I can inagine the scene: A pregnant Amalekite woman in a state of shock after seeing her husband, children and nation being destroyed runs in fear of her life. The woman huddled and crying is finally found by an ancient Jewish solider, as he plunges his sword into her pregnant belly ripping open her guts he quotes CMKeller:
“it’s for the greater good, I am executing justice.” Jewish soldiers have to be tough, right CMK?
Honestly this is literally making me sick.
Chaim
I’ve already gotten in a bit of trouble for responding to someone who was sliding in and out of devil’s advocacy, so let me make this very plain.
Dear Devil’s Advocate:
It’s a bit problematic to present the Father as harsh and the Son as merciful when the Son has said, “I and the Father are One. He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
Opus
It isn’t our moral sense that is the problem. It’s the scope of our moral perception, limited to our own narrow closed consciousness. You and I don’t know — and can’t know — each other’s deepest motivations and experiences. Language doesn’t help much; in fact, it can make things worse because of its imprecision. (That’s why there’s so much misunderstanding and constant clarification, as in these debates.)
As Ian Percy has said, “We judge others by their behavior. We judge ourselves by our intentions.”
God is privvy to “the big picture”. It is similar to how, in a large company, the sales veep will think that the CEO is insisting on too high a profit margin and isn’t mindful of sales competition, and the financial veep will think that the CEO is cutting margins too thin and isn’t mindful of stockholder’s equity. Meanwhile, the CEO, if she is a good CEO, can see the whole thing from a perspective that the others can’t.
Am I responding to Gaudere, or to the devil’s advocate? I ask because one of them said that humans are separated from others (but not necessarily bizzare aliens) by sentience, a sense of morality, and similar emotions. One of them twisted me 'round the Maypole for not wanting to assess the morality of a hypothetical pig and man, while for herself “it is hard for me to say whether I would save a sentient pig or a man until the choice is actually in front of me, and there is enough ‘room’ in the moral valuation of each life that either choice a person makes could be moral.”
Which one now, Gaudere or the devil’s advocate, has decided that the chimp and the pig can apprehend an infinite God, an immortal Spirit, divine forgiveness and love? Which one believes that animals drink the Living Water, eat the Bread of Life, and have sins that need purging by resurrection? Which one thinks pigs and chimps have the capacity for hypocrisy, blasphemy, atonement, and grace?
That said, if there is a pig Jesus, I would leave that to be the concern of pigs.
[deja vu all over again…]
It is not a flawed brain that produces evil, but a closed heart. Once again, a person is accountable only by what he has been given. To hold a person accountable for actions that he cannot help is an abominable morality. That’s why I believe that John was wrong about Judas. I believe that Judas was either free to choose to betray God or else is not to be held accountable for it.
Since we are unable to discern the motive of the heart that underlies a damaged brain, we are scarcely in a position to judge its morality.
All rights accrue to the owner of property. God is the Owner of the heavens and the earth and all things therein. In my opinion, you attach far too much significance to the body. Your body is not you any more than a vase is the flower it holds.
Absolutely, yes! Great question!
Assuming a healthy brain (otherwise, all bets are off), your actions toward anything made of atoms are merely an expression of your underlying spiritual decisions. Thus, cruelty to an animal is as morally heinous as cruelty to a man. It is the darkness of the heart that produces any cruelty at all.
That which you might perceive as cruelty from a damaged brain is not necessarily cruelty at all, but pathos.
Amedeus
I think that is splendid analysis that stopped just a bit short. The reason humanity is a problem is that we are corporeal and God is not. Our frame of reference is not absolute (which is what I think you were getting at). So there is a further axiom after “G-d isn’t human”, namely, we (the essential we, i.e., our spirits) are God, “pieces” of Him as it were.
