Per the discussion of what mean ole me has done to Jimmy Carter, Micah Tillman, a philosophy lecturer at Catholic University and blogger over at the Free Liberal, sends along some intriguing thoughts:
Regarding the Carter quotation from the Macomber article: Thanks to the “search inside” function on Amazon, I found the passage on pages 228-29 of Carter’s Living Faith. Three things are interesting/curious:
1. That Carter assumes Jesus would have to be looked back to as an example of good governance. If he had become King of the World, how would God Incarnate have died? (I assume Carter believes in the deity of Jesus, anyway.) I never considered whether Jesus would have died of old age before.
2. That Carter assumes there would be “exemplary” justice with Jesus at the top of a government of fallible human beings. This assumes that the morality of the leader trickles down, and makes everyone below him or her better/worse. Jesus, after all, would not have been judging every case in the world, nor administering every punishment, nor building every Habit house, etc. Most of the running of a world-wide government would be done by non-deities many levels below Jesus in the bureaucracy.
3. That Carter seems to think the only reason Jesus turned down the job was that he would have had to bow to Satan in the process (see p. 229). If only Satan had left that part out!
I don’t know that I can say whether Carter is right or wrong on these three points (I haven’t had long enough to think about them), but they’re fascinating to ponder.
