Scumbags for Jesus

In his Pentecost 17 sermon on Luke's parable of the Unjust Steward Clay Nelson explores how such a deplorable parable calling us to be like a scumbag ever made it into Scripture. "Haidt argues that because of evolution and our social nature we each contain two moral systems within us. In evolutionary time, one developed before humans had language and one after. Simplifying greatly his arguments, the one before language is our gut response, controlled by our primitive brain. The second system that required language was moral judgement. In our day-to-day lives we have gut responses immediately and then the second moral system kicks in to offer a plausible rationalization for why we feel that way. His scientific way of trying to differentiate the two systems was to probe the emotion of disgust. He would propose situations that caused a reaction of disgust in his subjects. He was looking for situations that his subjects knew were wrong, but couldn’t say why. He calls it moral dumbfounding." Read entire text at http://www.stmatthews.org.nz/nav.php?sid=327&id=764.