Welcome to my Sunday morning sermon. If you start to feel uncomfortable, just stay with me to the end; you may be pleasantly surprised.

This is staggeringly ridiculous, and far more terrifying than foreign terrorists:

Testifying in his own defense, a remorseless and resolute Roeder insisted he had committed a justified act for the defense of unborn children by killing Dr. George Tiller, one of the country’s few physicians to offer late-term abortions. It was a bold legal strategy that, if successful, had the potential to radically alter the debate over abortion by reducing the price for committing such an act of violence.

When it failed, those who share Roeder’s passionate, militant belief against abortion were outraged: One said they are getting tired of being treated as a “piece of dirt” unable to express the reasons for such acts in court.

(Emphasis added.) The anonymous “piece of dirt” commenter may be shocking, but the words of Donald Spitz—who should never be addressed as “Reverend”—are even more chilling:

The Rev. Donald Spitz, of Chesapeake, Va., who runs the Army of God Web site supporting violence against abortion providers, said the rejection of that argument has upset those who view Roeder as a hero.

. . .

Spitz was the spiritual adviser to Paul Hill and was with him at his 2003 execution for the killing of a Florida abortion provider and a clinic escort in 1994, an event that led to a lull in violence at abortion clinics. While saying he knows nothing of impending plans by others against abortion doctors, Spitz scoffed at suggestions that Roeder’s conviction will have a similar effect.

“Times change,” Spitz said. “People are not as passive as they have been. They are more assertive.”

Really? This person who claims to represent “God”—that’s the God of the Christian Bible, for those keeping score, not the God of some other religion—thinks that Scott Roeder, who testified in court that he committed all of the acts necessary to convict him of first degree murder, is a hero. Sure, maybe he is interpreting the Christian Bible “incorrectly.” That’s fine; I’ll give you that (and address it more fully below). But this lunatic and his friends Paul Hill and Scott Roeder are demonstrative proof that believing in God and Jesus Christ and reading the Bible are not magical tonics that prevent people from supporting or committing terrible acts of violence.

Surely my more reasonable religious friends will claim or observe or otherwise argue that “true” Christians, or at least the ones they would dare to associate with openly, are the ones who actually participate, who live within the “community” of believers, both past and present. And that is a perfectly decent thing to say—except for two points you need to consider.

First, even the official or “true” church—whether it’s one with an institutional history that it claims stretches continuously back through nearly two millennia to Jesus himself, or a more diffuse idea of some invisible community of true believers—has failed to prevent its members from committing terrible acts of violence. If we can look back through history and find anyone within your definition of the “true” church who would get along with Spitz, Hill, and Roeder, then you have a problem. (And just defining “true” church from the outset to automatically exclude those people doesn’t solve your problem; you still need to explain why that qualification is necessary.) When you claim that the central message or teaching of your religious group is contrary to these kinds of acts, and when you claim both that your group stands (or should stand) as the ultimate moral authority in human history, and further that those of us outside your group—especially those of us who disclaim any affinity with the idea that rules or guidelines for human behavior must come from a supernatural source—are the ones with a crippled ethical sense, then you must explain how that message, despite its alleged enormous power, and despite your claim that it’s backed by God Himself, failed to keep the violence and lunacy in check. (If your answer is simply that people are weak and sinful, then what good is a religion that amounts to little more than a support group where people can go every week, admit that they are weak and sinful, but keep on acting like jerks and idiots and worse? Why not just close up shop and let people go on being weak and sinful, but without the pretense that admitting it does the rest of us any good?)

Which leads to my second point: If there is any possibility that people have the capacity to be “good” without God—and I present myself as evidence—then you must admit that your “ultimate” moral authority does not require membership, participation, or affiliation with your church, your God, or anything else you claim to offer to humanity. The substantial probability remains that “good” and acceptable conduct that is not socially or psychologically destructive may be governed and defined by the fundamental natural limitations presented by the circumstance of people living together and dependent on each other for their continued existence and well-being. And if that is the source of the limitations giving rise to behavior we call “good” and “moral” and “ethical,” then while you are perfectly free to desire, enjoy, and even benefit from your membership in the church, “true” or not, you have no good reason to demand or even expect that the rest of us should need or want to join you.

