me what I mean when I claim existentialism as the philosophical basis for my life. It’s a really difficult question, because it can only really be answered experientially. If you haven’t experienced the epiphany of existentialism – and it’s not one I would recommend – then you can only learn about existentialism; kind of like Gandalf fighting the Balrog – it will lead to a much more powerful and confident you, but you basically have to die to get there. Another metaphor which might help is that of the female orgasm: if you haven’t had an orgasm, you will only know about it from what you’ve read and heard. Once you’ve had one, you know that no description of it can ever come close to capturing it.

And there you find two of my approaches to personal morality: mythology and eroticism.

But what is existentialism? It is, as Sartre suggests, the refusal to accept limits to yourself either from inside or outside. This refusal condemns you to loneliness. Hence one of the foundational principles of existentialism: Loneliness equals freedom. This refusal also condemns you to being misunderstood. Because you refuse to adhere to any standards of morality, many will consider you immoral. Because you refuse to share your deep faith with others, many will consider you faithless (or, worse, you can try to share your faith and others will consider you divine or a guru while perverting your message to their own already established restraints).

As mythological example, let’s use the figure of the Christ.

Jesus clearly refused to accept the limits of his Jewish/Roman society, and he was ultimately killed for this refusal. Let’s take a look at how his refusal went in a Cliff Notes version: first, he rejected the knowledge of his teachers and religious leaders, claiming that he possessed a greater knowledge in himself. Next, because of a shift of his internal compass toward an idea of extreme love, he rejected the economical limits of his society, abandoning even the means to participate in its economy and living instead as a beggar. He repeatedly told those who followed him that they didn’t understand him. In his darkest moments, he left his friends and family in order to be totally alone so that he could rejuvenate himself with the power of such loneliness. Trying to connect to others is spiritually damaging and exhausting, after all.

A key to his loneliness and his attempts to connect is Christ’s casting out of external limits. He throws away religion, family, society, and even basic assumptions about sin and gender. He consciously asks the universe to help him create his own morality and discovers that such morality can only be found within.

Once Christ had preached a while, he realized that his loneliness would never be overcome – even his best followers could not share his internal morality. So, to fulfill the demands of that internal morality, Christ committed suicide for love. His internal morality demanded that the pursuit of love was more important than the external limits imposed by the Jewish and Roman authorities, the external limits imposed by his friends who badgered him to not commit suicide, and, notably, the internal limits imposed by his animal instincts of self-preservation. How could he ignore all of these limits? Was such ignoring a supernatural feat? No. Those who argue that Christ had to be supernatural in order to overcome the limits of the external world and his internal needs insult Christ. He was mundane to the core. But he refused to accept the limitations the world wishes to place on all of us.

The story of Christ ends with the creation of a religion that demands we be like Christ, that we, too, understand that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us – it is the realization that we are in control of our own life destinies just as he controlled his own. This doesn’t mean that we should all kill ourselves to show love; we are not supposed to follow Christ’s lead as if he were creating a new set of limits for us – if we merely replace one set of limits for another, we fail to follow where Christ led. Instead, Christ demands that we think for ourselves, that we feel for ourselves, and that we never create for ourselves any idea of limits. Instead, we must create our own life goals and follow them.

Next: how does Christ show us how to ignore our preacher?

"we are as a result our own moral agents"

From Iain M. Banks' Matter (339-340):

“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.”

… “You see?... By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality – or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only realty – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.”

3 Hitchens D'Souza Debate Book TV

Where do we find morality?

The following is a summary of my comments to my friend Wesley which began with yesterday's posting about the Fall of Man:

I don't see how the Fall has anything to do with morality, especially since it is an amoral fall. As the mythic Fall is presented, creatures who had no notion of good/bad were severely punished for disobeying a creator-god -- but that disobedience could not have been "bad" in human terms, only in the eyes of a divinity with the power to make such judgments. Kind of like me saying that my dog Otis is a "bad" dog because he messes up the blinds to look out the window.

My disagreement with the Fall is not meant to suggest I believe in the perfection of humans. The saying for me is I'm Okay, You're Okay. I accept that I have my imperfections and that you have yours, but we are both valuable human beings who shouldn't set out to harm one another. If we set out to harm one another, then we should be stopped (the basics of my morality: first, do no harm).

Such notions of good/bad, like my “do no harm,” are created by the societies to which we belong as well as by our internal compasses. Each of us has a compass – call it our conscience or soul or whatever – which leads us down what we each consider to be a moral pathway. Many of us wouldn't like to follow the compasses of others (I, for instance, would never condemn a woman for expressing sexual desire), while many others would not to follow our compasses (many want morally to include a lockdown of female sexual desire outside of marriage, for instance – hence the very idea of a “slut”). Now the idea of where those compasses come from would be interesting to discuss -- the easy answer is to throw them back outside ourselves (to a divine being like the Holy Spirit, for instance).

As far as perfection goes as an ideal, I think the Buddhist faith has a better handle on it than Calvinist Christianity. Perfection is not something humans fell from, it is something humans should reach toward. According to Calvinist dogma, humans can never hope to be perfect again without divine intervention. According to Buddhist dogma, humans can individually strive for perfection, but only by denying their innate humanness. I don't personally like either approach, but at least the Buddhist gives one a reason to strive to be better -- an internal reason, I should say, since I look at external morality (God's rules, human laws, etc.) as false reasons for moral behavior: I want to avoid getting caught breaking most of these rules/laws, but I do not accept that any which are not internally evident as actual morality.

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Many see eternity as some continuation of time as we experience it today. I see eternity as the absence of all time. The Eternal Now. There is nothing you have been and nothing you will be. There is only Now -- no other time can ever exist. As such, I find meaning in the Now without recourse to something that might come during some time we call the future. Time is, after all, an illusion.

And how could you as a being be anything but eternal? Your elementary particles have always been and will always be. You will always be in some fashion. But many people look for a continuation of the conscious mind -- I don't know of any major religion, including Christianity, that offers that; the Greeks used to offer it, as did many Native American religions. But for Christians consciousness is mere fleeting electric impulses in the brain, right? And what of the soul? It is indeterminate, but I think we would agree that it isn't the mind -- it doesn't have the same wants or needs as the mind. For instance, Wesley’s daughters may be very important to mind; they are certainly important on an animal level (reproduction and all); however, to his soul they are as nothing, right? The soul is void of such human connections, isn't it? And as so, isn't the soul better understood as an expression of stardust trying to discover a purpose for its existence than as a continuation of any human personality? (Babylon 5 -- the most religious of all TV shows; watch it).