I bet you'd prefer a comment on the ideas you've written about here but, for the moment, I can't take my eyes off that beautiful image and am lost in imagining what it would feel like to be in that space with those colours, that fabric, the light streaming in, and the serenity born of the devotion to focus, thinking, writing....
I want to throw a few things against the wall and see if any stick. First is faith, without faith should there be no hope? Second, people that die, say they see the bright light, meet a relative that has passed or believed they were in heaven and then come back to this world, is this a firing brains last bit of energy? What happens to a persons energy at death, a beating heart, lungs inhaling and exhaling. Is death the only time energy dies and is not transferred into something else? I’ve never posted what I’m going to say now, in 2005 my wife and I bought a house in NH. We have had dozens of strange happenings there. Im a local contractor in Ma. and never believed in spirits or ghosts etc. But there’s something or someone on this property. One night in the garage I was standing next to an extension ladder I had just hung on the wall, I was 5 feet from the ladder staring at it and someone or something ran their hand down the ladder rings as loud as could be. WTF I thought. Doors slamming, windows shutting, hearing music, lights go on, tvs go on, etc. So is this a spirit or ghost? I’m telling you there’s something on this property. I’m not crazy, J.Goodrich
I see morality as resting on empathy: as I can feel pain, so can others feel pain. From there it's not a great leap to reach two sides of the same coin: the Golden Rule and the Iron Law ("As you sow, so shall you reap"). By whatever approach (one God, many Gods, no Gods), it's hard to go wrong with this framework.
Growing up I've felt a strong sense of morality that I try my best to follow. I can't settle on exactly what/how much of it is natural or acquired, and no thought, reading or discussion so far has convinced me, besides on some specifics.
IMO Morals can be from conditioning, either cultural or from our close environment. In both "positive" (conforming) and "negative" ways (reaction/rejection). I'd say most of them are conditioning, judging from history and current affairs. Some of them are natural, biological functions, god-given or whatever. I'm an agnostic that practically lives as an atheist, and feel no need or way to directly settle on this, unless I'm proven wrong. There might also be a combination of factors in every case.
What guides me the most is understanding the consequences of various moral stances. In grey areas I try not to be a control freak or block discussion in favor of my biases. I wish more people did that, but generally group think, fashion, marketing, oppression and fear seem to trample reasonable ethics.
God has spoken. The objectivity you seek is found in the bible alone. Reason alone will not suffice. The bible tells us why. Men without God, no matter how good they try to be reason themselves into depravity. It’s everywhere.
And what if God is not an entity or a He or She and is instead a Force (as in “May the Force be With You”) and that Force has an inherent logical, mathematical order to how it moves through us as a life force and enables us to evolve spiritually and morally rather than just plug in like a toaster?
Natural law is a good start, I.e. we can give reasons, so our moral decisions must be justifiable taking objective value into account.
However, considering God as a maximally great being, and a trinity (to be redundant, imo), we can derive what behaviors that sort of Being would require of other free beings—other persons. Kantian stuff with value grounding thrown in.
God’s commands proceed from His nature, and are necessarily good, bc God just is the Good. He is utterly unbounded agency. What would such a Being do to other beings? Actively love them, necessarily. He would be acting from a privation of love to allow (deontically speaking) his creatures to act in opposition to His nature.
We find that this current unpleasant cosmic state of affairs is limited in scope by a fixed temporal end point, and so we avoid the worry that God allowing created free beings to actualize evils swamps any Loving ultimate goal He could have for allowing that.
No. But that myth, Dan Brown books and related regarding Jesus bloodline and Mary Magdalene was in the same general area of southern France where the Cathars were. Jesus was a True Essene Gnostic and did not marry or have children.
Most Cathars were True Gnostics and because they did not accept the Pope and the Catholic BS were mass murdered by the King and Pope's Armies for their beliefs.
I appreciate that you search for Truth for what really matters. I searched these issues too and I eventually came to these conclusions:
1. Many people intuitively Know "Nous" what is Right and Wrong.
2. Some don't Know and have to be taught and it can work to an extent but often breaks down based on time or circumstances.
3. Many don't care and do what they want, and may or may not factor in what they can get away with it.
4. Some are just destructive and amoral.
I have read the Bible cover to cover 3 times at various points in my life. Especially in the Old Testament "god" really the Demiurge/Usurper is often Psychotic, Genocidal, Murderous, Ethnic Cleansing, Mass Child Sacrificer, Misogynist and extremely Jealous and is a Corporeal Being.
The True Divine God has sparks of Light which are captured in the Bible, especially in the New Testament, but not in what the Assassin Paul wrote who was not an Apostle.
I have read everything in the Talmud and Torah which is accessible in English and much of it is much worse.
