Tis Better to be Vile than Vile Esteemed

'Tis Better to be Vile than Vile Esteemed

By: George

It has often been suggested that honesty is the fundamental basis for being a good and virtuous person. While only those who are plagued with vice are capable of lieing, cheating, commiting purgery or fraud, those blessed with the transcendant qualities of truth-telling are somehow automatically proclaimed to be of a higher moral standing. This is a detestable acknowledgement of what morality is. Are we to understand that if we were to take two serial killers whom have commited attrocious pre-meditated murders, butchered their victims and hid the remains beneath their floor boards that the one who admited to these crimes would somehow be held up as a moral exemplum for all serial killers against the other? “It's ok, at least you're not as sinful as the one who denies his actions. Would you like to confess to other sins and forever be saved from eternal damnation?”

Because it is impossible to understand this sickening marriage between honesty and morality without taking into consideration the implications of religious forms of confession and the sin cleansing attributes of it. It is taught to our young that to be free from sin and to be accepted into heaven, you must confess your sins and be absolved by an elderly stranger in a purple jumpsuit, who would much rather be fondling his sceptre than listening to your innane dribble about skinning a cat and hoisting its intestines on a clothesline in your closet. Is it moral to tell your secrets to a man proclaiming to commune with God? I'm not sure. I certainly have no defining principles of morality. Is it moral to suggest that the crimes you have commited as a living person on a planet where the existence of the consequences of your actions are very real and noticeable can somehow be forgiven by a couple of ancient prayers and Hail Marry's? I should think there is something terribly wrong with this form of morality, in the least.

We are so entrenched in our notions that honesty forms moral characters that we forget that morality is not something which is gauged by the things we say or think but by the things that we do. I will, however, grant that being an honest person is perhaps a trait associated with many people that we can view as being moral, in so far as what constitutes being a moral person is concerned, but I believe it would be better classified as ethics, for the reason that morality has far too long been associated and subjected to religious doctrines. To make it quite clear, we are talking about what makes a person 'good'. Is being good telling the truth to your wife that you cheated on her with the next door neighbour's 18 year old red headed daughter while they were out of town? Does the act of telling the truth somehow negate the deplorable action of cheating? Certain dominant religious sects would suggest that by showing contrition, confessing your sins and accepting God's grace into your heart that the sin of cheating is now erased and you are once again a blank slate onto which more sins can be added and eternally cleansed. This forgiveness is gauranteed by the death of a martyr over two thousand years ago in a part of the world where notions of morality were vague and fuzzy. However, never the less, this man died for our sins before we were born and, without a doubt, before we knew we could commit them.

If this man died for our sins to grant the human race one final push forward by the grace of God, then why is it that the religion still demands a confession of our sins in order to be cleansed of them? It seems rather redundant, don't you think? Well, I suppose I won't try and fight the logic of religious teaching, because that can go on forever, and I'm sure I'm bound to get to it at some other point in time. Let's, instead, get back to the original argument.

We have become a society under the impression that our thoughts, feelings, opinions and ideas are the supporting forces behind being good, decent human beings. This is false. Virtuous thinking and virtuous actions are not necessarily concepts that are bound by some indomitable law of nature. The 'virtuous' teaching that sodomy (the biblical term, not for homosexuality, but the acts that homosexuals perform) is a sin against god is taught to pliable Catholic children, along with the abdication of contraceptive methods. What this results in is the secret and brutal assault on young boys in the trusted care of many priests. And while they still firmly believe in the abolition of condoms for contraceptive purposes, many of these priests transmit latent sexually transmited diseases which become apparent years later as the abused children themselves pass that disease to their children, along with the same bullshit teachings that started the whole cycle to begin with.

Christopher Hitchens, in his book God is Not Great, perhaps says it better than I ever could when he points out that “a high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.” I think it's about time we stepped off our soap boxes and refrained ourselves from spewing such complete nonsensical motives pertaining to what constitutes high moral characters. Morality is not something we can aspire to by telling ourselves that by confessing to the sexual abuse of a ten year old boy, lashing ourselves twenty times, climbing the stairs of a cathedral on our knees and kissing the hand of the pope is somehow going to relinquish us of all responsibilities of such a heinous and grotesque action. “'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed” reminds us all that we need to be worrysome of ideologies that tell us that we are better for admiting our sins. I would much rather bask in the vileness or morality of my actions in the comforts of my own concsiousness then have others praise the honesty of my intentions.