DAC

Hi, all. It’s been a while since I’ve had time to look in here. I see the same fervour is abounding, though. August1991: Shakeyhands: When P.E.T. became PM, I was an ardent Liberal. He persuaded me that it was time to change. In almost the whole time since he became PM, the Liberals have been the governing party. Back then I was confident that all of Canada belonged to me; I felt at home wherever I went. Now I’m afraid I might be deported sometime soon, if it were not that I’m multi-generation Canadian, & so there’s nowhere to which to deport me. Shakeyhands, given the quote from Trudeau you set as your theme, perhaps you should rethink which party you want to support.

Black Dog: October 8, 2004 Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that the school teacher in Alberta who was charged and convicted of hate crimes a few years ago did at most two things: He denied that the holocaust affected the commonly accepted 6,000,000 Jews; and he may have held to the conspiracy theory about Jews working behind the scenes to dominate the world. My memory is that it was clear that he opposed violence against Jews.

Hugo: October 8, 2004 Please explain to me how a libertarian anarchist can tell someone to sin no more. Anarchy denies any authority to which a person is responsible, and libertarian views, likewise, would seem to insist on freedom to "sin" if you want. I know you have argued elsewhere that anarchy means freedom as long as you don't inflict your freedom on others, but the specific case in which Jesus told a woman, "Go & sin no more" was sex between consenting adults. So far as I know anarchy and libertarianism would both say, "That's fine". So how can an anarchist and a libertarian tell the woman to stop doing it? Aside from that, Jesus said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15). The Greek can also be translated as a command, "If you love me, keep my commandments". Either way, it declares that there are commandments to be kept. It's not anarchy. It's not libertarian. Pacifist? Where do you find Jesus repudiating David the warrior, or John the Baptist, his own herald? John was specifically asked by soldiers what they should do. He did not tell them to get out of the army as soon as they could. he said to them, "Do not intimidate anyone or accuse falsely, and be content with your wages." (Luke 3:14) Jesus is not pacifist, libertarian or anarchist. The only way he can be held to be such is by grabbing a few pieces out of their context. I know. I have done that in the past at least on the pacifism issue. Hugo: October 8, 2004 Malachi 2:14 'Yet you say, "For what reason [does God reject your offering]?" Because the LORD has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, With whom you have dealt treacherously; Yet she is your companion And your wife by covenant.' So that you won't be tempted to claim this is some other covenant than marriage, the passage goes on to speak about the Lord hating divorce. They broke the marriage covenant by divorce. Mark 10:14 "what God has joined together, let not man separate." Jesus is here speaking about marriage. That makes it rather blind to say that a Christian interpretation of marriage has nothing to do with God. Hugo: October 9, 2004 That's completely backwards. Living according to Christ's teachings is the most important thing, more important than "accepting" Christ in the way you speak of."Not everyone saying to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter into the kingdom of the heavens, but the one doing the will of my Father who is in the heavens will. Many will say to me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and expel demons in your name, and perform many powerful works in your name?' And yet then I will confess to them: I never knew you! Get away from me, you workers of lawlessness." -- Matthew 7:21-23 Therefore, according to Christ himself, it is certain that Mahatma Gandhi (for instance) would be allowed into paradise since he lived his life according to the will of God and the teachings of Christ - pacifism, compassion, love for all men and disdain for material goods - even though he was a Hindu and did not accept Christ in the way you mean. Similarly, there are many who fit into the category Jesus decried, people who claim to be Christian and to have accepted Jesus into their hearts and yet lead a very un-Christian life. John the Baptist: John 3:36 "He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him." Jesus said of him (John 5:33) "You have sent to John, and he has borne witness to the truth." John 8:24 "Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for if you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins." John 12:48 "He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day." Mahatma Ghandi does not pass this test. You are correct in saying that there are many who claim to follow Jesus but show by their lives that the claim is false. That's what Jesus was talking about in the passage you quoted. Those who love him are moved to keep his commandments. But the Bible is clear from cover to cover. "by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified." (Galatians 2:16) "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." (Ephesians 2:8-9) Salvation comes, not by our doing good deeds, but by Christ's standing in the dock for us, taking our punishment on himself to clear us before God, and his working new life, righteousness, into our hears. I'll have to answer your mistaken interpretation of a biblical view of homosexuality another time. You may have observed from my erratic participation that I'm finding it hard to make time to indulge myself in these discussions.