Our perceptions, which are merely interpretations of our senses, separate us from God in a very real sense. That’s why a revelatory epistemology is necessary for comprehension of God. If He didn’t tell us, we would never know. That’s why Ramachandran remarked that temporal lobe activity is as much evidence for God’s existence as it is evidence against it. The temporal lobe might be the instrument by which God inspires Man. That’s also why a spirit vesselling in a damaged brain cannot be held accountable for “sin”. It might simply be that the helpless brain is failing to carry out the wishes of a good heart.
Gaudere
Revisiting this for extension of remarks:
Just because actions might look evil does not mean that they are evil.
A murder by a man with a brain that cannot help but murder is not the moral equivalent of a murder by a man with a healthy brain. For all we know, the spirit of the man with a damaged brain is decrying the actions of its brain. His spirit might be saying, “Oh, I loathe that I do this! Though I command my brain to do one thing, it does another!” We cannot know to a certainty.
But when that man is freed from his brain, his spirit will choose the Light just like any other loving spirit will.
Libertarian - thank you for your explanation. I know sharing your spiritual quest, something deeply personal, was important to you and I accept your gift in the spirit in which it was given. I hope that no one will use your “confession” for base purposes (e.g. for cheap shots in another forum.)
If I understand your position, it is as follows:God has revealed to me that a particular species is a vessel for the spirit of god. The particular species being the one represented by a specific DNA pattern. As far as other species found on this earth, or other hyopthetical species on other planets, are concerned, you make no statement since god has not revealed whether or not those species are vessels for the spirit of god.
Also, the presence of god depends on this DNA pattern and nothing else. i.e. a human who has severe brain damage, or one who is in a coma, is guaranteed to have the presence of god within him or her, whereas a chimpanzee possibly doesn’t. God has revealed that every being with chromosome pattern X has this capability, but has said nothing about beings with chromosome pattern Y which differs from X, even if the difference is only 3% (to pick a number) of the DNA molecule.
Perhaps you can explain this paragraph of yours to me.
« Which one now, Gaudere or the devil’s advocate, has decided that the chimp and the pig can apprehend an infinite God, an immortal Spirit, divine forgiveness and love? Which one believes that animals drink the Living Water, eat the Bread of Life, and have sins that need purging by resurrection? Which one thinks pigs and chimps have the capacity for hypocrisy, blasphemy, atonement, and grace?»
Does this mean that to have a “soul”, one must be capable of apprehending an infinite god, have the capacity for hypocrisy and blasphemy, etc…? This seems to contradict my previous understanding, that a human with severe brain damange still has a soul.
In re: the question about the ethics of rescuing the being in peril - if I understand you correctly, the morality of helping another human being depends on my motives. Does this mean that if my motive for allowing another human being to perish withot offering a helping hand is because I want to free the person’s spirit from the prison of the flesh, and allow him/her to join God sooner, my lack of inaction is moral and “good”?
Yes, but my criteria of whether a creature is a “person” and has the moral value of a “person” does depend on such things, whereas I thought your criteria for a being having the moral weight of a human was simply being “a vessel for God’s spirit”, with no mention of sentience required at all. If sentience is required in your definition of “human/person”, why in the name of all that you hold holy did you give me so much grief about it when I argued that position? 
It didn’t seem like simple devil’s advocacy, in your case; you seemed to genuinely find my criteria laughable.
The difference between the two situations was that in my choice, the choice was between a SENTIENT pig and a (presumably-sentient) man–a perhaps troublesome one, unless you hold that humans are the only beings that can have the moral value of a human, and sentient nonhumans have the same moral value as a nonsentient animal. The choice I gave you was a choice between a sentient man and a nonsentient pig–a no-brainer for me, and I would have thought the same for you.
Let me try phrasing it this way:
If a human who to all outward appearences is a vicious cold-hearted murderer devoid of any humanity or love, and a human in a coma, and a human born without a brain, ALL are vessels for God’s spirit…is it wise to discount the possibility of a loving spirit in our animal kin? If we cannot use a being’s actions or statements or sentience to determine the presence/absence of a spirit, and we have no way of knowing if Jesus has or has not come to anyone but humans, should you assume animals cannot be or are not vessels for God’s spirit?
