Why is free will considered to be a good thing? That is the question that has been bothering me lately, and one that I don't have an answer to. But free will is constantly talked of as if its existence is a good, and its nonexistence is an evil. God must have free will, and if we didn't have free will we would not be able to love God or others. I suppose I disagree with the assumptions that God has to have free will and that there is much choice in loving others (even the self-sacrificing sort of love that people rail on about). Regardless, I'm curious about how people talk in these ways as if it is self-evidently good. That is a much more interesting conversation than the one about whether we have free will or not.
The arguments always seem to be, to some degree, dishonest. People don't look at the evidence and decide whether or not free will exists (actually, whether or not to believe that free will exists), they value or don't value free will and move forward accordingly. Additionally, it seems dishonest from the love side, because I don't think anyone starts there. The idea that free will is a good is wrapped into a whole range of assumptions about economics and morality, and how we can treat people. Basically, we want to believe in free will because it allows us to be cruel to others, or at least to see cruelty against others and believe that we are not responsible in some way to alleviate their suffering.
Ah, but if we don't believe in free will why would we believe ourselves responsible?! That is the other problem with the conversation, which supposes that its one or the other, or that the complexity of life can somehow be dropped into nice categories (compatabilist, incompatibilist). It all starts to seem like someone started it out as a joke, and everyone who heard the joke took it seriously, and the rest of us have paid for it ever since.
I suppose the only real good that can come from the conversation is talking about the consequences of believing or not believing in free will, and the values in assuming that it is good or not good. It doesn't really matter whether we have free will or not, just whether or not we believe we do.
I'm not sure that "free-will" ever means very much, but it really doesn't mean anything when applied to God.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
A few thoughts in reply to a commentor on my last post, and some connected issues.
1. Where is the impetus for thinking that God's priority is to be understood? Especially to be understood in some essential way, or as an absolute truth? The closest thing to an absolute understanding of God is touching Jesus' body. In general in the gospels Jesus speaks quite ambiguously and mysteriously, and confuses the people around him, and is quite content to do so. When he explains what his parables mean (the sower and his seeds, for instance) it really only adds another layer of ambiguity, and often he only explains things after his followers ask him to. What is important is how God's interactions with people in the bible are non-repeating and unique, and this includes Jesus' methods and interactions too. Repetition leads to essentialization, and difference ends it. God constantly reveals himself as different from his self. Perhaps the impetus for projecting a desire to be understood onto God is our drive to understand God, which is our drive to atheism, to minimize God and conceptualize him as a linguistic proposition, as an ideal.
Any use of language is giving up on absolute truth. Whenever God "speaks" it is always a limitation on God's self. Language doesn't have the capacity to hold truth, especially taking seriously what Jesus says when he identifies truth as person. Incidentally, the more I insist that God is a being and person rather than an ideal, the less it makes sense for me to have a relationship with Jesus. For some reason its very popular to talk about being humble and killing off yourself (take up that damn cross, son), and to talk about God humbling himself in the form of Jesus, but this is never extended to God humbling his own statements, or humbling truth. Probably because truth (as an ideal, and as the bible, not as a person) is worshiped more than God is ever worshiped.
1.5. To talk about the meaning, you always have to extend your argument to something outside of the text, something that isnt present, that isn't there, something that's added or subtracted. Give it a whirl: read anything at all, ask yourself what it means, and if you think you know, ask how you know and on what basis you're making your interpretation. The interpretation always extends to something outside, which means that meaning is a sort of glue from the outside that holds everything together, rather than an internal tissue.
Of course, it's ignorant to say that this means you just pick and choose, as if everyone isn't already picking and choosing. The whole process of interpretation is picking and choosing different patterns of repetition and difference to spin out some sort of ideal and some sort of argument. More significantly, there are still good interpretations and bad interpretations, the standard for which is probably more based on ability to persuade someone who has read the same text, rather than on adherence to any sort of genuine meaning in that text.