It may be this thread is lost in time, now. Unfortunately, I have not had time or energy to get back to it before this. But maybe we can recover by going back to basics. Sweal's basic principles of ethics (as opposed to morality): In my summary: 1. Nothing is certain 2. Each human appears to be distinct 3. Human beings make choices In the last post Sweal asked If I have understood them, which appears to be a problem in our attempts at communication, I'd say the last two are fairly obvious. I have problems with the first because it makes an unsupported assumption that there is no God who can give us some certainty. My problem with the rest of our discussion is not the extrapolation, but the lack of extrapolation. Many statements have been made which are claimed to derive from these, but the derivation has never been demonstrated logically. Then, other ethical terms have been thrown in, with no basis given for them. The three statements above are claimed to be basic principles. That means that other elements of ethics rest on them. But usefulness, fairness, reliability have not been shown to derive from them. What is your basis for using these to evaluate anything? I can claim that usefulness, fairness, reliability are important for assessing issues, because they derive from the biblical teaching on which I found my views. But you reject such a foundation. So what makes fairness important in a world which is, on your perspective, essentially a huge accident? What is the meaning of reliability in a world in which, if you are right, "nothing is certain". If nothing is certain, nothing is reliable. Why, on your principles, should people say that usefulness is anything to care about? Many people would say beauty is more important, just to mention one alternative. Somewhere along the way you added in the concept that an action's ethical value had to do with its value for many people, not just one. But you have nowhere shown that to derive from your basic principles. It comes as an arbitrary claim. That's my basic problem with your argumentation. You make arbitrary claims which you say derive from your principles, but you do not show the logical derivations. So your arbitrary claims are supported by unsupported assertions that there is a logical derivation. Let me go back to your first principle, which I question. Your principle is essentially Immanuel Kant's famous argument. You say nothing is certain. If it can be shown that there is no God who is capable of giving us certain knowledge, then we can move from our visible weakness to say that nothing is certain. But if nothing is certain, then it is not certain that there is no God who can give us certain knowledge. So we have to allow that there may be something which is certain. There may be knowledge given to some people by such a God. Or let me put it more simply. Nothing is certain. Therefore the statement that nothing is certain is not certain. Therefore there may be something which is certain. The first principle you put forward is illogical in that it is self contradictory. It's like saying "Everything I say is a lie". Beyond that, as I've said above, you have yet to show a basis for using fairness, etc, as measures. That means you have yet to establish a basis for your ethics. Example: If each individual is sovereign, then the murderer is sovereign and can do what he pleases. Why should he care about another's preferences. You have not demonstrated that your principles say anything to compel him to consider others as anything but convenient tools or inconvenient obstacles to what he sovereignly wants.

It seems to me that the biggest problem in all this is not the issue of definitions, but the failure to take into account human nature. People are not naturally "nice". In my terms, we're all sinful. To try to translate that into terms acceptable to the anti-religious on this forum, we're all inclined to be self-centred, greedy, pig-headed (not on this forum, right? ), careless of others. Of course we have some people whom we treat well, protect, etc., but we're inclined to be ugly, where it seems to be to our advantage. Hugo's anarchy would be fine, if it were not for that stubborn human nature problem. That problem means that someone has to enforce the limits Hugo wants people to observe, or people will encroach on them wherever they feel they can advantageously. The strong will do it one way, the cunning another. But anarchy won't work. Democracy? C.S. Lewis said somewhere that the only good argument for democracy is that it is less awful than the alternatives. Personally, I think he was right.

