What is Man?

A week ago, one of my professors posed a question to my class. What makes a man a man? What would have to happen to a man to make him no longer a man? If he lost a leg would he still be a man? If he lost an arm? What if he lost all four of his limbs? We all seemed to be of the consensus that he would still be a man, albeit an armless, legless one.

At this point one girl remarked that if he lost his head he would be a dead man, to which we all laughed.

Okay, my professor said, what if he was barking like a dog, living like a dog? Or some other animal? Well, physically he would still be a man. Only his behavior would be different from most other men, and I couldn’t say that that would change the essence of what he is.

I started thinking about metaphysical attributes that humans possess and mere animals do not to try and determine if a man could lose one these attributes and be no more than a man. Humans are self-aware, whereas animals are not. We can contemplate our own existence, and ask questions about it. Animals cannot, as far as we can tell. Maybe being self-aware is what makes human life meaningful. But, then I thought of babies, which, to all intents and purposes are little more than human shaped slugs. They aren’t self-aware. They aren’t asking questions about their existence. They just cry when they’re hungry or tired or cold or when they’ve messed themselves and are uncomfortable. I can’t make a philosophical distinction between a baby and a man since all of the potential for manhood his there in a baby boy. Even without self-awareness, a man is still a man.

My professor then asked if a man without a conscience would still be a man. The ability to know right from wrong is another key difference between humans and animals. Many people in the class conceded that the lack of a conscience would turn a man into something else. I almost agreed with them, thinking of the horrors perpetrated by serial killers and rapists and the like. Surely they are something less than human. But then I thought of grown men with mental deficiencies that make them unable to distinguish right from wrong. Are these people something different from men because they happen to have this mental deficiency? I had to answer that they are men, even though they have such a deficiency.

I kept thinking about one of the scriptures that I used over and over again to teach people about our relationship to God: Romans 8:16-17. It reads, “The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.” That doesn’t just apply to people we like or people who behave in ways that we approve of, but every person on the earth.

I had to say that nothing could make a man less than a man, nor could anything make a woman less than a woman. Or in other words, nothing could happen to a human being to make him or her something less. There is something divine and sacred in human life, and nothing can take that away. If he demote someone to less than human when they do something horrific, as our favorite villains of the twentieth century, the Nazis, did, what we are really saying is that we don’t want to go through the effort of understanding them. (I won’t reiterate here what I recently wrote on the Nazis, but if you’d like to read it you can here) Animals don’t do the things they do for any rational reason, they just do things, and we want to think that no rational being would do anything horrific, so we say that they are less than human. Yet, man is capable of committing horrors. And, if guilty, man is worthy of the just punishment, which may be death.

At the same time, innocent human life is precious and should be preserved for its own sake. The devaluing of human life for any reason is the first step on the road to euthanasia, abortion, and even eugenics. All of these destroy the greatest of God’s creations: human life and the free agency it is endowed with. That is why I could not draw any line of when a man would become something else. Once a man, always a man. Once a woman, always a woman. Forgetting that gets us into dangerous philosophical ground. Forgetting that, I believe, makes it so much easier for us to commit horrors on our brothers and sisters.

Faith’s Proof

The Book of Mormon recounts an experience that the prophet Alma had with a man named Korihor. This Korihor was going around saying that the prophecies of God’s prophets, many of which concerned the coming of Jesus Christ, (this was before Christ’s birth in Bethlehem) were not true because “no man can know of anything which is to come” (Alma 30:13). He taught that no one can know of things that they cannot see, and that faith in the coming Messiah was the “effect of a frenzied mind” (16). “And many more such things did he say unto them, telling them that there could be no atonement made for the sins of men, but every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime” (17).

This passage in the Book of Mormon is so fascinating. Korihor, a man from the first century B. C., is making the same arguments that the wise and the learned are making in the 21st century. These arguments are not modern or new. People have been saying the same things for millennium, so the faithful should not fear them. We’ve dealt with them before.

Getting back to the story, Korihor ends up resorting to murder to win an argument and is subsequently brought before Alma to be judged. They get into an interesting theological debate and when Korihor asks Alma to show him proof of God’s existence in a sign, Alma responds with these words: “Thou hast had signs enough; will ye tempt your God? Will ye say, Show unto me a sign, when ye have the testimony of all these thy brethren, and also all the holy prophets? The scriptures are laid before thee, yea, and all things denote there is a God; yea, even the earth, and all things that are upon the face of it, yea, and its motion, yea, and also all the planets which move in their regular form do witness that there is a Supreme Creator” (44).

Alma’s answer doesn’t satisfy the rational and scientific modern mind. Nature obeys basic laws of physics like gravitation and thermodynamics. The motions of the planets and all of the things are not evidence of God’s existence because they can be explained scientifically. The scientific mind sees no place for God there.