2. I've heard many different people make this sort of statement, "The bible is so amazing, every time I read it I find something new!" What that usually conveys to me isnt anything about the bible but something about the person. Usually it means that the person hasn't read very much at all, and whatever they have read they haven't reread. That sort of experience of discovery is the experience you will have reading anything, and it happens because when you return to the text you've already read it, you've heard other people talk about, and you are a different person than the last time you read it. It has nothing to do with a special or magical quality, or secret knowledge that is being revealed. But most people don't read, so why should they know that? The bible is worth reading and rereading, but so are thousands of other books.
3. Is God omniscient? When you talk about God, 'omniscience' has no meaning.
1. Where is the impetus for thinking that God's priority is to be understood? Especially to be understood in some essential way, or as an absolute truth? The closest thing to an absolute understanding of God is touching Jesus' body. In general in the gospels Jesus speaks quite ambiguously and mysteriously, and confuses the people around him, and is quite content to do so. When he explains what his parables mean (the sower and his seeds, for instance) it really only adds another layer of ambiguity, and often he only explains things after his followers ask him to. What is important is how God's interactions with people in the bible are non-repeating and unique, and this includes Jesus' methods and interactions too. Repetition leads to essentialization, and difference ends it. God constantly reveals himself as different from his self. Perhaps the impetus for projecting a desire to be understood onto God is our drive to understand God, which is our drive to atheism, to minimize God and conceptualize him as a linguistic proposition, as an ideal.
Any use of language is giving up on absolute truth. Whenever God "speaks" it is always a limitation on God's self. Language doesn't have the capacity to hold truth, especially taking seriously what Jesus says when he identifies truth as person. Incidentally, the more I insist that God is a being and person rather than an ideal, the less it makes sense for me to have a relationship with Jesus. For some reason its very popular to talk about being humble and killing off yourself (take up that damn cross, son), and to talk about God humbling himself in the form of Jesus, but this is never extended to God humbling his own statements, or humbling truth. Probably because truth (as an ideal, and as the bible, not as a person) is worshiped more than God is ever worshiped.
1.5. To talk about the meaning, you always have to extend your argument to something outside of the text, something that isnt present, that isn't there, something that's added or subtracted. Give it a whirl: read anything at all, ask yourself what it means, and if you think you know, ask how you know and on what basis you're making your interpretation. The interpretation always extends to something outside, which means that meaning is a sort of glue from the outside that holds everything together, rather than an internal tissue.
Of course, it's ignorant to say that this means you just pick and choose, as if everyone isn't already picking and choosing. The whole process of interpretation is picking and choosing different patterns of repetition and difference to spin out some sort of ideal and some sort of argument. More significantly, there are still good interpretations and bad interpretations, the standard for which is probably more based on ability to persuade someone who has read the same text, rather than on adherence to any sort of genuine meaning in that text.
2. I've heard many different people make this sort of statement, "The bible is so amazing, every time I read it I find something new!" What that usually conveys to me isnt anything about the bible but something about the person. Usually it means that the person hasn't read very much at all, and whatever they have read they haven't reread. That sort of experience of discovery is the experience you will have reading anything, and it happens because when you return to the text you've already read it, you've heard other people talk about, and you are a different person than the last time you read it. It has nothing to do with a special or magical quality, or secret knowledge that is being revealed. But most people don't read, so why should they know that? The bible is worth reading and rereading, but so are thousands of other books.
3. Is God omniscient? When you talk about God, 'omniscience' has no meaning.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
coherence + Christianity
When did coherence emerge as a value of Christianity? This question has been on my mind for some time.
Christ's teachings were not systematic or coherent in the way that contemporary theology and teachings attempt to be.
Paul (probably the most popular savior in Christianity, although Jesus is a close second) is similarly not very coherent or systematic in the way that people want him to be. This doesn't mean that either of their teachings were incoherent (as a code word for nonsense or babble.)