God has not spelled out why he gave us the kind of book he did, but I think that one reason was precisely because we mortals are so foolish. If he had given us a detailed theological textbook, a series of single premises in logical order, it would either be too difficult for many people to grasp (as well as deadly boring to most), or it would be so simplistic that it would not cover the ground that needed covering. What we received is a book that is very difficult to mistranslate, for a start. A particular teaching does not just come in one proposition, for example, “You shall not steal”. That could easily be changed by a translator to “You shall not steal from the poor” (satisfying many leftists), and the person depending on the translation would never know anything was missed. But God arranged that his truths appear in a variety of forms, written by a variety of writers. The result is that the only way to remove some teaching from a translation is to rewrite so extensively that the claim to be a translation is simply gone. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have tried to translate the Bible in a way that supports their contention that Jesus is not God. But I can take a Jehovah’s Witness Bible, (The New World Translation and prove to any unbiassed person from it that the Bible teaches that Jesus is God. The worst translations I know of, if you read the whole Bible, will not lead you seriously astray. As well, we have a book written in common language, full of stories and illustrations. It is designed so that the simplest reader can grasp the essential points. Yet it has depths enough to keep the deepest thinker occupied for a lifetime. Can people distort it? Of course. I just received an e-mail from someone who took the English words, “Holy Bible”, assigned a numerical value to each character, multiplied them together, and found in them results which matched the moon’s diameter and the 360 degrees the earth goes through in its orbit around the sun. He concluded that the Bible is actually an ancient treatise on astronomy. Those who want to twist it can draw anything out of just about any writing. The Bible, because it is complex, provides more opportunities. But at the same time it provides more checks, more challenges. The twister is likely to come up quickly against something that doesn’t fit what he is trying to do. The same checks work to correct those who simply misunderstand - as I have found many times in my life, when I’ve seen something that challenges a view I had.

Huh? Was there something in those Bible stories that I missed? Please explain. Moses, seeing an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, murdered him (Exodus 2:12-13). As a consequence he had to flee Egypt, and lived as a shepherd until God called him through the burning bush to bring Israel out of Egypt. David arranged to have Uriah the Hittite killed, after committing adultery with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. To his chagrin she became pregnant, and he found that the only way to cover up his sin was to kill Uriah and marry Bathsheba. (2 Samuel 11) Paul was accessory to the murder of Stephen and actively engaged in attacking the early church. While it is not explicit, it appears that this included death for some of them. (Acts 7:58-8:3; 9:1-2) Each of them found forgiveness, and healing with God, and were put into or kept in places of leadership in his church. That’s pretty good grounds for thinking a suicide might also find such forgiveness.

And the CBC is a propaganda tool for the left. No honesty. No balance.

Why? What is magic about editors, that they should have freedom to spout their opinions, while publishers should not?

The Bible teaches plainly that repentance (turning away from your sin to God) is required "for" salvation. Jesus said, "unless you repent, you will all ... perish" (Luke 13:3,5). Some Christians think that means that if you commit suicide, you die in the act of a sin, and you never have the chance to repent of it. Therefore, they conclude, you are lost forever. Though I have not examined this directly, I assume that is the reasoning of the Roman Catholic Church, which will not allow the suicide to be buried in what they consider sanctified ground. For them, being buried in that sanctified ground is a statement that you are at least qualified for purgatory, and eventually heaven. The whole approach is a misconception of the Bible. It turns repentance into a good deed by which you qualify for salvation, and fails to reckon with the difference between the initial repentance by which a person turns in principle from all sin to Christ, and the day by day expressions of it in turning back to Christ from whatever particular sins have been committed in that day. The first, the principial turning from sin to Christ, is normally necessary for salvation, but even that is not a work of merit. Ephesians 2:8-9 tell us, "by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." If repentance gave you credit with God, it would be something to boast about. I could say that I'm better than others because I repented. But God rejects that. My repentance is simply part of the expression of my turning to God confessing that I am sinful, weak, and need his help. To echo in slightly different form what Slavik44 wrote, God is a god of great mercy. He reaches out to the weak and helps them. Otherwise we would all be lost. If a murderer like Moses, David or Paul can be saved, then someone who falls into such despair that he commits suicide is not barred from being welcomed by God. It's wrong, and Christians more than any others should understand that and know better, but that doesn't mean that Christians may not fall into such despair that they commit suicide. The situation MS described in the beginning is an aberration, but one that is unfortunately common.

I think the idea here is that if you stop for him, some time in the future, he may stop for you. The generosity of Muslims is notable. In a sense, these are examples of risky trades. August, I think you're stretching really hard to try to make a case for an ethic of pragmatism. Certainly in the instance in question, I was not expecting some future benefit from him. I remember it because the cyclist insisted he was going to pay me back for the help, though I told him it was a gift. I gave him my address so he could send me a cheque, even though I was certain he'd never send it - & he didn't. You may say it was pragmatically ethical because (apart from my expectations) it had the objective possibility of spurring him to help me sometime later, but it's a long stretch. The articles you referred to in an earlier post were interesting. I think the first writer was correct in saying that Adam Smith's analysis may be broadly true in the market place, but doesn't establish an ethic, or cover every situation. The second writer did not give enough detail to be sure, but I think his Chicago storm story fell short of his aim. Yes, his second merchant got out there and got more food on his shelves - but did he have to double the prices to accomplish that? Doubling the prices did perhaps hold people back from stripping the shelves bare, but were they the only way to do it? Interesting though. In the end it comes back to the ethical issue. Adam Smith describes how a free market works, in general. Does the fact that in the end it works out well for most people (not everybody) make it "good"? If so, why? From a materialist beginning (no formal religion), what is there about things working out well that makes it ethical? From the materialist beginning, this world and all of us in it are just a big a big, fancy accident. Why is common good "better" than pleasing myself? Especially when pleasing oneself may make an Osama bin Laden delight in causing a market crash and a depression, if he can. No, Christianity does not teach people to be greedy. But it does teach people to work to provide for themselves and to be able to help those who cannot. That Protestant work ethic has a lot to do with the prosperity we take for granted today. Non-greedy individuals can also work together ... Where is the evidence that "we would not enjoy all the comforts of life we do now if people were 'motivated only by a love of God'"?

It is the beginning. The next phase of the assessment is to ask about the gain/loss occasioned to all from your individual pragmatic choice. I think you're dodging the issues, Terrible Sweal. You have given no reason for anybody to think that "gain/loss occasioned to all" has anything to do with an action being ethical. At this point, it's an arbitrary assumption. Assume you show that my action was beneficial to all, in some way. What makes that ethical? Let's think about where this discussion has gone. It began with your claim that ethics could be established on a base free from religion. You laid out three principles which you claimed to be the principles of your ethical system. Later you added (in my estimation, though you claimed this was derived from the 2nd & 3rd principle) usefulness or pragmatism and fairness. Now you have added the concept of an action being beneficial to all (though I suppose you may think that derives from fairness). I have repeatedly invited you to show two things: what there is about your principles which should cause others to accept them, and how they give a basis for ethical judgment. I challenged you with an action that most people would agree was good, and yet which had no pragmatic benefit except my subjective belief that it was the right thing for me to do. You tell us that your initial principles derive from your study and thought, but you support them with nothing but an authority statement that they are valid. Oh, you do claim that if others think it out, they will see that your principles are good, but that statement is a blind faith claim - & you are supposed to reject faith claims in favour of evidence and logic. You have given no reasons to show that usefulness or "fairness" are measures of ethics. You have backed yourself into a corner in your effort to show that my choice to listen to my friend for three hours late one night was "good". The rationale you accept as making it a legitimate action also applies to Al Quaeda destroying the World Trade Center and thousands of lives. It appears that my choice is "good" in your ethic because it satisfied my goals at that time. By that reasoning, the terrorists choices are also "good", Jack the Ripper's choices were "good"; pick whatever monstrous act you want from history, and that reasoning says that it was "good". [Note that I am using "good" in quotes as a means of indicating an action that was ethically positive in your system. You may object to the term, but at this point I don't know what term your ethics would use for that. Substitute for it what you would use, please.] Aug 25 you wrote: Sep 1 you wrote I can see that proposition 3 would imply that people tend to make choices that they think are useful. But that says nothing about whether or not those choices are ethical, which is what this is all about, unless you are going to assume either that all choices are ethical, or only those which are actually useful (as opposed to appearing useful to the chooser) are ethical. I do not see at all how you extrapolate from usefulness to fairness, nor do I see anything in the statement that we are distinct individuals which demands fairness. You may be able to demonstrate this (obviously I don't think so!), but thus far it appears only as an assumption, an authority statement on your part. So let's go back to the real issues. To show that your principles establish a reasonable, logical, rational basis for ethics, you still need to do one of two things: 1. Show some axiomatic principle(s) which lead(s) logically to your propositions, or some principle which is so attractive that everybody will want to hold to it, which does that. 2. Alternatively, show logically how those propositions lead to universally desirable solution to ethical problems. How do they speak to us when tempted to steal or kill? What do they lead us to do when we contract to do a job, but then decide that the pay is not sufficient? How do they resolve the tensions between a woman’s concerns and her unborn child’s well-being? You have claimed the three principles are a basis for ethics, but you have given no reason why I or anybody else should accept them in the first place, nor have you shown how they lead to ethical action. Until you do that, your claim is an authority statement, a faith claim. It may not be religious in the sense of worshipping some god other than yourself, but it is at root religious.

