“That will set the United States’ position in this part of the world back fifty years!” I can still hear the despairing tone of an eminent scholar in the Athens Tennis Club as our conversation was interrupted by a waiter who announced that the American Marines had just stormed the beaches of Beirut. I agreed, but was wrong.

Forty-nine years later, it’s clear that our preemptive strike prevented civil war in Lebanon, splitting apart Christian president & Sunni prime minister. Conclusion: Give me 49 years and I’ll tell you whether any particular preemptive strike was a Good Idea. (Was our Army & Marine pull-out of Lebanon 25 years after our Marine invasion a Good Idea? I don’t know. It’s too soon to tell.)

On this week’s question, I’m so ignorant as not even to know whether our preemptive war in Iraq was a good idea—so how would I know whether our staying in, or getting out, would be a good idea? But the question is not about strategic foreign-affairs decisions made and to be made by persons democratically empowered to make them. It’s about the moral component in the decision-making process involving all our citizenry. The question is even narrower: Can we speak of “the moral position” on the “out of Iraq” question?

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This question is and is not a laughing matter: “Are physicians’ primary obligations to their patients or their religious convictions?”

A laughing matter: The question’s secular-antireligious bias is blatant. Maturely religious physicians have so integrated their religious and occupational “professions” that what is good for their patients is understood within the particular physician’s way of seeing and living in the world. Further, the bias naively assumes that what is good for the patient can be objectively known, confining the religious factor to the inferior realm of subjectivity. The question does not occur where what is good for the patient -- for example, stopping the flow of blood from a wound -- can be objectively known.

NOT a laughing matter: Some religious traditions dogmatically exclude or severely restrict some generally accepted medical procedures. For example, Christian Science and Roman Catholicism. For the births of our children, my wife and I avoided Roman Catholic hospitals out of fear that she would die and I would leave the hospital with a neonate and no wife.

But more fundamental than the partly hypothetical question driving a wedge between medicine and religion is the fact that religion and medicine are only superficially and secondarily in conflict. They are siblings, born of the common human desire to improve the human condition. Of course siblings occasionally fuss at one another, but their dustups do not erode their sibling identity. Historically, an outstanding instance of their cooperatioin is the fact that Christianity has been the primary hospital-builder to the world.

Two practical matters:

1 Medical institutions should accommodate the consciences of particular physicians, for both medical efficiency and religious freedom.

2 As in America we have the mutual freedom of "church and state," we should have also the mutual freedom of medicine and law. Government should stay out of doctors' offices and operating rooms.

“Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

Abortion and same-gender equality--are they small stuff? “Small” signals that the question’s category is size. When conversations hit a question of size, I frequently recall my father the judge saying,“In comparison with what?”

The longer you stare at something, the bigger it gets. Not in your eyes but in your mind. It’s the psychology of attention. If it makes you sick, it’s the pathology of attention.

An ancient prayer for wisdom put it this way: “Lord, give us a right judgment in all things.” Proportion. Balance. Reality. Truth. Fairness. Justice. Yes, intelligent Love. This Peace Prayer was influential in ending Europe’s Thirty-Years' War and Britain’s Puritan/Restoration bitterness: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” Essentials are big stuff; non-essentials are small stuff; and mutual love prevents differences of sorting from becoming hot-button destroyers of community.

As a Christian, I am saddened, distressed, even frightened by Christians who sicken their minds and societies by single-issue passionate polemic for or against something, anything, whatever. Jesus came preaching “gospel” (Middle English for “good news”), and some of my Christian brothers and sisters moralize the gospel down to their notions of proper behavior and politicize it to their petitions for the use of public power to force their points of view on all who disagree with them. We Christians can’t use the excuse that “Everybody does it”: Jesus didn’t do it.

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The next president of the United States will have done the best campaigning job of replacing this sentence’s “or” with “and”: “Is health care for children a parental responsibility or a moral imperative for society?” Who would not agree that whatever the proportions, the health care of children must be a concern of both parents and society?

My first response to the question was political--the politics of the home (the Republican Party’s emphasis) and of the state (the Democratic Party’s emphasis). And my conclusion is that, this time around, no ideological Democrat or ideological Republican is electable to the Oval Office.

Now that I’ve taken care of POLITICS, we can move on to MORALITY.

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Let’s start with you. If you twist your arm slowly, soon it will begin to hurt, and the pain will keep increasing until it becomes SEVERE. If you enjoy the pain, you’re a masochist. If you so twist the arm of someone else, you’re a sadist. And if your job is to inflict such pain, you’re a torturer (the root meaning of the word torture is “twisting”).

Let’s apply this to our question: “Can the use of torture ever be justified?” Not in international law, which defines torture as “any act by which SEVERE pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as” (and here I expand the list) information, punishment, sadistic satisfaction, intimidation, coercion to acquiescence, political re-education, discrimination, humiliation, repression, & deprivation. So defined, torture can never be justified.

