By Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
May 15, 2024
A valid moral judgement cannot be made on the rightness or wrongness, the good or evil of an act planned or presently engaged in, if the factual truth of the situation is not first determined. An accurate and truthful awareness of the facts of the situation must precede a morally valid judgment by one's conscience regarding how to respond to the situation. Knowing the facts is an essential requirement in Catholic moral decision making, indeed in the moral decision making in just about every philosophical moral system. In some theological moral systems facts are irrelevant. If a god says kill, you kill, facts be damned!
All censorship is intended to keep facts, truth, out of peoples' awareness because the censor thinks if they were known people would not do what he or she or they desire. Censorship is the lethal enemy of Christian morality because when it is employed in a matter of morality where a person is called to make a choice, it is just another way of manufacturing an intentional lie by which to deceive people into thinking evil is a good which they should approve, support and in which they should consent and participate.
Once it is seen that censorship has entered into a situation where a moral judgment is to be made, a person must postpone his or her decision whether to participate in or support the activity the censor wishes him or her to endorse or to oppose because he or she knows for certain that facts pertinent to understanding the truth of what is happening are being concealed. Without access to the known facts an authentic moral choice is impossible. Censorship is integrally hostile to the morality of the Gospels and to basic human morality. Why? Because, censorship is hostile to truth and the search for truth, and the Spirit of truth, i.e., God. It is a process which intentionally manufactures untruth in order to pass it off as truth.
Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum
"Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever," writes Cicero. Censorship is meant to keep people as children intellectually, morally, psychologically and spiritually. Children, one's own and others, are much easier to control and lie to than informed and empathically aware adults. What people do not know they cannot factor into their moral judgment of whether something is right or wrong, good or evil.
For example, for decades before the forced creation of the State of Israel, the reality of Palestine as a thriving, flourishing modern community went censored in the western world. Palestine was represented to the people of the west as a backward desert place, a land of Bedouins tribes in tents containing but a meagerness of modernity. Palestine was presented as a land without an organized people. Therefore, to the mass media fed mind of the average westerner, it was acceptable for European political powers to forcibly take 55% of Palestine from these backward Palestinian people for whom this land was their home and give it to industrious, modern European Jews, who were a people without a land.
The uncensored truth of what Palestine was before the State of Israel existed is this:
