Stupid 'Mysterious Ways'

Libertarian

O.K. So you’re not saying that the physical world isn’t real, just that, by itself, it doesn’t provide a moral context. I’ll assume from the above quote that you’re also saying that God is pure spirit, and that this explains His apparent nonintervention in the physical world.

The problem I see is that if an all-powerful being of pure spirit created the universe, then all physical suffering has a moral context. That is, God’s decision to create a universe with natural disasters and diseases that will inevitably produce physical suffering was a moral decision. His apparent decision not to intervene to alleviate that suffering is also a moral decision. I don’t see any way out except “mysterious ways.”

As an aside, I’m curious about your interpretation of the Resurrection, which is seen by most Christians as a physical event, at least in part. If Jesus rose bodily from the dead, then it seems to me that God does intervene in the physical plane.

Except I think that Lib is saying that suffering is irrelevant to the “Real Life” of human beings, which exists only in the morality of their actions; it was not immoral of God to create a world with suffering, because suffering isn’t part of the reality that truly matters. (Yes, this is a lot like some of the darsanas or philosophical systems of Hinduism.)

My problems with it are two:

  1. If suffering’s irrelevant to the true value of life, then why is it immoral for human beings to cause one another to suffer?

  2. If suffering, or certain levels or kinds of suffering, influence people to commit immoral acts (I stole your loaf of bread because I was hungry, but otherwise I would never do such a thing…oh-oh, here comes Inspector Javert!): then isn’t God back on the hot seat for having committed the immoral act, not of causing suffering which in itself is irrelevant, but of encouraging immorality, which is relevant?

Lib said:

How do you define “damaged” vs. what is “normal”? What if a person has been that way his whole life and never got treatment? What if they just managed to inherit a bad set of genes? As I’ve asked before, how do you know what the real “spirit” is?

Sure it is! :smiley:

Well, I don’t see a solution for the OP, you either give up one of the godlike traits, omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, or you choose mysterious ways. But here are at least some interesting ways of giving them up:
My favorite is that God, if there is one, is an author, and concerns himself far more with dramatic laws than with moral ones. It certainly seems to fit the way the world works.
Another possibility is that the Bible is fairly accurate but a godlike day is longer than a human day. This explains dinosaurs and evolution, but given the time scale, God is still on his seventh day, when he finishes resting he’ll clean up all this evil.
Personally, I’m an atheist. Well, most of the time anyway, sometimes I’m a goddess, but that’s off-topic.

Dumb Ox

Oh, indeed God can and does intervene in “the physical plane”. The only “plane” in which God refuses to intervene is our moral will, because to do so would be breach. He has given His Spirit to us free and clear. We may do with it whatever we wish.

Physical suffering has no moral context because there is no life, that is, no meaningful life, in the physical “plane”.

Jesus’ “body” was unrecognizable to those who saw it until He made His Spirit manifest to them. Spirit lives in the heart. If you look at a man’s face or body to discern whether he is God, you won’t know. A good heart can manifest in many ways, however many ways the physical universe supplies. Look at Tris’s posts for one example. Likewise, a cold heart (i.e., a sinful heart) can manifest in as many ways.

Kimstu

There is physical suffering and spiritual suffering, the former amoral, and the latter quite moral.

Look at it this way: Jesus said, “Blessed are those who are persecuted and endure all manner of evil for my name’s sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” (paraphrased). This nicely illustrates the dual nature of man (real and corporeal). The persecutor, though inflicting physical suffering, is actually edifying the Spirit of his “victim”!

In general, the whole preface to the Sermon on the Mount (“Blessed are the …”) speaks to this.

An action in isolation is amoral. Context is everything. The moral decision of the Spirit is made before the motor decision of the brain is carried out. The exact same action can be either moral or immoral, depending on why the Spirit decided to carry it out.

David

In this context, a normal brain carries out the wishes of the Spirit; an abnormal one does not. The reason it does not — heredity, catastrophe, accidental poisoning, whatever — is irrelevant, unless the Spirit of the person had decided (as in the case of your hypothetical drug abuser) to purposefully distort his brain with the design to do harm, in which case again his Spirit made his moral decision before his hand reached for the pill.

Surel

In a way, that’s dead on accurate. But God needn’t do anything at all to “clean up” the evil. Evil automatically eviscerates itself from God because it despises Him. It will die because it is cold and loveless, which is exactly what it chooses to be (evil being, in this context, the aggregate of Spirit that has grown cold).

David

I suppose I should address this again separately, since you listed it among other questions that had a different context.