Implicitly, international law says that pain-infliction is permissible as long as the pain is not SEVERE. I agree here with international law, and reject the arguments of those who say that no inflicting of pain can be justified.

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Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

No, I didn’t write that. I wanted you to read it as though it were something just written, so I left off the quotation marks. It’s from page 63 of "THE IRONY OF AMERICAN HISTORY," a 1952 classic by America’s premier public intellectual of the time, Reinhold Niebuhr.

“Christian realism” is the phrase Niebuhr’s name often brings to mind. He had a wry way of saying things, and I remember the irony I could see in the slightly upturned corner of his mouth when he said things like forgiveness sometimes doesn’t work and unforgiveness never works.

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Two men sprang to mind when I read “Happy Holidays? Why are many holiday family gatherings marked by tension and unhappiness?”

ANTONY FLEW—formerly Britain’s most prominent atheist—in late age concluded that the existence of purpose cannot be explained without assuming the existence of a purposeful Mind behind and within the universe. Late last year, with eleven other academicians, he urged the British government to teach ID (yes, “intelligent design”) in the public schools! But--given the “On Faith” description of “many holiday family gatherings”—we cannot believe that they are intelligently designed, can we?

Well, yes, if we hear from the other man who sprang to my mind. He wasn’t an archangel, but he used “the Archangel” as a way of referring playfully to a life-assumption that has educational and therapeutic value. (Though himself a devout Christian, he avoided using “God,” a turn-off word for many of his patients.) A Berlin psychotherapist and Jungian analyst who emigrated to the U.S. at the beginning of World War II, he was missing a shoulder—blown off when he was a German soldier in World War I.

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We get bored and our minds wander. Wandering minds are seldom exposed and shamed. Certainly, no scandal.

How otherwise it is with wandering genitals! Of all our body parts-and-powers, wandering genitals are the most scandalous. Especially in America: Ingrid Bergman’s genitals in California wandered from her husband’s genitals in Sweden, so she had to leave the U.S. (after playing the pure virgin in a 1948 film on Joan of Arc)....

....so on to our “On Faith” interrogation: “From Clinton to Craig, from Swaggart to Paulk, America seems obsessed with sex scandals. Is sex outside of marriage a sin? Is it a public matter? Is it forgivable?”

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Around the world and through history, VIRTUE//VICE lists are a staple of ethics and religion, behavior and belief. The current “On Faith” questions involve a VICE list: “In Christian theology, there are Seven Deadly Sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. Which of these do you think is the worst? Which is most prevalent and harmful in our society today?”

GREED is my choice. It’s both the worst and, in our society today, the most prevalent and harmful. But before supporting my choice, I must make two adjustments:

..........The Seven Deadly Sins are broadly “in Christian theology,” but specifically they are a vice catalog within Roman Catholic ethics. In the English language, they are not known to have appeared together until 1711. Further, virtue/vice catalogs precede Christianity in classical (Greek and Roman) and Jewish literature.

..........Generally, Christian ethics treats first of virtues, only thereafter of vices. Traditionally, the virtues are seven: four classical (prudence, justice, courage, temperance), three specifically Christian (faith, hope, love).

In the Christian paradigm, life in all its aspects is to be seen as providential, as divinely given. Early Christianity described Christian character by lists of virtues-values so conceived. In Galatians 5:22, the virtues are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” In Ephesians 5:9, the values are “all that is good and right and true.” In Philippians 4:8, Christians are to “think about these things”: “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable...any excellence...anything worthy of praise.”

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Some Sunday in the late 1920s, a sober-faced church-school teacher looked down into my eyes and intoned “Let him who thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.” (1 Corinthians 10:12) Yesterday, at age 90, I had my first fall from loss of balance: I thought I was standing, but the truth is that I was falling. The Scripture was morally right, and my senior-exercise trainer was physically right.

The metaphor from our two-leggedness hit me as I read our question: “What does the Elliott Spitzer scandal say about our public and private morality? Should he have resigned?”

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When Ashley Montagu came out with his “The Natural Superiority of Women” (1952), I asked him whether it would have been more scientific to write on “The Mutual Superiority of the Sexes.” We had just had a debate in which he opposed my “God is love” to his “Love is god.” He was a feisty character, with a preference for inflammatory utterance. In the debate, I objected that he left God out; in the conversation, I objected that he left men out. They are related: the natural superiority/inferiority of the sexes is a divine design.

Photo your average man alongside your average woman and what do you see? Only the natural superiority of the male, in size and musculature – a superiority decreasingly functional to the protection and control of women and children as societies become more complex. / Since the female is naturally superior in the perception and manipulation of human relations, female power increases with the complexity of society. / As the imbalance increases, desperate males increase their battering of females. / As the muscular battering is visible (though female internal wounding of males is not), social and legal sanctions against it increase. / As society sees men as at least potential batters, male dignity declines in the public mind.

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