Saint Paul says something interesting about obedience and righteousness in Chapter 6 of his Letter to the Romans :

• 16: Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
• 17: But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed,
• 18: and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

Nietzsche, the great champion of the 'Superman' and derider of the 'masses', thought Jesus was a great man but that his followers were slavish wimps.

Are you free, or have you merely chosen your master? There are many masters around to whom we might be enslaved : 'science', advertising, leisure, fitness, image, weight, sex, democracy, environment, love, goodness, charity - even, dare I say it, the very idea of freedom, which is so strong for some people they are incapable of escaping it. I know someone who is so committed to independence from his past that his every action is designed to push him away from his past - and therefore his every action is actually dependent on his past!

Mr Beata gave a meditation (which I missed, sadly, being a slave to my beautiful dreams and slumber) on a famous experiment conducted by Milgram at Yale. In this experiment, as you will remember, two apparently random subjects are invited in to take part in a 'learning experiment'. One is in fact a plant, already in the know. This one is 'randomly' selected to be the victim of an experiment in learning by physical punishment and is bound into an electric chair. The other is told, on authority, to punish the first subject by the administering of an electric shock. Quite against the expectations of psychologists, the punishers obeyed instructions and in the most extreme version of the experiment, involving the punisher being asked actually to force, physically, the screaming victim's hand onto the electric plate, a staggering 30% of naive subjects did this. Thirty percent of us would torture if told to do so by someone in authority. You will find more details of these experiments, and others, in the link at the top of this page. One of them is quite revealing, though I utterfly deplore the experiment. In a similar setup with a real, cute, fluffy puppy being given real shocks, women were more obedient than men, with some of the women involved giving the puppy the full range of electric shocks...

So, the question I would like to discuss today : Who are our masters? Are we aware of forces we obey which we really should not obey? Can we hope to be free, or can we merely choose our master? Which master should we choose?

Do you agree with Milgram : 'Perhaps our culture does not provide adequate models of disobedience'?

See you on Thursday,

Mr P