Good/Evil

[Earthwalker]

so true.
My Mom is a publishing hopeful. Her work seems more Donaldson 'style' than Tolkien, which of course she would argue with me about...writers are sooooo wierd.

Anyway, during the final storyboard process...years ago now..., as we sat in her office late nights, and discussed characters, atmosphere, etc.
Often my interpretations of the 'stuff' these characters were made of, the nuances of events and happenings that seemed inexorably tied to real-life events, to her philosophy, to her way which I know so well...were totally wrong.

Maybe it's because a good writer can make you think not only outside of ourselves, but inside of ourselves as well?
Maybe good readers can't help but interpret?
Either way it's true we must trust the author on their meanings of what they wrote.
Even though they, the writers, may/or may not have changed significantly since the time of writing a specific story. (20 years since inception for my Mom, and that is likely true for many authors)
Only they know what undertones, spiritual philosophy, influences, what message they were conveying at the time.

[Fist and Faith]

Seems like a good place for this. Stonewielder just came in the mail the other day:

"True pure evil, Assessor, is waste. It is the blunting of potential, the cutting off of a person's or a people's promise, or options, for development. It is, emblematically, the death of a child."

Pretty good. I've been defining evil as forcing your will onto another. Which amounts to the same thing. They would certainly develop in a different way if allowed to follow their own will.

[rusmeister]

Seems like a good place for this. Stonewielder just came in the mail the other day:

"True pure evil, Assessor, is waste. It is the blunting of potential, the cutting off of a person's or a people's promise, or options, for development. It is, emblematically, the death of a child."

Pretty good. I've been defining evil as forcing your will onto another. Which amounts to the same thing. They would certainly develop in a different way if allowed to follow their own will.

What about evil done to oneself?
Surely one can damage one's own body and soul - the one by physical damage, like cutting oneself on purpose, and spiritually, for example, by immersing oneself in pedophilia materials and exciting that kind of wicked lust. (If we consider that thoughts do tend to lead to deeds if we encourage them enough, then it can be seen how this kind of evil to oneself can grow into evil towards others (although other forms of evil also do this, if less obviously.)
This fits with Stonewielder's quote, but leaves out the motivator (making it sound like no one with any sense would desire to do evil) - that there is a dark sweetness to evil that we gradually cease to perceive as dark as we indulge it. Thus a people's moral perception can shift without the actual moral law shifting.

[Fist and Faith]

Well, I didn't mean for that to sound like I had the complete, perfect definition of evil. I'm sure there's plenty of aspects to be explored.

I don't believe there's a soul, so I don't believe we can damage it. But sure, we can damage our own body. Of course, I'm sure we'd disagree over when that's evil. Piercings? Tattoos? The giraffe women? Those people who put the huge discs in their lips? I worked with a guy who had branded his fraternity symbol on himself several times. Which of those are evil? Heck, I don't even think hacking off your own hand is evil. Tragic. Stupid. Dangerous. Possibly the result of mental illness. But I think my own body is my own business.

As for pedophilia, no, it is not a "dark sweetness." The thought that it is is disgusting, and the thought that you could gradually cease to perceive it as dark is worse. I could not immerse myself in it, because it is repulsive; in what I assume is the literal sense - it repels me. There is no lust in it, wicked or otherwise. It is as evil an act as any. And it fits into my definition perfectly. Forcing your will on, and causing incalculable damage, to the most glorious thing in the world - children. There's no trend toward pedophilia in society. There's no loosening of this moral perception. There has always been a percentage of people who liked it, and there always will be. But they are not the result of someone like me starting to look at pedophilia materials just for the heck of it, and becoming attracted to it. They start out with the desire for it, and look at the materials first. And these people do not spread their morality to the rest of us.

[rusmeister]

Well, I didn't mean for that to sound like I had the complete, perfect definition of evil. I'm sure there's plenty of aspects to be explored.

