And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.  And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”

The story of Elijah’s experience at Mount Horeb after fleeing from Ahab and Jezebel gives rise to some of the strangest interpretations.  Some people think that whatever the weakest voice is, that is the voice of God.

I think the expression “still small voice” is a metonymy.  The voice is not called still and small in the sense that it is weak, but in the sense that one can hear it only in interior silence.

With the distractions of the wind, the earthquake, and the fire, Elijah found it difficult to find interior silence even in the desert.  Besides all those, we have the iPod, the YouTube, and the all-consuming  job.  One wonders what we are trying to drown out.

One of the aims of terrorists is to make their opponent lose their sense of balance and proportion.  Judging from recent events, this isn’t difficult to do.

Consider for example the terroristic murders at the Charlie Hebdo magazine.  The liberty to criticize a religion one considers false must be defended, and satire is a legitimate genre of criticism.  But satire doesn’t require obscenity.  Without becoming indecent myself, I cannot even describe the acts depicted by some of the magazine’s cartoons.

Now if the murders had never taken place, it would have been easy to say this.  But since they have taken place, many opponents of terrorism now seem to think that if you don’t defend obscenity, you are soft on free speech and religious liberty.

No.  Pornographic cartoonists do not become heroes just by being killed.

There is no moral equivalence.  Indecency does not justify murder, which is infinitely worse.  We really are at war with an implacable foe.  But let us not lose our heads.  That is just what the Enemy desires.

Tomorrow:  A Still Small Voice

The other day I came across yet another claim by an atheistic philosopher that God is unnecessary to ethics, that we can ground moral duties even if there is no God.

Let us set aside the question of whether this common claim is true.  For purposes of discussion, let us proceed as though it were.

Even so, it is curious that the theories of moral duty by atheists are usually much thinner than the ones developed by theists.  From a theist point of view, some of the pieces are missing.

Most of the atheists I know are consequentialists.  In these cases, one of the missing pieces is the concept of intrinsically evil acts – wrongs that are wrong even if they happen to bring about good results.

With only a few exceptions, even those who aren’t consequentialists tend to support abortion and euthanasia.  So another common missing piece is the concept of the sacredness of human life.

There are other differences, but let’s consider these.  Leaving aside psychological motivations – of which I can think of several -- what logical reasons might there be for them?

One, surely, is that if you don’t believe in God, then even if you do believe in goods and evils, you cannot believe, with the classical tradition, that human beings were made for something more than the goods of this life.

One would think that this would make the goods of this life more important.  Oddly, it doesn’t.  It makes them less important.  At least it makes life itself less important.

A life in preparation for a greater life is infinitely more precious than a life that is all there is.  A course of days that is already launched upon eternity is infinitely more momentous than an allotment of heartbeats that is already on the way to the abyss.  A soul that is made in God’s image is infinitely more significant than the mechanisms that make a pathetic bag of organic chemicals think that it has a soul.

Tomorrow:  Losing Our Heads

The chief limitation of the human intellect is not sheer shortage of brainpower, but defect of character.  The weakness of our minds is not that we are not smart enough, but that we are not good enough.

Consider how faulty our thinking is about other people because we are too interested in ourselves;

How readily we devise reasons to disbelieve truths which are stated by our enemies;

How easily the disorders of our hearts and affairs make us lose intellectual focus;

How insidiously the desire for pre-eminence and the fear of losing status impair intellectual honesty;

How dreadfully we tire ourselves with the effort of trying not to think of things that we cannot face;

How obsessively we raise pinnacles of plausible reasoning to excuse and monumentalize what we know to be wrong;

How eagerly we substitute cleverness for wisdom, curiosity for wonder, passion for zeal;

And how easily we are dissuaded from the happy travail of thought by sheer failure to love truth enough.

Were it not for these and all the many other drags and weights of sin, we would spring from insight to insight as easily as a robin capers from branch to branch.  Our minds would be the tinder that our passions are now, ready at a spark to burst into flame.  It is said to be thus with the blessed.

Tomorrow:  Curious Differences

Mondays are for student letters – or at least letters from young people -- and yes, this was a real letter.

Question:

Yo, wass up, I’ve been dating my girl for about a year now and I love her you know, even if I don’t always tell her that.  Anyways we just found out that she’s pregnant and she’s really upset, she doesn’t know how to tell her folks.  Oh yeah, I’m 20 years old, she’s only 17.  I’m young, intelligent, make a good living for myself.  My girl is from a different background, her parents don’t mind that, but they’re real strict and I think things will change now that I got her pregnant.  We don’t believe in abortion and she don’t want to give it up for adoption so we’re gonna have to eventually tell them what’s going on.  What should I do? How can I let her know I’m sorry?  Please help me.

Reply:

You say you love her.  I don’t see the evidence yet.  Do you really want to know how to let her know that you’re sorry?  Or do you just want to get off the hook?  The way to show that you’re sorry is to do the right thing.

This is where you find out how much you want to be a man.

No matter what you’re afraid of, her parents have a right to be told; there is no “eventually.” The sooner the better.  Like today.  Most families pull together in a pinch. 

If you were both of age, I would tell you to marry her, provide for her, stay married, be faithful, and be a good father.  That’s the advice I gave another young guy who got his girlfriend pregnant.*  Your case is different, because depending on where you live, she may not be of age.

I can’t give you advice about the law.  Morally, I advise you to face the music.  Do what you can to repair the hurt that you’ve done to this girl and your unborn child.  That includes providing for them.

From now on, everything else in your life takes second place, and I mean everything.

Note

* See “I Got My Girlfriend Pregnant.  What Now?”  The girlfriend of that letter wrote to me a moving letter of her own some time later – after she and the young man were married and the baby was born -- and I included it in Ask Me Anything, pp. 66-68.

Tomorrow:  Light Through Darkness