vol III Development:
Chapter 1: Epistemology
page 9: Accountability
The judgement of God
Christianity sees one of God's principal roles in human life as judge. We read in the apocalyptic section of the Creed that Jesus is going to come from Heaven to judge the living and the dead. Apostles' Creed - Wikipedia
In the divine Universe proposed here, every action is subject to the judgement of God which returns the decisions 'works', 'does not work'.
We all know to our cost that it is easy to dream up schemes that do not work, whether we are cooking, bringing up children or governing nations. The judgement of God is very evident in the engineering disciplines, where things fall down, blow up or fail in less spectacular ways if they are not constructed in a way that takes into account all the possibilities of failure and forestalls them.
It is common knowledge that no matter how carefully we think about the design of something, it will probably reveal flaws when the design is embodied. Hence the need for testing, so as to replace possible catastrophic failures by testing the components of the proposed system one by one, then in smaller and larger assemblies until we get to the full system.
Accountancy
The testing of engineered physical systems serves as a paradigm for a more generalized form of testing commonly known as auditing. Auditing is part of accountancy. In effect it adds accountablility to accounts, deeming them trustworthy.
Accountants use counts of money, inventory, and property to compress all the dealings of an enterprise (large or small) into a set of numbers from which we can judge whether the enterprise is healthy or sick. Accountancy - Wikipedia
Financial accounts are often subject to audit, that is the numbers are tested for internal consistency, and, where possible, against the realities they are intended to measure. Audit - Wikipedia
Professionalism
It is not possible to audit everything, since we would end up in an endless loop of auditing the auditors ad infinitum. Instead we must ultimately trust people to act professionally, that is to do things properly, perhaps in accordance with a set of professional standards which may be backed up by an 'oath of office'. Hippocratic Oath - Wikipedia
Such standards and oaths, if any, are often administered by professional bodies that undertake to guarantee the standards of work by their members. Often, when a profession has been found incapable of self control, governments may step in to maintain the integrity of the profession. Furthermore, governments themselves may be corrupt, and we must then rely on free investigative media and whistleblowers to draw our attention to their failures and hopefully motivate reform. Engineers Australia
Child sexual abuse
An event that has emphasised to me the importance of the the revision of theology is the massive moral failure of the Roman Catholic Church in the matter of child sexual abuse. It seems clear that the cover-up of this abuse has gone right to the highest level of Church administration, with the consequence that the Church can no longer be trusted. It has fallen to the secular authorities in various jurisdictions to bring the Church to account for its crimes. Australian Government
We learn from our mistakes. Whenever there is an error, like a plane crash or the unexpected death of a patient in hospital, we expect a thorough inquiry to reveal the causes of the error and to recommend policies and practices to prevent its recurrence in the future.
The abuse problem appears to have very deep roots. The Church has shown in numerous occasions that it sees itself to be above the law and accountable to no-one except an imaginary God and a set of divine laws which is has created for itself. Furthermore, it sees itself as above reality, basing itself on mysteries and miracles which make little sense to reasonable people. Obviously the radical solution to this problem is to replace the Church's God with the real god revealed by evidence based science. This is what I have set out to do.
(revised 8 August 2014)