I think Jesus expressed it quite clearly, though I know you have a problem with metaphors, which I’ll help you decipher after the passage:

[/quote]

"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?

"Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’”

Matthew 7:15-23

[/quote]

The tree represents a person’s heart (or essence). The fruit represents moral decisions. And the fire represents self-consumption.

OK, Lib, just to make sure I’m clear on this, you said:

So, in other words, it is pretty much impossible for a human to make a judgment about somebody’s spirit, because all we have to go on is physical action. God, of course, sees beyond that and so He knows if the body is doing the will of the spirit or is acting against its will.

In other words, it’s quite possible that a mass murderer has a loving spirit and would be in what you call Heaven.

Is that correct?

Lib also said:

I think I know what you mean, but that’s a potentiall dangerous philosophy. I mean, think of that philosophy in the hands of Christian Reconstructionists (Christians who want to remake the U.S. into a theology). They could institute all sorts of Inquisition-like policies because even if they torture people, it’s all for the greater good, and physical suffering has no moral context – the only thing that matters is spiritual life.

I know this isn’t the way you intend it, but just seeing it typed out like that sends a chill up my spine.

David

Yes, though “remotely” might be a better qualifier than “quite”, thus:

[/quote]

Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!” The disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

The disciples were even more amazed, and said to each other, “Who then can be saved?”

Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.”

Mark 10:23-27

[/quote]

Mine, too!

When a man presumes to sit on God’s Throne, the potential for physical harm is enormous.

(See my latest plea to FriendOfGod in Christianity and Love, Part III.)


Personal note: Thank you, David, for understanding me.

Libertarian

O.K. I understand it for real this time. :slight_smile: Let me try to explain in my own words to make sure. Your argument is that intention, a quality of the spirit, is the measure of morality. Thus, inflicting physical suffering for the good of the sufferer, like Rumi’s nobleman from my earlier post, is justified.

In your mind, therefore, any judgment of others has no place. Since I cannot know another’s Spirit, but only see the results of his actions, I really have no grounds to pass moral judgment on another person. Ditto for God. This is a kind of “mysterious ways” argument that applies not only to God, but to others as well.

Sorry if I seem to be harping on this, but it recently occurred to me that “mysterious ways” might indeed be a valid answer to the existence of evil. But I wanted to know if your approach was a version of that argument or something completely different before I posted my thoughts on that subject.

So, the ends justify the means?

Or would you consider any cases where the means are just so far out of line that no ends can justify them?

David

It would even be possible for a mass murderer to be more moral than your or I. Given that the brain of such a person might be sending the body impulses that could not be resisted by the spirit, those actions would not be subject to moral interpretation. On the other hand, that person could be responsible for saving many lives just by resisting those few impulses that could be resisted, or by voluntarily giving up his freedom by turning himself in to the police once he realized what was going on. This could be seen as positively heroic from a moral standpoint.

I agree that some people could justify things this way in their own mind, but it wouldn’t really be valid under Lib’s philosophy. First, the Inquisitionists would have to be certain that they were doing God’s will and not merely following their own selfish motivations. Otherwise, they would be committing an egregious sin. And since God Himself, in the form of Jesus, never did anything like this, they would be undertaking a questionable course of action indeed. Also, they could never know that their suffering would produce the desired result, since matters of (another’s) spirit are completely out of sight.

I see I cannot take a vacation without threads burgeoning like they live on Pern. So I have a bunch of comments to make:

A Square of Flatland to one side, regarding which I confess I did not take the time to sort out what various posters were using to make various points, I found most of Libertarian’s analogies to be quite clear without definitions. In a thread devoted to questioning what theists ascribe to “God’s mysterious ways,” e.g., it seems to me quite clear that Lib. is speaking of life in the context of something given by God, not the biochemical processes that activate living bodies. An old principle of law is that one argues in the language and code of the forum. If we were debating the evidence for and against the Higgs boson, for example, citing II Peter or the Mahabharata would be out of line; a quote referring to the Eightfold Way would be understood to deal with particle physics, not Buddhism, without clarification. I found criticizing Lib. for not pinning down his metaphors, given the context, to be less than kosher.

Now, as to the omni-{adjective of your choice} characteristics of God, a metaphor:

David B. often speaks of himself humorously and ironically as a god. But within the context of this board there is a small element of truth to his irony. Consider that all but ten or so posters know me exclusively through my posts. It would be quite within David’s powers as moderator to go into one of my posts and change it to a cogent apologetic for atheism, quite contrary to my personal beliefs and stated views, working it in my “style” and with some statement that justifies my apparent change of viewpoint. Within his powers. But not within his modus operandi. The board exists, with him in that godlike role, for the interchange of views unfettered by anything but the overall rules under which we use the SDMB in the first place. For him to ascribe to me a view contrary to my own, using his powers to make it appear they are mine, would be contrary to the spirit of what he is attempting to do with this board.