So I believe you are saying that God can do whathever he likes to my body, and it is perfectly moral and within his rights, yes?
Is gassing a million monkeys of the same moral weight as spraying for ants and killing a million of them? What if no cruelty is intended, the animal simply got in your way, or the animal’s pain has a good result for you? For example, we kill animals without malice because we like the taste of their flesh. But what if we like the taste of monkey’s brains eaten while the monkey is still alive, yet feel no malice towards the monkey nor delight in its pain? We can cause a great deal of suffering without ever intending to be cruel; can it ever be immoral to do harm even if it is not done out of cruelty?
[Edited by Gaudere on 06-03-2001 at 08:18 PM]
Gaudere
For me, the only way sentience plays into the whole morality picture is, not whether the object of your intention is sentient, but whether you are. In other words, do you know what you are doing? Is your brain carrying out the desires of your heart, or is your brain an obstacle to the desires of your heart? Maybe the reason you’re having such a hard time getting a grip on what I am saying is because my expository skills are so poor. On the other hand, you won’t ever “get it” until you dispense with the a priori assumption that moral decisions are made by the brain. I think the fact that we are looking at this two different ways is definitively indicated by the dance we keep doing. You keep going, “What attribute of thought underpins morality?” And I keep going, “It is not an attribute of thought, but of thought-independent moral character.” We could set our discussions to music and have a party.
In your view, the brain makes a decision that is either moral or not. In my view, the brain carries out a decision or not that the Spirit has already made.
You are extremely capable in matters of empathy, and in attempting to see things from another person’s frame of reference. If you truly want to understand my view of morality, it is necessary that you assume my point of view for the duration of your examination. Now, as you examine these answers, please understand that, yes, I know you see things differently, but that the way you see things will not give you insight into my answers.
It doesn’t matter toward what end the cruelty that is born in a man’s Spirit manifests. Consider that what the man perceives around him is an amoral matrix. Thus, the action that his brain carries out is moral or immoral no matter what atoms are out there before him and no matter what motor commands his brain gives to his body. Whether the pig the man sees is sentient or not, whether what he sees is a pig or not, the moral nature of the situation is to be found nowhere in the atoms, but inside his own essence.
I know you are merciless with analogies, but try to discern what I’m saying here without straining gnats. You can think of your moral journey as one big test of a sort. The test booklet that is handed to you is the EMG spectrum. You are given a body so you can do locomotion within its dimensions, and you are given perceptions so you can make sense of otherwise senseless amalgamations of molecules. The test has one question: What will you do with what you have in front of you? You spend your whole life answering it.
Well, I think a human born without a brain might be called a corpse. But that aside, my understanding is that the test is handed out to humans only. I don’t hold this view dogmatically, but merely have derived it deductively. Jesus extended His own suffering for the sake of people. He never cursed a person, but He did curse a tree. He delivered demons out of people, and sent them into pigs. He was the Son of Man. Even leaving common sense aside, if God has placed His Spirit in other vessels, that has no bearing on my own moral decisions as I explained in my preface above. My morality is not measured by what is outside me, but by what is inside me.
So long as what He does with your body is not a usurpation of the will of your Spirit, what He does with His property (your body) is perfectly moral. Once again, you will not understand this (if understanding is indeed your goal) unless you see this from my point of view, which is that your body is not in any significant sense “you” at all. There is no life, other than trivial cell replication, in your body.
No matter what we do, if we do not love our subsequent action is immoral. In the entire spectrum of action, from feeding a hungry child to torturing a child, any of it that is not from love is immoral. Again, it is not the contents of the test booklet’s question that is being evaluated, but rather the answer we supply. There is one “right” answer to the question of what you will do with what is around you, and there are an infinite number of ways to express it. But at its root, your answer must be “I will love what is around me.” That is why Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” He is Love.
Shall we continue our dance? 
