The Christian Morality Help Center Project

Christians rely on religious texts such as the bible to guide their moral behavior, or if they cannot find an answer to their moral issue in the Bible they consult their clerics. As our product experts here at the Christian Morality Help Center closely examined these time consuming options, we had no alternative but to conclude a new approach using modern technology will be the best solution to helping Christians live morally. By the way, the Cell Phone Bible Edition and the more compact Cell Phone Ten Commandments edition are going to be ready for release, real soon. Until then, Christians can carry a printed edition of the KJB, NIV, RSV, ASV; Greek N-A or any combination you like. Keep them handy at all times in your purse or backpack. Now, we realize how tiring that can be after a while, but relax, help is on the way. Our product development team has laid in a supply of Jolt Cola and Cheetos and is working around the clock to produce our product spec. Let me tell you about the project.

Problem Definition
Even if a Christian has one or more bibles or a copy of the Ten Commandments with them, it is often difficult to find the exact bible verse or commandment that fits your immediate moral dilemma and time is often a pressing factor. All of us Christians know our Bibles are just crammed with helpful advice, but unfortunately, most of it is contradictory and you wind up after wasting your precious time applying your own common sense, anyway. Well we are going to eliminate time wasting bible searches for you. You’ll see. It’s going to be great. We will even be including a solution to the fat man on the overpass dilemma.

When you think about it, the Ten Commandments are not much help in our modern world what with suicidal religious maniacs and fertilizer bombers on the loose. Plus, who can remember all 10 of the commandments, or is it 18 or 20? Secondly, I don’t recall reading anything in the commandments about overpasses, passenger trolleys or sacrificing one fat men to save other lives. What is the problem with fat men anyway?

We say the Ten Commandments are just too simplistic to help modern people, with all due respect of course. With just a modicum of thought you can easily see that even that old workhorse of ethical thought, the Golden Rule, is no help with the fat man and the train dilemma. Because, if I am the fat man I don’t want to get thrown on the tracks. No way! And I never, ever indicated I would throw someone over the railing, either. How does the Golden Rule apply?

Let me assure you the Christian Morality Help Center Design Team analysts along with our staff of ethicists and moralists are assiduously grappling with all such opaque moral problems Christians may encounter. We promise to supply fast concrete, concise answers to your requests for help using our patented BioEnergyFrequency accelerator software technology (Scientologists, take note!). I’ll just say here however, that to meet our aggressive development milestones we are really trying to avoid getting bogged down in pages and pages of dusty Christian dogma written eons ago by committees that didn’t respect the limited patience for double talk and obfuscation most readers today have for this kind of exposition. No disrespect meant, of course. It is just so wearing on a person to have to wade through texts on dogma. You thought the ISO 9000 QA regulations were a pain. Boy, there is no comparison.

The other option questioning Christians have now is to call their cleric for advice. But, our lab tests revealed the trolley and the hapless passengers are probably going to be history long before you ever get through your cleric’s answering machine command options. Let’s see now; press one for condom use, two for school prayer, three for chastity. Nah, that’s not fast enough in the real world and there are no options on his machine for trolleys or fat men. None, that we could find anyway. You can quickly see the problems with this scheme. Even if you do manage to select a good button and leave a message, your cleric might also get dragged down in dogma, which at the risk of being tedious, we have just pointed out, can be extremely vexing and time consuming to wade through (no offense meant). Then when he does get back to you, the answer is going to be filled with so many qualifications, ifs, ands, CYAs, and maybes, you might be more at a loss than you were to start with. You’ll have to go through the entire process all over again hoping to get a more appropriate answer. Can you see why our analysts rejected this solution?

Lastly, you could resort to a more direct, face to face approach if your nearest cleric is reasonably close by. Bear in mind, your cleric is a busy person, what with talking to paving and painting contractors, roofing experts, bankers, and maybe even composing a weighty sermon or two (although they could save time going to Google). Your cleric has to wear many hats. Plus they have to respond to hundreds of other parishioners and they might all have dire moral issues at the same time as you and need a quick response. Please take a number.