The suggestion has been made over and over again that for human beings to have choices, a world in which their choices are meaningful and not merely Hobson’s or the selection of near-identical alternatives is required. And for some reason, it pleases God to allow humans such choices. That reason, most of us theists believe, is that God values free will and wants to be loved freely, not by compulsion. Io has no choice but to orbit Jupiter; this atom of radiothorium has no choice but to emit an alpha particle and break down. A world in which robohumans had no choice but to obey God’s law is quite possible. But not, we believe, what he had in mind. It does not take away from his omnipotence, omniscience, or omnibenevolence to have created a world in which humans can make valid moral choices, some of which are evil, and contrary to his expressed will, any more than it takes away from David’s moderator powers that he refrains from converting me to the appearance of an atheist. (Granted that he would answer to Ed, Tuba, CK, and Lynn for abuse of powers in the larger scale of the board structure, we are for the purposes of this metaphor confining ourselves to GD and assuming their failure to intervene. The other gets into metatheology of Cabellian proportions, and need not concern us here.)

Finally, for what I believe are obvious reasons, both the OP and responders of all viewpoints have dealt with the Judeo-Christian God in various interpretations. It would be totally fair to bring other contenders into play, to look at the matter from the generic point of view. What, for example, would a Deist god be responsible for in these contexts? He, after all, created a world in which all this horsehockey occurs. If he is not culpable for malfeasance as a theist god would be, he is at least guilty of nonfeasance on the same terms. What about the IPU? I’d challenge Gaudere to do a deadpan post in which she defends the IPU’s paradoxical nature on the same terms.

Finally, the question of “natural disasters” comes up. My personal feeling is that the typical insurance company is breaking the Third Commandment in referring to them as “acts of God.” Typically, a natural disaster is bad only because people are negatively impacted – killed, injured, suffer property loss, etc. – by them. But from a totally different viewpoint, some at least can be seen in a positive way. Much of the best soil from the point of view of fertility is volcanic in origin – vulcanism in an uninhabited place can be seen as beneficial, in the long run. For some plants (and animals?), a forest fire is a good thing, clearing new space for them to grow and enriching the soil with the ash of burnt trees. There are plants which require post-fire conditions to reproduce. Rainstorms are good if you’ve been in a drought. The ancient Egyptians celebrated the Nile floods which restored fertility to their land. A natural disaster is a disaster only as it harms that which is valuable to me (or you, or whoever).

Just some thoughts to add fuel to the thread.

Libertarian

Something very odd is happening here, because I actually understand most of what you’re saying. (Keep in mind, though, I’m a “weak” atheist and a pragmatist, so it’s difficult for me to accept a metaphysical construct for more than a few minutes at a time.) (So I’d better post this quickly!)

I have some questions for you, however. You said (to Kimstu):

You also said (to DavidB):

So, if I understand correctly, the morality of an action is entirely dependent upon the motive of the Spirit, regardless of outcome, and the wishes of the Spirit are not carried out correctly by an “abnormal” brain, but are presumably reflected accurately in a “normal” brain.

Having had some close contact with persons carrying “abnormal” brains, I’ve been trying to consider this belief in terms of my direct experience. Please bear with me, as this does have relevance to the issue of morality, and also (hopefully) to the O.P.

Part One

My older sister is schizophrenic. She began hearing voices when she was a teenager, and has spent many years in and out of hospitals and on/off various anti-psychotic medications. She is 43 now, and for most of the past decade has stayed on her meds and has a fairly (for her) normal life at the moment. She’s described to me, the times when we’ve candidly discussed her illness, what it’s like for her when she’s not medicated.

According to my sister, during her psychotic episodes her understanding of good and evil does not change; in other words, although the voices she hears may tell her to do violent or hateful things, she understands that they are immoral. She might, in her delusionary state, beleive that the voices are coming from a dog or even a loved one and do violence against them, but she will not obey the voices’ commands to do what she knows is evil.

Conversely, her understanding of right and wrong seems to be highly flexible on a day to day basis. On any given day, it might make perfect sense to her to walk three miles to the store in her bathrobe, buy a cup of coffee and a pack of cigarettes and stand outside the store smoking her cigarettes and drinking her coffee until both are gone. Or, it might seem right to pilfer a family member’s belongings, negotiate a price for them at a pawn shop, buy some luxury expendable with the money and share that with the family member she robbed.

