How religious belief can affect morality

There are various ways in which religion affects our moral conduct, that go beyond the specific teachings of a religion. Religious belief supports the idea of an inherent purpose to human existence, and the idea that in the end justice will be served. This is supported either by a belief in a final judgment or in a belief in some kind of law of karma, which in Eastern religion governs reincarnation. Some people believe in a law of karma that governs our earthly life, but that doesn't work perfectly.  The simple fact is, that in this world, people can commit murder, get away with it, and be happy about it.  On this matter, watch atheist filmmaker Woody Allen's movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. The belief in an inherent  purpose  and the belief in ultimate justice, either through karma or through a final judgment, provide energy for the moral enterprise of many persons. I'm not saying you can't be moral without them, but for a lot of people, they sure help. When we think about religion and morality, we think about specific teachings, but there is more to it that. 

Kamala Harris fires a blank

I fail to understand Harris's gains based on the debate. She fired a blank at Biden, and made it look like she hit him.I guess she hit him with a soundbite. It is one thing to say "That little girl was me, it sure helped me." It is another to argue for busing as public policy mandated by the Department of Education. That kind of federal control of schools is going to freak out the entire middle and help Trump. Biden doesn't have to deny that it could help in some instances. But busing as public policy has been abandoned in the public arena, and unless you can argue that it ought to be brought back, this is going to hurt her in the overall primary fight and certainly in the general election, especially among swing voters in states like, well, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Does the law of noncontradiction apply to moral claim, such as the claim that adultery is wrong?

There are a couple of possibilities here. One is that physicalism is true. If physicalism is true, then all facts are physical facts, and the law of noncontradictions applies to physical facts. Claims about what is right and wrong cannot be reduced to physical questions, therefore, the law of noncontradiction does not  apply here. But what if  there are facts that are not physical facts? Mathematical facts, strictly speaking, are not physical facts, since they do not obtain at particular places or times, but rather obtain at all places and times. There are also logical facts, which also do not depend upon locality. And then, are there moral facts? Atheists disagree with  one another as to whether there can be moral facts. Atheist J. L. Mackie argued that there are no moral facts. But even without God, philosophers like Erik Wielenberg think that there are nonetheless moral facts. https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/2763.Erik_J_Wielenberg 

If there are moral facts then the law of noncontradiction applies to these. 

But then, suppose that religion is not just something people make up, but instead is true. In this case, physicalism would be false, because a divine reality exists which, at least we ordinarily define physics, physics cannot discover. In that case, there would be a real God, maybe a Christian, Jewish, or Muslim God which actually exists, in which case it is quite possible that facts about what is right or wrong is grounded in what God knows, or what God commands. Thus, God might know, and therefore command, that adultery is wrong, and even if you are the President of the United States, if you disagree with that, you are mistaken. 

Racism then and now

One problem is the fact that we have gone from blatant bigotry to more subtle forms of racism. "I have nothing against Mexicans, but why can't they learn our language like immigrants of the past used to when the came over. And, of course, a lot of them are here illegally." That isn't exactly calling them "spicks" like kids of my playground used to, but the racism is still there.

A big difference between Christianity and Islam

 There are some big differences between Islam and Christianity. A big one has to do with what happens when someone is caught in adultery. Muhammad approved of the stoning of an adulteress (after she bore and weaned her child), but Jesus required that the one to cast the first stone had to be without sin and ref used to cast it himself .

What do we mean by "society?"

"Society" is a hypostasized abstract noun. I often wonder sometimes if it refers to anything.Is there such a thing as "society" or are there just socieities?

Are we genetically inclined to be generous?

It would be nice to believe that the human genome is constructed so as to find joy through contributions to the good of all. This is a claim that might require some scientific evidence. There is a popular belief in our society that our genetic structure pushes us to be selfish. In the new prefaces to Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins is at some pains to dispel the idea that the "selfishness" of our genes provides a justification for selfish behavior in humans.  But it looks like an attempt on his part to put a meme back in the bottle after if got out.  

