Transcendence--Part 2

‘Liberal’ Christians admit Jesus and the NT authors were mistaken, but in so doing they are trying to pole vault up a steep incline while sliding down the slippery back slope of increasing doubt and skepticism. If the NT isn’t historically accurate about such a key doctrine as the return of Christ, many ask, how could one rely on Scripture's accounts of Jesus rising from the grave, ascending into heaven, etc.

How can the Christian religion be true and accurate about anything else?

After all, the bar of requirements for historical writing has been set very high in the modern age. All things, people think, need to be factually accurate, inerrant to be of real value. So religion, the spiritual, and the transcendent all need to be judged with the measuring tools of science.

A compass of accuracy needs to discern the geometric lines of theology and faith, to eliminate and banish any heresy that deviates from the factual.

What a very high raising of the TRUTH bar for us thinking humans to catapult over!

The nature of truth is a difficult subject bar none (to throw in a word play to lighten this heavy post;-)

The difficulty of hope versus illusion-delusion (false hope) and reason versus despair (false reason) is a very high bar indeed. Can any hope of the transcendent be found at all?

Millions of humans think not. So they quit 'pole-vaulting' and settle down on the ground of Materialism/Atheism/even Nihilism and Subjectivism/Relativism. Such thinkers include Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne, Yuval Noah Harari, Sean Carroll, Brian Green, etc.).

In striking contrast, many other thinkers and scientists created the ENLIGHTENMENT/Deism/generic theism, etc. Their new outlook based in reason and the scientific method--Not revelation--managed to clear the bar of required evidence.

All of them strongly hold to modern evidence--evolutionary biological, geological, astronomical, rational--but don't think such evidence proves that Reality is meaningless, subjective, etc. Instead, they think that Reality is ultimately transcendent, moral realism is true, all humans have inherent worth, etc. They state they base their hope in reason and cosmic regularities, Life itself, etc.

In the LIGHT of the True, the Good, the Just, the TRANSCENDENT,

Daniel Wilcox




SIDE NOTE:
on more historic difficulties for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-- 'revealed religions' of doctrinal claims Another difficult raising of the bar of religious hope came 1,500 years after Jesus, in the time of Galileo and Copernicus.

The Creedal Church claimed supreme understanding and control in all matters. Yet a minority of scientists contradicted the teachings of the Church and, allegedly, the Bible. They claimed to have proved that the sun doesn’t round the earth each day; indeed, the earth is not the center, not the focal point of all creation as Genesis claims.

Soon science increased its evidential findings--our sun is actually only a very minor star, Not the Center of Reality.

Contrary to the Scriptures’ statement, “God made the stars also,” in actuality, those stars are cosmically vast than our puny solar system. We are on an edge of a galaxy, which is one of millions of other galaxies!

So much for the literal understanding of the Jewish Bible, the New Testament, the Quran, and common sense!

Scratch!

Of course, multi-millions choose to twist the plain text in the sacred scriptures. They argue Genesis describes the creation of the sun on the fourth day from the perspective of God’s Spirit at the level of the surface of the planet looking up!

So God looking up from planet earth's surface does make it seem like the sun comes after the earth rather than before. What has happened? A dense, heavy cloud of vapor had hidden the sun during the first 3 days. The sun finally appeared above the earth on the 4th day.

There is a very bad case of Not only 'scratching' but of cheating!

But the verse in Genesis doesn’t speak about the sun appearing from behind fog on the fourth day; on the contrary, it says: “And God said, 'Let there be light in the vault of the heavens to light up the earth.' And so it was. And God made the two great lights…” (Genesis 1:14-16)

Other religionist wrote of a dualistic existence, where science concerns itself with the observable and the factual but religion concerns itself with the spiritual and moral. Many theists of the present time manage to make this philosophical leap.

Then the discoveries by Darwin and many other scientists that life proceeds not by a sudden miraculous creation 6,000 years ago, but by a combination of cosmic luck and survival of the fittest over millions and millions of years.

