MORALITY ROCKET

MORALITY of a TWO-STAGE ROCKET A two-stage rocket ejects stage one mid-flight. The necessary separation does not indicate it was wrong or unnecessary for liftoff. But nether does it value the initial stage so much that it remains attached throughout the flight. Launching God's redemptive plan involved a disturbing amount of violence as it broke a number of corporeal barriers. However that does not mean His initial launch would characterize the mission. Like the spent first stage of a rocket, the law of sin and death blasted off with ferocious violence but was designed to fall away as God's mission progressed. Or so it would seem. The unbelievable harsh inauguration of God's plan during stage-one compared with His compassionate nature in stage-two and the peace delivered with the payload (His Holy Spirit) has lead several to question God's character or the accuracy of the record. 1)If the record is accurate God broke His stage-two moral teachings during stage-one. To clear His name one option proposed is that the record of His violent immoral acts, especially during stage-one should be jettisoned as simply reported inaccurately. 2)If stage-one is not accurate then God's loving moral character can be preserved untarnished. The inaccurate text should be dropped of because it is wrong. It makes sense that if God is a loving moral God then the record of stage-one's atrocities committed at God's command must be jettisoned. Otherwise God is guilty of serious immorality and injustice. However I see a third option. 3)Rather than God being either moral or immoral it is proposed He is amoral. First of all amoral means an absence of morality. It goes without saying as the God of all of time,space and matter,He stands outside not only of our standards of right and wrong but any standards of right and wrong...including the morality He provided. Secondly, We have only a glimmer of the measures required for God to push His wild creatures from our amoral garden into a state of knowing good and evil. Nether can we, now, appreciate what it took to tame the immoral creature who left the garden. I suspect that all along it was God's goal to install His love in our hearts. Those who love peace find themselves in good company when it comes to their difficulty reconciling the rather obvious immoral and unjust commands attributed to God. C. S. Lewis dropped his formal theological activities to write children's books over the issue of morality. He finally did recognize the flaw in his assessment of the topic. He failed to take seriously enough the question of "intent". An act is either moral, immoral or neutrally moral depending on the intent. God's intent, as see from the cross, was aways love. That is not to say that a moral judgments can be made based on their out come because, as it turns out, morality can not be discerned from observation. Observation yields only speculative knowledge. Where as practical knowledge is required to judge morality and that demands understanding. In the words of G. Elizabeth M. Anscombe (who bested CSL on the subject), "We need to know what they take themselves to be doing, how they understand their actions. This knowledge does not come from observation but knowing what the intentions were." I submit that certain post-cross acts have such observably horrific outcomes that they seem to go beyond understanding. But that's the old Emauel Kant reviving his "Moral Deotology" in me. Sorry Lord.