If Christ meant for his teachings to be systematic, coherent, we would certainly have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Second, Christ not writing his own teachings meant that he was quite willing for his teachings to be misappropriated, misrepresented, misremembered, represented incompletely and ignorantly. If Jesus were concerned with the truth of his teachings, in the way that contemporary teachers, preachers, theologians are concerned with the truth and coherence of their own, we would have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
If we say that Christ came to be abused, why don't we extend this to the abuse and forgetting of his teaching by his followers, by those who came after him? This doesn't begin with misintepretations of the gospels but the very act of writing the gospels.
I'm not trying to call the gospels into question, or projecting sinister intentions on the writers of the gospels, because I dont see any such sinister intentions. But Christ gave up some very important claims when he left his legacy with his followers!
I'm also interested in the way that valuing coherence leads to splintering and disunity, just as valuing truth as an absolute necessarily leads to division. The idea that we can know truth combined with the value for coherence (the total domination and reconciling of knowledge) is totally antithetical to the ecumenical drive. The steady splintering of the church over the millenia derives from this drive to coherence, from the will to truth, as Nietzsche puts it (or does he?).
So where did all this begin? Augustine? Canonization? Aquinas? Probably none of them, since they themselves aren't enough to explain why coherence has emerged as a value.
Christ's teachings were not systematic or coherent in the way that contemporary theology and teachings attempt to be.
Paul (probably the most popular savior in Christianity, although Jesus is a close second) is similarly not very coherent or systematic in the way that people want him to be. This doesn't mean that either of their teachings were incoherent (as a code word for nonsense or babble.)
If Christ meant for his teachings to be systematic, coherent, we would certainly have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Second, Christ not writing his own teachings meant that he was quite willing for his teachings to be misappropriated, misrepresented, misremembered, represented incompletely and ignorantly. If Jesus were concerned with the truth of his teachings, in the way that contemporary teachers, preachers, theologians are concerned with the truth and coherence of their own, we would have the Gospel According to Jesus Christ.
If we say that Christ came to be abused, why don't we extend this to the abuse and forgetting of his teaching by his followers, by those who came after him? This doesn't begin with misintepretations of the gospels but the very act of writing the gospels.
I'm not trying to call the gospels into question, or projecting sinister intentions on the writers of the gospels, because I dont see any such sinister intentions. But Christ gave up some very important claims when he left his legacy with his followers!
I'm also interested in the way that valuing coherence leads to splintering and disunity, just as valuing truth as an absolute necessarily leads to division. The idea that we can know truth combined with the value for coherence (the total domination and reconciling of knowledge) is totally antithetical to the ecumenical drive. The steady splintering of the church over the millenia derives from this drive to coherence, from the will to truth, as Nietzsche puts it (or does he?).
So where did all this begin? Augustine? Canonization? Aquinas? Probably none of them, since they themselves aren't enough to explain why coherence has emerged as a value.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
reward and punishment
There is no connection between offense and punishment, or action and reward. There is no connection in value, no way to make the two equivalent in value. Steal a car and get placed in jail? Where is the connection? What is the system of values that allows these equations to take place? Likewise, rewards. Spent 10 hours lifting boxes and receive 100 dollars? Where does the connection come from?
Seeing offenders punished is pleasurable, but pleasure in others suffering feels guilty, so we believe that they've deserved it! Hard work is a pain, and we want to believe that it means something. But there isn't a connection between hard work and reward (or virtue and reward).
The logic can be maintained by saying that there are natural consequences to certain behavior, but why would I want to maintain that logic?
Seeing offenders punished is pleasurable, but pleasure in others suffering feels guilty, so we believe that they've deserved it! Hard work is a pain, and we want to believe that it means something. But there isn't a connection between hard work and reward (or virtue and reward).
The logic can be maintained by saying that there are natural consequences to certain behavior, but why would I want to maintain that logic?
