Conference lgp30::christian-perspective

    RE: .0   Bob,
     
                     Good Lord Bob!  About 99% of all that went right over
    my head.  I'm sure its great stuff, but right now I'm feeling kinda
    dumb.  :-}   Sorry....
    
    Dave

OK, Dave, in that case just answer this question "Does justice pay"?

				-- Bob

    RE: .2   Bob,
    
                     An interesting choice of words.  My gut reaction is to
    say no.  Justice should be its own reward and not something we do
    expecting to be rewarded...even though we might be.
    
    
    Dave

Dave,

Let's say that you are a Czechoslovakian dissident in 1980 trying to persuade a
colleague to defy the authorities.  (The government wants your colleague to
write a series of articles praising communism, and you want him to refuse.)
You tell him, "It would not be just for you to write these articles", and he
asks "Does justice pay?"  What do you tell him?

Is justice really its own reward?  Do you hope to be rewarded in an afterlife
for anything that you do (or believe) here on earth?

				-- Bob

    RE: .4  Bob,
    
                   Justice *HAS* to be its own rewards on this earth full
    of imperfect people.  I would tell the individual that it is the long 
    term benifits of justice that counts....not the short term in this
    case.
    
                   Let me ask you a question Bob.  Lets say that Jesus is
    real and God is real.  All that is in the bible is real...including the
    promise of eternal life thru Jesus Christ.  What is eternity compared
    to this short life we have.  If God sacrificed his only son just so we
    could have this promise?...is that justice?  If he died for your sins
    and not his own?  Where is the pay for Jesus?
    
                            
    Dave

Re: .5 Dave

>                   Justice *HAS* to be its own rewards on this earth full
>    of imperfect people.  I would tell the individual that it is the long 
>    term benifits of justice that counts....not the short term in this
>    case.
    
Aren't you contradicting yourself?  First you say that justice is its own
reward and then you say that it has long term benefits.

>                   Let me ask you a question Bob.  Lets say that Jesus is
>    real and God is real.  All that is in the bible is real...including the
>    promise of eternal life thru Jesus Christ.  What is eternity compared
>    to this short life we have.

Obviously eternity would be far more important than life here on earth.  But
who gains eternal life?  Is there anything we can do in this life to ensure
that we will receive our eternal reward?

>  If God sacrificed his only son just so we
>    could have this promise?...is that justice?

Are you asking for my opinion?  No, I wouldn't say that it is justice.  If
God can do anything, why did Jesus have to die?  Why not just forgive us and
get it over with?

>  If he died for your sins
>    and not his own?  Where is the pay for Jesus?
    
You'd have to ask him that...

				-- Bob

    
    I have a question.  If life here on earth is so unimportant, then
    what the heck are we all doing here?  Why would God create all these
    spirits and send them into the world, and then have them only focus
    on getting the heck out?
    
    Carole

    re:  Carole - Why incarnation?
    
    Carl Jung, the Late Thoughts section of his Memories, Dreams,
    Reflections, addressed just this question.  While these were not
    intended to be final statements but something on the order of
    speculation, I found them interesting.
    
    He related a vision he'd had of his father, about nine months before
    his mother's death.  (His father had died many years previously.)  Dad
    was asking son Carl, now an eminent phychologist, about marital
    psychology.  They (Carl's parents) had had a very difficult marriage,
    and apparently Dad knew nothing more than he'd known when he died. 
    However, he foresaw a need to relate to his wife after she left the
    earth plane, and wanted to know the latest.
    
    In another instance, a person who had had a fairly ordinary life had a
    dream a few days before she died, in which she was teaching a class or
    leading a discussion among discarnate (dead) people who were
    passionately interested in what she'd accomplished in that lifetime.
    
    Jung's tentative conclusion in all of this was that (if I can relate it
    well) we have this three- (or four-) dimensional existence because it
    is an ideal medium for what one might call progress.  That without
    incarnation and it's attendant feelings of separation from the Godhead,
    we would grow slowly, if at all.  
    
    This certainly fits with human psychology.  We're all familiar with
    cases of arrested development in persons who are too closely tied to
    Mom or Dad.  
    
    DR

    Re: Basenote
    
>	... Havel's reversal of the precedence of Being to Consciousness
>	amounted to saying that at least some of what Marx thought
>	superstructural - including our sense of being under unconditional
>	moral obligations - cannot be explained in terms of socioeconomic
>	pressures.  Havel went on to speak of "respect for the order of Being,
>	where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where,
>	they will be properly judged."  "The interpreter or mediator," he
>	continued, "between us and this higher authority is what is
>	traditionally referred to as the human conscience."
    
    I like Havel already.  I agree that Beingness takes precedence to
    consciousness, as Being has "eternal" qualities, and consciousness is
    relative to the time and place and circumstance.  Being can change
    location but cannot be changed itself, a Man here will be a man
    elsewhere.  But consciousness is relative.  
    
    To the extent that Being is of an eternal quality, it necessarily
    follows that there are certain eternal laws, or guidelines or
    frameworks in which Being can and must exist.  And it is these laws,
    guidelines and frameworks which cause the manifestation of what is
    known as "conscience".  
    
