Re: Why do the Mormons bother with this newsgroup?

Paul Dean wrote (nearly a fortnight ago; the usual apologies...):

[much snipped...]

[me:]
>> If you know of situations in which the term "punishment",
>> or something in another language that could reasonably
>> be translated as "punishment", refers to something without
>> those features, then I would be interested to hear of them.

[Paul:]
> For example, it can be said that the punishment for over-eating is to
> be obese.

I think that would generally be agreed to be a bit of a
stretch (no pun intended), but actually it more or less
has the features I described anyway. The only difference,
admittedly an important one, is that there's no one else
making it happen or ordering it to be done.

But the NT's references to "punishment" consistently
make it clear that God is imposing whatever it is.
If someone says "Depart from me, you cursed, into
the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels",
it's pretty unambiguous on that point, no?

>> Is "childishly simplistic" a term of scorn?
>
> No.

I think maybe we need a new term to denote things that
you say that would be scornful if anyone else said them,
that are understood as scornful by the people to whom
they are addressed, but that are not in fact scornful.

> I wasn't clear. My point was that you could be the greatest prose
> write that ever lived and yet spell individual words in ways which
> look to other people like mistakes. But overall your novel was
> perfect and would have been less perfect without the mistakes. So
> God can be just while individual people are left without a real
> chance of salvation.

In general and on the whole, spelling mistakes make a
literary production worse. There are some circumstances
in which that isn't so; perhaps they aren't really mistakes
but correct spellings in what the reader eventually discovers
is a much-mutated future version of the language; perhaps
the narrator is a poor speller for some reason important
to the plot; perhaps there's some conceit about the book's
having been through a long history of unreliable copying
before it reaches the reader; I could go on at some length.
Fine so far.

So the question is whether God's justice *is* like the skill
of an author writing such a book. Or at least whether it
could be.

That certainly isn't so for *every* perfection. Good
mathematicians don't introduce errors into his or her
proofs to enhance their beauty. Good parents don't
abuse their children every now and then for the sake
of contrast. Good doctors don't let some patients die
even though they could give them several more years
of decent-quality life.

At one time it was traditional to claim that there are
three fundamental kinds of excellence: truth, beauty
and (moral) goodness. That's an oversimplification, but
perhaps a useful one. It seems to me that local imperfections
can enhance the whole only when the dominant sort of
perfection being considered is of the second sort.

Quali artifice perebimus.

>> I mean something like this: if God is just, then no one
>> should be entitled to say, at the point at which their
>> fate becomes irrevocable, "But wait! I never really had
>> the option of not ending up like this."
>
> I don't *feel* that situation would be contradictory. I can't quite
> explain why, but it looks like God is still just. Does the pot say to
> the potter, "why did you make me this way?"

No, because a pot is just a piece of clay; it has no mind,
no will, no preferences, no ability to suffer, and so on.

>> Ridiculous scenarios, one and all, but (if, as I expect,
>> you concede that in such ridiculous circumstances your
>> love might turn out not to have been quite so unconditional)
>
> I honestly don't know why you expected my answers to be 'no's -
> perhaps I don't know what you mean by 'love'. (The last example was
> unanswerable because it involved an actual change of identity rather
> than a change of knowledge about an identity.)

Fair enough. It seems to me that given sufficiently startling
new information about someone, we can in principle discover
that "X isn't the person I thought s/he was" even though it's
not X, but our understanding of X, that has changed.

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Pope Benedict XVI (fool or bigot ?)
    ... At any rate read the speech. ... It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, ... faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. ... devoted to something that did not exist: God. ...
    (rec.motorcycles)
  • Re: Reclaiming Atheism
    ... [about quasi-anthropomorphic language about God, ... I said some things about God. ... application of reason. ... If I've misunderstood what you're saying, ...
    (uk.religion.christian)
  • Re: Whats the Problem?
    ... I still haven't seen a good reason. ... I can't imagine what special effects have to do with prophecy. ... People in Biblical times supposedly saw God. ... evolution even when the data points away from them. ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Whats the Problem?
    ... I still haven't seen a good reason. ... You are back to employing double standards, Jim. ... tone when people patiently try to explain features of evolution or cosmology. ... And what effect of God can we see, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: What is Blind Faith?
    ... God's, or how anyone who believes in reason is his own god. ... It is the Baha'i Faith, ... spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely ...
    (soc.religion.bahai)