No collusion? Witch hunt? Hardly

Let's go over some clear and undeniable facts. The Russians, not a 400-pound guy in a Manhattan apartment, engage in a great deal of illegal interference against our country's election system. This, in my view is an attack on our country. Countries that do that should be penalized, and we should make it clear we won't tolerate it. Even the beneficiary candidate has a moral duty to issue a "thanks, but no thanks" message to such a country. But instead, the beneficiary candidate starts acting as if he welcomes the interference,, even going so far as to suggest a further crime they might commit, of delivering the missing e-mails of Hillary Clinton. You also have Trump's staff getting the Republican platform changed from its prior anti-Putin stance to a more pro-Russian stance, you get all kinds of contacts during the campaign between Russian agents, contacts about which Trump official lied repeatedly. You had a campaign chairman who had previously worked for a pro-Putin dictator in Ukraine. You had a national security adviser who was an agent of the Turkish government and had inappropriate connections with the Russians. You had an attorney general who lied about contacts with the Russians and had to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. You have a President who acts as if everything is normal and tries to keep Russia from suffering any harm from the crimes they have committed, and even at a conference in Helsinki took the side of the Russians against the word of all of his intelligence agencies that Russia didn't do it. And you're telling me that what was wrong was that they investigated the possibility that there might have been not collusion (there was plenty of that), but an actual criminal conspiracy between people in the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Oh, and I didn't even mention the Trump Tower meeting with Don, Jared, Manafort, and Veselnitskaya. Mueller didn't find enough evidence to issue conspiracy charges, although if they had been really a dirty cop in the pay of the Democrats he would have found a way to invent some. Oh, and you find Trump trying to shut down the investigation on multiple occasions, and if he had had a more cooperative staff it would have worked. But to say that do investigate all of this was a big no-no, and only someone who didn't like Trump's immigration policy would initiate such an investigation to keep Trump policies from being enacted? That's ridiculous. Anyone in their right mind would want to know what was going on, at least anyone who doesn't own a MAGA hat. We can all be thankful there wasn't some quid pro quo between the Trump staff and the Russians, and, if anything, we should be grateful to Mueller for assuring us of at least that. But that still leaves a lot of conduct on the part of the President and his aides that is, quite frankly, profoundly corrupt. To say "no collusion" as if this is a clear bill of health for the President is a shameful distortion of the truth and the product of clever marketing and propaganda. People like Justin Amash and 800 former federal prosecutors came to a very different conclusion when the actually read the Mueller report.

Monotheistic science, religion and the ecological crisis

With the rise of monotheistic religions, we began to think of the world as operating in accordance with laws as opposed to the whims of various deities. In this is makes sense of what science discovers about the world. But  science enables technology, and technology permits humans to exercise control over the natural world in a way they never could before. But that power of technology brings with it the temptation, never so much as experienced by ancient peoples, to exploit the earth's resources in ways that harm the ecosystem, make life more difficult for many living creatures, and make the world potentially unlivable for future generations.  You could, I suppose, say that monotheistic religion helped cause the ecological crisis for the same reason you might say that science caused the ecological crisis. But if you can condemn religion for this reason, you also have to condemn science for the same reason. 

China and the attempt to blame Christians for the ecological crisis

 Lynn White (and others) lay much of the blame for the current ecological crisis at the feet of the Abrahamic traditions, especially Christianity.

I think the refutation of Lynn White's thesis can be found by looking at the climate crisis in China, a country for years under atheistic communism and certainly no history of Christian domination. They have the worst climate problem in the world. 

https://www.iqair.com/blog/air-quality/china-air-quality-facts

The Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception

Lots of people get these confused. The Virgin Birth of Christ, which is 

taught in Matthew and Luke, says that Christ was conceived in

Mary’s womb without sexual intercourse, through a divine miracle. It is 

accepted by Catholics and conservative Protestants.

The immaculate conception of Mary is the doctrine that Mary herself was

conceived in her mother’s womb free of the stain of original sin. It’s a 

Catholic doctrine that Protestants deny on the ground that the Bible teaches

“For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

The poached egg argument

“A man who said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse… But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. 
-

The Donald Trump of atheism

Dawkins is kind of the Donald Trump of atheism. But he has his following, just as Trump does. 

Does the Bible support slavery? Well, it depends on what parts you cut out.

Apparently slaveowners were afraid to let their slaves read the whole thing, because they might rebel if they read it.

Here. 

Is there anything you accept on faith?

I think it is Dawkins' view that you should never take anything on pure faith. But on the one hand, if you take statement X, and say that statement needs proof, then someone might say ask for proof of that statement, and then ask for proof for that statement, and then ask for proof for that statement. etc. So there  has to be something you believe that doesn't have to  be proved by something else.  Is what you believe without proof something you believe on faith? If so, what are those things you don't need proof for? 