And I am not talking about some kind of Dante-esque “First Circle” of hell, for those who “did not sin; and yet, though they have merits, / that’s not enough, because they lacked baptism, / the portal of the faith that you embrace.” (Inferno, IV.) I’m not arguing that you who consider yourselves “true” members of the community of faith according to Jesus Christ should look upon the rest of us decent people with sad but benign approval; I’m saying that if you are “good” or “moral” or “ethical,” too, then it’s for the same reasons that I am—except you obscure those reasons with vestments of theology. If the good and virtuous are defined not by dictates handed down from heaven to people who could otherwise choose to behave and organize themselves by any other principles (go ahead: make lying, theft, and murder the norm!), but by the limitations necessitated by the simple fact that humans live together, in societies, to reap the enormous benefits of interdependence, then saying otherwise, while it may produce an inspiring narrative, does not change reality. Either virtue was arbitrarily defined by God, who could have defined it otherwise, or virtue arises organically from our human experience and God was limited to requiring only those virtues that fit our actual needs.

Maybe God did appear to people long ago and advise them well about their conduct with each other. But even if he did, the simple fact that people have certain ideas about how to behave is not proof that morality is the result of divine revelation, or disproof that morality is the product of the natural exigencies affecting us all, whether we believe in God or not. It’s just an appealing story.

Christianity failed to stop Paul Hill and Scott Roeder, and so far it has failed to stop Donald Spitz from cheering them on. And here I rejoin the views of my more reasonable religious friends—with a qualification. What might have stopped Hill and Roeder, and what still may stop Spitz (though he might be too far gone), is a recognition and understanding of those natural exigencies, the fundamental limits on behavior without which human society would fail to exist. Some of you within your church, “true” or not, may indeed recognize and understand those factors in morality, and being embedded in a past and present community of fellow believers may assist your commitment to behaving well and virtuously. But if that is true, then you are obviously engaged with your world—our world—the immanent one, called “here and now,” and you have not been distracted from the natural exigencies of today by inspired dreams of another world. That is what makes mainstream Christianity, in all its various forms, so inoffensive to the rest of us. Why should it bother me that you believe in God, follow a liturgical calendar, read the Bible, or pray every day, so long as you are not forgetting the people around you, treating them well, paying your taxes, and otherwise participating in society? You can even claim to believe that you are only behaving well because of the content of your religious beliefs: I am still confident that if someone managed to prove that God does not exist, and never existed—even though no one will ever prove that—you would continue to behave in pretty much the same way. Without your reliance on God to tell you how to behave, you would soon, perhaps immediately, discover that there are many, many good reasons apart from divine revelation to behave well.

But if you are one of those more reasonable religious friends, you have the same responsibility as I have to combat the evils arising from the supernaturalist distractions of people like Roeder, Hill, and Spitz. We can disagree about abortion—because there is ample room for disagreement—but there is no room to disagree with the view that people should not be murdering each other because they disagree about abortion. Your responsibility as someone who is engaged with human society, and the natural exigencies and fundamental limitations it presents, even if you maintain religious practice, is to ensure that your practice of religion provides no comfort to those who would allow their dreams of another world to ruin this one. Some of that is built right into Christianity: Jesus told his followers to treat others well, for example. You even have the central story of the incarnation, that the full revelation of your God was completed by the divine experience of becoming human. Those stories fail to explain why people should treat each other well—they only dictate certain behavior—but that doesn’t mean you should fail to provide that explanation.

You Christians, even the more reasonable ones, too easily let your supernatural beliefs slip into a position of primacy such that the dreamers’ distractions—I should say the sleepers’ distractions—and their acts of violence are aided by your failure to address the fact that, even if the contents of your narratives are true, they do not exclude the substantial probability that virtuous behavior is rooted in the natural world, and not the supernatural one. So long as people are allowed to drift away in religious beliefs, unmoored from present circumstances, people will continue to commit violence in the name of your religion. If you want to stop them, then you should be working much harder at adjusting your practice to provide clear and practical explanations for good behavior and the transcendental experience that many people crave. If all you’re doing is saying that people should behave well because God told them to, then you leave the door wide open for the “false” practitioners—the ones you claim to reject—to elaborate their own dispensation of morality from God. Your limp replies that they are misinterpreting scripture will never succeed against those lunatics because your scriptures are so heterogenous and diverse that no one will ever agree on the exact, perfect, and unambiguous interpretation of what they say. You must do something more if you want to prevent people like Roeder, Hill, and Spitz from carrying on their dangerous and destructive activities in the name of your religion and your scriptures and your God.

