Dennis Prager: We all have moral bank accounts

[Cocoa]

Prager has his upon an innovative moral system. You can do all the bad stuff you want, as long as you balance it out by preaching to others.

This very column does so much good that it entitles Prager to go out and kill someone.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/dp20050322.shtml

<snip>

I note this because it brings home a point that is often lost on most people -- religious or secular, conservative or liberal -- that human beings all have what I call moral bank accounts. Just like a real bank account into which we make monetary deposits and from which we make monetary withdrawals, we make moral deposits into and moral withdrawals from our moral bank accounts based on the actions we engage in during our lifetime.

Now, of course, some people make so many withdrawals -- Hitler, for example -- that no imaginable good act they can do will seriously change the balance from extremely negative to positive. But most people need to be assessed based on this bank account analogy. I first came up with this idea when Clarence Thomas was accused by Anita Hill and the Democratic Party of sexual harassment. Needless to say, no one knew for sure which party was telling the truth. But I made the argument on my radio show that given all the good Thomas had done, given the absence of indications of him ever acting indecently toward women employees, his moral bank account was, to the best our knowledge, quite in the black. Whether or not he said the words "pubic hair" in a conversation with Anita Hill 10 years earlier was of absolutely no concern to me in assessing his moral character -- i.e., the balance in his moral bank account.

Similarly, I wrote in this column and argued on radio that the dismissals of William Bennett made by people, conservatives and liberals alike, over revelations that he had gambled large sums of money were unfair even if one is opposed to gambling. Why? Because the gambling paled in comparison to how much good Mr. Bennett had done with his talks and books on moral character.

It was conservatives -- usually religious conservatives (whose social attitudes I so often identify with) -- who were particularly disturbed. If they had applied this notion of moral bank accounts to Bill Bennett, they would not have been.

More…

[wtbymark]

1. what a fricken idiot

[mcscajun]

2. Moral Bank Accounts?

<Boggle, boggle, boggle>

Where do they GET this stuff?

And how can they be religious and reduce their own beliefs to commercial transactions with an invisible sky-god?

[Cocoa]

3. I used to have a system like that

I think I was about ten years old.

[LSparkle]

4. Insufficient funds, Dennis

Take away his microphone (and computer).

[neverforget]

5. So does that mean we can get loans on our morals? and are the interest

rates fixed?

[triguy46]

6. What an idea, stupid, and without merit....

Another example of the hypocrisy of the right. They continually whine and moan regarding what they call "moral relativism" the very idea
espoused here. There is certainly no philosophical basis for this
idea of any merit, its simply the concept of "if you do enough right things, they will counteract your bad." It certainly is not a Christian view, though one held by the repub masses who claim to have a highly developed moral sense.

The more I think about this, the more I realize what a dork this guy must be.