Is gay monogamy a myth?

I think the tendency on the part of people of a more conservative bent to nonetheless find gay marriage acceptable depends largely on their ability to see gay marriage as a mirror image of straight marriage, only with a same-sex as opposed to an opposite sex couple. Some, however, doubt that this kind of mirror image can exist in the gay community. 

“Male homosexuals are very seldom monogamous,” Dr. Elizabeth Iskander asserts, “they overwhelmingly reject the type of relationship most heterosexuals think of when they think of marriage: a long-term relationship where sexual activity is strictly limited to one’s marriage partner.”

Here. 

A gay rights slogan

It is a slogan to say that allowing gay marriage allows gay people to be who they are. 

Is a person's true identity to be found in their sexual feelings? Not their beliefs, their ideas, their friendships, their occupation, etc? What about people who never find the right person to have a relationship with? Are they unable to be who they are?

Wherever you stand on issues like this, beware of slogans. 

Punting to the government for our morals

Why do we always punt to the government to decide whether something is right or not? That is, if we think something is wrong, we want the government to pass a law against it, and if the government doesn't pass a law against it, we assume it's OK? There was a woman in Colorado who was asked why she smoked marijuana during  her pregnancy, and she replied by saying that since the government said that smoking pot was legal, she figured it was OK for her to smoke pot while pregnant. The government need not be our moral compass, or abortion, on homosexuality, on marijuana, or on whether it's OK to tell a woman you love her in order to get her to go to bed with you, even though you don't. Nor should it decide whether it is OK to show up at funerals of AIDS victims with "God hates fags" signs. Of course it's not OK, but we don't want the government stopping it either.  

Adam, Steve, Donald, and Melania

It seems to me that you could take the anti-gay position from a theological point of view (homosexuality is wrong in God's eyes), and still support same-sex marriage in the civil realm. This is what most people do with respect to Donald Trump's marriage. If we are enforcing Christian standards in the area of marriage through government, then you would have to say that someone who is dumping his wife for a younger woman for the second time, and is a well-known serial adulterer, should not be given another marriage license.  Instead, we ask him "are your prior divorces final," and if they are, he gets a license. If you are going to say that Adam and Steve can't get married because of what the Bible says, then you also have to say that Donald and Melania can't get married because of Mt 5:32 and other passages.

Abortion and demographics

People who accept traditional understandings of these monotheistic religions have a greater tendency to oppose abortion that those who are, say, religious skeptics. But the arguments on both sides of the issue rarely mention God or the Bible directly. 

What does "abortion is murder" mean?

What exactly is packed into the idea of murder is interesting. For example, if you do not believe that the things whose life you are taking is a person, is it still murder? Is manslaughter murder?

 What if you deceive yourself into believing that some being who clearly are persons are not persons---Jews, for example? In cases like that my intuition support the use of the word “murder” because the perpetrators clearly and unmistakably ought to believe in the personhood of their victims, even if they do not. Is abortion murder in that sense? Is the full and complete personhood of the fetus so clearly true that to deny is to, to use Paul's phrase, "suppress the truth in unrighteousness?"

What if you take the life of a person for reasons that you morally justify taking the life of a person, but sub specie aeternitatis, they do not justify the homicide? Are you then a murderer? 

 The word homicide does not carry the negative connotations of the word murder. Should the word murder be used for all homicides that lack moral justification? 

It looks as if the term "murder" in the context of abortion, even if appropriate, needs some parsing. 

What should the punishment be for abortion if it is to be punished?

Pro-lifers believe that abortion is not currently a crime, due to Roe v. Wade, but it should be one. Though, interestingly enough, they often think that abortion providers, not the women who get the abortions, should be punished, and the punishments they recommend are not nearly as severe as the punishments for first degree murder. Does this make sense? If pro-lifers are right about the fetus, what kinds of punishments should there be for the parties involved in an abortion? 

Is there a dissonance between the legal and the moral arguments concerning abortion?

Roe is based on this argument:

1. The right to bodily autonomy, and privacy with respect to medical decisions (absence any superior countervailing right) is known to be established by the Constitution. For example, as decided in the Griswold case from 1962, state governments do not have the right to prohibit artificial birth control.

2. The fetus's right to life prior to viability is not a right we can be sure of. Reasonable opinion differs as to whether the fetus has such a right.

