Posted on 03/19/2010 1:04:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.
Does this mean that you can just go out and rape and pillage, behave like an ancient Roman grabbing Sabine women? Not at all. I said that there are no grounds for being good. It doesn't follow that you should be bad. Indeed, there are those – and I am one – who argue that only by recognising the death of God can we possibly do that which we should, and behave properly to our fellow humans and perhaps save the planet that we all share. We can give up all of that nonsense about women and gay people being inferior, about fertilised ova being human beings, and about the earth being ours to exploit and destroy.
Start with the fact that humans are naturally moral beings. We want to get along with our fellows. We care about our families. And we feel that we should put our hands in our pockets for the widows and orphans. This is not a matter of chance or even of culture primarily. Humans as animals have gone the route of sociality. We succeed, each of us individually, because we are part of a greater whole and that whole is a lot better at surviving and reproducing that most other animals.
On the one hand, we have suppressed all sorts of common mammalian features that disrupt harmonious living. Imagine trying to run a philosophy class if two or three of the members were in heat.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
The Catechism of the Catholic Church on Morality -- page two.
I was behind a car yesterday on my way home from a protest at Boccieri’s office in Canton. They had three bumper stickers on it. One was a Hillary sticker. The second said “Happy Atheist” with a smiley face, and the third just floored me. It said “Your imaginary friend is a dead Jewish carpenter”.
The Beginning of Heaven and Earth. Which precedes both angels and humans.
Seems about right to me. Stupidity and depravity so often seem to go hand in hand....
If you ask for MHO, I'd say he is pleading for relief from being a human being: It's way too difficult for him on God's terms. He'd prefer to do things "otherwise," out of some hypothetical "freedom" that can only be obtained by the death of God.
Or another way to put it, in his blindness, he thinks there is nothing to see....
What could elucidate his problem he dismisses out of hand: the understanding that, without God, man has nothing to stand on.
Some people nowadays — the self-appointed social reconstructors who lust for political power — think exploiting this situation is their very opportunity.
So yes, I agree Ruse is a simpleton. But he strikes me as a dangerous simpleton. His specialty is: He understands nothing. That is, fundamentally he is a nihilist. I.e., a champion of death, in principle.
INDEED.
I think we’ve observed at least one or more hereon . . .
demonstrate seemingly willful flight from reason . . .
although . . . curiously . . .
in the purported name of reason.
What a stinking pile of contradictions that tends to be!
LOL.
Well put.
Thx.
Those bumper stickers will not make very attractive decorations on a certain cell in hell.
Seems about right to me. Stupidity and depravity so often seem to go hand in hand....
###
INDEED.
WELL PUT.
How can heaven have a beginning if it has no end?..
An Eternity future should make possible an eternity with no beginning..
Beginnings and endings could be sooo 3D... or 4D..
Could time be an illusion or an allusion?...
Its true time seems very real to the flesh.. for fleshly reasons..
Could be timing is important but time is of marginal import..
I strongly agree that the killing of cubs by some incoming male lions (so they can breed sooner) is programmed behavior. They are very gentle with their own offspring as I recall.
Why should?
Eternity refers to timelessness. Beginnings and endings have no meaning in timelessness. They are events, and events need temporal context. Or so it seems to me, FWIW. Which probably doesn't shed much light on this issue at all.
True.. its also true there could have been many beginnings and endings.. urrr.. events.. This galaxy must have started at some point.. with many concurrent events since.. same with this solar system.. and this planet.. heck a day is an event.. even a moment..
This post is an event.. Ooops it just ended..
(flossing teeth and laughing at my cunning Snarkmanship)
Why is it "also true" that there could have been "many beginnings and endings?" How could you possibly know?
Assuming your statement is true, how could you ever find out anything about this question, that is by way of direct evidence, observation, so to falsify/"prove" it? One can spin out cosmologies all day long; but what's the point, if one can't even test them against the reality that we actually experience and know? And articulate in a common natural language?
If they can't be tested in principle, then they must remain pure speculations. Why bother oneself over "stuff" like that?
As to how "stuff" (whatever) got started, the Lord has clued us in on such matters in the Holy Scriptures, and backs that up with His revelation of the natural world (the Creation).
These are the records that teach truly.
PAX CHRISTI
The $64,000 dollar question..
With mans tendency to re-write history even "reality"..
How could you really know much anything for sure..
Takes faith in the "writers" I suppose..
And the writers "observer problem"..
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