Choosing Religion, Ethical Dilemmas, and Just War

I recently received questions on these three topics from a student on a spiritual search. She has given permission for me to quote our correspondence in case it might be useful to others.
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“[T]his summer I’d been ‘shopping’ for a religion until [in one of your classes a student] asked you how one should ‘find’ a tradition if one was not raised within a religion. Following your advice that ‘no birth is an accident’ and that one should figure out where one comes from, I did a little research of my own; it ends up nearly all of my ancestors on my dad’s side are Lutheran. All this surprised me, since my birth has generally been called an accident and I’d thought I’d come from a fairly agnostic family. . . . I met with a Lutheran pastor . . . and attended services, and since then I’ve started reading some Lutheran/Christian texts, but I’m wondering if you have any more advice for me, in terms of ‘finding’ a tradition to belong to. I feel like I’m kind of copping out on my ‘spiritual quest’ or whatever you want to call it by just conveniently choosing a religion some people related to me were associated with. It seems too easy and too intellectual and I’m not sure my heart’s in it.”

First of all, the problem with “choosing a religion” is that the grounds upon which you can choose are functions of religious beliefs, even if they are not formal. Let’s say you reject Hinduism because of its belief in reincarnation. Well, on what grounds do you not believe in reincarnation? You are already the product of a civilization that rejects the idea of reincarnation and has influenced you in that rejection. But if a Hindu says “on what grounds do you reject reincarnation?” and you say “I have no religion, so I don’t know,” then how can you justify rejecting Hinduism? Or embracing it for that matter?

My point is simply that it is not really possible to exist so far out of a religious tradition that in the matter of “choosing a religion” you don’t have some pre-existing elements of faith. If you didn’t, you’d have to choose every religion or none, since the judgment of any implies the pre-existing faith in at least some of the tenets of it or of another. And of course “none” isn’t possible either. As my teacher Mary used to say, “all human beings worship. The only question is what they worship.”

I think you have begun well. Read those Lutheran texts and see to what degree they speak to you. And I would also suggest that you work backward and read the Christian documents that Luther was revising so you can decide whether his revolution or that which he was revolting against rings more true. You have already seen what Dante has to say. I suggest you read the Gospels, and St. Paul’s letters, and the writings of St. Augustine (in particular his Confessions and his City of God), and then read about St. Francis, and writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure. Then you will be able to see what it is that Luther is particularly energized about. And then you will slowly grow to increasing recognition of where in the tradition you yourself might belong.
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“I sure wouldn’t have believed it maybe three years ago but more and more lately I’ve found myself defending your (and C.S. Lewis’s) positions to other students here at college—advocates of atheism, utilitarianism, Objectivism. More often than not they attack me with some sort of “thought experiment” like the following: “you must torture and kill one person in order to save an entire city from destruction—what do you do?” And I can’t on earth figure out how I’m supposed to answer this sort of question. They all remind me a lot of “Sophie’s Choice” which you mentioned . . . a long time ago, but that doesn’t get me any closer on figuring out how to answer or respond to these types of intellectual challenges. Any thoughts?”

I’m very glad that you are defending the rational and true position of ultimate values rather than succumbing to the pressure of the fuzzy-minded crowds.

The first thing to say about the kind of test question they “attack” you with (and it is an attack, because they themselves would not want to be faced with such a question), is that the prior question is why they are asking it. Is it a real desire to know the truth, or is it a scoffer’s challenge (like the jailer’s question of the rebbe in prison [in the first chapter of Martin Buber’s The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism]: trying to trip him up with a question from the Bible)?

The second thing to say is that if the questioner does not share your belief in fundamental and ultimate universal values, then the question is pointless. Whether you say “do the torture” or “don’t do the torture,” the relativist questioner has no grounds for approving or disapproving of your answer because he has rejected both the principle of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and the principle of “he who saves a life is as if he has saved the whole world” (in their various versions). In other words, the question whether you’re allowed to cause one man to suffer to save many other men can only have any meaning to someone who believes it is wrong to harm others unjustly and it is right to protect innocents from harm. If you don’t believe in those absolute values, you have no moral grounds for preferring one answer of the question to another.

The truth is that only with someone who agrees on the fundamental values and on their universality can engaging in a discussion of the torture question be worth anything. It’s like trying to sue in court someone who does not believe in the rule of law.

The real response to such a challenge is to ask the challenger on what grounds he stands to condemn torturers or innocent village destroyers if he doesn’t believe in universal moral values? Why not torture someone or kill innocents if all values are relative? Then you will come to the real difference of opinion, which makes the question he initially asked trivial by comparison. And you will usually find that he is a relativist when it suits him and an absolutist when it suits him. He’s a relativist when he’s afraid you are going to hold him to some standard of value, and he’s an (illogical) absolutist in being against all moral absolutes.