I don't believe there's a soul, so I don't believe we can damage it. But sure, we can damage our own body. Of course, I'm sure we'd disagree over when that's evil. Piercings? Tattoos? The giraffe women? Those people who put the huge discs in their lips? I worked with a guy who had branded his fraternity symbol on himself several times. Which of those are evil? Heck, I don't even think hacking off your own hand is evil. Tragic. Stupid. Dangerous. Possibly the result of mental illness. But I think my own body is my own business.

As for pedophilia, no, it is not a "dark sweetness." The thought that it is is disgusting, and the thought that you could gradually cease to perceive it as dark is worse. I could not immerse myself in it, because it is repulsive; in what I assume is the literal sense - it repels me. There is no lust in it, wicked or otherwise. It is as evil an act as any. And it fits into my definition perfectly. Forcing your will on, and causing incalculable damage, to the most glorious thing in the world - children. There's no trend toward pedophilia in society. There's no loosening of this moral perception. There has always been a percentage of people who liked it, and there always will be. But they are not the result of someone like me starting to look at pedophilia materials just for the heck of it, and becoming attracted to it. They start out with the desire for it, and look at the materials first. And these people do not spread their morality to the rest of us.

I bring up pedophilia precisely because, for now, in our society, at the moment, it IS disgusting. Just as homosexual activity was a century or so ago. (Collectively) our views on homosexuality have changed. Why not pedophilia? The reasons you offer are not so different from reasons offered a century ago against homosexuality. If we do not have iron-clad morality, there is no reason why we may not shift on any moral position - what society allows or approves of. I think, as a literally true event or as an allegory, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah has great truth - that a society really can degrade to a point that we cannot imagine ourselves degrading to - that there IS such a thing as moral degradation and that it can even happen to us.

To the people who engage in it, obviously there IS a dark attraction - an attraction that we would characterize as dark, or bent.

As to forcing one's will, I was speaking of starting by simply fantasizing about it - not of actually committing it directly on children. When one has indulged long enough, obtaining materials and images is the next step. And so on. Until it finally DOES become the extension of one's will directly onto others.

I'm not going to argue or debate. I'm really tired of debating, and its end run of ad hominem. But it seemed like that was something I could put out there to think about without fighting or arguing. I said that I'm not slamming doors.

[Fist and Faith]

But a person does not abhor pedophilia, then fantasize about it, then view materials, and, eventually, change their moral perception of it. Those who are attracted to it in the first place are the ones who fantasize about it, and, if they were fighting it in the first place, eventually, come to embrace the idea. Again, no change in moral perception.

The assertion that society could change its views on pedophilia is speculation. The thought that society has changed its views on some things is not evidence that it will, or even can, change its views on all things. And it's entirely possible that the views that have changed, like on homosexuality, are good changes. A correction of a wrong that had no legitimate grounding. It is hoped that groundless prejudices will, eventually, be seen for what they are, and be done away with. A change in a society's view on something is not necessarily degradation.

[Cambo]

Why not pedophilia? The reasons you offer are not so different from reasons offered a century ago against homosexuality.

Do you mean the reasons people engage in it, or the reasons to define it as evil?

If the former, the reasons are exactly the same. There exists a desire, and eventually they choose to act on it.

If the latter, the reasons are completely different. Fist's conception of evil involves enforcing will/inflicting harm upon others. This has nothing to do with homosexuality. Homosexuals may also be rapists or paedophiles. But most are not, and there is nothing inherent in homosexuality that involves forcing one's will upon others.

Either way, your willingness to conflate the two disturbs me.

[Avatar]

Evil comes of treating other people as objects. Harming others unnecessarily is wrong. Harming yourself isn't evil, it's just stupid.

As for Rus' argument, we might consider that as times have changed, paedophilia and "statutory" rape has become perceived as a greater evil than once it was.

Link

An age of consent statute first appeared in secular law in 1275 in England as part of the rape law. The statute, Westminster 1, made it a misdemeanor to "ravish" a "maiden within age," whether with or without her consent. The phrase "within age" was interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was 12 years of age...


