Let's say you were fairly well-versed in the Federal and state criminal code. If you had a close friend who you knew was embezzling from his company, would it be judgmental to go to him and let him know his actions were illegal and when he was caught, he was going to face some serious penalties? Of course not. It would be an act of affection, an act of love for the guy.
Did you invent the law or simply report on it to your friend?
From a Catholic point of view, the moral law is the same thing. People do not invent it, they discover it just like we discovered physics, chemistry and math. Through scripture, revelation and logical deductions, we've discovered the moral law that was written, not by man through a legislative process, but by God when He created the world.
In his excellent book, The Great Good Thing, Andrew Klavan discusses his conversion from atheism to Christianity.
Then, in my atheist reading, I came upon the writings of the Marquis de Sade. It marked a watershed in my thing. Nowadays, “the divine Marquis” is sometimes depicted as a naughty rogue who enjoyed what the British call “a bit of the slap and tickle,” a libertine who brought a needed dose of sexual freedom into a pinched an hypocritical era. That’s not how I saw him at all. Sade–from whom we get the word sadism–was a violent psychopath who brutally tortured servants and prostitutes for his own pleasure. (When even the French imprison you for your sexual practices, you know you’ve crossed the line!) He was also a philosopher of genius.
Sade understood that if there is no God, there can be no ultimate morality. There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. Unlike Freud and other atheists, though, Sade followed mad Hamlet’s logic with unswerving honesty. Without morality, he said, we are only responsible to our natures, and nature demands only that we pleasure ourselves in any way we like, the strong at the expense of the weak. “Nature, mother to us all, never speaks to us save of ourselves… prefer thyself, love thyself, no matter at whose expense,” he declared. And then, with wonderful wit, he added: “Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.” All of this, he illustrated with graphic passages of pornography depicting tortures, rapes, and murders in a way intended to sexually arousing. And his work is arousing. It’s also repulsive. And to my eyes, it’s evil.
Here, at least, however, was an atheist who outlook made complete logical sense to me from beginning to end. If there is no God, there is no morality. If there is no morality, the search for pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all in all and we should pillage, rape, and murder as we please. None of this pale, milquetoast atheism that says “Let’s all do what’s good for society.” Why should I do what’s good for society? What is society to me? None of this elaborate game-theory nonsense where we all benefit by mutual sacrifice and restraint. That only works until no one’s looking; then I’ll get away with what I can. If there is no God, there is no good, and sadistic pornography is scripture.
But the opposite is also true. That is, if we concede that one thing is morally better than another, it can only be because it is closer to an Ultimate Moral Good, the standard by which it’s measured. An Ultimate Moral Good cannot just be an idea. It must be, in effect, a personality with consciousness and free will. The rain isn’t morally good even though it makes the crops grow; a tornado that kills isn’t morally evil–though it may be an evil for those in its way. Happy and sad events, from birth to death, just happen, and we ascribe moral qualities to them as they suit us or don’t. But true, objective good and evil, in order to be good and evil, have to be aware and intentional. So an Ultimate Moral Good must be conscious and free; it must be God.
So we have to choose, Either is no God and no morality whatsoever, or there is morality and God real.
Either way makes sense, if you’re speaking strictly about logic. I didn’t reject Sade’s outlook on logical grounds. I rejected it because I found it repulsive and I knew it wasn’t true just as I know that one plus two always equals two plus one, though neither I nor anyone else can prove it. So, too, I know that a Nazi who tortures a child to death is less moral than a priest who gives a beggar bread–and that this is so even in a world that is all Nazis everywhere. In the chain of reasoning that took me finally to Christ, accepting this one axiom–that some actions are morally better than others–is the only truly non logical leap of faith I ever made. Hardly a leap really. Barely even a step. I know it’s so. And those who declare they do not are, like Hamlet, only pretending.
After reading Sade, I abandoned atheism and returned to agnosticism.
Emphasis mine.
What Andrew is describing is the realization that there is a universal, objective moral order created by something above Man. That is analogous to the universal, objective legal code that governs American society. It is not judgmental to quote the legal code to your friend. It is also not judgmental to quote God's law to your friend since in both cases, you are not interpreting or inventing anything, you are simply reporting facts to him. There is no judgmentalism involved because there is no judgment.
Here is a snippet from the text of the California Penal Code covering embezzlement.
Every officer of this state, or of any county, city, city and county, or other municipal corporation or subdivision thereof, and every deputy, clerk, or servant of that officer, and every officer, director, trustee, clerk, servant, or agent of any association, society, or corporation (public or private), who fraudulently appropriates to any use or purpose not in the due and lawful execution of that person’s trust, any property in his or her possession or under his or her control by virtue of that trust, or secretes it with a fraudulent intent to appropriate it to that use or purpose, is guilty of embezzlement.
Quoting that is not judgmental.
Now, one could argue that the Catholic Church is making things up from whole cloth. That is a fair argument, but it is still one that requires logical proof and logical refutation of the entirety of evidence the Church can muster on its behalf, evidence that is more than just scripture and revelation.
You cannot replace a model of reality with nothing, but you can replace a model of reality with something better. Your "something better," however, will require you to prove that it's better.
Getting back to the point of this post, my fundamental argument against most accusations of "you're being judgmental" as a Catholic is that reporting the reality of God's moral law does not involve any personal judgment at all.
Now, if I decide to throw rocks at you because you have sinned in some way, that is an act of judgment and expressly forbidden by the Church, unless it is part of Caesar's* law, in which case the secular law takes precedent.
As long as I'm not throwing rocks, this takes a whole bunch of "don't judge" off the table.
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| I'm ambivalent about your recent behaviors, but Cat disapproves and is letting you know. |
* - Or Trump's law in our case. These fascist dictators are pretty much interchangeable.
