Mourdock: 2+2=5

[Farm Boy]

Eh - forget it.

 

[LightSpectra]

I think if God was capricious I would have no duty to love him whatsoever. But I don't believe that that alleviates a duty to my fellow persons.

God loves your fellow persons more than you or I ever will. And I don't think you, I, or them could possibly be happy if we do not fulfill the reason why we exist, our natural good, which is to love God more than ourselves. And since God is love, to love is to commune with God and become like Him.

Perhaps you should do a better job representing your position. :/

What should I respond to? Everything in that trainwreck of a post was the same argument: "Since you believe in [stated premise X], you surely must also believe in [absurd premise Y which I do not believe and does not follow from X]..." That's where that hilarious chromosome stuff came from.

If you tolerate something, you condone it.

Tolerate: Allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference.

Condone: Accept and allow (behavior that is considered morally wrong or offensive) to continue.

Presumably if God did not condone rape, he would not allow it.

Do you condone serial murderers by coexisting in a society where they exist? Perhaps you would advocate security cameras in every room of every building, satellite surveillance, secret police agents on-hand every square mile. If you don't advocate stripping every human being of every afforded privacy and liberty, then you're just allowing them to become serial murderers. You're condoning them.

Do you see my point?

As you just said, evil is entirely his fault, as without him granting us free will there would be no evil. There's no way he couldn't know about this, either, as you also just said. He made us with the perfect awareness that we would be cruel to each other.

See below.

I accept the concept of unconditional love but I do not approve when it's used to justify things that are clearly in violation of someone's rights. A parent can love his/her child unconditionally but it doesn't justify his/her approval of child's actions if those are violating someone else's rights.

God does not approve of sin. "Hate the sin, love the sinner" was a formulation by St. Augustine that captures how unconditional love can exist at all.

Surely unconditional love has a starting point but if unconditional love is what's the only requirement for a person for one's life being beneficial to the world means that if one is a true believer in one's deathbed one's life has been beneficial. Or should we weight one's action before & after the conversion to true believer to measure whether one's life was beneficial or not ? In this case I would assume that previous murders are worse than any good one could do on a limited time in a death row so one's life wasn't good for the world.

Baptism/conversion to to a life of Christ, if genuine and honest, is a rebirth. The old life has died and the new life has begun. So a converted murderer on death row is now almost like a totally different person to consider in this light.

Even worse is if the murderer was a true believer while committing the killings. I can't accept that one's influence in the world was good regardless of what he or she may believe or love unconditionally.

I agree with this.

So, again, how do we know that God didn't intend an abortion to happen, for example?

There is an equivocation issue here. I'm trying my best to explain how we can talk about God's will. In the antecedent sense, everything that happens in the universe is God's will, since He created a universe which he knew it all would occur. In the moral sense, God freely and non-imposingly asks human beings to act rightly, and thus we can say he desires against people doing evil, even if them doing evil is his antecedent will.

I'm under no illusion that most people are going to read that and make some remark about God being schizophrenic. The problem is this is an immensely complex issue and I don't particularly have all day to write paragraphs about it. So I ask you not to fault the belief itself and instead fault me for my failings as a poster.

In the Summa Theologiae I-I, Q. 19, art. 6, St. Thomas Aquinas addresses the question, "Whether the will of God is always fulfilled?" His answer is yes.

The first objection asks, "It seems that the will of God is not always fulfilled. For the Apostle says (1 Timothy 2:4): 'God will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth.' But this does not happen. Therefore the will of God is not always fulfilled." In other words: the New Testament says that God wants all men to be saved, but Hell exists. So not everything God wills happens.

St. Thomas' reply is divided into three arguments, and the third is this: "according to Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii, 29), they are understood of the antecedent will of God; not of the consequent will. This distinction must not be taken as applying to the divine will itself, in which there is nothing antecedent nor consequent, but to the things willed.

To understand this we must consider that everything, in so far as it is good, is willed by God. A thing taken in its primary sense, and absolutely considered, may be good or evil, and yet when some additional circumstances are taken into account, by a consequent consideration may be changed into the contrary. Thus that a man should live is good; and that a man should be killed is evil, absolutely considered. But if in a particular case we add that a man is a murderer or dangerous to society, to kill him is a good; that he live is an evil. Hence it may be said of a just judge, that antecedently he wills all men to live; but consequently wills the murderer to be hanged. In the same way God antecedently wills all men to be saved, but consequently wills some to be damned, as His justice exacts. Nor do we will simply, what we will antecedently, but rather we will it in a qualified manner; for the will is directed to things as they are in themselves, and in themselves they exist under particular qualifications. Hence we will a thing simply inasmuch as we will it when all particular circumstances are considered; and this is what is meant by willing consequently. Thus it may be said that a just judge wills simply the hanging of a murderer, but in a qualified manner he would will him to live, to wit, inasmuch as he is a man. Such a qualified will may be called a willingness rather than an absolute will. Thus it is clear that whatever God simply wills takes place; although what He wills antecedently may not take place."