A 1576 law making it a felony to "unlawfully and carnally know and abuse any woman child under the age of 10 years" was generally interpreted as creating more severe punishments when girls were under 10 years old while retaining the lesser punishment for acts with 10- and 11-year-old girls...

In 1875, England raised the age to 13 years; an act of sexual intercourse with a girl younger than 13 was a felony. In the U.S., each state determined its own criminal law and age of consent ranged from 10 to 12 years of age. U.S. laws did not change in the wake of England's shift. Nor did Anglo-American law apply to boys.

--A

[rusmeister]

But a person does not abhor pedophilia, then fantasize about it, then view materials, and, eventually, change their moral perception of it. Those who are attracted to it in the first place are the ones who fantasize about it, and, if they were fighting it in the first place, eventually, come to embrace the idea. Again, no change in moral perception.

The assertion that society could change its views on pedophilia is speculation. The thought that society has changed its views on some things is not evidence that it will, or even can, change its views on all things. And it's entirely possible that the views that have changed, like on homosexuality, are good changes. A correction of a wrong that had no legitimate grounding. It is hoped that groundless prejudices will, eventually, be seen for what they are, and be done away with. A change in a society's view on something is not necessarily degradation.

And it's entirely possible that the views that have changed, like on homosexuality, are bad changes. An imposition of a wrong that has no legitimate grounding. It is hoped that groundless prejudices will, eventually, be seen for what they are, and be done away with.

A change in a society's view on something is not necessarily degradation.

Of course not. But you don't seem to acknowledge the fact that degradation is even possible for our society. The error that most ought to be combated is the one that suggests this - it is the error that we in our time are most likely to fall into. It's part of the whole 'excelsior!' myth of evolutionism - that mankind inevitably improves. The law of entropy suggests that improvement is far less likely than degradation.

Hardened criminals are not born such. Pedophiles (a terrible euphemism!) do not appear out of thin air. They are born as helpless little babies, and only very gradually become what they later are. A very slow, step-by-step process.
A child made curious by an image looks - and then looks again. If it is a forbidden fruit they are likely to look again and again until they have become used to the images, and tolerate them as something 'normal' (to them).

I dunno. That's obvious to me. I also have personal experience of this. Denying it to me is therefore useless, and I don't think there's any value to arguing the point. That we can degrade, both individually and collectively, - and indeed, are likely to without rock-solid sacrosanct morality to stand against that degradation - is to me an obvious truth.

[rusmeister]

Why not pedophilia? The reasons you offer are not so different from reasons offered a century ago against homosexuality.

Do you mean the reasons people engage in it, or the reasons to define it as evil?

If the former, the reasons are exactly the same. There exists a desire, and eventually they choose to act on it.

If the latter, the reasons are completely different. Fist's conception of evil involves enforcing will/inflicting harm upon others. This has nothing to do with homosexuality. Homosexuals may also be rapists or paedophiles. But most are not, and there is nothing inherent in homosexuality that involves forcing one's will upon others.

Either way, your willingness to conflate the two disturbs me.

This is a re-write - my wife magically shut down my windows last night.
I was responding to an earlier statement by Fist:

As for pedophilia, no, it is not a "dark sweetness." The thought that it is is disgusting, and the thought that you could gradually cease to perceive it as dark is worse. I could not immerse myself in it, because it is repulsive; in what I assume is the literal sense - it repels me.

People did in fact react to homosexuality the same way 100 years ago. The fact that people did not begin "coming out of the closet" until the 1970's is strong evidence that this is so. Fist's conception of evil is alien to his own ancestors - I'll bet 99% of them.

So your dichotomy doesn't work from the beginning. People of the former Christian culture, be it Protestant (as ours mostly was) Catholic or Orthodox did not measure evil merely by whether it causes visible physical harm to others. They had a thing called common sense, as well as a religion, which BOTH told them that this stuff is evil (and that evil can be done to oneself, and even unknowingly, as they and I would hold is the case here).

