Life and Conscience [“Faith at Work”, part VI] 2/15/48
Scripture: Matthew 5: 21-26
Text: Exodus 20: 13; “Thou shalt not kill.”- or - “Thou shalt do no murder.”
As we have considered the commandments in this series of meditations, we have dealt with those which might be termed general planks in our platform of building, or re-constructing -- a good society. These have been (1) The worship of the one true God; (2) No human-conceived substitutes; (3) recovery of the urgency in keeping sacred our attitude toward divinity; (4) preservation of a regular time and practice of worship; and (5) giving all due honor to our heritage. We want to be sure about the right allocation of our loyalty; we must make distinctions which lend to a sense of urgency; we must be careful to employ the right institutions and methods of strengthening our feeble individual efforts.
Now we move to “planks” that seem to us more specifically ethical. Here we find a precept as to what we shall do, or not do. “Thou shalt not kill.” The American translation reads, “You must not commit murder.” Another frequent translation: “Thou shalt do no murder.”
Elton Trueblood suggests that when we get to this consideration, we find that the ultimate moral principles of a people are revealed not so much by what they do, as by the way in which they justify their actions.
When we try to tell why an action is right, we do so by appealing to more profound positions which we assume our opponents will accept as fully as we do.
I suppose everyone will assent to the thesis that the American use of an atomic bomb against a Japanese city killed a host of innocent people along with some who may have been guilty of great evil. How was use of the bomb defended and justified? President Truman, and many others, argued that, however horrible was the immediate effect of the bomb, ultimately it saved human lives by the millions by forcing a speedy end to the fighting. The ultimate principle, to which appeal is made in this argument, is that all human life is sacred; and if life can’t all be saved, use the course which will save most of it.
Almost all persons in our present society agree with this ultimate principle. It is one of the most easily accepted planks in the moral platform. We suppose that we understand it so clearly that it requires no discussion - like an axiom in a mathematical formula. It may seem really a waste of effort to discuss it, inasmuch as almost everybody disapproves of wanton murder.
Simple as it may seem, it is, however, easy to show that the problem is exceedingly complex.
Some theosophists try to avoid moral difficulties by the simple effort to kill nothing. This, however, appears to be no solution. You remember the story of the uneducated Hindu who would kill nothing - neither man, sacred cow, fish nor chicken nor insect. His agitation over the life seen through a powerful microscope, in one drop of his drinking water, was acute. Rather than accept the fact that he was guilty of swallowing some life - and destroying part of it - every time he drank some water, he settled the matter for himself by smashing the microscope! Which didn’t settle anything for long!
We are constantly faced with the choice of which life is to be taken. Will you kill the lice which carry typhus fever germs? Or will you let the typhus germs kill the people? On very high grounds indeed, one who can kill the lice and refuses to do so is terribly evil. He may seem to be avoiding the issue; but his very avoidance is taking sides by valuing lice rather than people.
The sensitized conscience realizes that lower forms of life must frequently be sacrificed for the higher forms of life.
Now if the sense of the commandment is accurately translated “murder,” it is unjustified killing that is condemned. The principle involved is something more subtle than the mere determination not to take life.
The words of Christ add a further refinement by his insistence that the real sin of murder lies deeper than the act of murder; it lies, says Christ, in the hatred of the murderer. Thus the man who tries to murder his neighbor, or who would like to murder him, but is hindered by circumstances beyond his control, is as guilty of evil as the man who was not thus hindered.
Left standing alone, the moral law against taking life has little meaning. Life is somewhat better than dirt, but why get so excited about it? Isn’t it silly to get concerned over the destruction of a louse? Perhaps it is silly to be concerned over the destruction of a larger creature who may at times be the carrier of germs. If man is nothing more than a complicated organism, soon to wear out and be displaced, what is so highly valuable about him? He hasn’t even the strength, stature or chemical value of some of the other creatures.
But though talk about the sacredness of life is stupid on the grounds of materialistic assumptions, there are grounds on which it makes sense. If God really is, if He is author of all created things and has made mankind in his own image, as no other creature is, the pattern of thought changes sharply.
The individual person may be dull or even derelict. But if, with all his sin, he is truly made in God’s image, and is capable of eternal fellowship with God; and if he is truly one for whom Christ died, then we begin to see why we should value human life.
Physically, man is not very great. Mentally he may be replaceable. It seems that no man is indispensable. Morally, we are all far from good enough. Our highest flights of human planning are marred by self-centeredness from which we never succeed in escaping.
The only valid basis on which our common human objection to murder can be sustained is the theological basis. If man is merely a sample of a racial blood stream, as Hitler taught, it may be altogether reasonable to kill people as easily as Hitler killed them. Hitler was consistent.
Mere life is not what is supremely precious. This is shown in the fact that so many sensitive and courageous people willingly give up their own lives for a cause or for other lives. This would be ridiculous if it is mere life that is to be preserved.