3. A right of which we are certain takes precedence over a right over which there is uncertainty.

4. Therefore, because of the uncertainty with respect to the fetus's right to life, the right of the mother to bodily autonomy and medical privacy takes priority, and a woman has a right to an abortion prior to viability.

What do you think is the bad premise in this argument, (if you think there is one)? What is surprising to me is that the anti-Roe legal arguments seem to concentrate their firepower on premise 1, but people interested in the moral issue of abortion object to premise 2. There seems to be some dissonance between the legal arguments on Roe v. Wade and the moral arguments concerning abortion. Does anyone besides me find this troublesome?

Abortion and the beating heart

I've never understood the significance of the heartbeat in the abortion controversy. The brain, not the heart, is the organ of thought, and the heart is a blood pump. Either life begins at conception, or the development of the cerebral cortex is what is relevant. Is this another example of pro-life political pragmatism?

Moral relativism and the Holocaust

If you are a relativist, whether the Holocaust was OK is just a matter of human perspective. If the Nazis had won WWII, and history is written by the winners, then if Hitler had won WWII the history books would praise the Holocaust as one of Hitler's great accomplishment. It was how Hitler and those who followed him felt about it right, and if morals are relative to how people feel about it, then the history books would be right. When you say that there is no objective truth in the area of morality, this is what you have to swallow. Or, again, look at hatred for homosexuals (who were also slaughtered in the Holocaust). Lots of people hate homosexuals, and many for reasons that have nothing to do with religion. If morals are relative, that is how people feel, and there is nothing really wrong with that. If you are going to be a moral relativist, you've got to be a consistent one, but most people aren't consistent in their relativism, by any stretch of the imagination.

Christianity and anti-Semitism

There are, unfortunately forms of anti-Semitism that Christians have engaged in. Hitler's version of anti-Semitism, however, is really incompatible with Christianity, because it said that what is wrong with Jews is not their religious choices (failure to accept their own Messiah), but rather what is wrong with them is their race. That is the race that produced Jesus, Paul, and all 12 apostles. In other words, one of that racial group is God Incarnate, according to Christianity. Why any Christian would support Hitler is beyond me (though, I am sorry to say, many did).

Is this homophobia?

The position of the Catholic Church on this is interesting. They don't think, per se, that there is anything sinful about having a gay orientation. They just say that those who have such an orientation are called to a celibate life. 

Hard and soft determinism

Neither soft nor hard determinists believe that we are the original sources or causes of our actions. My act may be caused by my choice, but what caused my choice? That needs a cause, too. In determinism, causes are events which are temporally prior to the action. And those causes need causes, and therefore a chain goes back in time prior to when any of us were born. Given conditions millions of years ago, you could not have done otherwise that write this e-mail you just wrote me. Assuming that everything is material, for example, given the state of the material world 4 million B. C., and given the laws of nature, everything has to happen just the way it does. 

What soft determinism actually says is not that we are originating causes of our actions. What it says is that even though we aren't the originating causes of our actions, we can still be responsible for them just in case the immediate causes of our actions are our own will. There is a difference, for example, between consenting to sex and being raped, in that the consensual partner wanted the sex to occur, while the rape victim did not. Freedom, says the soft determinist, is the ability to do what we want to do. The fact that we were caused to want to do it doesn't affect our responsibility for our actions. 

The hard determinist, and the libertarian, look instead at the fact that we are not the ultimate source of our actions, that a number of things in place before we were ever born guaranteed that we would do what we did. Given this fact, the idea that we can deserve something bad for doing something bad, if determinism is true, doesn't seem right. 

Did Mueller come up with nothing?

Did Mueller come up with nothing? Certainly not. Just not the slam-dunk "unindicted co-conspirator" affirmation that might have provided a bipartisan basis for impeachment, which is what you need to get impeachment and removal. Leading Russian figures were indicted for a criminal attack on the American election system. Several American figures, including the former campaign chair, deputy campaign chair, and national security advisor, have all been convicted of felonies, based on questionable relationships with Russia and lying about it. Evidence of criminal activities were found which Mueller did not think to be part of the narrow scope of his inquiry, which he farmed out to other jurisdictions, such as the Southern District of New York. What they did not find was sufficient evidence that Trump or people in the campaign assisted in the basic Russian crime of interfering in our elections.