Later in succeeding years, other scientists tabulated their technical findings and showed the earth came about 4 billion years ago, not 6, 000, and the universe has existed at least 16 billion years! This setting of the sacred bar careens outrageously high so that only the most blind, or most compartmentalized, or the most irrationally determined can leap the bottomless chasm up and over the cosmically high bar of hope.

Good grief, what convoluted hypocritical rhetoric!

Multi-millions of human beings have 'scratched'. Been Disqualified.

Guest Blog from Professor Roger Olson: "What if humanity could be saved only by torturing children to death?"

from An Ethical Dilemma Posed in a Stephen King Novel
SEPTEMBER 29, 2019 BY ROGER E. OLSON

"What if…the world, humanity, could only be saved from total obliteration by torturing children to death?

"Spoiler alert! If you intend to read King’s latest novel The Institute you may not want to read this as it contains some details about the plot. I will not, however, give away the ending.

The Institute is not your typical King novel if there is such a thing. It’s not exactly a horror story although it is a horrifying story. It contains some sci-fi elements and some violence but it’s nothing like “It” or “The Shining” or “Pet Sematary.” I would compare it more with “Mister Mercedes” or even “The Stand” in terms of tone.

"Like most of King’s novels and short stories it carries within it an ethical dilemma. What’s the right thing to do in a grievous situation where there does not seem to be a right thing to do?

"Of course, there’s often the hero who intuitively knows the right thing and does it.

"But here is the intriguing question embedded in The Institute: If the world, humanity, the whole of nature on earth, could only be saved by kidnapping and torturing children with the inevitable result that they die, would doing that be ethically justified?"

READ THE REST OF PROFESSOR ROGER OLSON'S ETHICAL REFLECTION BASED UPON STEPHEN KING'S NOVEL, THE INSTITUTE at:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2019/09/an-ethical-dilemma-posed-in-a-stephen-king-novel/


In the Light of Moral Realism,

Dan Wilcox

The Lowest of the Low--Denial of the Reality of Ethics

It would seem that Divine Command Theory of conservative Christianity which claims that an action is only wrong or right if God declares it so is the worst form of ethics.

How much lower can one get than to proclaim that ethnic cleansing, the slaughter and rape of enemies, the abuse and torture of others, the enslavement of humans is good or justified because the Almighty says so?

For a long time, it appeared that DCT was the worst of the worst.

Thankfully most secular human leaders (in the U.S. at least)—regardless of their particular worldview--emphasized human rights, justice, equality, fairness, generosity, tolerance, the Bill of Rights including free speech, freedom to change and criticize religions and ideologies, etc. (to one degree or another).
BUT all that has changed.

Now many secular leaders are claiming there are no human rights, no objective ethics, that all ethics, even opposition to rape and enslavement are only "subjective" constructs"!

When did the abhorrent tilt to relativism come about?

(It’s enough to scare the living daylights out of any human rights worker, any Civil Rights leader, any one involved in law enforcement, any normal citizen who is concerned with real ethics.)

Look at this strange exchange this week on the Internet:

Atheist blogger Neil Carter wrote, "our moral systems of guidance are no more objective than the compass Jack Sparrow carries around with him on his many misadventures.2 And that furthermore, that is perfectly okay."
--

Human Rights Daniel Wilcox: This is completely untrue. Rape, slaughter, slavery, molestation, abuse are ALWAYS WRONG. Human rights, justice, goodness, equality, etc. are always right.

For instance, the Humanist Manifesto III states, (like the Enlightenment, and human right organizations now such as Amnesty International) that "We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity, and to making informed choices in a context of freedom consonant with responsibility.”

Note emphasis in the Manifesto on words such as
"Inherent worth"
"freedom"
"responsibility".

Humans don't make up ethics; they aren't "constructs" as Neil Carter claims.

On the contrary, ethics are discovered, are "inherent" in reality.
--

Neil Carter also wrote, "...humanists of every stripe can agree that human beings should never be treated as someone else’s property."
--

Note the danger of Carter's words:
"can agree"

But agreement has nothing to do with whether some action is good or bad!