So, would you still claim a human in an irreversible coma is a vessel of God’s Spirit, but a language-using chimpanzee is not? The Bible calls Jesus “the Word made flesh”, no? One might argue Jesus wasn’t incarnated so much as a Homo sapiens as he was a language-using organism, and that therefore the proper view of things which are in the “image of God” would focus not on their DNA or how many chromosomes (or tentacles) they might happen to have, but on their minds.
I can’t quite buy this total separation between constraining my body and usurping the will of my “spirit”. I’m very much afraid that if you do enough things to my body, you will eventually be able to usurp the will of anything which I could possibly recognize as being me. Leaving that aside, it also seems to me that God, if the Bible is to be believed, does seek to usurp the will of my “spirit”. If my spirit wills the wrong thing, I go to hell and am tortured forever (at least according to the words which Jesus is recorded as having spoken).
Arnold
I cannot imagine what sort of base purpose someone might derive from my witness, but then I’m known to be naive about such matters. The fact that I smoked pot in those days perhaps, or that I was a hippie? Goodness, if you think that’s something, ask me one day about my earlier flirtations with Satanism.
Your interpretation of what I was saying, while a bit clinical, is essentially correct. I do have an issue with the repeated reduction of the Infinite Existence to a lower-case “god” who pushes the sun around in the sky, but that’s my problem and not necessarily yours. I use “God” in the sense of His name — His identity that differentiates Him from entities that are only vaguely conceptually similar in absolutely trivial ways — and therefore treat it much in the same way that I would treat the name “Arnold” rather than dismiss your uniqueness by referencing mundane general “arnolds” whose closed consciousnesses ought not to be confused with yours.
At any rate, to your questions:
The apprehension by the brain need not be manifested but merely potentialized. “Knowledge” of the Spirit does not come from the brain. The heart (the temple of the Spirit) is the horse and the brain is the cart. If the cart is normal, it will go wherever the horse takes it. If the cart has one square wheel or an anchor that is buried in the ground, the horse is not faulted when the cart does not respond the way a normal cart would. On the other hand, a wild and intransigent horse will take even a normal cart for a precipitously perilous ride.
No. His flesh is not your property, nor is his moral journey a test issued by you. (See the post to Gaudere above.) Love does not rationalize. Brains do that. God is not fooled by people who claim to do things in His name, but are motivated by their assumptions that they are His proxy. “In that day, many will call out to me, ‘Lord! Lord! Did we not do mighty miracles in your name?’ And I will say, ‘Get away from me, you evil-doers! I never knew you!’” — Jesus
MEBuckner
[sigh…]
Indeed, one might. Feel free.
If such words were recorded as being said by Jesus, those words are either (1) misunderstood by you, or (2) lies, no matter whether they are written in the Bible or upon a bathroom stall. Do not confuse parables, which are analogies, with imperative statements. Morality is nothing more than a set of decisions, our decisions.
Given that God is Love, it might be that that which you think you disdain is not what you really disdain at all. One realization that I had upon my conversion was that I had never really disliked Who God really is, but only my own weird fabrication of Him as some sort of mad scientist qua genie.
Libertarian: I use god as lowercase because in my mind the god you describe is not the same all-powerful god as the one described by other people (e.g. cmkeller in this thread) and I would reserve the capitalization for my definition of god if I had one, or for the universally-accepted definition of god if there were one. In any case, please feel free to mentally substitute an uppercase g when you read my posts. And if you choose to spell my name arnold instead of Arnold I will not be offended.
You had said «A materialist would choose people over pigs because people are like us, which is a line of reasoning familiar to white supremicists.» From your description, it seems that the deity that has revealed itself to you has given the same criterion. I.E. “The living beings to which I choose to give souls are those that possess the same DNA pattern as yourself.” Perhaps that would explain why many white supremacists use the Bible to prop up their beliefs? :eek:
If the people accorded souls depend on DNA pattern X, then this means that by genetic engineering (introducing foreign genes into a human being’s DNA) I could eventually have an unbroken line of descent from a man with a soul to a man without a soul. Conversely, I could, from a creature without a soul, eventually produce a creature with a soul. Not sure if this contradicts your view of souls in any way, but I find the possibility intriguing.