I will try my best to clarify any questions you may have about it to the best of my ability but if you want an extremely in-depth analysis, I can do nothing but suggest secondary literature about it.

I don't think that the GOP is trying to have a war against women, rather they're broadly trying to impose religious doctrine on society as a whole.

I'm not entirely clear on why believing a living unborn human being has an inalienable right to life like any other human being is "religious doctrine", since those principles can be derived from purely rational processes.

I'm struggling to make sense of this. When will I need God the most?

And on what grounds am I supposed to have this faith in the first place?

I would really appreciate an answer to these questions

Those questions have far too much breadth for me to answer in the amount of time I have to post. Might I recommend reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church?

1. You cant get pregnant from being raped
2. You cant die from child birth complications

Is it such insanity that people hold this beliefs ?

Both are factually inaccurate, whereas "rape is evil" and "all people have a right to life" are true statements.

Wow, I would have never thought to see any Christian admit to the double standard of his religion so explicitly.

How is that a double standard?

There was still a lack of consent

How is "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word" not consent?

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

If you're referring to the Decalogue, then it falls under "coveting thy neighbor's wife".

So, it's ok to rape you own wife?

 

[LightSpectra]

So, it's ok to rape you own wife?

I already addressed this on page one and two. The Decalogue describes fundamental sins, it does not explicitly list all of them, and not in the order of their seriousness either. Rape and blasphemy are the two sins taken as the most egregious in both Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism, probably also Eastern Orthodoxy.

 

[Borachio]

I'm not absolutely sure but up to mid C20th wasn't it impossible to rape your own wife, under UK law? Her being your wife and therefore something you could virtually do as you liked with. Apart from murder, that is.

Just a bit of an aside remark, from me.

 

[Grendeldef]

I'm not absolutely sure but up to mid C20th wasn't it impossible to rape your own wife, under UK law? Her being your wife and therefore something you could virtually do as you liked with. Apart from murder, that is.

Not just in UK but around the western world. In Finland rape in marriage wasn't technically a crime until 1994, huah
A marriage was taken as a religious concept and therefore beyond normal jurisdiction. One of those weird things were men's rights supersedes those of women's - the right to relieve oneself from a boner in a way that it doesn't effect one's eye-sight.

G

 

[Crezth]

God loves your fellow persons more than you or I ever will. And I don't think you, I, or them could possibly be happy if we do not fulfill the reason why we exist, our natural good, which is to love God more than ourselves. And since God is love, to love is to commune with God and become like Him.

I don't care how much God "loves" who or what. I don't need God to care about my fellow persons.

What should I respond to? Everything in that trainwreck of a post was the same argument: "Since you believe in [stated premise X], you surely must also believe in [absurd premise Y which I do not believe and does not follow from X]..." That's where that hilarious chromosome stuff came from.

If you don't feel comfortable discussing biology, then perhaps you should stop talking out of your ass about when "life" begins.

Do you condone serial murderers by coexisting in a society where they exist? Perhaps you would advocate security cameras in every room of every building, satellite surveillance, secret police agents on-hand every square mile. If you don't advocate stripping every human being of every afforded privacy and liberty, then you're just allowing them to become serial murderers. You're condoning them.

Do you see my point?

This is a rather bizarre point because, in fact, we don't condone serial murderers, and where and when we find them we put them away.

It's a little different when talking about God, however, because God is entirely to blame for serial murderers to begin with. It is no fault of mine if my neighbor becomes a serial murderer, and if he does, society takes it upon itself to sequester him away for its own good.

We have free will because we have no choice - an odd but apt way of phrasing it, I think - but we respect the natural independence and agency in other sentient beings as a matter of sympathy. What we do with that free will is a matter of our own lookout, and in fact there's nothing intrinsically good or bad about free will. It can be used for all manners of wicked or noble purposes, and it consistently is. So the question should be why did God bother creating free will at all? It seems to me that if he wanted humanity to be good, he could have made them good with no fuss about it. Instead, he had to give them the capacity to be evil. As one who styles himself a universal policeman it seems as if he was merely giving himself a job by doing so, like planting a gun on a suspect. In other words, without God there would be no evil, so we should have nobody to blame but him for that evil.