There was a crime against our country, and it was Mueller's job to prosecute those who were involved in committing it. Please, please, please, don't tell me that you're OK with a foreign government hacking into campaign computer systems and leaking secret stuff, so long as they do it to the Democrats and not the Republicans. The Russians try to do this in elections around the world. It was no witch hunt--Mueller did his job and was honest enough not to try to make illegitimate cases that could not be carried through to convictions. Where he did prosecute, no one has been acquitted. And yet, through all of this, he had to endure constant a constant media attack calling his investigation a witch hunt. Now Trump supporters are calling for Trump opponents to apologize and back off. Maybe. But Trump supporters need to apologize for their constant Mueller-bashing and witch hunt charges. Lots of people in the Trump orbit were guilty of inappropriate relationships with Russia, which is why they're going to jail. There was a major crime against our electoral system, a cyber 9/11. I was actually kind of hoping Mueller would indict a sitting President--Vladimir Putin of Russia. But he didn't. But don't call it a nothingburger. You don't have to be on the Left to have problems with a foreign government hacking our election system and a President who benefits from that hacking and then acts as if the Russians did nothing wrong, and even carries on conversations with their leader while insuring that we have no record of it. Trump consistently welcomed the fruits of this crime against our country, asked Russia to provide Hillary's hacked e-mails, and as President consistently has disregarded his own intelligence community's assessment that there is no reasonable doubt that this interference was the work of the Russians. . I would call that collusion after the fact (rather like being an accessory after the fact to murder), but that is not the sort of collusion that fell within Mueller's mandate to prosecute, and is not, I guess, illegal. It may be within reason to impeach the President on just these grounds, it is certainly something for Americans to take into consideration in 2020 when, as is expected, Donald Trump’s name will appear at the top of the Republican ticket.

We have not been given a definitive answer to the question of whether our President is so under the influence of a foreign government that he is likely to do things that are not in our national interest in virtue of his business interests or the undue influence that foreign governments might have over him. That is the proper subject, not of a criminal investigation, but of Congressional oversight.

Political idolatry

In general, I find political parties to be conglomerations of moral, nonmoral, and immoral concerns, producing some pretty accidental alliances. No Christian should be fully and completely comfortable with any political party. One can, I think support the party one think best embodies Christian principles at any particular time, but there are always going to be some things about your own party that make you cringe. If you think your own party is always completely right the opposing party completely wrong and evil, you are committing idolatry.

Mary Anne Warren's case for abortion rights

uMary Anne Warren, in “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” argues that the fetus does not have a right to life.

uOnly a person has a right to life.

uFor a human to have a right to life, it needs five criteria.

u1. Consciousness

u2. Reasoning

u3. Self-motivated activity

u4. Capacity to communicate

u5. Self-awareness

Fetuses don’t pass these criteria, and are therefore only potential persons.

They do not  have a right to live, at least not one sufficient to overturn a woman’s right to control her own body. 

Don’t infants fail these criteria as well?
Wouldn’t that justify infanticide? 

uWarren says no. She says that even though the  parents may not want the baby, others in the community do, valuing newborn infants that way we value valuable art works.

uPeople in the country also want newborn infants preserved.

uBut what if we stopped thinking that? Would that mean infanticide would be OK? 

Two philosophers, Michael Tooley and Peter Singer, think that both abortion and infanticide can be justified. 

Universal Causation and Determinism

Having a cause can mean a number of different things. It can be something that  contributes to the occurrence of something. Or else it could mean that something that guarantees the outcome. The thesis of determinism is the claim that for every event that happens, there are a set of past events that, given those past events, the future event is guaranteed to occur. The thesis of universal causation entails determinism on the second definition of causation.

Judith Thomson's Defense of abortion

uThomson assumes for the sake of argument that fetuses really do have the right to life.

uDoes that mean that the fetus is entitled to use the mother’s body as a life-support system until it is born?

uThomson suggests that this need not be true. Suppose the Society of Music Lovers kidnapped you and hooked you up to a famous violinist to provide kidney function for nine months. You can get up and leave at any time, but, if you do, the violinist will die.

uAre you obligated to stay in bed all that time and let the violinist use your kidneys, or do you  have the right to get up. If the right to life is an absolute trump card over every other right, then you do. If not, then there may be circumstances in which personal liberty, or considerations of the quality of life, can outweigh the fetus’s right to life in much the way that these considerations can outweigh the violinist’s right to life.

How many abortions does this justify? 

Possibly, not a whole lot of them. The idea that quality of life considerations can outweigh the right to life does not mean that, in typical abortion cases, it does so. 

Why aren't open marriages more popular?

