Hello Dano
Sorry about the lateness of this reply. Sunday is the busiest day of the week for me, and Monday is my recovery/family day (and online flying day - trying to master the KI-61 is proving to be an interesting challenge this tour). I'll try to get to some of the other posts tonight, they are all fascinating in their own way.
Originally posted by Dadano
Yes. It was good.
To you, it was good.
It isn't good anymore is it?
Of course not. You have grown, evolved and matured. In this case, I have simply grown, evolved and matured at a faster rate than you did. I would guess about age 12 or 13 I would have seen this as a bad thing, as something I would not do myself.
Dano, I'm sure you realize this, but if this
was good, but
now isn't, then ultimately there is no such thing as good and evil, at least not in the real ontological sense. At best all they are, are descriptions for the way we feel about certain actions at a given moment in time. Therefore helping an old lady or mocking her, famine relief or genocide are neither moral nor immoral, the just
are.
Saying that my position on what was good evolved or matured would actually imply some sort of development or advance, but from what to what? According to evolutionary biologists, evolution has to do with survival of individual organisms and the maximizing of our ability to reproduce (hence Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene") and certainly my point of view regarding Theism and Theists has not
helped my chance of survival - quite the opposite actually, if I were a Salmon I've gone from swimming with the stream to swimming against it. Also the social Darwinists have shown us that evolutionary thought doesn't make us nicer to the elderly, gnerally it makes us more likely to get rid of them to make room for the fit and productive.
In any event, my position did not evolve, it changed radically and that fairly quickly. I went from hating God and his followers to Loving Him and Loving them as well. I went from desiring to get even with my enemies, to desiring good for them and praying for them and trying hard to love them. I moved from darkness to light, and from living according to what was good in my own rebellious eyes, to living according to an absolute set of rules laid down by a transcendent God (albeit imperfectly).
The funny thing is, when the scales fell from my eyes (read Acts 9 if you want to know what I'm talking about, my experience is similar to that of Paul) I realized that for my whole life I had been living in opposition to what I knew to be true and like Stalin on his death bed, shaking my fist in the face of God, and spitting on his law, his people, and his mercy. My psychological make-up during that time was described fairly well by Paul in Romans 1:18-32.
I'll bet that at heart you realize that there really are absolutes out there as well, that you instinctively know, even if you deny the possibility, that there really is Good and Evil and that they don't change according to our whims. I'll even bet that when you do certain things, your conscience challenges you, and although you may suppress or ignore the alarm at times, a small voice (no, not the well-dressed Cricket) tells you,
this is wrong or
you should do this.
That conscience that speaks to us is the remnant of the image of God in man, we don't discover it by observing the universe, it just is. That image may have been obscured by the fall, but its still there none-the-less and we cause ourselves nothing but psychological trauma and emotional pain when we go against it. Our dependence on Therapy and Prozac and the scores of similar meds we run to are part of the high national price of everyone doing what seems good to them, and kidding themselves that good and evil don't exist.
- SEAGOON