This is different, I should reiterate, from society apparently "condoning" evil because it does not attempt to stop it through the destruction of the liberty of its constituents, because society did not create the paradigm within which that evil might be exercised - rather, it grows out of this emergent behavior. And we respect free will because we have it, and there's nothing we can do about it, and we sympathize with each other and through mutual understanding made possible by language, rationality, and a common ancestry we realize that, as a whole, we're happy having our free will to ourselves and would rather not rob anyone of it if we can help it.

God does not approve of sin.

Why not?

"Hate the sin, love the sinner" was a formulation by St. Augustine that captures how unconditional love can exist at all.

Perhaps, among the deluded and the sycophants. We shouldn't have any obligation to love our enemies, not simply because it is against our self-interest, but because it is against the interest of those we live and work with and depend upon. I should not love, for instance, someone who is trying to blow up my neighborhood. He is an enemy and should be regarded as such - to shirk this responsibility is to shirk any measure of devotion to those who have earned it, notably by not trying to blow up my neighborhood. By the same token, I don't feel obligated to love a God who is just as likely to ask me to sacrifice my firstborn as he is to make my favorite team win the playoffs.

 

[peter grimes]

What should I respond to? Everything in that trainwreck of a post was the same argument: "Since you believe in [stated premise X], you surely must also believe in [absurd premise Y which I do not believe and does not follow from X]..." That's where that hilarious chromosome stuff came from.

Hmm, not sure if I'm glad you found it funny - at least you read it, even if you choose to ignore my questions.

The six or seven paragraphs of irrelevant strawmen of my position was highly amusing.

I don't see any strawmen - could you please point them out? I certainly didn't intend to do that, as I'm confident in the strength of my points without needing to resort to the techniques of creationists.

In fact, I stand by my questions to you. In interest of further discussion, I'll post them here:
1. how do you view the rapes where there is no conception?
2. What on earth is god up to in those cases?
3. either pregnancy is a natural process without godly intervention, or your god messes around with it. How can we tell the difference?
4. when does that interference happen?
5. When does your god decide that a fertilized egg is a new person?
6. Is it before or after implantation?
7. How can we tell the difference?
8. Nearly half of the eggs that are fertilized fail to implant - is this a failure of nature, or a failure of your god to steer the outcome?
9. How can you tell the difference between the two?
10. If pregnancy is a process of nature, then what does your god have to do with it?
11. Does he [redacted for humor] intervene in the natural world?
12. What evidence is there that this happens?
13. In which rapes does he intervene to produce a child?
14. Is he culture-blind?
15. do you believe (contrary to evidence) that your god denies children to perfectly capable, wealthy, well-intentioned, totally bible-abiding christian couples?

There's two ways to describe God's will: antecedent and moral. In the antecedent sense, anything that God wills will happen, since He is omnipotent; this is unavoidable. This includes evil. It is inconceivable that God did not know every single thing that would happen in the course of the universe the moment He created it. In the moral sense, God tolerates evil born from corrupted free will, but yet still desires that His subjects act rightly, both out of love for Him and love for each other.

Since nobody else brought it up... I do not think that word means what you think it means.

But the implication is that your god is just fine with Rape, since he chooses not to intervene even when he knows one is about to happen. Free will and all, right?

 

[civver_764]

Those questions have far too much breadth for me to answer in the amount of time I have to post. Might I recommend reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church?

I know what the Catholic Church's position is, I just want a reason to accept that position myself without resorting to circular logic. Before you use Christian doctrine to make a point you have to validate that doctrine.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

I already addressed this on page one and two. The Decalogue describes fundamental sins, it does not explicitly list all of them, and not in the order of their seriousness either. Rape and blasphemy are the two sins taken as the most egregious in both Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism, probably also Eastern Orthodoxy.

Yeah, I was just being boorish.

One only has to read Leviticus to understand that the Bible in no way is any consistent guide to go by with regard to morality. One picks and chooses the parts one already likes based on morality completely unrelated to the Bible and then points that out as a base of morality. It's a well-know transparent mechanism which only the mirror-blind cannot see.

 

[Farm Boy]

Still a bit boorish.

 

[GhostWriter16]

There was still a lack of consent

Wait, so consenting is a lack of consent?

Ignoring the idiocy of A: Acting like God actually slept with Mary and B: That God actually has to let anyone consent to anymore than a potter has to get the clay's consent to mold it...

She actually did outright consent to carrying Jesus in her womb. She actually did, openly, freely, consent.

As such, you are simply acting dumb.

 

[Crezth]

B: That God actually has to let anyone consent to anymore than a potter has to get the clay's consent to mold it...

