Test Everything

I grew up with Bill Cosby humor. Some of it was classic. I laughed every time I heard his version of Noah's story. Funny stuff. And his illustrations of how children are obviously brain-damaged were hilarious. He was funny and his humor was clean and it was good stuff. Except ... I'm not allowed to be amused anymore. Cosby is a convicted sexual predator, a disgraced comic. You'd better not laugh at his stuff or you're complicit.

It's not just Cosby, of course. It's what we do today. They've torn down multiple monuments because those guys, heroes in their day, are bad, bad, bad now. There is a petition to change the name of the city of Columbus because Christopher Columbus is now a fiend rather than a friend. Apparently the great 18th-century preacher, George Whitefield (I have a quote from him over on the side there), and even Jonathan Edwards are in deep water because of views on slavery that are no longer allowed. I have long been ashamed to be tied in title alone to John Calvin because everyone knows he did a bad thing. We're done with them, right? They have moral failures and we are no longer going to associate with them. We are above all that. "Thank you, God," we pray, "that we are not like them" (Luke 18:11).

Two things.

First, this is what is known as a logical fallacy. The genetic fallacy is a common logical fallacy that attempts to determine the truth of an argument by its origin. It can go both ways. "Well, my dad said it so it must be true," is just as fallacious as, "Well, Hitler said it so it must be false." Of course, rarely is it so blatant. With my Bill Cosby reference, for instance, I might say, "His Noah routine was hilarious" and a detractor would huff and puff and blow my house down with, "Cosby! Don't you know he is a sexual predator??!" Well, yeah, okay ... but his Noah routine was still hilarious. On my blog I had one commenter who swore off reading it because I quoted C.S. Lewis and everyone knows he was evil. Well, at least this reader did. The problem with this fallacy is that it never ends up examining the argument it is falsifying. It simply shoots the messenger.

The other thing, though, is the sheer arrogance we carry about with this line of thinking. "Did you hear what Columbus did??!!" we declare self-righteously. Well, sure! Now, shall we talk about your transgressions? It is arrogance to think that we're better than they are and, therefore, our arguments are better than theirs. Beyond that, it is absolutely arrogant to think that what we hold as good and evil today will be regarded the same tomorrow. Remember, in 2008 Californians voted overwhelmingly to keep marriage as the union of a man and a woman ... twice. By today's standards California was a pit of vipers, haters to the core. And that was just over a decade ago. In the '60's racism was normal and sexism was expected. (You should see some of the old TV shows. Watching through today's moral cheesecloth, those folks were downright evil.) Morality -- not to be confused with objective morality, a morality based on an objective standard -- changes all the time. Seemingly day to day. What makes you think that the moral high horse you're riding today won't be tomorrow's snake in the garden? Arrogance. We're arrogant enough to think that just because we are here, morally, it is right. In the words of the Gershwins, "It ain't necessarily so."

I miss Cosby, with his clean humor and his funny stories. I don't admire the man. I can make that distinction. Nor do I admire my own sin. I can make that connection. So I can appreciate wisdom from wise people and still recognize when an Adolph Hitler said something that was true (like, "If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed"). I don't have to toss out the scholarly work of a Jonathan Edwards or the wise sayings of a George Whitefield because they weren't perfect human beings. No one but God can stand up to the demands of perfection. The rest of us will have to "test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thess 5:21).