I already voted.
But you did seem to be downplaying the evil of purely physical dissolution and suffering. I guess I misunderstood; but I’m still not sure how to interpret your passage quoted above, where you say that the death of the body is not the death of the real person.
The real person is a spirit, not a body. Jesus taught that man is born of water (his mother’s womb) and spirit (God’s breath) — that is, man is a dual creature. He is like an elephant in that he is flesh and blood, but he is also like God in that he is eternal and moral. I do not mean to diminish the tragedy of physical suffering. God knows I suffer plenty myself, just with my emphysema and other ailments. I’m not saying it’s not tragic, but it’s not evil. Events are not good or evil; men’s hearts are good or evil. By “heart” I mean “the vital or essential part; core” (American Heritage, 8th def.)
Okay; thanks for the clarification.
Thank you for the understanding.
Yeah, well, dualism is still false. 
You mean, as opposed to true. 
I can’t tell from your posts whether it was “yea” or “nay” - you said something about agreeing with elucidator, but since his vote was “shrug”, I’m still not clear.
Let me rephrase that. The universal measure was meant to apply to the definition of good, not the action. (I shouldn’t post right before bed.) We don’t know what anyone values, but we can get a good idea from actions and testimony. Again, sociopaths seem to not make choices on free will, but rather choices determined in part by genetics and physical eccentricities.
I understand where your statement on moral judgments comes from, but that is a rule more honored in the breach, isn’t it? I swear I’ve heard Christian ministers make at least a few.
I know you canna change the laws of physics, Captain, but Mars gets along fine without earthquakes. (Or Marsquakes). Why not set up land masses right the first time, and not have them floating around running into each other? God must be a pretty poor builder if this is his best.
I’m obviously not talking about physical freedom. Do you not believe in psychology at all? Does someone lacking empathy able to make the same moral computations as someone with it? Our moral choices don’t come from a big book of what to do when. When we’re children, and say something mean that makes someone else sad, we pick up on it and try not to do it again. If we can’t recognize that we affected someone else, how can we learn?
An assertion that contradicts all the evidence we have. Pure delusion. There is no rational reason to believe in “spirits”, and every rational reason not to.
You do every time you promote your fantasy that we have immortal spirits, and even worse that they are more important than our real selves. Your beliefs lead directly to a sociopathic worldview and behavior, if taken seriously. As I’ve said, building a worthwhile morality requires that your viewpoint be rejected or ignored.
In other words, the real part of us. Our body and our brain-based mind, not some self indulgent fantasy about spirits. Murder and rape and torture are evil because they hurt real flesh and blood and thinking people, not because of some imaginary spirit. People are evil because of what they do in the real world, and a worthwhile morality is based on actions and consequences in the real world, not actions and consequences involving some imaginary spirit.
Sadly, they have indeed. Nevertheless, Jesus made it plain: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:1-3) There are all sorts of things that can interfere with the sorts of ethical judgments most of us make from day to day, including sociopathy, autism, and just plain brain damage, like after a car wreck. But remember that I define goodness as an aesthetic, not an ethic. A person’s morality cannot be judged by his actions, as in the counterexample I gave before.
Sorry, but that sounds random. Mars isn’t even habitable and can’t hold a decent atmosphere. It seems to me that earth is just right, whether God created it or not. Obviously, I’m not a Biblical literalist, and so I believe the earth emerged from stardust just like all the other planets in the known universe, but there’s no reason God couldn’t have created it in exactly that manner, maybe even waiting through trillions of universes until the earth emerged, who knows. His eternity makes the length of time or number of tries it might have taken moot anyway. In any case, I’m not sure what you’re getting at about earthquakes and such. These are amoral as far as I can tell, even under ethics models of morality.
I believe that our moral choices are not made by our brains, but by our spirits — which, as Jesus teaches, are our real and essential selves. Our bodies are just meat and bones, like an elephant. What makes us God-like is our spirit, as I explained to **Sophistry and Illusion ** above. We merely inhabit bodies in a temporal frame. A damaged brain that cannot obey the will of a spirit is no measure of a person’s morality (i.e., what they value).
Really? So the racist who hates niggers and burns crosses without drawing blood is a good guy?
This I agree with. But you are making assumptions about the heart as much as we are. Just as you can’t tell that a heart is pure because someone is acting in a way that looks moral, you can’t tell that a heart is impure by someone acting evilly. Since we can’t tell for sure about real people, let’s go to art. Do you think Lenny in “Of Mice and Men” had an evil heart?
Incidentally, Voyager, I don’t think you’d want to remove the earth’s liquid core and plates. Without our magnetic field, we might be just another dead Mars.
As much as I dislike defending him, Der Trihs said they were flesh and blood people, not that they needed to be hurt in flesh and blood. I imagine a burning cross would do considerable mental harm.
No, no. I agree with you completely. I can’t tell whether it’s pure or impure. Regarding your example, I’m not an avid reader of fiction and am not familiar with it other than by name. I will say that in the movie Sling Blade, my opinion is that Karl Childers is not evil and that Doyle Hargraves is. But my opinion, if they were real characters, would be completely worthless in a moral sense. Now, before this gets even more tangential, let me say that I differentiate between a moral judgment and an ethical judgment. I do understand the need to make ethical judgments for the sake of a civil society. People who commit unethical acts need to be dealt with. Libertarianism is itself basically a philosophy of ethics.
Fine, then. He doesn’t burn crosses. He just watches negroes through tiny slits in his curtain and curses them in quiet mumbles as they pass by, hating them with a fierce but silent intensity. Is he a good man?
Why shouldn’t he be? I would say he’s wrong to have that much hate, of course. But he hasn’t done anything bad. In fact, despite his impressive hatred, which would give him good reason (for him) to do something, he does not. I would have to imagine that either his hatred is not enough to commit a bad act, or that it would be but he does not wish to cause harm for whatever reason. He isn’t necessarily good, but I wouldn’t say thoughts alone made him a bad person, simply a wrong one. We’d need to look at his actual acts to know whether he’s good or not.
I don’t know what **Der Trihs ** would say, though.
And are black people real and made of flesh and blood, with minds just like everyone else ? And does racism have effects that affect those real flesh and blood people that go far beyond cross burning ? Yes it does.
Hate is not evil. It’s only it’s effects upon real things which may or may not be evil. And spirits aren’t real.
You’re asking the wrong guy. I’ve said that moral judgments are unsound. All of them. It was **DT ** who said that evil is defined by physical harm to flesh and blood.