In some respects, I have to agree with science on this one. Alma is taking one of his own assumptions, that the order of the universe denotes the existence of a Creator of that order, and demanding that Korihor accept it. Korihor doesn’t.

Yet, even though Alma doesn’t prove God’s existence with his rebuttal, he illuminates an important principle of faith. Alma can’t prove God’s existence to Korihor. He knows that he can’t. So, he does the next best thing: he declares his faith in God. To Alma, nature and the motion of the planets and everything else, witness that there is a Supreme Creator because he has chosen to believe in that Supreme Creator. He has had personal experiences with God that have confirmed that faith and as a result, he sees proof of God’s existence everywhere he looks. Korihor can look at the same scene and see only dirt, rocks, a few trees and the sky. He doesn’t see what Alma sees because he chooses not to.

Philosophers and scholars have been trying to prove and disprove God’s existence for ages. I find some arguments more compelling than others, but when you come down to it, none of them actually does what it seeks out to do. Those trying to prove God’s existence always run into the wall of only having secondary evidence to make their case and those trying to disprove it always run into the wall of trying to prove a negative and end up sounding like people trying to disprove the existence of bears because they never saw one at the zoo. In the end, I can only prove God’s existence to one person: myself. The evidence cannot be used outside the courtroom of my own conscience.

I think that God wants it this way. God wants us to rely on faith. After all, it is the first principle of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If He wanted to prove His own existence, He surly could. He chooses not to because He wants us to rely on faith, when things are going well for us and when things are not going well. He wants our faith to be tried and tested, not coddled and obvious.

Korihor chose not to have that faith. He continued to demand a sign, so Alma gave him one. He was struck dumb. Later on, he was trampled and killed. It’s funny. Being struck dumb didn’t cause Korihor to change his life and serve God. I guess he figured that there was a perfectly rational and scientific explanation for why his vocal chords gave out right when Alma said they would. There’s always a perfectly rational and scientific explanation for those kinds of things.

So This is the New Year…And I Don’t Feel Any Different

I’ve never really liked New Year’s Eve, and this past one was the second worst I’ve ever had. I flew from California to Boston on the 31st and landed with a splitting headache and some real stomach discomfort. I got to my apartment at about 10:30, crawled into my bed and didn’t move until about 12:30, when I turned off the light and fell asleep. Only one of the twenty-six New Year’s Eves that I’ve celebrated has been quite as bad as that, but I still don’t like it. Usually on New Year’s Eve, people get all excited and talk about new beginnings and blank slates and stay up until midnight and watch the ball drop and sing “Old Lang Syne” if they can remember all of the words.

Well, every year, I stay up and watch the ball drop and go to bed and wake up the next day and…well, life hasn’t changed much. I have to remember to write the date as ’10 now instead of ’09, which I will consistently forget to do until about June, but other than that, I’m in pretty much the same situation I was in on December 31st: my student debt hasn’t gone away, I still don’t have a job, and this coming semester of graduate school is looking to be even worse than the last one.

So what’s with all the talk about new beginnings and blank slates?

I was thinking about that in church yesterday and had an interesting thought. The New Year doesn’t give anyone a blank slate. Yes, it’s fun to go to a party and to watch a ball drop as everyone else in the world is watching that same ball drop (unless they happen to live in a different time zone as you do, then you’re watching it one or more hours before or after them) but you have to admit that New Year’s is pretty meaningless. It’s an excuse to party and (if you’re not Mormon) drink till you pass out. That’s it.

What really provides a blank slate is Jesus Christ. We all make mistakes. We say something we don’t mean, or mean but don’t intend to say that hurts someone else. We neglect to go out of our way to offer help that someone could probably use, but we’re not sure and we wouldn’t want to offend them by offering our help. We take our loved ones for granted, we take what isn’t ours, we take offense where none is intended. All of us do things we wish we hadn’t. All of us sin, and that sin weighs us down. I know that it’s not popular in our modern world to talk about sin, but it’s real and ignoring it won’t make it go away. A New Year won’t make it go away either.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ provides lots of new beginnings. One almost every week, in fact. When we are baptized, we are washed clean of all our past sins. We come out of the water completely clean. After that, we got to church each week and partake of the Sacrament (the name we Mormons use for what other churches call the Eucharist or Holy Supper). If we are repentant as we eat of the bread and water, we renew our baptism and are clean again. We have a blank slate. And we can resolve then and there that we’ll be a little better in the coming week.

A real blank slate is not something that comes with the changing of a calendar. It’s not something you celebrate with late night parties, confetti and a giant ball. Don’t get me wrong. Next December 31st, I don’t want to be lying in bed. I want to be among good company and eating good food. Even more, I want to have a lovely lady that I can kiss to start 2011. But that’s just the day that I’ll have to start writing the date twice every time I sign something. My new beginning I celebrate quietly every Sunday.