If you have made it this far, you should have noticed a few things. First, I am not advocating the destruction of religion (only that reasonable religious people pull their heads out of the sand about the effects of their laziness). Second, I am not claiming that religion is the source of evil in the world (just that it has perennially failed to prevent evil). Third, if you prefer to maintain your practice, then I am quite certain that the suggestions I offer fall squarely within the mainstream of your tradition: is there anything in your scriptures that prohibits you from examining the world and striving to understand why people ought to behave well?

Believe what you need to believe, but don’t let religious beliefs become excuses for failures of virtue.

The comments below serve as an open thread, prompted by a discussion elsewhere, on general topics that encompass religion, morality, ethics, secularism, and whatever is reasonably related. Here are the rules of conduct, which I will enforce as needed, as fairly as I can:

1. Do not make personal attacks.
2. Having an opposing opinion is fine. Being unreasonable or grossly and unnecessarily intemperate in expressing your opinion is not.

Anyone who can follow those simple rules is welcome to participate. If you have never commented here before, your comment will probably have to be approved before it will be posted. I’ll try to do that as fast as I can.

Finally, let me also suggest a few guidelines for the substance of discussion:

• If you state opinions, be prepared to support them with facts, reasoning, or both.
• Recognize the difference between facts and opinions: facts are potentially true for everyone, opinions are not.
• Even if you think you have supported your opinions with facts and reasons, remember that different people are convinced by different things. If someone is not convincing you, give them a hint as to what it might take. If you know that no one will ever convince you that you’re wrong, then you should probably take your discussion elsewhere.
• No matter how persuasive you think you are, you cannot force others to agree with you.
• Punctuation, correct spelling, complete sentences, and coherent paragraphs are not required, but they sure make other people more likely to pay attention to what you say.

You can disagree with the guidelines. You still have to follow the rules.

Once again, the letters page of The Fresno Bee was filled with foolishness this morning. So I decided to go online and push back. And then, on one letter, this comment appeared, from someone using the alias “All_American“:

Sarah [Palin] is a scholar bar none when put up against any liberal. She knows what being an America is supposed to look like. She actually loves the constitution. What a novel idea! What liberal even likes the constitution? I have never seen or heard of one.

Liberals have and will always mock a true American because they in their hearts want us destroyed. I believe that with all that is within me. They want to put the constitution in the shredder and have their Ayatollah or Darwin likeness rule. Profound freedom haters!

Mock on you low life liberals. Public opinion is looking at you with disgust. You will soon be back in your closet too afraid to face the country you have tried to destroy.

Just let that sink in. Sarah Palin is a scholar who loves the constitution. Liberals—all of them, whoever they are—belong in a closet, “want to put the constitution in a shredder and have their Ayatollah or Darwin likeness rule,” and are “freedom haters.” “Public opinion” is a person: it looks upon “liberals” with disgust.

Despite what others may think, I would not call myself “liberal” or “conservative.” I see no value in ideological assertions, as a matter of principle, that individual freedom is always good or that traditional methods of social organization should always be favored. We should think critically about how our predecessors organized their society and be willing to stomach a reasonable amount of risk that discontinuity, or changes in the ways we do things, will upset our stability—based on our thoughtful and educated risk that we have a greater likelihood of increasing our stability. And if thousands of years of contemplation by people all over the world struggling with the relationships between free will, determinism, and happiness have taught us anything, it should be that limitless freedom is a recipe for disaster: when we consider the tension between individual and society, we cannot forget the benefits of society for individuals, and the reasonable costs to individuals of maintaining that society.

There are ideologues on both ends of the spectrum, people who’ve decided to promote an idea no matter what facts may block the path to ideological purity. But there is a reasoned middle ground, where facts about our immeasurably complex world should make us question the viability of every ideology. We need social welfare programs and tough law enforcement. Serious problems like crime and poverty need to be addressed at both ends of their occurrence, including strong measures of prevention and real consequences when prevention fails. We need a strong sense of freedom, so people will recognize their ability to contribute and innovate, to everyone’s benefit, but freedom needs to be tempered by the inherent limitations on individuals when they choose to reap the benefits of social organization.