I have read the Koran and most of the Hindu texts and some Buddhist texts.
True Gnosticism is the Truth, not when they turn it into a religion. And these people are often the ones they called Heretics and wiped out (Cathars) and/or burned at the stake.
There is a strand of thought in Orthodoxy that God is even beyond Logic. While subsuming it, He can also transcend it. While that grates with me... maybe that's just adolescent arrogance. Humans think human logic is a universal even God must be bound by. Isn't that cute? Like a hominid who thinks the gods battle each other with sharpened sticks and fire.
I applaud your journey of enquiry. Yet many great minds have sought a provable morality and failed to produce it. I know of very few successes. There is *perhaps* the Golden Rule and *perhaps* Buddhist ethics. Even those are arguable: maybe "do unto others before they do unto you" is at least a plausible alternative to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Nietzsche and other great brains that pondered hard on this concluded that morality (as we know it anyway) comes from God or it comes not at all. In my view there is a laughable naivety of humanists who believe themselves to have deduced a morality that just so happens to equal the same summit reached by Christian thought, but whitewash out its Christian, Jewish, Babylonian etc roots. They are like a person who stands on the roof of a building that was built with scaffolding and pronounces there was never any need for the scaffolding. So your position (that morality can be proven) is an act of faith, and I respect it as such, but I suppose consider the alternative: if morality cannot in fact be proven, and thus far I would say it has not been, then what? You want to jettison God and keep morality? In fact (in that case) you must have both, or neither. And - open your eyes - we are living in a world that has chosen to have neither.
God is self evident, you need to put a lot of effort to be an atheist. Faith and reason, it’s not Ala a capricious God, it’s a God that shares three characteristics with his creatures that’s the reason we are made at His image, those characteristics are intellect, memory and free will, and we act on those as free creatures God made us. As you well said, natural law have sense because it comes from a being that is smarter than us and very creative I would add, if we put together all the geniuses in this planet they would not be able to come up with a world like this, not with a single atom or cell. The level of complexity that we are surrounded with is amazing, we are created by a being outside this realm. The Greeks came to the same conclusion about the first cause, before any Christian theology was settled. You can read St Thomas Aquinas and you will find a lot of the answers you are looking for. Locke was half way ok but got a lot of things wrong.
I bet you'd prefer a comment on the ideas you've written about here but, for the moment, I can't take my eyes off that beautiful image and am lost in imagining what it would feel like to be in that space with those colours, that fabric, the light streaming in, and the serenity born of the devotion to focus, thinking, writing....
I want to throw a few things against the wall and see if any stick. First is faith, without faith should there be no hope? Second, people that die, say they see the bright light, meet a relative that has passed or believed they were in heaven and then come back to this world, is this a firing brains last bit of energy? What happens to a persons energy at death, a beating heart, lungs inhaling and exhaling. Is death the only time energy dies and is not transferred into something else? I’ve never posted what I’m going to say now, in 2005 my wife and I bought a house in NH. We have had dozens of strange happenings there. Im a local contractor in Ma. and never believed in spirits or ghosts etc. But there’s something or someone on this property. One night in the garage I was standing next to an extension ladder I had just hung on the wall, I was 5 feet from the ladder staring at it and someone or something ran their hand down the ladder rings as loud as could be. WTF I thought. Doors slamming, windows shutting, hearing music, lights go on, tvs go on, etc. So is this a spirit or ghost? I’m telling you there’s something on this property. I’m not crazy, J.Goodrich
I see morality as resting on empathy: as I can feel pain, so can others feel pain. From there it's not a great leap to reach two sides of the same coin: the Golden Rule and the Iron Law ("As you sow, so shall you reap"). By whatever approach (one God, many Gods, no Gods), it's hard to go wrong with this framework.
Growing up I've felt a strong sense of morality that I try my best to follow. I can't settle on exactly what/how much of it is natural or acquired, and no thought, reading or discussion so far has convinced me, besides on some specifics.
IMO Morals can be from conditioning, either cultural or from our close environment. In both "positive" (conforming) and "negative" ways (reaction/rejection). I'd say most of them are conditioning, judging from history and current affairs. Some of them are natural, biological functions, god-given or whatever. I'm an agnostic that practically lives as an atheist, and feel no need or way to directly settle on this, unless I'm proven wrong. There might also be a combination of factors in every case.
What guides me the most is understanding the consequences of various moral stances. In grey areas I try not to be a control freak or block discussion in favor of my biases. I wish more people did that, but generally group think, fashion, marketing, oppression and fear seem to trample reasonable ethics.
God has spoken. The objectivity you seek is found in the bible alone. Reason alone will not suffice. The bible tells us why. Men without God, no matter how good they try to be reason themselves into depravity. It’s everywhere.
Couldn’t have said it better myself!