The usual justifications of moderns for changing what is morally acceptable are largely irrelevant to the world view of the Christian world up until a few years ago - the arguments in favor do not speak at all to the objections - or the common sense. I say that our ancestors were right and the moderns are wrong, and as they reject faith, above all Christian faith, they grow more and more wrong.

Since you reject the Christian world view, it's useless to debate it. All you can hope to do is understand, and my contention is that most people are unfamiliar with the traditional Christian worldview, to the point that they simply assume their own rightness.

I'm walking a tightrope now of wanting to say things where there ARE responses to modern ideas, yet not wanting to engage in fruitless arguments that end in ad hominem attacks - to offer the one side that almost no one today tries to really examine - what exactly our ancestors believed, so that they built a society that had zero tolerance for certain behaviors, and what the context of that belief was. I feel mostly unwelcome here and don't want to simply go twenty rounds of shouting opinions.

[Fist and Faith]

A change in a society's view on something is not necessarily degradation.

Of course not. But you don't seem to acknowledge the fact that degradation is even possible for our society. The error that most ought to be combated is the one that suggests this - it is the error that we in our time are most likely to fall into. It's part of the whole 'excelsior!' myth of evolutionism - that mankind inevitably improves. The law of entropy suggests that improvement is far less likely than degradation.

The problem isn't that I don't acknowledge the fact that degradation is possible for our society. The problem is that you keep giving examples of where society has not degraded. A greater acceptance of homosexuality - as opposed to treating them badly, thus forcing them to hide themselves away and deny themselves when asked - is not degradation. It is an improvement. (And your goal, to lovingly help them to feel and act as you think they should, is not what was happening for millennia, and is not the situation that has been improved upon.) There isn't any greater acceptance of child pornography or pedophilia today than there was in the past. Indeed, as Av pointed out, laws against it have grown tougher over the centuries.

You need a clearer understanding of this degradation. The Ten Commandments do not begin with:
"There may come a time when certain wrongs come to be practiced. This is a warning so that you will see them when they begin, and put an end to them immediately."
The reason it doesn't start that way is because those things were already happening. Laws are not made before the crimes come into being. 3,000 years ago, there was adultery, murder, stealing, etc etc. Society has not degraded from glory to what it is today. Society has always been what it is today. Some people have always harmed society and individuals, and other people have always tried to stop them. There was never a paradise for you to look back on, and say, "There! That's how we should be. We've fallen so far from that. We've degraded."

Hardened criminals are not born such. Pedophiles (a terrible euphemism!) do not appear out of thin air. They are born as helpless little babies, and only very gradually become what they later are. A very slow, step-by-step process.
A child made curious by an image looks - and then looks again. If it is a forbidden fruit they are likely to look again and again until they have become used to the images, and tolerate them as something 'normal' (to them).

I dunno. That's obvious to me. I also have personal experience of this. Denying it to me is therefore useless, and I don't think there's any value to arguing the point. That we can degrade, both individually and collectively, - and indeed, are likely to without rock-solid sacrosanct morality to stand against that degradation - is to me an obvious truth.

I'll have to take your word for your personal experiences. But my personal experiences are that I cannot look at child porn; look again; look yet again because it is forbidden fruit; and become "used to the images." And the vast majority of humans seem to agree with me.

The child who does that is the one born with a problem. Possibly a mental illness. Possibly a victim of abuse. A normal, healthy person does not. We all have the opportunity, but we do not take it. Anybody with access to the internet can look at child pornography. But we don't. And it's not because, even though we want to, various reasons make us choose not to. It's because we don't want to.

[Avatar]

Laws are not made before the crimes come into being. 3,000 years ago, there was adultery, murder, stealing, etc etc. Society has not degraded from glory to what it is today. Society has always been what it is today. Some people have always harmed society and individuals, and other people have always tried to stop them. There was never a paradise for you to look back on, and say, "There! That's how we should be. We've fallen so far from that. We've degraded."