Monday, January 4, 2010
heroism and memory
Why value heroism in ethics? Where does it come from? In part, I think Christians have simply picked up the model of the bible itself, and the form of memory that is found within the text.
For years I have heard people talk about the bible as if it contains stories about ordinary people ("called to extraordinary things"). But this really isn't the case. We have very little in the text about peoples ordinary lives. They are introduced as ordinary figures, but they never remain that way, and we see only the heroic moments of their life.
Perhaps most obviously this takes place with the gospels, and Jesus himself. Why is there a twenty plus year gap in the record about his life? Presumably this is because the writers of the gospel believed that what happened in those years was unimportant. They privileged the spectacular events of his early and late life over the mundane events that took place between, and now we are forced to read poorly written inspirational novels to have a sense of what might have happened in those years.
To be part of the biblical story then, Christians are forced to see themselves as heroic figures. To the extent that they are not heroes, they are not part of the story. Or at least that seems to be the easiest response to the memory at work in the bible.
I am curious about the fact that people are so willing to find moral lessons and warnings in the texts and stories of the bible, but cant extend lessons to the form of the bible itself! In other words, you can talk about how awful a person was, but not how awful the letters and stories they wrote are. You can learn the mistakes from their lives, but not from the values at work in what they wrote. Obviously, I think that's a distinction that has no worth.
For years I have heard people talk about the bible as if it contains stories about ordinary people ("called to extraordinary things"). But this really isn't the case. We have very little in the text about peoples ordinary lives. They are introduced as ordinary figures, but they never remain that way, and we see only the heroic moments of their life.
Perhaps most obviously this takes place with the gospels, and Jesus himself. Why is there a twenty plus year gap in the record about his life? Presumably this is because the writers of the gospel believed that what happened in those years was unimportant. They privileged the spectacular events of his early and late life over the mundane events that took place between, and now we are forced to read poorly written inspirational novels to have a sense of what might have happened in those years.
To be part of the biblical story then, Christians are forced to see themselves as heroic figures. To the extent that they are not heroes, they are not part of the story. Or at least that seems to be the easiest response to the memory at work in the bible.
I am curious about the fact that people are so willing to find moral lessons and warnings in the texts and stories of the bible, but cant extend lessons to the form of the bible itself! In other words, you can talk about how awful a person was, but not how awful the letters and stories they wrote are. You can learn the mistakes from their lives, but not from the values at work in what they wrote. Obviously, I think that's a distinction that has no worth.
Monday, December 28, 2009
What I Read, and How I Did It
38 books total, which is quite a bit less than the 68 I read last year. But I have a feeling that I actually read more this year, just that more of my reading was consumed with short stories, excerpts, chapters, articles, plays (8 Shakespeare plays, for instance). I kept a partial log of all those, but it got exhausting after a while. The other part is that 19th century novels made up the largest bulk of what I read.
There are books here by people from England, Scotland, Japan, USA, Turkey, France, Germany and Australia. Only 3 were written by women. 21 were written in the 19th century, 11 in the 20th, 6 in the 21st.
The List
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
In Xanadu - William Dalrymple
Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo
Palm -of-the-Hand Stories - Yasunari Kawabata
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Lying Awake - Mark Salzman
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
The Language of God - Francis Collins
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Washington Square - Henry James
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Autobiographies - Charles Darwin
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Archive Fever - Jacques Derrida
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Europeans - Henry James
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz
Top Ten (in no particular order)
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
There were very few books that were easy to eliminate off-hand this year. The quality of what I read was quite high over the year! I might do another post on book covers, since that's something that's become more interesting to me over the last year. If they were in particular order, Moby Dick would be at the top as the best book I read over the whole year. In part its because its such a strange book, but especially when I was reading it in the middle of a dozen other novels in the 19th century, none of which are very similar to it at all, at least in form.