>	"Absolute" here means something like "such that I can only live with
>	myself if...."  To say that one has an absolute obligation, in this
>	first sense, is to say "Here I stand; I can do no other."  In the
>	second sense, however, "absolute" means something like "objectively
>	wrong," where "objectively" has the force of "wrong whether or not you,
>	or anybody else, can see its wrongness - yet you would only *fail* to
>	see its wrongness if your mind were clouded by sin, prejudice, emotion,
>	impure motives, or unfortunate cultural conditioning."
    
    Indeed, when the author here says that ""absolute" here means something
    like "such that I can only live with myself if..." it is referring to
    the eternal Being of self existance, or "I couldn not live with the
    BEING me if I did such and such".  
    
    The "Objectively wrong" act which has force whether one realizes it or
    not, is a concept I also believe in, and is inseparable from the
    "Absolute", in that Being, again, is eternal and whether one believes
    Being is eternal or not, the laws, guidelines and frameworks of BEING
    remain in effect and the same for all BEINGS.  
    
    Whether by "unconditional obligation" (i.e.knowing who you are and
    regardless of circumstances not forgetting who you are), or by
    "objective factuality" (i.e.seeing is believing, the only reason I do
    so is because I saw this happen before), the bottom line "metaphysical
    foundations" are indeed essential to ethics.  Who you think you are,
    your nature and BEING, has much to do with what one considers ethical
    or Right Thinking.
    
    Playtoe  
    
    

 
     I suppose that justice pays if your are willing to consider
   being tortured, imprisoned or shot as payment. The truth is that
   these are frequently the payment for acting in a way consistent
   with what might generally be regarded with being just. 
     There is a chapter titled, "A Nation Of Rabbits" in Solzhenitzyn's
   "The Gulag Archipelago". In it the author lays a lot of the blame for
   the terror of the Stalin years on the Soviets themselves. People remained
   silent, they willing cooperated with and worked for the state security
   organizations, they staffed the administrative organizations that
   rounded people up and they staffed the camps themselves. It took millions
   of people to send millions of people off to the Gulag.
     If the Soviet people had refused to participate the nightmare of the
   Stalin years would not have been possible. 
     The question of absolutism versus relativism seems only to apply as
   long as there enough people willing to wield the means of oppression
   or remain silent while other do.
     The recent events in Eastern Europe are a good example of the sudden 
   change that can occur when people refuse to participate in their own
   oppression.

                                                                  Mike 
     

    RE: 10
    
>     I suppose that justice pays if your are willing to consider
>   being tortured, imprisoned or shot as payment. The truth is that
>   these are frequently the payment for acting in a way consistent
>   with what might generally be regarded with being just. 
    
    I won't ask you to explain this, if you care to it might help, but at
    this point I don't quite catch the meaning here.  I think the confusion
    lies in "what might generally be regarded with being just."  Human
    conception of "justice" often falls short of "MAAT" or Divine Justice
    (as advanced by the Egyptians).  Even as the human conception of "Good"
    falls short of divine "Good", as Jesus said, "Why calleth thou me GOOD,
    only one is GOOD, God in Heaven".  And, IMO only one is JUST, God in
    Heaven.  
    
    We may, or may not, try and do our best, or be good and just, but we
    invariably fall short, because our primary concern as humans is "self
    preservation"...whereas this is not God's primary concern, of course,
    so his Goodness and Justice is "absolute", and ours is "relative".
    
>     The question of absolutism versus relativism seems only to apply as
>   long as there enough people willing to wield the means of oppression
>   or remain silent while other do.
    
    I don't agree, of course.  Absolutism of JUST is not even approached by
    your example of Stalin years, it concerns strictly the relative aspect
    of just.  I would restate the above sentence as follows:
    
    "The question of absolutism versus relativism seems only to apply as
    long as there are people vying between the will of God and the will of
    the State (i.e. between "do unto to others as you would have them do
    unto" and "do unto to others before they do unto you")."
    
    Eastern Europeans, Russians, being essentially a "godless" people,
    allowed Stalin to rule the day because they knew not or believed in no
    higher authority.  The absolute vs relative opposition can only occur
    where the two extremes of God vs man exist.  There must be a basis for
    "absolute" conceptions is order for there to be a conflict with the
    "relative".  The Stalin years example is on a "collective/social"
    level, but on an individual level, each citizen, unless they had a
    belief in God they could not grapple with the thought of defying
    Stalin's will (man's will).
    
    Playtoe

     Playtoe:
     
              A quick response for you. What I meant by my first
             paragraph was that insistence on standards of just
             behavior such as basic human rights for one's self
             and others can land you in a in prison or in a hole
             in the ground depending on where you happen to be.


                                                               Mike
              

Note 31.481
>    I wouldn't
>    say, let's not pass a law against rape if we don't have the jail
>    facilities.  If rape is wrong then as a society we should try and stop
>    it and bear the responsiblity of the consequences of that decision.

Paul,

	I appreciate your efforts to demonstrate genuine respect of differing
perspectives.  I would say that it is because of you that I am beginning to
grasp what the absolutist perspective is all about.

	I do believe rape is wrong.  I believe rape is *always* wrong.  I
don't believe there is *ever* an exception.  There can never be a good or
reasonable excuse to rape.  So, at least on this issue, I might be classified
an absolutist.

	However, I am not so certain how effective incarceration is in
preventing the rapist from ever raping again, or even if that is what jail
is intended to do.  And I'm not certain that incarcerating the perpetrator
makes anything better for the rape victim, though I concede it does provide
some protection for the victim, at least, temporarily.

Richard