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Permalink Reply by Jaume on August 9, 2010 at 11:17am

Nelson: the premise is that "they" are Christians who believe in a Christianity that we would recognize as Christianity in any sense.

The premise I referred to was actually your assumption that "the bible is supposed to be THE source for objective morals", even for those who practice a selective reading of the Bible. That's not always true. Indeed, some just read what they want to read and turn an hypocritical blind eye on everything that annoys them, and on those I agree with you. But I'd dump them in the other category I listed earlier ("those who let scripture tell them what morality should be", to quote myself - whether these choose to accept the Bible in its totality or not.)

Some do it in a more critical way, they're the most interesting of the bunch, and the ones I've been talking about all along. And, since the discussion is about theologians (people who're supposed to reflect on biblical issues), I think their views are more worth considering here than the cafeteria cherry-picking Christians' you're thinking about - who often don't have any of their own.

what does Etty Hillesum's personal view of god have to do with this when that god clearly has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity?

Because Hillesum was heavily influenced by Christian thought and thus can't easily be written off as a non-Christian thinker, because ideas evolve, and because one doesn't have to assume that a fundamentalist view of Christianity, based on a corpus of texts that weren't assembled before Constantine, is the only correct one (or one would have to assume that early Christians weren't true Christians as well.)

how does it undermine what i was saying about Christians who do what i described to

It doesn't really undermine it, I just think you over-generalized, and you did put different kinds of people in the same bag. What you described (cherry picking) can be done for different motives. That was my point.

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Permalink Reply by Doug Reardon on August 5, 2010 at 12:37pm

They don't believe that they are using "their own moral intuitions" but that god has 'spoken' to them to 'know' what is proper.

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Permalink Reply by Jānis Ķimsis on August 5, 2010 at 11:23am

Lately, it seems to me that religion and philosophy are just simmering in their own juices while science takes bigger and bigger chunks of reality away from their influence.

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Permalink Reply by kamana kapu on August 8, 2010 at 10:32pm

The difference between Spirit and religion is that whereas in Spirit All are Equal, in religion the dogma is that None are Equal! None are equal to those at the top the pyramid, none are equal to those on the second level except those at the top, none are equal to those at the next level down except those that are above, and so on to the bottom. It is important to note that all of the entities on the pyramid are males. Religion, therefore, is a fraud developed by the human male and only for the human male. Religions No. ! enemy, No. 1 target and No. 1 victim is the human female and their children.

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