I wonder why open marriages aren't more popular than they in fact are.  For example, politician after politician has been caught in extramarital affairs, and I have never heard a single one of them defend their conduct by saying that there is really nothing wrong with what they did, since they had an open marriage to begin with. Perhaps people abstractly think or say that there would be nothing wrong with an open marriage, but when it comes to their own lives, they wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. 

Disability rights and assisted suicide

 Evidence seems to suggest that people who ask for assisted suicide do so, in many instances, not to relieve pain, but because they are having trouble facing disability. By allowing assisted suicide in these cases, are we sending the message that life with disability is not worth living. Disability groups see this as an example of ableism, a prejudice against those with disabilities, and because of this disability rights groups are almost unanimous in opposing assisted suicide.

Want to support the right to life? Impeach Trump!

I can understand the pro-life argument as a reason maybe for voting for Trump over Hillary. What I don't get is Christians not challenging the proclivity of the Republican party to cover from Trump no matter what comes out against him, to refrain from serious investigation of his fitness to be President. Whatever my conscience might tell me about voting Democratic in light of its excessive defenses of abortion, there is no way in the world I could vote Republican so long as Republicans refuse to address wrongdoing by the President. The Cohen hearings are an excellent example. Republican questioners, with maybe one exception, kept just attacking Cohen, who is not on trial (at least by the House), not on any ballot, and whatever you think of him, was offering hard evidence of criminal activity by a sitting President. If the worst happens and Trump is impeached guess what? Hillary Clinton won't become President. The one who will become President will be the most President most dedicated to the pro-life cause in history: Mike Pence. Want to support the right to life? Impeach Trump!

Wives should submit, or should they?

It would make life easier for me as a husband if they had to. But I think its pretty problematic.

Here. 

Homosexuality and inerrancy

It is quite true that the essence of human nature remains what it has always been, and the Bible has an explanation for that in terms of our being created by God but having somehow fallen out of fellowship with God. Whatever you think of the literal stories that are told about how that happened, it seems to explain a heck of a lot of human history better than virtually any other account I can think of. In fact, secular schemes often founder because they expect human nature to be better than it really is.

That said, some things do change in significant ways. One of them has to do with marriage customs. In Bible times, marriage for love was not normative, and, what is more important cultures in all countries, pagan or Hebrew, felt a strong need to reproduce. That was how you were cared for in you old age, this was how you maintained the tribe's defense. So people didn't make their gay relationships their marriage. It was, if anything, something you did for fun and games over and above your marriage, and you basically typically used slaves and young boys for those fun and games. The picture of homosexuality in the ancient world was an ugly one, if you read the account of it given in Sarah Ruden's Paul among the People. It wasn't gay people wanting to marry the one they loved, it was whether it was OK, if you were a male who has a wife, to get something else one the side from someone who was treated as a plaything, whether male or female.

Ruden perceives Paul's condemnation of homosexuality as falling under the rubric of justice. She writes:

"Paul's Roman audience knew what justice was, if only through missing it. They would have been surprised that justice applied to homosexuality, of all things. But many of them---slaves, freedmen, the poor, the young--would have understood in the next instance. Christ, the only Son of God, gave his body to save mankind. What greater contrast could there be to the tradition of using a weaker body for selfish pleasure or a power trip. Among Christians, there could be no quibbling about what to do: no one could have imagined homosexuality's being different that in it was; it would have to go. And tolerance for it did disappear from the church."

Ruden doesn't adjudicate the issue herself. But, she leaves the Christian gay defender an avenue to come back and say: Look, we can understand Paul as not being a blind homophobe for saying what he did about homosexual conduct. But the world has changed. We aren't like that. We don't want to exploit helpless victims. We are just same-sex attracted Christian people who want to replicate the institution Christian marriage with a same-sex partner. We in society today don't feel so obligated to reproduce, (and many married couples don't), and we can still practice parenthood through adoption. (Do married couples have an obligation to at least try to reproduce?) 

But it isn't quite that easy for the Christian gay defender. The counter-argument is that it's a difficult argument to make that homosexual acts are condemned in Scripture because of the practice is somehow done in an unjust manner. In many passages in Scripture the acts are cataloged as wrong in virtue of, well, their being homosexual acts. And while we might explain Paul's opposition to homosexuality in terms of his observation of how vile the practice was in his time, Christians hold that Paul had an Inspirer, the Holy Spirit, who as the Third Person of the Trinity, was surely aware not only of what homosexuality was like in the first century, but what it is like now in the 21st. If God had intended to only to condemn the injustice of ancient homosexual practice, He would have said so. 