As far as not rescuing the being in peril, on previous pages you said
«If my motivation is to rescue him because I value him as a child of God, then my action is moral.
You are right that if a spirit is loving, then any and all actions by that spirit’s brain are moral, even if the brain malfunctions ? which is something we’ve discussed before.»
I fail to see how me allowing the person to be freed from the prison of the flesh is not the mark of a loving spirit. Or if it isn’t, and if my action is the result of, as you say, rationalization by the brain instead of love from the soul, how is the converse (me rescuing that person) any different?
Arnold
Fascinating. The One who exists eternally, transcending time and space, and is capable of creating singularities that evolve into men; the One Whose morality is Absolutely Perfectly Good and infinitely axiomatic; the One Who is the very Source of Life and Meaning — that One comes up short of all-powerful.
[shrug…]
But now you are demanding that there be a moral implication to God’s decision about what vessels shall house Him, not just that the Spirits in those vessels shall love one another. It is not a remarkable fact that God chose man, but merely a fact. If He had chosen apes, we might not be here debating on the Internet. But then again, we might. But we can assume, given the axioms I have presented, that God’s decision, definitively motivated by Love, was a moral one.
Mercy. Who can say? Some brains can rationalize horrors that other brains cannot even conceive, even while masking their intent behind piety. Jesus said that they are “like whitewashed tombs, all clean and white on the outside, but inside full of dead mens’ bones and decay.” They do not fool God.
Well, that’s one of those iffy things, and yes it is intriguing. It can be argued that God accords to you the capicity for creativity, invention, and reason so that you can create new vessels for His Spirit. As Jesus said, “You will do even greater things than I.”
You’ve hit upon the crux of why I was so stubborn with Gaudere. You’re asking for a rationalization of a moral judgment. Such is impossible. Opposite actions, letting die and letting live, can each be either moral or immoral depending on factors unaccessible to us. In the particular case you raised, I had to assume one out of an infinite possibile expressions of a consciousness that is closed to me.
But suffice it to say that, whenever you act or don’t act, either one a moral praxis, you spirit has made its moral decision before your brain makes its motor one.
What a cool typo! I think I’ll let it stand as is. It’s like “I Spartacus”!
Libertarian - I didn’t say your god was not all-powerful. My sentence was supposed to mean “out of all the [all-powerful] gods I see people describe, your is but one of them.”
As far as god choosing only the human species for having souls:
When the materialist choses creatures similar to herself and assigns them a special place in her worldview, you considered the reasoning abhorrent (or so I take it since you compared it to the “white supremacist view”). When god assigns us the same criteria, you say “Well that’s god, therefore the reasoning is moral.” This seems to me to present a strange dichotomy and reminds me of Orwell’s doublethink. A reasoning that you deplore in a human is the basis of your morality when it comes from god.
As far as white supremacists using the bible to support their opinions, you say “Some brains can rationalize horrors that other brains cannot even conceive, even while masking their intent behind piety.” Of course, if they are interpreting the bible correctly, then their actions are not horrible, but perfectly moral. I will refer you again to my comment above.
You also say “It can be argued that God accords to you the capicity for creativity, invention, and reason so that you can create new vessels for His Spirit.” Create new vessels, and also remove the presence of god from a vessel. I.e. a human progeny could conceivably be transformed “biologically engineered” to be a creature without a soul, since the presence of a soul depends on a certain DNA configuration.
Finally, “You’re asking for a rationalization of a moral judgment. Such is impossible. Opposite actions, letting die and letting live, can each be either moral or immoral depending on factors unaccessible to us.” So I suppose the answer to my question, about whether it is moral or ethical of me to allow a being to die because I love the being so much that I want them to join god sooner, would be “I don’t know if it’s ethical or not, only god knows” ?