And true ethics aren't based in any "can."

They are always "ought."

Besides, various humanists have justified not only enslavement, but the slaughter of civilians, torture, inequality,
and even claimed that infants aren’t “persons”!

And that, therefore, an infant, since it isn't a "person," it may be killed up to one year old!!

And that some animals have more value than some human infants!

Tragic. How confused and downright wrong such thinking is.

Even if humans changed their minds and declared various immoral actions no longer immoral and okay, they wouldn't be moral.

This sort of relativistic thinking is the extreme danger of nonobjective ethics.
Lots of humans in the past and now declare terrible actions good.

That has nothing to do with whether or not they really are good.
--

An Atheist:
“That we find near universal agreement about moral statements does not in any way refute their subjectivity.”
--

Human Rights Daniel
Humans don't make up ethics; they aren't "constructs."
--

An Atheist:
“They most certainly are. Ethics are abstractions that comprise many different factors. How we were raised, natural empathy, selfish desires, how importantly we value fairness, thoughtful consideration... all of these and more are used to develop what we would call "ethics."
--

2nd Atheist:
The legal definition of rape has changed during my lifetime. It wasn't until 1993 that marital rape was made illegal in all 50 states. So before then was marital rape moral or immoral?"
--

3rd Atheist:
"What any given culture puts into the bucket of "wrong" is inherently relativistic."
--

Human Rights Daniel:
No.

Ask Enlightenment leaders such as Thomas Paine, ask the UN Declaration of Human Rights, ask The Human Manifest III, ask Amnesty International, ask Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights workers, etc.
--

4th Atheist
"Appeal to authority. FAIL.

As you have been told here for years by many people much smarter than me:
There is no such thing as "objective ethics" or "objective morality". There is only ethics that most of us like or accept as part of our current social structure, just like every other society that exists or has existed."

"Have you stumbled upon a set of ethical observations equivalent to Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of thermodynamics in physics? Then your objective morality doesn't exist, and you should really stop embarrassing yourself by insisting it does simply because you're frightened of the idea of it not existing.

You like the ideals espoused in the Humanist Manifesto? That's nice. But don't pretend this is somehow an objective document. The fact that you (and most other people) might like the ideas within it does not make it objective."
--

5th Atheist:
"If you could devise an objective moral framework, i.e. one that objectively answers all moral questions under any circumstances, then you could have objective morals, on equal footing with mathematical truths. Of course, nobody has ever succeeded in creating such a framework.

Moreover, if these objective morals in certain cases would differ from your own subjective morals you would most probably reject the objective framework and go with your own subjective morals anyway. So, an objective moral framework (if even possible) is only useful if all people (inter)subjectively agree to the moral outcomes of the framework."
--

Atheist Blogger Neil Carter:
"My point is that all morals systems are constructs, even the ones we can agree on. And I'm pretty sure all humanists will agree that rape is bad."
--

H. R. Daniel Wilcox:
Whether humanists "agree" that they are subjectively against rape, has nothing to do with whether or not rape is really wrong.

Morals aren’t “constructs.”

Consider that the vast majority of orthodox Muslims believe in inequality for women, and think that ex-Muslims ought to be punished.

That isn't okay.

Those humans are objectively wrong, are immoral in their beliefs and actions.

Most Americans think that if the U.S. government tortures and slaughters civilians that is justified.

But that doesn't make it okay.

Many American Christians think that human rights ought to be denied same sexual couples!

But that doesn't make it okay.

Amnesty International has worked for human rights for many years. AI thinks every human has human rights. That human rights are real,
not "subjective" "likes."

Human rights aren’t “constructs” but are inherent in reality. Every human is born with rights which are “inherent” and “unalienable.”

No way are ethics "subjective" and made up by humans.