Clay doesn't have feelings.

 

[Farm Boy]

I has the feels!

 

[Angst]

I think you are operating under the faulty premise that the loudest members of a group are somehow a representative sample of the group as a whole. I don't think that of the Democrats despite the number of loudmouth crazies they have.

What loudmouth crazies?

 

[Farm Boy]

The Reverend Jesse Jackson is balls to the walls stupid with some regularity. Though I may actually agree with how he got arrested yesterday, I'll have to look it up.

 

[LightSpectra]

I don't care how much God "loves" who or what. I don't need God to care about my fellow persons.

God is love. If you love your fellow persons you're doing God's work and God is acting in you. Recognizing the root and source of it amplifies the effect.

If you don't feel comfortable discussing biology, then perhaps you should stop talking out of your ass about when "life" begins.

I'm happy to discuss biology, but I do not see fit to respond to arguments which assume premises for my argument that I don't actually hold.

This is a rather bizarre point because, in fact, we don't condone serial murderers, and where and when we find them we put them away.

It's a little different when talking about God, however, because God is entirely to blame for serial murderers to begin with. It is no fault of mine if my neighbor becomes a serial murderer, and if he does, society takes it upon itself to sequester him away for its own good.

We have free will because we have no choice - an odd but apt way of phrasing it, I think - but we respect the natural independence and agency in other sentient beings as a matter of sympathy. What we do with that free will is a matter of our own lookout, and in fact there's nothing intrinsically good or bad about free will. It can be used for all manners of wicked or noble purposes, and it consistently is. So the question should be why did God bother creating free will at all? It seems to me that if he wanted humanity to be good, he could have made them good with no fuss about it. Instead, he had to give them the capacity to be evil. As one who styles himself a universal policeman it seems as if he was merely giving himself a job by doing so, like planting a gun on a suspect. In other words, without God there would be no evil, so we should have nobody to blame but him for that evil.

This is different, I should reiterate, from society apparently "condoning" evil because it does not attempt to stop it through the destruction of the liberty of its constituents, because society did not create the paradigm within which that evil might be exercised - rather, it grows out of this emergent behavior. And we respect free will because we have it, and there's nothing we can do about it, and we sympathize with each other and through mutual understanding made possible by language, rationality, and a common ancestry we realize that, as a whole, we're happy having our free will to ourselves and would rather not rob anyone of it if we can help it.

"As a whole, we're happy having our free will to ourselves and would rather not rob anyone of it if we can help it" is a mantra that lets rapists run free and do as they will prior to being caught with evidence pointing to their crimes.

I don't actually believe the above paragraph. I doubt you do either. According to the standards you are holding God to, unless you do every possible thing to prevent rape (stripping others of their liberty and privacy to the fullest extent of your powers, and advocating a society built upon such), then you are condoning it because you could be doing more to stop it.

You say that evil is God's fault because He created the free will from which evil is predicated upon, so the indirect causation is ultimately his fault. Might as well say that the inventor of gunpowder is the cause of all gun-based murders and wars in history since they couldn't exist without gunpowder. It fails to recognize what the actual cause is.

Why not?

All sin is contradiction of unconditional love. Why God permits sin is speculative: perhaps we have linear imperfect existences so that we may sin and contrast its value with God.

Perhaps, among the deluded and the sycophants. We shouldn't have any obligation to love our enemies, not simply because it is against our self-interest, but because it is against the interest of those we live and work with and depend upon. I should not love, for instance, someone who is trying to blow up my neighborhood. He is an enemy and should be regarded as such - to shirk this responsibility is to shirk any measure of devotion to those who have earned it, notably by not trying to blow up my neighborhood. By the same token, I don't feel obligated to love a God who is just as likely to ask me to sacrifice my firstborn as he is to make my favorite team win the playoffs.

You can love somebody that's trying to blow up your neighborhood. That doesn't mean you're letting him blow up the neighborhood. If you really loved him, you would do everything you can to stop him, both for the sake of his neighbors that he ideally should be loving, and to spare his own conscience from the future regret of having murdered so many people.

You misunderstand what love is. It's not a pleasant feeling or state of mind. It's willing the good of others. If I love my enemy, then I wish for him to be saved by God and live a good life of serving his neighbor that brings him happiness.

I don't see any strawmen - could you please point them out? I certainly didn't intend to do that, as I'm confident in the strength of my points without needing to resort to the techniques of creationists.

