Sins of the Fathers

It goes against modern Biblical and theological thought to take some of the old testament seriously, and we will go to lengths to explain away various anomalous points of view. The punishment of David's son for David's own misdeeds is one of these. Today we find it difficult to imagine the punishment of the innocent for the mistakes of the father. How can Ham's children be cursed throughout the generations? How is that just? How can a just god punish innocent children for a previous generations misdeeds?

So when I say that this goes against modern religious thought, I also of course include non-theistic philosophies. I have no doubt that some people site the above as the very reasons why they forsake any theistic religions; how could they believe in a God that punishes the innocent for the fault of the guilty. Surely the ancients were warped; they had a sick sense of justice.

No, says I, they were more realistic, more empirical, and less blinded by ideology than we are. One need only look at history to see that constantly and forever more, a generation is punished for the crimes of those preceding it. Rather than go from some abstraction of God as an all good and kind being, they went from what they knew, and described God from it. They knew, because they could witness it throughout history and every day life, that when a father screws up, his children are punished. They are cursed because he has been improprietous, unjust, lacking in foresight, etc.

Let us look at Confucian scholarship. What is the Mandate of Heaven? It is, to be a bit crude in translation, the eastern equivalent of the divine right of kings. In other words, a king rises because he is just and falls because he is unjust. But Confucius knew better than to think it that direct; rather, he says that when a ruler falls, it is more likely because the Mandate of Heaven was lost in the previous generation, by the misdeeds of his forerunner. Thus, a just king might lose his kingdom because he inherited it from an unjust king. Is this justice? How could we follow a philosophy with such obvious unfairness?

Because it is true! Because history is full of "divine punishment" upon populations for what was done before, and it is folly--FOLLY!--to believe we have the moral high ground because we seem to be doing well today, because we are rich today. Whether or not we were morally upright, whether we were considerate of our children and theirs, will be shown by history after we are dead. We must not look to our present to see how we are doing, our stock portfolios will tell us nothing! We must look at history, at the actions that preceded downfall and decline time after time: these include reckless abuse of resources, environmental degradation, cultural degradation (particularly a loss of rural culture), and excessive abuse of the monetary system by elites. And all of these things we can see happening today, and they will boil and fester for a generation or more until finally our grandchildren will pay the price in blood for our ignorant bliss.