My sister feels guilty about some of her behavior but not all of it. She has no feelings of guilt for any actions she took against the voices, even if those actions caused direct harm to someone; she believes that all those actions were justifiable self defense. However, she feels badly for any harmful thing she did through faulty reasoning or confused perception.

Now, knowing my sister to be a good, gentle and kind person, I’ve forgiven her (many times) for the things she’s done. I also know (because she’s told me) that some of the bad things she’s done were done with clear intent, knowing that they were wrong, in moments of weakness.

Here (at last) is where my question arises. My sister would say that her violent actions against me when she thought I was sending evil thoughts into her brain were highly moral, yet her other misdeeds while delusional were just as immoral as her intentional misdeeds while clearheaded. However, if I accept for the moment that abnormal brain chemistry subverts the wishes of the spirit and that only the moral decision of the Spirit is relevant, then I would have to say that all of my sister’s actions were amoral, with the possible exception of those actions she took with full knowledge of their immorality. But knowing that, even when she is medicated, her brain chemistry is radically different than a “normal” person, then I must accept that perhaps none of her actions can be considered the product of a normal brain, and thus all of her actions are as blameless as the actions of an animal!

If I accept this, then where is my sister’s humanity? Is she no more responsible than the dog that goes through my garbage? Has she no more decency than a tree, no more nobility than a cabbage? Does she have no more moral substance than a stiff breeze?

And if this holds true for my sister, who is intelligent but irrational due to brain chemistry, what of the merely stupid among us who, through faulty reasoning, perform or allow evil acts, even though their intentions are not evil? Are we to assume their actions are amoral because their rationality has failed them? After all, our ability to form rational thoughts and make decisions on how to act comes entirely from our physical brain. If my brain does not function as efficiently as yours, and I decide that the greater good to humanity will be served by lynching a man based on the color of his skin, then are my actions less morally reprehensible because I’m an idiot?

Part Two

Lib, you paraphrased Matthew 7:15-23 in response to DavidB’s question: “how do you know what the real ‘spirit’ is?” Contrary to traditional readings of Jesus’ statement “by their fruits you shall know them” to mean that the teachings and works of “false prophets” will be evil, you explained that the meaning of the passage is that bad people can be recognized because they make bad moral decisions. While this is an interesting interpretation, it doesn’t quite answer David because it gives no guidance on how to recognize a “bad moral decision” since we cannot peer into another’s soul to determine the wishes of the Spirit.

If the morality of actions is divorced from the consequences of those actions, so too must the morality of the person be divorced from their corporeal actions. So, to repeat David’s question, how can we know what the real spirit is? If Love can manifest itself in someone who does horrible things (David’s hypothetical mass murderer), then by what “fruits” will we know the truly evil?

And more to the point, if suffering and destruction can spring from the actions of a truly moral person, what is the use of following any religious or moral code? If we feel justified in any atrocity because it fits our view of “holiness”, then what is the practical difference between your philosophy and Aleister Crowley’s “do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”? After all, if my honest impulse is to show my Love through violence, I’m satisfying your criteria for morality as well as fulfilling Crowley’s imperative.

Part Three and finally back to the OP

The belief that:

appears to let God “off the hook” for the suffering caused by natural disasters, but also puts Him/Her/It in the position of supreme responsibility for moral answers. If the consequences of our actions in the physical world are irrelevant to our Spiritual health, which is instead determined by the morality of our choices, then God must provide and make clear the moral code on which we must base our decisions.

If we dodge the “mysterious ways” argument by saying that physics is irrelevant to morality, then we run headlong into a different mystery, that of true Morality. If Morality has been revealed to humanity by God, where is this written, and how do we clearly understand it? God gave us Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Confucius, Socrates, Og the Caveman and all the priests of Ra. Who has the code, and why is it so hard to find?

So instead of “Mysterious Ways”, we end up with “It Doesn’t Matter” and “Guess What’s Right”.

I think I prefer my pragmatic view of the universe. What happens in this world is the only basis for morality, even if my soul is immortal, for what other meaningful context is there? If my immortal spirit cannot be damaged, except through poor moral decisions, then where else but the physical plane can I practice morality?

I can respect a God Who sets up a Universe to allow moral decisions, but I can neither understand nor respect One Who sets up certain rules of behavior and then doesn’t post them in an unmistakeable manner!

Dumb Ox

[Please don’t hit me but…]

From what follows, I’m afraid you don’t. But I blame myself for my own inability to explain what I think.