So by now, I think you’ll agree our proposed solution is best. I am proudly speaking about our fully modern, computer-equipped Christian Morality Help Center, staffed by knowledgeable friendly assistants. The good part is the assistants really don’t have to know a lot about solving moral dilemmas. They just have to be pretty good at text searches in what I propose to call the Morality Answers Database (MAD).

After we get this Christian project up and running, and the Buddhists, Mormons, Jains, Muslims and Jews see how beneficial it is, we can contract to design especially tailored morality help centers. I am positive all the religions will want their very own. From my limited study, the thing that stands out to me is that all religions don’t exactly agree with Christian morality on some of the more arcane points, like whether to stone apostates and women seen in the company of males who they are not related to or married to. Nonetheless, I’m convinced we are on the right track and this product concept is going to become a “killer app” as we marketing guys say. It will just take some judicious modification to get the Christian MAD ported over. Because of all the differences in religions, think of all the theologists, egg heads, computer programmers and technicians that will find work in these hard times. This will be a huge, badly needed boost to our economy — almost as big as the NASA space station. We may get the Medal of Freedom from the President of the United States. Well it pays to think big.

When we roll out the product, here is how the concept will work:

You, Mr or Mrs Christian, encounter a Christian moral problem. The first step is to connect to the Christian Morality Help Center by phone or computer. After you complete the simple security formalities by stating your full name, customer number, social security number (no hyphens please), pass code, mother’s maiden name, birthplace, color of your first car, make and model of your toaster, your pet dog’s name, your favorite cousin’s astrology sign and your favorite soft drink, the center will complete a quick confirmation of what you supplied. The security check is going to be fast and will probably take no more than 20 maybe 30 minutes tops. Don’t worry, it’s a toll free call, at least for our new customers, for a while.

As soon as an attendant is available (for the fastest service, place your call at 1:00 AM UT) you’ll be whisked right over to your personal help center attendant, who to save costs is probably in Calcutta, India. No worries, they all speak good English, and have easily remembered Anglo Saxon first names. Have you, like me, wondered how they all have Anglo Saxon names? This must have resulted from when the Brits were running India as a colony. Don’t bring this up to your attendant though; they are still slightly peeved at the Brits as I understand it.

Once your attendant completes your interview process and has your problem well in hand they will turn to their computer and type in some key words. Before you know it, their computer screen will light up with all kinds of “hits”. Then all that is required is to read this list to you or send it to your computer. Simple, no? In chat mode with the attendant your amazingly complex, state of the art computer can work just like those Teletypes we used to use, only slower.

To my mind, the absolute best part of the system is that the Christian moral seeker is totally relieved of any tedious effort needed to think through their problem and apply logic and reason to finding a solution. Don’t you agree logic and ethics are two of the most intellectually challenging academic specialties? Who needs them when you have a Bible or better yet our subscription service. Do you know anyone in your family or among your friends who chose such a loser academic path? Not my dad or mom.

I often wonder why god has not updated his commandments to — you know, sort of better suit our modern world (no offense God). Why do you insist on hiding? Maybe the Deists are right and after you made our little solar system, you went in search of bigger and better cosmological projects, thinking we would take responsibility for the planet, all of the life on the planet, and ourselves, of course. Let’s hope we fix it back up before God thinks about returning to check on how we are minding his handiwork. It would not be good to disappoint the big guy.

About the fat man and the trolley problem don’t be squeamish. Toss him over the rail onto the train tracks. It’s really a very simple moral judgment problem. At least that’s how I see it. I gotta get back to writing the spec. I’m jazzed and I’ve only had 10 Jolt Colas.

By, Richard Collins
Copyright, all rights reserved
Available on Amazon Kindle

Resources:
http://tinyurl.com/267etl New York Times Magazine – The Moral Instinct

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