Agreed. And as I said elsewhere, the trend is to improve things, not make them worse. Thousands of years ago, murder and rape were not necessarily considered as unacceptable as they are today.

--A

[rusmeister]

A change in a society's view on something is not necessarily degradation.

Of course not. But you don't seem to acknowledge the fact that degradation is even possible for our society. The error that most ought to be combated is the one that suggests this - it is the error that we in our time are most likely to fall into. It's part of the whole 'excelsior!' myth of evolutionism - that mankind inevitably improves. The law of entropy suggests that improvement is far less likely than degradation.

The problem isn't that I don't acknowledge the fact that degradation is possible for our society. The problem is that you keep giving examples of where society has not degraded. A greater acceptance of homosexuality - as opposed to treating them badly, thus forcing them to hide themselves away and deny themselves when asked - is not degradation. It is an improvement. (And your goal, to lovingly help them to feel and act as you think they should, is not what was happening for millennia, and is not the situation that has been improved upon.) There isn't any greater acceptance of child pornography or pedophilia today than there was in the past. Indeed, as Av pointed out, laws against it have grown tougher over the centuries.

You need a clearer understanding of this degradation. The Ten Commandments do not begin with:
"There may come a time when certain wrongs come to be practiced. This is a warning so that you will see them when they begin, and put an end to them immediately."
The reason it doesn't start that way is because those things were already happening. Laws are not made before the crimes come into being. 3,000 years ago, there was adultery, murder, stealing, etc etc. Society has not degraded from glory to what it is today. Society has always been what it is today. Some people have always harmed society and individuals, and other people have always tried to stop them. There was never a paradise for you to look back on, and say, "There! That's how we should be. We've fallen so far from that. We've degraded."

(GKC alert!)
I think the basic problem is the one outlined by GKC in "Heretics" www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/heretics/ in the first and last chapters. We do not agree on what is good. If what is improvement to you is degradation to me, then we cannot come together. You keep saying that your worldview can include mine. Your worldview to me is quite nebulous and undefined, and I'm not even interested in arguing it. I can see that regardless of what you believe, and your own ideals, that there is a definite war in progress - a spiritual war, where neither side can tolerate the other. So arguing is useless - neither of us is in a place where we are willing to seriously consider alternatives to our worldview, whatever that might be.

Laws are only made when they are deemed necessary. If the philosophy of a people or nation excludes certain behaviors so that no one (or practically no one) ever commits them, there will be no perceived need for law. Laws growing tougher is only a sign that the moral climate has degraded to a point where they become necessary. The special trouble of law without sanctity - holiness, a rock-solid dogmatic worldview on which they are based - is that they can be changed at any time. I think existing law, which has indeed expanded considerably, is a remnant of the philosophy our nation used to hold - what the vast majority commonly agreed on - that there is continued existence and consequences after death, for example. Once that is abandoned, once there is no rock-solid basis on which to maintain moral principles, then they may be changed at will - as Washington warned.
So Av's point (which is based on a true fact - the expansion of law against pedophilia - is evidence of the weakening of the moral climate and the abandonment of absolutes. (Lucas's cheezy line "Only Siths deal in absolutes!" is an example of how people can become ignorant of the necessity of absolutes on which to base the relatives so that good does NOT ultimately become evil.)

You can make the assertion that we have never degraded. It's an assertion. The Christian assertion is that we degraded suddenly in pre-history (the Fall) and have been degraded (Fallen) ever since. So yes, murder, etc, has always existed in (post-Fall) human history. But we also assert that we did indeed fall from somewhere - from paradise - and your assertion that we did not is merely that, and it sounds pretty dogmatic, confident and certain to me.