If I am animated by and made of SourceForce, then i am free to decide to dreamAwake my destiny and it is my will be done in the end is it not?
And what if God is not an entity or a He or She and is instead a Force (as in “May the Force be With You”) and that Force has an inherent logical, mathematical order to how it moves through us as a life force and enables us to evolve spiritually and morally rather than just plug in like a toaster?
Natural law is a good start, I.e. we can give reasons, so our moral decisions must be justifiable taking objective value into account.
However, considering God as a maximally great being, and a trinity (to be redundant, imo), we can derive what behaviors that sort of Being would require of other free beings—other persons. Kantian stuff with value grounding thrown in.
God’s commands proceed from His nature, and are necessarily good, bc God just is the Good. He is utterly unbounded agency. What would such a Being do to other beings? Actively love them, necessarily. He would be acting from a privation of love to allow (deontically speaking) his creatures to act in opposition to His nature.
We find that this current unpleasant cosmic state of affairs is limited in scope by a fixed temporal end point, and so we avoid the worry that God allowing created free beings to actualize evils swamps any Loving ultimate goal He could have for allowing that.
Thoughts?
Exactly Chris!
No. But that myth, Dan Brown books and related regarding Jesus bloodline and Mary Magdalene was in the same general area of southern France where the Cathars were. Jesus was a True Essene Gnostic and did not marry or have children.
Most Cathars were True Gnostics and because they did not accept the Pope and the Catholic BS were mass murdered by the King and Pope's Armies for their beliefs.
Chris,
I appreciate that you search for Truth for what really matters. I searched these issues too and I eventually came to these conclusions:
1. Many people intuitively Know "Nous" what is Right and Wrong.
2. Some don't Know and have to be taught and it can work to an extent but often breaks down based on time or circumstances.
3. Many don't care and do what they want, and may or may not factor in what they can get away with it.
4. Some are just destructive and amoral.
I have read the Bible cover to cover 3 times at various points in my life. Especially in the Old Testament "god" really the Demiurge/Usurper is often Psychotic, Genocidal, Murderous, Ethnic Cleansing, Mass Child Sacrificer, Misogynist and extremely Jealous and is a Corporeal Being.
The True Divine God has sparks of Light which are captured in the Bible, especially in the New Testament, but not in what the Assassin Paul wrote who was not an Apostle.
I have read everything in the Talmud and Torah which is accessible in English and much of it is much worse.
I have read the Koran and most of the Hindu texts and some Buddhist texts.
True Gnosticism is the Truth, not when they turn it into a religion. And these people are often the ones they called Heretics and wiped out (Cathars) and/or burned at the stake.
Jesus was a Gnostic Essene.
There is a strand of thought in Orthodoxy that God is even beyond Logic. While subsuming it, He can also transcend it. While that grates with me... maybe that's just adolescent arrogance. Humans think human logic is a universal even God must be bound by. Isn't that cute? Like a hominid who thinks the gods battle each other with sharpened sticks and fire.
I applaud your journey of enquiry. Yet many great minds have sought a provable morality and failed to produce it. I know of very few successes. There is *perhaps* the Golden Rule and *perhaps* Buddhist ethics. Even those are arguable: maybe "do unto others before they do unto you" is at least a plausible alternative to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Nietzsche and other great brains that pondered hard on this concluded that morality (as we know it anyway) comes from God or it comes not at all. In my view there is a laughable naivety of humanists who believe themselves to have deduced a morality that just so happens to equal the same summit reached by Christian thought, but whitewash out its Christian, Jewish, Babylonian etc roots. They are like a person who stands on the roof of a building that was built with scaffolding and pronounces there was never any need for the scaffolding. So your position (that morality can be proven) is an act of faith, and I respect it as such, but I suppose consider the alternative: if morality cannot in fact be proven, and thus far I would say it has not been, then what? You want to jettison God and keep morality? In fact (in that case) you must have both, or neither. And - open your eyes - we are living in a world that has chosen to have neither.
Natural Law is binding and immutable and observable. It’s where science and morality meet.
God is self evident, you need to put a lot of effort to be an atheist. Faith and reason, it’s not Ala a capricious God, it’s a God that shares three characteristics with his creatures that’s the reason we are made at His image, those characteristics are intellect, memory and free will, and we act on those as free creatures God made us. As you well said, natural law have sense because it comes from a being that is smarter than us and very creative I would add, if we put together all the geniuses in this planet they would not be able to come up with a world like this, not with a single atom or cell. The level of complexity that we are surrounded with is amazing, we are created by a being outside this realm. The Greeks came to the same conclusion about the first cause, before any Christian theology was settled. You can read St Thomas Aquinas and you will find a lot of the answers you are looking for. Locke was half way ok but got a lot of things wrong.