Posted on 02/26/2003 7:19:40 AM PST by Nix 2
Well he's outlined it all out in his book. I don't have the time nor the space to explain all the exceptions, details, and nuances to you. The axioms we operate by are simple. God exists, God created man, and the Bible is the word or law of God. Everything else follows from those. I take my axioms on complete faith in exactly the same fashion as you take your axioms dealing with the initiation of force on complete faith. What's to argue? Possibly you don't believe you take your axioms on faith?
I doubt they disagreed on whether they personally wanted to be enslaved.
Again, there is to be slavery. Would you prefer to be a) the slave, b) the slave owner, or c) neither. When you find rational men lining up for option a) I'll change my mind.
I think I understand it...it's been a long time ago, but I've read both Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu, as well as Bodhidharma, Confucius and Menicius (both more social thinkers than philosophers), even some of the Vedas. Took me a long time to get back to the RCC...
By the way, one of the reasons that the Tokugawa Shogunate nearly wiped out (Catholic) Christianity in Japan (approx. 500,000 Church adherents at it's peak) was it's emphasis on individual salvation...Christians apparently are less docile creatures than Buddhists or Shintoists.
Example: It was morally reasonable for Truman to order the dropping of nuclear bombs, given the options available to him. If he could have simply waved his hand and caused the entire Japanese death-before-surrender faction to relent or vanish into thin air, but had instead chosen drop nuclear bombs, it would have been an indefensible atrocity.
It's kinda funny. I've read that book many times. I'm very much familiar with it. In fact, I used to teach from it.
And never, have I found a satisfactory answer to the question you're avoiding.
How does God define murder?
Why wasn't Joshua's slaying of innocent women and children by cutting their throats, murder?
Was it the fact that God commanded it?
How would we be able to tell today, if someone did something similar?
How do we separate those who really murder because God says so, from those who are just saying that?
This is ludicrous on its face. For instance, the reaction of human physiology to certain substances is an empirical "is", from which one dervies certain "oughts" (e.g. one ought not drink sulfuric acid, one ought not wiggle a black widow spider's web with one's bare fingers, etc).
The answer is consistency. Moral absolutism requires consistency which obviously isn't found in the "it's okay in that case because god wanted it" answers. However, absolutism is found in the following: One doesn't initiate force because when one accepts that it's right to initiate force one must also accept that it is right to have force initiated upon oneself.
To remain consistent, if you believe that murder is okay then you must also believe that it is okay for someone to murder you. If you believe that stealing is okay then you must also believe that it is okay for someone to steal from you.
So how can morals exist without a god? Simple, I don't want someone to murder me so I know that murder is wrong. I don't want someone to sleep with my wife so I know that it's wrong to sleep with someone else's. I don't want someone to burglarize my home so I know that it's wrong to break into another's house and steal from them.
I see that people can get the same results by carefully massaging them as well.
Clearly, the burden of proof is on the claimant to establish himself as a case of (3) rather than (1) or (2). Meeting that burden requires a showing that the allegedly divine directives are consistent with some independent standard of morality.
Thus, the problem is neatly stood upon its head -- humans cannot be reliably guided by divine morality until they figure out the principles of morality for themselves.
Still a creature possesed with some quality other than mobility and the ability to reproduce that separates him from organic machines.
This is an old question: what defines life? Many have tried to answer the question, and the two criteria you give fail the test, because fire can do both and is thought to not be alive.
Maybe I missed something, freeee, but it was you who argued that because man used bacterial DNA to build an organic, mobile, self-replicating machine, that man had indeed created life, and therefore God does not exist.
I was merely pointing out that those criteria (organic, mobile, self-replicating) were NOT the entire schema for life; that there must exist some other "property" that separates man from machine.
And of course, that fact than man can create organic machines does not disprove God.
Or the ancient world. Did you know that before the advent, and continuous pressure of the Christian faith, that:
a) Infanticide was legal? (Outlawed by edict of Christian Emporer Valentinian I in 374 AD)
b) Abandoning children to die of exposure was legal? (Outlawed in same edict)?
c) Killing of older children (honor killings) was legal? (outlawed in 325 AD)
d) Slaughtering human beings for sport in the gladiatorial arenas was legal? (Outlawed by edict in 376 in the east and 404 AD in the west)
e) Nuclear marriage was a joke? (a man could cheat on his wife with anyone, male or female, without punishment).
f) Pedophilia was an accepted fact of life?
And on and on and on. The most infuriating thing about you people is that you state that you don't need God for your ethical system, and then you go on to state that your ethical system comprises exactly the things that were completely alien to the world before the advent of the Christian faith, things for which thousands of true-believing martyrs went to their deaths.
Before Christ and his church, human life was cheap, might makes right prevailed, charity was not something you did for goodness' sake, but to get ahead etc.
In other words, you're cultural Christians and you don't even know it. Most of you would blanch at the idea of drowning an infant with Down's syndrome, but that happens in the non-Christian world all the time.
The next time you guys decide to trash the Faith, remember--most of your belief system as to what is right and what is wrong was formed by it.
Some humans have the notion that God approves of murdering infidels and beating women who expose their faces, so we need a better way to evaluate moral claims than "because God says so".
So how do we tell when one is commiting murder under the libertarian dogma? How do we separate those who are really responding to an initiation of force, from those who are just saying that?
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