Even if every human on the face of the earth said that in some cases slavery, rape, slaughter, racism are okay, those actions still wouldn't be moral.
--

6th Atheist:
"Rape is bad" is not actually a moral statement without defining what "rape" means. And when it comes to the definition of rape there is no consensus, not even among humanists. Does rape require penetration, or could it include other sexual acts? Can it be rape if the perpetrator was convinced that it was consensual?

Can it be rape if there was no violence involved? Does rape within marriage require stronger evidence? Can the behavior of the victim be a mitigating factor? Etcetera.

ETA: I would (subjectively) answer these questions with yes, yes, yes, no, almost never. Others would (subjectively) come up with other answers.”
--

Look at the central statement again by the 4th Atheist:
“As you have been told here for years by many people much smarter than me:
There is no such thing as "objective ethics" or "objective morality". There is only ethics that most of us like or accept as part of our current social structure, just like every other society that exists or has existed.

Have you stumbled upon a set of ethical observations equivalent to Newton's laws of motion, or the laws of thermodynamics in physics? Then your objective morality doesn't exist, and you should really stop embarrassing yourself by insisting it does simply because you're frightened of the idea of it not existing.

You like the ideals espoused in the Humanist Manifesto? That's nice. But don't pretend this is somehow an objective document. The fact that you (and most other people) might like the ideas within it does not make it objective.”
--

And this is the view of many modern thinkers at present. Consider the views of the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari in his famous book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

He states that "equality," "liberty," and human rights are "myths."

--
:-(

When did so many modern thinkers turn against the Enlightenment, and start claiming that ethics are “relative,” “subjective,” only human “constructs,” and rejecting the view that human rights are “inherent” and “unalienable”?

When did such humans begin to think that even rape and slavery are only subjective preferences or “dislikes” or “likes,” not really inherently evil actions?!

Deeply Troubled,

Daniel Wilcox

Discussing CUSSING

ALERT: These urls and articles (and my responses) deal with the question of whether or not swearing, slurring, profaning, verbally attacking, etc. are amoral, only mores, or a question of ethical truth.
In the process some of the commentators use obscenities, profanities, and racial slurs.

This time around, the cursing started with the President Elect in a past video tape of him from Hollywood. 'We’ll show ‘em.' And he did.

Usually, I don’t print out obscenities in my articles any more than I put feces on the table at breakfast or dinner.
HOWEVER I do understand that sometimes academics use the actual words because they want to emphasize the exact nature of the particular words they are talking and thinking about.

Other writers use them because they are attempting to portray real humans how they really speak in conversation.
They aren’t approving or showing disapproval ethically.

Other thinkers use cuss words, racial and sexual slurs, etc. freely in their writing (and their speech) because they are committed to ethical relativism, and so put their finger forward from the first.

http://philosophybites.com/…/rebecca-roache-on-swearing.html

https://aeon.co/…/where-does-swearing-get-its-power-and-how...

Rebecca Roache on Swearing

What, if anything, is wrong with swearing? Rebecca Roache discusses the philosophy of swearing in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.
Warning. This episode contains quite a lot of swearing.
Listen to Rebecca Roache on Swearing
Read Rebbeca Roache's blogposts on the Uehiro Centre Practical Ethics blog
--

MY RESPONSES:

http://infiniteoceanoflightandlove.blogspot.com/2016/01/purity-of-mind-and-heart.html

http://infiniteoceanoflightandlove.blogspot.com/2011/05/pure-and-profane-speech.html

http://infiniteoceanoflightandlove.blogspot.com/2016/01/part-3-what-is-purity-of-heart.html

Later, I am going to write an in depth article to lecturer-in-philosophy Rebecca Roache, President Elect Donald Trump, and others, so this is only my basic abstract.

For those interested check out new blog articles in the soon future on my blogpost, where I write brief articles, and very long ones (which only literature teachers, historians, philosophers, etc. will be interested enough to suffer through:-)

Shoot! This is post is already getting fairly long.
(Notice, “shoot,” my favorite intense word back when I was a fundamentalist kid;-)


In the Light of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty

Daniel Wilcox