We claim that un-Fallen man is something we CAN look back on, and say, "There! That's how we should be. We've fallen so far from that. We've degraded." Only that man failed, and that's why Christ came to us, our world, to be the second Adam, to correct Adam's fault, who said "Let MY will be done", where Christ said "Let THY will be done". And that IS Who we look to to say "There! That's how we should be." Jesus Christ IS the un-Fallen Man.

Hardened criminals are not born such. Pedophiles (a terrible euphemism!) do not appear out of thin air. They are born as helpless little babies, and only very gradually become what they later are. A very slow, step-by-step process.
A child made curious by an image looks - and then looks again. If it is a forbidden fruit they are likely to look again and again until they have become used to the images, and tolerate them as something 'normal' (to them).

I dunno. That's obvious to me. I also have personal experience of this. Denying it to me is therefore useless, and I don't think there's any value to arguing the point. That we can degrade, both individually and collectively, - and indeed, are likely to without rock-solid sacrosanct morality to stand against that degradation - is to me an obvious truth.

I'll have to take your word for your personal experiences. But my personal experiences are that I cannot look at child porn; look again; look yet again because it is forbidden fruit; and become "used to the images." And the vast majority of humans seem to agree with me.

The child who does that is the one born with a problem. Possibly a mental illness. Possibly a victim of abuse. A normal, healthy person does not. We all have the opportunity, but we do not take it. Anybody with access to the internet can look at child pornography. But we don't. And it's not because, even though we want to, various reasons make us choose not to. It's because we don't want to.

Are children tempted to look at a porno mag they found tossed in the woods? Are they tempted to steal a pack of baseball cards from the store? To lie when asked what they have been doing? This is the common human lot. It is not limited to some children "with problems". We all have the problem. And the child who begins to do these things habitually becomes used to them - they cease to shock him, and he graduates to bigger and worse things. It is something that can happen to any of us - only our weak wills and whatever guidance we really accept that prevents (some of) us from going down these paths. The path of the pedophile can be a simple graduation from 'regular' porn to a few chance encounters with more egregious types that he indulges - purely as fantasy, of course. Only it doesn't always stop there. Or more accurately, he doesn't always stop it there.

You didn't go down that path (

Spoiler

and thank God!

), and so, happily, you find pedophilia to be heinous. But you could have. If slow development of events had taken a slightly different turn, and you had made slightly different choices, step by small step, you could have become what you (by sheer chance

Spoiler

or the grace of God

) hate.

Anyway, I think Washington's right and there is no way to maintain national morality - whatever individuals believe - if you exclude the religious principle from public life.

[Fist and Faith]

You can make the assertion that we have never degraded. It's an assertion. The Christian assertion is that we degraded suddenly in pre-history (the Fall) and have been degraded (Fallen) ever since. So yes, murder, etc, has always existed in (post-Fall) human history. But we also assert that we did indeed fall from somewhere - from paradise - and your assertion that we did not is merely that, and it sounds pretty dogmatic, confident and certain to me.

We claim that un-Fallen man is something we CAN look back on, and say, "There! That's how we should be. We've fallen so far from that. We've degraded." Only that man failed, and that's why Christ came to us, our world, to be the second Adam, to correct Adam's fault, who said "Let MY will be done", where Christ said "Let THY will be done". And that IS Who we look to to say "There! That's how we should be." Jesus Christ IS the un-Fallen Man.

Obviously, I'm not going to go along with saying we HAVE degraded from what the pre-Fall people were. It's fine to have an ideal way of life in mind, and try to live up to it. I'll go along with that. (Although, obviously, we'll disagree with what that ideal way of life is. No knowledge of good and evil?? Not an ideal way of life, imo.)

It's another to say we HAVE degraded. You can think we have degraded. But, for me, there needs to be something visible (at least historically visible) that can become degraded. And, taking society's attitude toward homosexuality as an example, the only visible behavior I'm aware of is certainly worse than the growing acceptance of homosexuality that we see today. Homosexuals have been killed, even still, which seems to have been sanctioned by the Bible. They've been beaten, even on a regular bases. They've been cast out by their families. They hid themselves from everyone they knew and loved in order to avoid these fates. They learned to be afraid and ashamed of themselves. What is it like to live an entire life ashamed of yourself?