After last year's list, I made a list of what I wanted to read in the next year. Out of the ten books/authors listed I only ended up reading Dickens (much, much more Dickens than I expected) and Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. What about this year? First, I anticipate finishing Origin of Species, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and Discipline and Punish. But here are some other titles I have sitting on my shelves that I'd like to read this year :
2666 by Roberto Bolano.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill.
Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee.
Underground by Haruki Murakami
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro.
All the Names - Jose Saramago.
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado.
Funny that the last three were on the list last year, too!
There are books here by people from England, Scotland, Japan, USA, Turkey, France, Germany and Australia. Only 3 were written by women. 21 were written in the 19th century, 11 in the 20th, 6 in the 21st.
The List
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
In Xanadu - William Dalrymple
Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo
Palm -of-the-Hand Stories - Yasunari Kawabata
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Lying Awake - Mark Salzman
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
The Language of God - Francis Collins
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Washington Square - Henry James
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Autobiographies - Charles Darwin
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Archive Fever - Jacques Derrida
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Europeans - Henry James
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz
Top Ten (in no particular order)
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
There were very few books that were easy to eliminate off-hand this year. The quality of what I read was quite high over the year! I might do another post on book covers, since that's something that's become more interesting to me over the last year. If they were in particular order, Moby Dick would be at the top as the best book I read over the whole year. In part its because its such a strange book, but especially when I was reading it in the middle of a dozen other novels in the 19th century, none of which are very similar to it at all, at least in form.
After last year's list, I made a list of what I wanted to read in the next year. Out of the ten books/authors listed I only ended up reading Dickens (much, much more Dickens than I expected) and Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. What about this year? First, I anticipate finishing Origin of Species, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and Discipline and Punish. But here are some other titles I have sitting on my shelves that I'd like to read this year :
2666 by Roberto Bolano.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill.
Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee.
Underground by Haruki Murakami
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro.
All the Names - Jose Saramago.
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado.
Funny that the last three were on the list last year, too!
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
christianity, heroism, ethics
The highest priority in Christian ethics is to be a hero, to do something extraordinary and extraordinarily difficult. This begins with the altar call, which is a conversion from cowardice to heroism, weakness to strength.
The non-Christian is weak, constantly giving in to sin, continually unable to resist the desires of the self. The Christian life begins with that act of aggressive heroism, standing in the middle of a crowd of strangers, always as part of a minority of other heroic figures, and moving to the front of the stage where you are entered into the army.
Likewise, Christian ethics are always talked about with the taint of heroism: chastity and purity as total sexual abstinence, for instance. But hypothetical ethical situations are always made as extreme (heroic) as possible: if you went home one day and found a man raping your wife, would you kill him?! Will you sell everything you have and give it to the poor?! Would you go to hell for someone else? If God came to you today and asked you to be a missionary to cannibals in Africa, would you go? These questions are so absurd that even I couldn't come up with them on my own!
Christian ethics is a game to invent new sins which are even more precise and difficult to follow than the old ones. Is it a sin to burn music? Is anal sex a sin? Is it a sin to not give someone money when they ask? These questions are as useful--read, useless--as when someone asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Of course, Jesus didnt answer the question, because there was no way to answer the question without assenting to the assumptions behind it, which were flawed to begin with. The question of whether something is a sin or not is the same, it is a movement towards heroism, towards making the self as strong as possible.
The same is true of analytic philosophy, which always analyzes takes a situation to the greatest extreme. I suppose this is to have the most distance, to see a situation with the greatest clarity possible. But how many of us are going to go home one day and find our wives or husbands or children being raped, and have the power to commit or not commit murder? Very few. The trouble is also in creating relationships between that extreme situation and someone punching me in a bar when I mouth off, or say something by accident. Treating them as the same, when they're not. Part of the problem with heroic ethics is, obviously, that they cannot incorporate the mundane lives that all of us live, we will always be disappointed that our friends are not being raped, because how are we to exercise our heroic ethics if a heroic situation does not present itself?