But it is agreed that there are many reasons why a man will willingly die and many situations in which it is considered unworthy for a man to continue to live. “He that would save his life, loses it” has sunk deep into our western consciousness.
The most moving fact about Jesus Christ, symbolized by his cross, is the fact that he valued divine truth and the salvation of other people above his own physical life! Here, he truly seems to us divine!
Sometimes our great concern for the continuance of physical life is evidence not that we moderns have a high respect for man, but rather that we have a low one. The sheer materialist is often more eager to keep life going than is the genuine believer in God. This is entirely understandable since the materialist entertains no hope of life beyond the grave, while the Christian is convinced that this life is but the tiny beginning of an endless existence.
It is a pagan concern that puts so much concern on the preservation of the body after death by many futile attempts to defeat time. A consistent Christian will pay little attention to a dead body beyond its decent care and disposal and the safeguarding of health for the living. For the Christian believes that “this mortal must put on immortality.” It is not, therefore, life per se which is sacred, but personality that is sacred.
We do not value the materials used in a laboratory. We use them in experiment. And when one is spoiled, we throw it away. This is the only ground on which experimentation is possible. But real experimentation with human life as a laboratory material is revolting. This is a chief reason for being so thoroughly shocked at the Nazi human laboratories of World War II.
By the same token, if it were true, as some few have said, that the use of the atomic bomb on Japanese people was an experiment, we must conclude that it was a horrible evil. Whether it was or was not such an evil seems to depend on the attitude with which it was used.
What is so terrible about war is not that people die -- they die anyway sooner or later, some by disease, some with the infirmities of age, many by violence of accident. But the terrible thing about war is the encouragement it gives to think of other human beings not as personalities for whom Christ died, each precious in his own way, but as experimental targets.
I don’t suppose any bombadier was trained to aim at a 9-year old child; a crippled old man, an anxious woman with a baby in her arms, a patriotic man. Bombadiers were trained, I understand, to aim at targets. Unfortunately the effective target was usually made up not of materials alone but of people. The only workable solution of the problem of the sacredness of life seems to be the cultivation of an uneasy conscience.
Animals and plants must die to feed humans. Some animals must be given infantile paralysis in an effort to find how boys and girls can be saved from this dread ailment.
But we must never do this wantonly or easily. Dr. Schweitzer expresses this moral position when he writes: “Those who test operations and drugs on animals, or who inoculate them with diseases so that they may be able to help human beings by reason of the results thus obtained, ought never to rest satisfied with the general idea that their dreadful doings are performed in pursuit of a worthy aim. It is their duty to ponder in every separate case whether it is really and truly necessary thus so to sacrifice an animal for humanity.”
If it is necessary to cultivate an uneasy conscience about the death and suffering of animals, it is a thousand times more important to cultivate such a conscience as regards the suffering and death of human beings. It seems that some human beings must die to save others or to save a way of living which will dignify and beautify other lives -- some of them yet unborn. We seem forced to accept all this as reasonable, but we dare not let ourselves get used to it so as to take it lightly. Our hope lies in keeping alive a sensitivity that never allows us to accept death and suffering supinely.
War may come again -- may God forbid it! But if it should, brave men will sacrifice themselves rather than permit the sacrifice of others. But there is little glory in it that the true hero wants. And the option should not be limited along to young men!
By and large, the Christian church has often held that there are conditions under which it is right for a Christian to participate in war, because the alternative may be worse than the fighting. But it is to the credit of the church that the church has usually faced war with sorrow and misgiving. All Christians know that war is tragic.
One more brief consideration; during the past few years, something terrible has happened to our minds in that we have all become hardened to human pain and death. I don’t refer to soldiers and sailors -- I refer to us who remained civilian! Once we were much concerned if a dozen people were killed in a train wreck or one aviator was lost at sea.
Now we can read in our papers that millions of little ones in other countries (and even some in our own!) are suffering and dying from lack of food, fuel, shelter, clothing -- we read of it, and turn to the sports page.
It is an evil thing if we can bear the sober report that thousands, perhaps even millions of people on this earth will almost surely die of starvation and its attendant diseases, and yet we have no stirring of horror in our souls!
We cannot build a healthy society without regaining the consciousness that the unnecessary death of one child of God in one part of the world is as tragic as the death of a child of God in any other part. We must recover the capacity to be shocked! This will not be connived. It must be cultivated. This is our spiritual task. People must become tender hearted again!
We have started the task of reconstructing and rebuilding if we begin to convince ourselves, and all others, that an undisturbed conscience in days like these is an invention of the Devil! A troubled, active conscience is a sign of however angelic we may become.
Thou shalt not kill God’s children - either by design or by neglect.
May God have mercy on us, and incline our hearts to keep this law!
Amen.
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Dates and places delivered:
Wisconsin Rapids, February 15, 1948
Waioli Church, February 16, 1975