In fact, I stand by my questions to you. In interest of further discussion, I'll post them here:
1. how do you view the rapes where there is no conception?
2. What on earth is god up to in those cases?
3. either pregnancy is a natural process without godly intervention, or your god messes around with it. How can we tell the difference?
4. when does that interference happen?
5. When does your god decide that a fertilized egg is a new person?
6. Is it before or after implantation?
7. How can we tell the difference?
8. Nearly half of the eggs that are fertilized fail to implant - is this a failure of nature, or a failure of your god to steer the outcome?
9. How can you tell the difference between the two?
10. If pregnancy is a process of nature, then what does your god have to do with it?
11. Does he [redacted for humor] intervene in the natural world?
12. What evidence is there that this happens?
13. In which rapes does he intervene to produce a child?
14. Is he culture-blind?
15. do you believe (contrary to evidence) that your god denies children to perfectly capable, wealthy, well-intentioned, totally bible-abiding christian couples?

1. It is evil. Rape with conception is also evil.
2. Any answer I give is speculative. I don't believe in a God that rules in favor of "the greater good" so I will not say that any rape is "for the best." That being said, as God is all-powerful, I do believe He can derive some good from any evil no matter its grievousness, even if the good is dwarfed by the monstrosity of the evil.
3 & 4. In the antecedent sense, anything that happens was known by God when he created the universe, and events are merely "unfolding" of a divine foreknowledge. So, does God "interfere" in a pregnancy? Yes.
5-7. At fertilization, because fertilization is the first step in the development of a human being.
8-11. Dividing the two is erroneous. "Nature" is nothing but everything God has created, and it operates according to how God has created it.
12. Divine miracles are one such proof. Philosophically there are also many ways of determining that existence at all is impossible without God's existence.
13. What does "intervention" mean to you?
14. Depends on what you mean by that.
15. Denial is not the right word. It presumes that people have a right to children and can demand it from God.

But the implication is that your god is just fine with Rape, since he chooses not to intervene even when he knows one is about to happen. Free will and all, right?

I've already talked about this. It is possible to say, in different senses, that God wills everything that happens in the universe, and that God also wills the betterment of all people in them acting rightly. Evils like rape do not please God, then, so the only word I can use to describe God's attitude towards it is that he "tolerates" it.

I know what the Catholic Church's position is, I just want a reason to accept that position myself without resorting to circular logic. Before you use Christian doctrine to make a point you have to validate that doctrine.

This takes a lifetime for some people. I am woefully incapable of doing so in a few paragraphs on a message board.

Yeah, I was just being boorish.

One only has to read Leviticus to understand that the Bible in no way is any consistent guide to go by with regard to morality. One picks and chooses the parts one already likes based on morality completely unrelated to the Bible and then points that out as a base of morality. It's a well-know transparent mechanism which only the mirror-blind cannot see.

That's because, contrary to what Protestants believe, the Bible is not a self-interpreting document where all of its meanings can be derived from a strictly literal reading. The reason modern Christians do not follow Leviticus, for example, is because most of it is the code of Mosaic law, which the early apostles of Christianity (as described in the Book of Acts) decreed was not necessary to follow in order to be a Christian (this is what the circumcision debate was about). It's not "pick and choose". There's very good reasons for all of it, if you would investigate.

 

[JollyRoger]

You mean good excuses to pick and choose, right?

 

[LightSpectra]

You mean good excuses to pick and choose, right?

Nope. Nothing is "picked and chosen". It's actually more arbitrary to read every word in the Bible solely in the literal sense, since every part of the Bible was written in a specific writing style and historical framework.

Assuredly nobody thinks it's arbitrary or inconsistent to use the Federalist Papers as an aid to interpret the Constitution. But when non-fundamentalist Christians do it, they're being cafeteria Biblists; why's that?

 

[GhostWriter16]

Nope. Nothing is "picked and chosen". It's actually more arbitrary to read every word in the Bible solely in the literal sense, since every part of the Bible was written in a specific writing style and historical framework.

Assuredly nobody thinks it's arbitrary or inconsistent to use the Federalist Papers as an aid to interpret the Constitution. But when non-fundamentalist Christians do it, they're being cafeteria Biblists; why's that?

I had a conversation with another Catholic on CFC about Catholic interpretations of the Bible and while it may seem that interpreting the Bible oneself is unsatisfactory (I'd agree with you, the Holy Spirit is supposed to interpret it for us), the Catholic interpretations have at times seemed to me to ignore plain meaning and common sense interpretations both of the text itself AND if the earliest patristic writings.

I'm not arguing that we don't do the same thing, but I never claimed my interpretation is infallible. If the Catholic interpretation is infallible according to itself than if it makes even one error the entire thing is false.

I'd be willing to discuss it again if you have the time.