Posted by LOL on October 02, 2013 at 17:31:33
In Reply to: Re: A Truth For Today posted by LOL on October 02, 2013 at 16:37:42:
Okay, I just read some of the older exchanges. As someone mentioned, you do tend to sink things to a strange level. Nevertheless, I will humor you as that was probably not the reply you wanted.
>>>>We do not have to b e God to k n o w what is his perspective in the big and important things in life. Why? Because we have access to information about it.
Fine, but as mere humans, we can only interpret information and derive its application by assigning categorizations such as good/bad or godly/ungodly, and in turn communicate these conclusions to other humans by means of media, such as language, which in itself is subject to the limitations of social constructs and so forth.
>>>>Neither do you have to be another human being in order to know what is right and wrong for that person, on the large issues and even lots of small ones.
You strike me as harboring a whole lot of cult-like thinking, but as I said, I will humor you.
On smaller issues, you could certainly tell a child not to play with a knife and decide that it's too dangerous an activity and take the knife away from the child.
On larger issues, this is problematic.
If you truly believe in free will and individual accountability, then you also know that people ultimately have to arrive at a realization of right and wrong and decide for themselves. If you could truly decide right and wrong _for_ others, which you can't, any appearance of conformity with your precepts on would amount to mere pretense and imposture.
You may assert otherwise all you want, but in reality, you can at most share that something is right or wrong in "your" eyes, based on your knowledge and experience (interpretation of information and empirical data). As an extension to that, you could play the fear card and invoke the power of the collective and communicate that something is either in accordance with, or goes against, the prevailing collective wisdom, or social conventions - family, religious, legal or otherwise. You could communicate the consequences of their actions.
However, utilizing the collective to determine right and wrong for others is not without problem. I'm sure you could name countless situations in which others deemed something to be "right" for a particular individual, but it turned out to be very detrimental to the individual and to others. Killers have walked free based on technical legalities. The innocent have been wrongly executed.
>>>>And yes, there is such a thing as a universal moral code, not subject to each and every individual.
Then it would still be up to us, as individuals, to decipher and appreciate such a code, to understand it for ourselves. Some may discern the existence of a universal spiritual construct. Others may value such a code but argue that such a construct is absent in nature and that moral codes have all been historically inconsistent and are in fact a social constructs, and so forth.
>>>>According to your own argument all these things must needs be up to each individual and his empirical set of data, mustn’t it? How can you then make these things absolute categorical affirmations?
You answered your own question.
What I've written here either resonates as true to you, or it doesn't - no skin off my back. I certainly cannot "decide" for you that it is true, or "know" that you are wrong not to believe me.
>>>>Does that defeat your own argument? Or make it oxymoronic, meaningless?
LOL! Hell, no.
If I had written something like "The absolute truth about this sentence is that there is no such thing as absolute truth," then yes. That's pretty much what Tony Evans did, although he took two sentences to hang himself.