Society's acceptance of homosexuality is not a degradation of that situation.

And even you can't claim that the pre-Fall attitude toward homosexuality was better than the growing acceptance we have today. And that's because there wasn't any homosexuality before the Fall. I assume? So as soon as homosexuality came into being, it was reviled, and punished. YOUR attitude - wanting to lovingly help them be the people God wants them to be - is surely an improvement over what we've had since the Fall, but it is not what society ever saw, and is not what we have degraded from.

[Avatar]

Yep, we've improved, not degraded.

--A

[rusmeister]

You can make the assertion that we have never degraded. It's an assertion. The Christian assertion is that we degraded suddenly in pre-history (the Fall) and have been degraded (Fallen) ever since. So yes, murder, etc, has always existed in (post-Fall) human history. But we also assert that we did indeed fall from somewhere - from paradise - and your assertion that we did not is merely that, and it sounds pretty dogmatic, confident and certain to me.

We claim that un-Fallen man is something we CAN look back on, and say, "There! That's how we should be. We've fallen so far from that. We've degraded." Only that man failed, and that's why Christ came to us, our world, to be the second Adam, to correct Adam's fault, who said "Let MY will be done", where Christ said "Let THY will be done". And that IS Who we look to to say "There! That's how we should be." Jesus Christ IS the un-Fallen Man.

Obviously, I'm not going to go along with saying we HAVE degraded from what the pre-Fall people were. It's fine to have an ideal way of life in mind, and try to live up to it. I'll go along with that. (Although, obviously, we'll disagree with what that ideal way of life is. No knowledge of good and evil?? Not an ideal way of life, imo.)

It's another to say we HAVE degraded. You can think we have degraded. But, for me, there needs to be something visible (at least historically visible) that can become degraded. And, taking society's attitude toward homosexuality as an example, the only visible behavior I'm aware of is certainly worse than the growing acceptance of homosexuality that we see today. Homosexuals have been killed, even still, which seems to have been sanctioned by the Bible. They've been beaten, even on a regular bases. They've been cast out by their families. They hid themselves from everyone they knew and loved in order to avoid these fates. They learned to be afraid and ashamed of themselves. What is it like to live an entire life ashamed of yourself?

Society's acceptance of homosexuality is not a degradation of that situation.

And even you can't claim that the pre-Fall attitude toward homosexuality was better than the growing acceptance we have today. And that's because there wasn't any homosexuality before the Fall. I assume? So as soon as homosexuality came into being, it was reviled, and punished. YOUR attitude - wanting to lovingly help them be the people God wants them to be - is surely an improvement over what we've had since the Fall, but it is not what society ever saw, and is not what we have degraded from.

Of course I can make claims about time before the Fall, Fist. Since man wasn't Fallen, there was no homosexual desire. Amazingly simple. We have come to desire many wrong things after the Fall. The wrongest thing is to justify the wrong things and make them "right".

I would translate "knowledge of good and evil" into your language as simply "knowledge of evil".

Again, you can speak about people who suffer from homosexuality as you do. I put the desire right alongside other ones that none of us approve of and that we DO agree that people ought to be ashamed of practicing (I'll emphasize "practicing"). From that standpoint it is not improvement to increasingly encourage its practice. So the whole trouble comes back to the fact that we do not agree on what is right, and your progress is my regress and vice-versa regarding these issues.

[Avatar]

Of course I can make claims about time before the Fall, Fist. Since man wasn't Fallen, there was no homosexual desire. Amazingly simple. We have come to desire many wrong things after the Fall.

Really? How do you know? And what "fall" are we talking about? The biblical story of man's expulsion from "Eden?"