So I think to accept the more liberal understanding of homosexuality along the lines suggested by the argument I sketched above, you have to reject the kind of strong doctrine of inerrancy, for example, provided in the Chicago Statement. Catholics, of course, are playing a different, but similar ball game, in that for Catholics the "inerrancy" is in the Magisterium, and Scripture for them is not considered quite so transparent.

Which goes back to whether we need an explanation for the condemnation of homosexuality. If we feel one is needed, then we might be able to provide one that leaves room for the possibility that gay Christians can, as good Christians, practice homosexuality. Conservative believers, however, can warn that given the sinful nature of man, we have to be careful of accepting interpretations of the Bible that allow us to do what we want to do. If we are not careful, we are going to end up interpreting everything out of Scripture that we don't want to obey.

Like C. S. Lewis, I have never had to deal with same-sex attraction. I respect both viewpoints on this issue. I think the more inclined you are toward an inerrantist model of Scripture, the harder it will be to find homosexual conduct acceptable.

Will gay marriage be the end of homosexuality?

 If homosexuality is genetic, then it is being passed down by gay people going against their orientation. If gay marriage is accepted, gays will marry one another, not reproduce, and eliminate the gay population.

If God opposes homosexuality, do we owe gay people an explanation as to why?

Here is a question which I have struggled with a lot of late. Suppose we conclude, based on Scripture, that God considers homosexual conduct to be wrong. And suppose a person struggling with homosexual desires asks the question of why God condemns such conduct. That seems like a reasonable question to me, but do we owe them an answer? What would it be?

Judge not

I'm not a pedophile, but who am I to judge those who are? Nothing, right?

We can, it seems to me, hold views that certain types of sexual conduct are wrong, just as we have the right to hold views that other kinds of behavior are wrong, without being guilty of "judging" in some negative sense.

Of course, it's the Bible that says we shouldn't judge. If the Bible isn't true, what's wrong with judging?

Chesterton on determinism and criminal punishment

The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment.-- G. K. Chesterton

Though, I suppose, saying "Go and sin no more" also changes the environment.

The paradox of utilitarianism

Can an argument be made  that focusing on consequences produces worse consequences overall than other reasons? For example, the consequences of lying for all concerned might give worse results than our egotistic thinking patterns are bound to recognize. Hence, a general rule "don't lie" might produce more happiness overall than saying "lie if and only if it will maximize happiness."

Social Utility, Sympathy, and Reasons for Being Moral

Why would someone be moral if they didn't believe in God? For example, it is possible, if there is not God, to literally get away with murder. If there is a God, then it is literally never true that no one is looking. If there is no God, then it can sometimes be quite literally true that no one is looking. If you are never caught by humans you will die and reach the same condition as your innocent victim, after having reaped all the benefits of wrongdoing. Why wouldn’t an atheist commit a murder if he were to benefit from doing so and was reasonably confident that he or she would never be caught.

The philosopher David Hume suggested two reasons for being moral that don’t have anything to do with religion: social utility and sympathy. But are these enough to keep us moral, or, more importantly, to insure that it is always rational to be moral? It might depend on how good we are at sympathizing, and whether we stand to benefit, not benefit, from behaving morally. Given some set of desires and states of character, and on the assumption that to act rationally is to maximize the satisfactions of one's desires, the immoral person can be perfectly rational, and it can even be irrational to be moral. Does this mean that you can be moral without God if you have good circumstances for doing so, but if you aren’t so lucky, then you won’t be so moral?

What is repentance?

Repentance means walking back the states of mind the led you to sin. It means setting yourself the task, in Christianity with the aid of the Holy Spirit, of ceasing to be the kind of person that committed that immoral act in the first place. That is no fun. Sinful acts are attempts to satisfy sinful desires, and repentance involves undercutting the grip of those desires on you. It's supposed to be painful. The idea that "Oh, I can sin, and then just repent later" is a self-defeating one. It's something that will make your life tougher in the long run.

Martin Luther King

 How do you think religion affected Martin Luther King? Was it an accident that he was a reverend, as well as a civil rights leader? 