Incidentally, this is not just legalism. Legalism is only possible when its supported by the heroic ideal which tells people that they should be heroes. And I think that heroism doesnt need legalism, even if they fit together very well.
God is actually never depended on. Christian ethical heroism depends upon the strength of the self not of God. The assumption is that when the Christian "falls into sin," it's because they are not depending on God, not "finding strength in God." I suspect that to some degree the reverse is true, that erasing "sin" from a person's life is not God's highest priority, that giving people heroic situations to practice their ethics in is not God's highest priority, that God is quite willing for people to sin, having higher and better aspirations for their lives. I suspect that God does not want everyone, including all who follow him, to be Christians.
In any case, the solution for me is not to interpret the mundane as heroic but to do away with the heroic ideal altogether. As long as your priority is to be free from sin, there is no chance that you are "depending on God." But of course, I feel embarrassed to even use that sort of language, since I don't think that it means very much.
Similarly, I dont think that hypothetical ethical situations are good for anything, except for heroic boasting, or heroic self-deprecation.
The non-Christian is weak, constantly giving in to sin, continually unable to resist the desires of the self. The Christian life begins with that act of aggressive heroism, standing in the middle of a crowd of strangers, always as part of a minority of other heroic figures, and moving to the front of the stage where you are entered into the army.
Likewise, Christian ethics are always talked about with the taint of heroism: chastity and purity as total sexual abstinence, for instance. But hypothetical ethical situations are always made as extreme (heroic) as possible: if you went home one day and found a man raping your wife, would you kill him?! Will you sell everything you have and give it to the poor?! Would you go to hell for someone else? If God came to you today and asked you to be a missionary to cannibals in Africa, would you go? These questions are so absurd that even I couldn't come up with them on my own!
Christian ethics is a game to invent new sins which are even more precise and difficult to follow than the old ones. Is it a sin to burn music? Is anal sex a sin? Is it a sin to not give someone money when they ask? These questions are as useful--read, useless--as when someone asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Of course, Jesus didnt answer the question, because there was no way to answer the question without assenting to the assumptions behind it, which were flawed to begin with. The question of whether something is a sin or not is the same, it is a movement towards heroism, towards making the self as strong as possible.
The same is true of analytic philosophy, which always analyzes takes a situation to the greatest extreme. I suppose this is to have the most distance, to see a situation with the greatest clarity possible. But how many of us are going to go home one day and find our wives or husbands or children being raped, and have the power to commit or not commit murder? Very few. The trouble is also in creating relationships between that extreme situation and someone punching me in a bar when I mouth off, or say something by accident. Treating them as the same, when they're not. Part of the problem with heroic ethics is, obviously, that they cannot incorporate the mundane lives that all of us live, we will always be disappointed that our friends are not being raped, because how are we to exercise our heroic ethics if a heroic situation does not present itself?
Incidentally, this is not just legalism. Legalism is only possible when its supported by the heroic ideal which tells people that they should be heroes. And I think that heroism doesnt need legalism, even if they fit together very well.
God is actually never depended on. Christian ethical heroism depends upon the strength of the self not of God. The assumption is that when the Christian "falls into sin," it's because they are not depending on God, not "finding strength in God." I suspect that to some degree the reverse is true, that erasing "sin" from a person's life is not God's highest priority, that giving people heroic situations to practice their ethics in is not God's highest priority, that God is quite willing for people to sin, having higher and better aspirations for their lives. I suspect that God does not want everyone, including all who follow him, to be Christians.
In any case, the solution for me is not to interpret the mundane as heroic but to do away with the heroic ideal altogether. As long as your priority is to be free from sin, there is no chance that you are "depending on God." But of course, I feel embarrassed to even use that sort of language, since I don't think that it means very much.
Similarly, I dont think that hypothetical ethical situations are good for anything, except for heroic boasting, or heroic self-deprecation.
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