In the middle of all that, the Constitution has surprisingly little to say. And most reasonable people can find ways to disagree about what it does say. Did the Constitution set us off in one direction, setting only the limits of our innovation going forward? Or is the Constitution our guiding star, the fixed destination for our national journey? Either way, the Constitution provides a central—though increasingly indeterminate—text that maintains the center of our national conversation. It seems likely that we will one day set that document aside and draft another, which will precipitate another progression into indeterminacy. The meaning of any document will never last forever. And as someone who does a good amount of writing, I can attest to the possibility that even a text written by a single author can have meanings that the author never imagined or intended. But I have never any American, liberal or conservative, seriously suggest that we should put our Constitution, or any constitution, into either a literal or a metaphorical shredder.

We can deal with conflicting ideas, if the conversation continues, if our constitutional center—whatever it means—will hold. But there is a real world, with real people, whose lives can be thrown into terrible disarray without any good reason when ideas lose contact with facts and ideology takes hold at the seat of power. And those people who disconnect their ideas from facts pose a greater danger to the livability and longevity of our society than people who commit atrocious acts of intentionally disruptive violence. When the national discourse takes leave of reality, we will quickly find ourselves susceptible to all forms of manipulation, unmoored from anything that would prevent us from destroying ourselves. Without facts, without curiosity, without the drive to learn about our world and each other, our society—and all of the benefits it gives us—will quickly crumble under the weight of our stupidity.

People like “All_American” are getting louder, and they want to take over. They believe that “liberals” (whoever they are) want to destroy our society, but their refusal to temper their ideological views with facts makes their movement ignorant, shrill—and powerful. It’s much easier just to claim that “liberals” hate freedom, or that they want to take your money, than it is to engage reality with facts and reasoned discourse. But we will pay a steep price if they win—not in taxes, but in the loss of our freedom, our intelligence, our happiness, our economic strength, and our moral authority. I would rather pay taxes and struggle against the forces of ignorance that will always threaten to overtake our political system.

And here is how we struggle: by promoting education and reasoned collaboration among citizens, by finding people like “All_American” and pushing them to engage their minds with us and the rest of the world, by thinking critically and skeptically and teaching our children and young people to do the same, by pursuing knowledge without limitations but using it only with caution. The forces of gleeful ignorance and dangerous selfishness threaten to ruin the great society we have built, but we cannot let them succeed.

Professor Myers has it right:

Children are your responsibility, not your personal sheet of blank paper.

Right? Understand? Seems uncontroversial? But he continues with a razor sharp observation that should spur some critical thought among its targets:

They aren’t there for you to scribble on, crumple up, and throw away if you don’t like them. Isn’t it weird how the religious wackjobs can howl about how a fetus is a human being that must be granted the privilege of existence, but once it pops out, it reverts to being a possession, a thing that mommy and daddy can do with as they please?

Read his post at the link above to see the ridiculous context in which his remarks arise.

My law school—the San Joaquin College of Law—has posted a series of videos from a talk on civility in the legal profession by two local attorneys, Warren Paboojian and James Weakley. Watch them and learn how attorneys ought to practice. And these are not just for attorneys; if you have an attorney, or are thinking of hiring one, think about what these guys are saying. Choose wisely.

The New York Times asks John Yoo: “Do you regret writing the so-called torture memos, which claimed that President Bush was legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture?”

He answers: “No, I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered.”

It’s a half-ass answer to a half-ass question. They gave him a way out by failing to ask a stronger question, like this one: “Do you regret advising President Bush that he was legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture?” Instead, the question is just, “Do you regret writing the memos?” And the part about the president being “legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture” just identifies which memos they are talking about.

So Yoo could just point out the obvious: the simple fact of writing the memos was part of his job. But what people want to know, and what the Times failed to ferret out, is whether Yoo feels any remorse for specifically advising President Bush that he could “ignore laws prohibiting torture.” Even though Yoo had a client with a legal question that needed answering, he did not have an obligation to answer that question in a certain way. He could have written those memos to argue that laws prohibiting torture are still applicable, no matter the people you’re dealing with, even when they’re in a newly made-up category like “enemy combatants.”

People like John Yoo should never be asked softball questions by journalists. And I’m not saying that just because I think Yoo’s political views are inhuman; people who assert hardball positions, no matter where they fall on the spectrum, should get hardball questions from journalists. If we’re going to have a free press, we should have a useful press, too.