A central business of human life is to apply the universal values we believe in to each particular situation as it arises. Each such application is a test of what we are and what we believe. And we make our choices not knowing the “answers,” not knowing whether we have passed the test of being judgment-making creatures. But we must judge anyway, and we will judge, whatever we think, and so we are taking the test, whether we like it or not, despite not knowing anything about how it will turn out. It’s what human beings do.

The clear-thinking person strives to discern and then to do the right thing, though it isn’t clear or easy. The confused person pretends there are no values to go by and so it doesn’t matter and, in practice, judges that it is “better” to avoid making any moral judgments at all. This is a great way of pretending to get off the hook, except that it can’t really work, because a) he himself has surrendered any grounds for justifying that “better,” and b) in a crisis moral situation, all decent, non-pathological human beings would recognize who is the more admirable, the man who strives to do good, even at great personal sacrifice, and the man who avoids making a decision and runs from it instead.

Finally, we have been given a long history of wisdom to help us. We know the universal values, and we are in the particular situations of our lives. Those are givens. But we also have great men and women and their sayings to guide us in making our decisions. We have Moses and Maimonides and the Baal Shem Tov; we have Socrates and Plato and Aristotle; we have Jesus and Augustine and Aquinas and Francis and Bonaventure; we have Confucius and Lao Tzu, the Bhagavad Gita and the Buddha, Kant and Pascal, Dante and Shakespeare, Austen and Dickinson, C.S. Lewis and Viktor Frankl and Martin Buber.

And we also have one another: I mean those among our relatives and friends and teachers whom we admire and trust and whose own experience often can shed light on the difficulties of the decisions we must make.

Hence we do not have to invent reality for ourselves. Some of these guides speak to us more clearly, more relevantly than others. But the fact that in the abstract one cannot answer the kind of question the challenger asks is no evidence whatsoever for there being no better way to act, and no worse way, in a real life situation.
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“Finally, just war. I’ve read Buber’s letter to Gandhi which you mentioned [in class], and I really want to say that war is justified in some cases, but how can you send people off to war when you know that some civilians/innocents will inevitably be killed? How can that be a just war?”

The question presumes that we live in a perfect and just world and that if we behave justly, no harm will be done. But this is a false premise. The world is not Eden. It is flawed or fallen or troubled with man’s sin, however you want to describe it, and goodness in the world can only ever be an approximation unless one is especially gifted with vision and grace (like Socrates or Jesus or St. Francis or the Baal Shem Tov). Again, one must make judgments. No just person wants innocents to be harmed in war. And yet, though war will inevitably harm some number of innocents, not to go to war may be a far worse choice, may result in far worse consequences to innocents.

There is a wonderful speech on this subject in Shakespeare’s Henry V. On the battlefield before Agincourt, one of the soldiers says, in the hearing of the disguised king, that the king will have a lot to answer for because men are going to die. Henry muses then on the king’s purpose in going to war (not that his men should be killed) and on the responsibility of each individual soldier for the state of his own soul. It’s worth reading.

Because this is true, any ruler, or any people who are voting, must consider all consequences and alternatives in every case. But anyone who makes a blanket statement about all wars being immoral, while strictly speaking correct because it would be better if war were not necessary, is denying reality if he cannot also recognize that sometimes war is the more moral choice.

If the choice is between conquering a neighboring town in order to get more land or striving to live as well as possible on one’s own, of course war is the immoral choice. But if the choice is between surrendering the values of justice, liberty, and the rule of law to a conquering tyrant like Hitler, then not to go to war against him is the immoral choice.

Here again, we must return to the fundamental values and use them as guides to see through the confusing facts of the situation we are in. And of course, we never have benefit of hindsight when we are making such decisions. They are always an approximation, the best we can do in the circumstances. But that is just what is wanted: the best we can do, not just any old thing. (For inspiration here, read the great speeches of Winston Churchill.)
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“[How can we] reconcile what look like impossible paradoxes[?]”

The key thing here is to be very clear about what the paradoxes really are, and then to accept that we must all learn to live with paradox. Paradox is the nature of the world from the viewpoint of man. We are male and female, we want to live and know we will die, we have both selfish and generous impulses in us, we crave meaning and want not to be judged, we have faith and we doubt. This is the human condition, and I think that no human meaning or energy would be possible if we were not paradoxical beings. But it means there is no one, simple, easy rule to follow in all circumstances that will never lead astray. Always what is required is engagement of the whole self, all we are and all we know and all we believe, all our virtue, in making the decisions we are called upon to make. And that is the true path through life, and I believe the ultimately rewarded path: the path of meaning and the path most pleasing to God.