Arnold
I’m afraid you’ve crossed some wires.
For one thing, I do not “deplore” the materialist’s reasoning. Perhaps you came in late and missed the remark’s context. What I said (originally) was that the materialist’s reasoning is arbitrary. I do not consider being arbitrary to be necessarily “abhorrent”. There have not been discovered any morality waves in nature; therefore, any morality drawn from nature is arbitrary.
Second, recall that an evil is not less evil when exercised against an animal or some other man. God assigns man no special exemption in that regard. A man as a biological unit per se has no special status above an animal, other than being (in some ways) smarter (sometimes). Both the man and the animal are mortal. It is God’s Spirit within the man that is special, and is that which comprises the real man. Find me a pig who is jealous of God’s spirit in you, and I will explain God’s decision to it.
There is no interpretation of God’s Word (Jesus) that will allow you to hate another man, despite whether you make your comments a hundred times over. I will refer you again to Matthew 23. White supremecists are using the Bible as toilet paper.
No. I think I made the remark somewhere that a Christian will accept a DNA definition of a human, but that is an inclusive, not an exclusive, definition. God indeed placed His Spirit in man. People. People like Jesus. That does not preclude God from placing His Spirit in some other vessel. I have simply been saying that I see no evidence that He has. I know of no Son of Apes. I have never met an alien. And I have never biologically engineered a critter.
You’ve put your bait into the wrong pool. You are not relieved from your moral obligations no matter whether the object of your treatment hosts God’s Spirit or not. Therefore, all this musing about building sentient creatures or Dolittling with animals has no bearing on your own moral obligations.
You know whether its moral if you do it. Not I. Not your brain. You. The real you. Not your body. Not your atoms. Your Spirit. So does God. You and God are one and the same. Your brain’s consciousness closes your view-port to a narrow focus, a reference frame that cannot know any other, but when your shackles are removed, you will see fully, just as He does.
Responding to Libertarian:
I suppose I was confused because you said “The reasoning being proposed here (the materialist’s reasoning) is the same as the reasoning of the white supremacist”, and I assumed that you didn’t like white supremacists. What was I supposed to infer from the comparison?
Yes, but the definition of evil is different. Or perhaps I should clarify this to make sure I know your position. I am assuming that you think it’s OK to kill an animal for food, but not to kill a human for food (as one example.)
I’m not even going into the whole debate as to whether or not there is only one possible interpretation of the bible. I’ll just throw in a quote from a white supremacist’s website: “We don’t hate people of other races, we just want them to remain separate.” There it is, racial ideology without hatred.
And it does not state that god necessarily has placed his spirit in other vessels. So the strongest statement one could make would be “I don’t know if it is possible”, not the strong negative that you have used.
Refer to my question above as to whether or not one can kill an animal for food, vs. a human. Assuming that the former is OK, and the latter is not, you might say that the moral obligation is identical and the permissible actions fit the same morality, but I sure don’t see it.
I will accept your correction about who knows if my action is moral. If I refuse to save the being in danger, or deny a helping hand, no one can judge me except myself and god. In any case, Libertarian or Gaudere cannot either praise or condemn me. In a perfect society, I would not be punished for whatever action I take (or choose not to take.) Have I finally got it right?
Arnold
I have to make a quick trip to Saturn. I’ll be back as soon as I can.
We CAN know one another’s deepest motivations and experiences. The process may be difficult, but it is not impossible to accomplish.
Something I just realized:
God can do the impossible; human CEOs can’t. God can fix a problem without getting anyone killed; CEO’s can’t always fix their business’s financial picture without firing some employees. (Or so they say…)
Interesting how so many people who think God can work miracles always find excuses for those times when He could have worked a miracle, but didn’t. I think it’s because they have realized there truly are holes in their theology and offer excuses and explanations to plug them up.