--A

[Cambo]

Faith based claims do tend to be "amazingly simple." I've experienced this myself. For example, take my belief that we are all part of a Greater Self, the experience of isolation from this Self being due to our indivdual egos. Now take two powerfully non-rational experiences, my mystical experience and my Acute Psychotic Episode. My experience of one was "good" and my experience of the other was "bad." I wish to validate the good one and invalidate the bad one. So, one was a result of becoming aware of the Greater Self, one was a pathology rooted in a malfunctioning ego.

Amazingly simple, really.

[Fist and Faith]

You can make the assertion that we have never degraded. It's an assertion. The Christian assertion is that we degraded suddenly in pre-history (the Fall) and have been degraded (Fallen) ever since. So yes, murder, etc, has always existed in (post-Fall) human history. But we also assert that we did indeed fall from somewhere - from paradise - and your assertion that we did not is merely that, and it sounds pretty dogmatic, confident and certain to me.

We claim that un-Fallen man is something we CAN look back on, and say, "There! That's how we should be. We've fallen so far from that. We've degraded." Only that man failed, and that's why Christ came to us, our world, to be the second Adam, to correct Adam's fault, who said "Let MY will be done", where Christ said "Let THY will be done". And that IS Who we look to to say "There! That's how we should be." Jesus Christ IS the un-Fallen Man.

Obviously, I'm not going to go along with saying we HAVE degraded from what the pre-Fall people were. It's fine to have an ideal way of life in mind, and try to live up to it. I'll go along with that. (Although, obviously, we'll disagree with what that ideal way of life is. No knowledge of good and evil?? Not an ideal way of life, imo.)

It's another to say we HAVE degraded. You can think we have degraded. But, for me, there needs to be something visible (at least historically visible) that can become degraded. And, taking society's attitude toward homosexuality as an example, the only visible behavior I'm aware of is certainly worse than the growing acceptance of homosexuality that we see today. Homosexuals have been killed, even still, which seems to have been sanctioned by the Bible. They've been beaten, even on a regular bases. They've been cast out by their families. They hid themselves from everyone they knew and loved in order to avoid these fates. They learned to be afraid and ashamed of themselves. What is it like to live an entire life ashamed of yourself?

Society's acceptance of homosexuality is not a degradation of that situation.

And even you can't claim that the pre-Fall attitude toward homosexuality was better than the growing acceptance we have today. And that's because there wasn't any homosexuality before the Fall. I assume? So as soon as homosexuality came into being, it was reviled, and punished. YOUR attitude - wanting to lovingly help them be the people God wants them to be - is surely an improvement over what we've had since the Fall, but it is not what society ever saw, and is not what we have degraded from.

Of course I can make claims about time before the Fall, Fist. Since man wasn't Fallen, there was no homosexual desire. Amazingly simple. We have come to desire many wrong things after the Fall. The wrongest thing is to justify the wrong things and make them "right".

I would translate "knowledge of good and evil" into your language as simply "knowledge of evil".

Again, you can speak about people who suffer from homosexuality as you do. I put the desire right alongside other ones that none of us approve of and that we DO agree that people ought to be ashamed of practicing (I'll emphasize "practicing"). From that standpoint it is not improvement to increasingly encourage its practice. So the whole trouble comes back to the fact that we do not agree on what is right, and your progress is my regress and vice-versa regarding these issues.

You still speak without any support. There's never been a society that self-destructed because of homosexuality. Nor is there reason to believe a society that accepts homosexuality cannot exist just fine. (Again and again, you say that the ills of society were caused by other things, which led to a greater acceptance of homosexuality. It does not follow that homosexuality is the, or even a, major problem with society.) Therefore, we have no reason to consider homosexuality harmful. That being the case, it is certainly an improvement to accept homosexuality, instead of ostracizing, beating or killing them, and making them hide who they are.

Don't get me wrong. "God doesn't want it" is a valid stance. Just come out and admit that that's what it is. As I've said, there's no reason you can't base all political stances on religious belief.

[danlo]

Quick philosophical question: If Lewis and GKC never existed would there be no rus?