Which brought this from Ren:

Good lord, no.

Intention, contextlessly, is neither a quality of the Spirit nor any measure of morality. Love is a quality of the Spirit (its His essence) and His measure is the measure of morality. That is, a deed is a “good deed” if it is motivated by God’s perfect Love. A “good intention” cannot be good if it does not correspond to God’s own Absolute Goodness. He is the Objective Absolute.

Be Perfect.

I expect Gaudere might pick up here to go round a few, but the means is never justified by the ends; whereas the ends are always justified by the means. Do what is right, and what is right will follow. And I’m not talking about the atoms; I’m talking about the Spirit.

Here’s where the atoms come in. They are the medium by which you paint your moral landscape, the tools you use to build your moral home, the mis-en-scène for your moral play. The atoms are a chaotic house of cards, not real, but compelling nonetheless by virtue of their sheer ubiquity.

Delusion nullifies any good intention. A man is not working on God’s behalf simply because he claims he is. What is rationalized by the brain is laid out plain in the heart. What is in a man’s heart? We each are here to learn what is in our own, and that alone we know. That’s why you have your consciousness, and I have mine. And neither of us can “experience” the other’s. The atoms separate us that way (via the brain’s consciousness). That is necessary because spiritually, we are all one.

(Disclaimer to any interested party: No, I am not attributing the “miracle” of consciousness to God in the manner that I might attribute the “miracle” of fire to Him simply because I don’t understand the nature of consciousness. I am merely saying that consciousness serves God’s purpose. Whether He designed it by natural selection or whether He willed it into being miraculously is irrelevant.)

I do not mean to cast aspersion on your creative thinking, but you really must clear your mind of any unnecessary entities (like preconceptions) to grasp this, despite its simplicity. I know I had to. For me, I had to realize that the atoms are mere analogies of what is real. It’s all too easy to mix up the metaphors (applying the corporeal to the real). Take that approach, and perhaps you’ll understand what I’m saying. Not that understanding me is necessarily worth anyone’s while. But now I’m rambling. Sorry.

Lib said:

I think you just agreed with my Universal Pragmatism school of thought.

If not, my apologies!

Carry on.

Xeno

I hate to answer your long, thoughtful, and eloquent post with such a brief reply, but if you need more explanation than this, just ask. Uncannily, your post follows mine above! :slight_smile:

Where is your sister’s humanity? It’s in her heart, where her Spirit is. That’s the real essence of humanity, that we house the Living God. You cannot live her life (i.e., you cannot experience her consciousness). You have your own life to live, and your own moral accounting to do. I (and you) cannot judge whether her violent actions are immoral based simply on the fact that they are violent, and that is the whole point I have been trying to make.

What dawns on me now is that y’all are asking me, “how can you tell whether so-and-so is a good person”. And I am telling you that the only way you can tell is if the fruit of their Spirit is God’s Perfect Love. Do you “feel” from them what you “feel” from God? If you say, “but I don’t feel anything from God, I don’t even believe in God,” then I say that you must then decide for yourself what you consider to be good.

You have your own life, your own journey, your own travails that cannot be even remotely known to me, not in any meaningful way, as they are known to you. Likewise, you cannot know me.

God doesn’t set up rules of behavior simply because there aren’t any. It isn’t the behavior; it isn’t the motive; it’s the character (the essence). It isn’t whether you are busy, or whether you have good intentions — it’s whether you Love or not. Just like it isn’t the tree; it isn’t the fruit; it’s whether the tree is good. If it is, it will bear good fruit.

Love, and you will always do the right thing.

Yes, God is indeed responsible for all this. But it is His spirit that we have been given. Yes, He is resonsible for giving us life and for giving us moral freedom. But He is not to blame when we freely and volitionally do not love. We are. Much as we might like to pin on Him our own moral decisions, we are saddled with them nonetheless because of His perfect noninterference in our will.

We can blame Him that we are poor as dirt, but we cannot blame Him that we are mean as snakes. There are poor people of good character (like my father). Poverty does not cause evil. Nothing in the atoms causes evil. Evil is born in the heart.

Poly

You express yourself so clearly. How I envy you.

Like you said before, Lib, we pretty much see things the same way, from two very different approaches toward understanding. I always find your conclusions much easier to understand than the arguments from which they were obtained! I find that fascinating, disconcerting, gratifying and very amusing. (Probably why I enjoy rattling your cage so much!)

But we already went several rounds on this, and it turned out that how I define “means” is sometimes how you define “ends”, and we both agree that there is a moral imperative for the likely consequences of your actions to have some bearing as to your choice of an action.