This is going to be a quick hit with no real answers; but I came across a couple of very interesting items this morning on the topics of God, Liberty, and Morality.
The first is Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars who asks “what do we think of the notion of a God given right to liberty (or equality) in order to make such rights “unalienable”? Attaching something to God is probably the only way to make such a concept we really like trump all other claims.”
While chewing on that, I stumbled across a page written by Wil Forbis entitled “searching for the Moral Directive in The Watchmen.” Since I read “The Watchmen” in the Spring of 1990, I have found a particular monologue by the character Rorschach to be very compelling. In that monologue, he says:
This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us.
I suspect that formulation very well may be correct. It is up to us to assign value to our actions and the consequences of our actions. The proper yardsticks for doing so are not terribly clear, but I think it is up to us to create those yardsticks and apply them.
When considering Rorschach’s proclamation, Forbis turns to Yale Professor Arthur Allen Leff who wrote:
I want to believe —and so do you— in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously.
. . .
I also want to believe —and so do you —in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and good and to create it.
Like I said, no answers from me at this point (if ever), but certainly some good stuff to chew on.
Uh, I think you might be talking about “Watchmen”, the Alan Moore comic, and not “The Watchmen”, a Canadian rock band. But the Wikipedia link you posted seems to disagree.
(P.S., Rorschach sucks. Google it.)