The real debate is over legal immigration

 The bipartisan bill that Trump turned down had, I think 1.7 million for border security including fencing. But it was considered no good because it was a fence instead of a wall. But there is more to Trump's position on immigration than just the wall. He wants to keep LEGAL immigration limited for, in particular, lower class workers, and in fact make it harder for such people to enter our country. Hence the comment about not wanting people to come in from "shithole" countries. (Whether this reduces to a desire not to let more black and brown people into our country can, I am sure, be questioned). But if we worked harder to let as many noncriminals as we can enter our country legally in an orderly manner, wouldn't it cut a significant portion of the market out of the illegal immigration racket? Everyone wants border security to keep bad people out of the country, even if they don't think a wall will provide best bang for the buck. (Emperor of China: We're going to build a big beautiful wall, and the Mongols are going to pay for it). But wouldn't we need less border security if we didn't put so many restrictions on legal immigration? Whatever happened to "Give me your tired, your poor?"

Gotta Serve Somebody

One commentator of Facebook implied  that in accepting the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity in Jesus Christ, Christians are more vulnerable to giving undue adulation to a political leader, such as Donald Trump. And my answer is, nothing could be further than the truth. Christians know what it takes for a human being to be worthy of the devotion that we give to Jesus, and no one human living or dead comes anywhere near that standard. But godless nations have historically given a kind of adulation to their human leaders that no Christian would ever dream of giving even to a divine right monarch. No American leader, even one as benighted and corrupt as Donald Trump (and as you know I have absolutely no use for him) has the record of butchery and cruelty that Mao Zedong (dubiously) achieved, yet the Communist government in China encouraged this kind of attitude toward their leader.

 The east is red, the sun is rising.
From China comes Mao Zedong.
He strives for the people's happiness,
Hurrah, he is the people's great saviour! 
(Repeat last two lines)

Chairman Mao loves the people,
He is our guide
to building a new China
Hurrah, lead us forward!
(Repeat last two lines)

The Communist Party is like the sun,
Wherever it shines, it is bright
Wherever the Communist Party is
Hurrah, the people are liberated!
(Repeat last two lines)
(Repeat first verse)

There is a temptation, when God is rejected, to replace devotion to God with devotion to some human leader. As Bob Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody. 

An argument for why death is not a bad thing

Here.  It is based on this statement of Epicurus.  The Epicurean argument was an argument against fearing death. This is the quote: “Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.

 From this it is easy to derive a Epicurean defense of abortion. 

1. Where the fetus is, death is not. 
2. Where death is, the fetus is not. 
So, why oppose abortion? 

One of my office-mates was a protege of Rosenbaum. When he explicated his position, another office-mate of mine asked, "So, on your view, why shouldn't I just kill you now?" His answer was "Only if you could do it painlessly." 

Shoving democracy down people's throats

Democracy is supposed to reflect the will of the people. What if the people get together and vote on it, and decide that they want a dictatorship. Does some greater power have the right to come in and say "No, the people have a right to a democracy, so we're going to shove one down everyone's throat, whether they want it or not?

Isn't this a description of American foreign policy in many cases? 

My right to my opinion

I have always been puzzled by the phrase "I have a right to my opinion." What does it mean? 

Are human rights fictions?

I wonder if people are clear on the idea of what human rights are. The idea of human rights is that I am entitled to something in virtue of being human independent of what the people with the biggest guns decide. What this means isn't as easy as it seems to get clear on. It seems to imply the existence of a moral fact.

If it's a human construct, then it seems to be a purely fictional concept. Unless there is some reality that makes it true that I have certain rights, then it is false that I "really" have them even though people with the biggest guns are denying it to me?

What was the UN declaring when it made the human rights declaration. Was it saying we wish countries would treat their citizens this way?

When is religious involvement in our political life inappropriate?

The movements supporting the rights of women, and the civil rights movements, were started within religious groups. It is not an accident that the Civil Rights movement was led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. The Declaration says that we were endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights (so, no creator, no rights?) Are these instances of the inappropriate intrusion into our democratic life? If not, what constitutes an appropriate, as opposed to an inappropriate insinuation of religion into our political life? If religion motivates some to oppose abortion or gay marriage, people think that's inappropriate. But when Jefferson makes a religious appeal to defend inalienable rights, or when King organizes the Montgomery bus boycott, or when religious groups organize for women's suffrage at Seneca Falls, this is OK? I'll bet the segregationists wished the King would stay in his pulpit and preach Jesus instead of getting involved in a political issue like civil rights. Is religious involvement in politics bad just in case I agree with it?