It's not an ideal world. It's a world in which thieves break in & moths and rust corrupt. The thief who succeeds is benefited, but it does not benefit society as a whole - despite theloniusfleabag's attempt to find a means of turning even that evil into good. I only know Adam Smith from secondary sources, but it's my impression that he did not assume that the measure of goodness was benefit to the whole society, but attempted to demonstrate that laissez faire capitalism was in the end beneficial to the whole society. In any case, growing up in 18th C Scotland, he certainly imbibed heavily from Christian teaching, wherever he may have gone with it later. The highly unusual thing about him was that he held that what might appear to be selfish action would actually work for the common good. I agree that his views are counter-intuitive. I'd need to be convinced that they were contrary to Christian teachings. Christian teaching prescribes generosity, self-sacrifice to help the truly needy, but it prescribes fair practice, economic justice, in dealing with others. But the ethics of pragmatism falls short in dealing with real need. I think that most long term material need can be best dealt with by enabling the needy to become economically productive, but there is a time and place when the only effective help is a handout. Many years back I stopped to check on a guy trying to wheel his motorcycle along the edge of a remote highway at night. He'd run out of gas, and had no cash. My personal self-interest would be to drive on by. Tough for him. But was it unethical for me to get him $5 worth of gas and let him be on his way? My loss, his gain, net economic benefit to society zero, because it was money I would soon have spent on something else. On your pragmatic scale, it was unethical on my part, or at best neutral, unless you can show a pragmatic rationale for putting others before yourself. August, you said that my biblical ethics, which calls for self-sacrifice at times What you are saying to me, is that biblical ethics are in some ways counter-intuitive. But from my perspective, it doesn't matter in the end whether I build a great pyramid or win an Olympic medal or whatever. What matters to me is that I do the best I can to please the God who has given me so much love, so much mercy, that in all eternity I could never repay him. The interesting thing is that when people are stirred by God's kindness to serve him, it does bring pragmatic benefits to the whole society. Slaves are set free. Women are valued. Workers gain improved working conditions. Knowledge is advanced. The society prospers. But it is a mistake to presume that the pragmatic results are the measure of the value of actions. Pragmatism does not succeed in giving an adequate basis for determining what are the best choices in may situations.

In the first place, T Sweal, you have never explained what you mean by 'net pleasure'. Since you used the word pleasure, I assumed it had something to do with what we commonly mean by pleasure. If you are going to use words with unusual meanings, you should define them, if we are to have rational discussion. In the second place, because you put it in quotes, I presumed that there might be something unusual in your understanding of the term, and I responded with "pleasure", also in quotes, to try to communicate that so far as possible I was allowing for unusual meanings, trying as best I could in the uncertainty to match whatever you intended. My argument is not that I was unhappy about the situation (though I was), but that I derived no pragmatically measurable benefit from it. The trouble is that you are trying to argue for the validity of an ethic based on pragmatic assessment of the gains and losses. It is not sufficient to be able to see a rationale for my action. I have made no secret that I have a rationale for my action. For you to be able to say this is anything but bad, you have to be able to show that there is a pragmatic advantage to it. The fact that I perceive an advantage does not make your point. Presumably Hitler saw advantage to his actions. No question that Al Quaeda saw advantage to mashing the World Trade Center. If you say my choice was ethically "good" because I perceived a benefit from it, then you have to make the same decision for the World Trade Center smash. I'm fairly sure you wouldn't want to do that.

Sorry Thelonius. Can you try that one again. I'm not getting your point, perhaps because I'm not sure what you mean by a whimsical variable.