Stages Of Grief

[Jimmy]

Well, I just wanted to say, it was a good post Jimmy.

 

Thanks for the compliment. It is rather ironic given that the webmaster implicitly refused my request to be 'declassified' instead of being called an apologist - which I certainly am not; I am also not such a fan of being immediately placed in the camp of the enemy. On a less bitter note, I did notice on your profile that your interests are nearly perfect except for the fact that you neglected scotch - it's too bad that you are no longer under grace (read: ironic parody)

 

With all due respect, I think that you may have slightly missed my point. I am arguing that notions such as stealing cannot be abstracted from concrete living persons and their relationship. That is, you cannot consider 'stealing' to have any existence apart from the persons who are involved in the action (victim, perpetrator, etc.). 'Stealing' would come into existence as an act of this kind by virtue of the inter-relationship. Take the silly ethical quandary forced upon first year philosophy students: guy's wife needs medicine and shopkeeper will only sell it at a high price that guy can't afford. Guy acquires the meds without purchasing and getting permission from the shopkeeper. If you press people, they will not consider this a prosecutable act of 'stealing.' If the action is indeed stealing is the very subject of debate in court. Lawyers invoke characteristics of the interrelationships among participants to decide what the act is. You still seem to be abstracting 'stealing' from lived life and relationships and I don't think this is a good move.

 

Glad for the opportunity to post!

Jimmy

[Ouroboros]

Thanks for the compliment. It is rather ironic given that the webmaster implicitly refused my request to be 'declassified' instead of being called an apologist - which I certainly am not; I am also not such a fan of being immediately placed in the camp of the enemy.

Hmm. Did you change your "What Gods" in the profile? Because, usually that answer is reflected in the choice of the icon.

 

On a less bitter note, I did notice on your profile that your interests are nearly perfect except for the fact that you neglected scotch - it's too bad that you are no longer under grace (read: ironic parody)

Hah! I amended the profile. Can't let such an important item we forgotten.

 

With all due respect, I think that you may have slightly missed my point. I am arguing that notions such as stealing cannot be abstracted from concrete living persons and their relationship. That is, you cannot consider 'stealing' to have any existence apart from the persons who are involved in the action (victim, perpetrator, etc.). 'Stealing' would come into existence as an act of this kind by virtue of the inter-relationship. Take the silly ethical quandary forced upon first year philosophy students: guy's wife needs medicine and shopkeeper will only sell it at a high price that guy can't afford. Guy acquires the meds without purchasing and getting permission from the shopkeeper. If you press people, they will not consider this a prosecutable act of 'stealing.' If the action is indeed stealing is the very subject of debate in court. Lawyers invoke characteristics of the interrelationships among participants to decide what the act is. You still seem to be abstracting 'stealing' from lived life and relationships and I don't think this is a good move.

Interesting. I will think about it before I answer or add anything. I don't think there's any "morals" that lies outside the human mind or life, so I have to see where we missed each other here...

[Jimmy]

Greetings Han,

Let me try to be a little more clear (I find that I get lazy when I post).

 

"Even the meta-narrative/universal moral code has to be interpreted subjectively."

- This is the line that most clearly betrays your propensity to abstract notions like 'stealing.' You still seem to be clinging to the notion of an abstracted moral code that is separate from life as lived by use subjectivity. Your use of the term 'subjectively' implies that the moral code has some sort of objectivity - i.e. something with some sort of objectivity is interpretted subjectively. Do you think that you may be implicitly contradicting yourself by the way that you are invoking and clinging to the classic Cartesian subject-object dualism?

 

"I don't think there's any "morals" that lies outside the human mind or life"

-This is also indicative of the S-O dualism I mentioned above. I am not arguing for some sort of solipsistic notion of morality. My point is that moral notions only have meaning and existance in a concrete community of persons in relationships. Furthermore, this existance is not reified outside of the corporeal/embodied practices of living. I don't know if you are much of a reader but a friend of mine wrote an article last year in the journal Theory and Psychology entitled 'Culture, Emotion, and the Normative Structure of Reality'. This may illuminate why I think Descartes does you wrong.

 

 

In terms of the "What God's" section in my profile: I changed from 'God the Father, Son, & HS' after the response from the webmaster to whatever it says now. I had some other good ideas for this section but most of them involved the sort of thing that will get a guy kicked off the site. Ahh: sic transit gloria mundi.

 

Best,

Jimmy

[Bobo]

I read your post about the CCC leader telling you that you cannot be moral without any meta-narrative. I think that this is a common notion held in common by many Christians (I would bet that it stems back to C.S. Lewis' 'Mere Christianity') and I think it is completely wrong whether one is religious or not.

 

For the sake of maintaining the highest standards of accuracy, this man was actually a Reformed Presbyterian Church minister who happened to be at the CCC meeting. He was in no way affiliated with CCC. (I'd hate to create a snowball effect of this being repeated falsely over and over again.) But I digress...

 

 

The meta-narrative/universal moral code is fundamentally unethical. A meta-narrative implies that right action can be spelled out propositionally and holds true for all people in all situations. However, life is messy (i.e. too complicated to be spelled out propositionally) and universal moral codes always break down and end up reflecting injustice. The reason for this break down is, I think, that the uniqueness and variability of real persons is subverted in order to put people into categories. These categories are of course defined by the moral code. As such, instead of respecting persons in their own right they are treated as belonging to a category. I would go so far as to say that it is the meta-narrative that always becomes the means by which people are dehumanized and turned into mere objects like rocks and trees (see note 1 below) that can be manipulated without regard to their well-being. In a crude statement: universal moral codes/meta-narratives are the very things that enable bigotry.

 

Y'know, I didn't think about it that way. But you're absolutely right.

 

But, as many fundamentalist Christians (especially the six-day creationists) love to point out to make us liberals squeamish, Darwinism does have some racist baggage. In a way, the Holocaust stemmed from an unnatural marriage of Darwinism and fundamentalism.

 

Allow me to excerpt from a fundie website:

 

In [Hitler's] chapter [in Mein Kampf] entitled "Nation and Race," he said, "The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he, after all, is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development (Hoherentwicklung) of organic living beings would be unthinkable." A few pages later, he said, "Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live."

 

http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/hit.htm

 

 

To act ethically, we need to take an approach to people that is based on dialogue. When one understands the other, one comes to see what is compelling and meaningful to the other and thereby come to see what we dispositionnally enact in a taken-for-granted manner (crudely put: our biases are made visible to by dialogue with others). One can see oneself through the eyes of the other and act upon the knowledge of: (1) our own enriched self-understanding via the other, (2) our understanding of the other, and (3) the ways in which these two understandings interrelate (see note 2 below).

 

Well said.

 

Note that this is not a live-and-let-live philosophy but rather the commitment to engage in mutual understanding followed by judgment - that can of course be revisited. In short, ethical actions are fundamentally interpersonal.

 

This runs totally counter to the idea of vice laws, such as those against drug possession and prostitution. Not quite sure where I shake out here.

 

Of course, these laws might be justified with the "no man is an island" argument. I have experienced the negative effects of loved ones' vices, so this might be persuasive for me.

 

BTW, on a more personal note. I have read a little bit of philosophy and a lot of social science. From my reading I would position myself by saying that I think that there is something salvageable in Christianity. (I think that one needs to categorically reject fundamentalism and take a very critical look at the socio-historical development of evangelical Christianity).

 

What exactly can you salvage? I've wanted to pose this to a liberal Christian for a long time.

 

As I began to move away from evangelical Christianity, one of the first steps was to explore mainline/liberal denominations. (Granted, I live in Indiana, so the mainliners here are more like evangelicals in blue states.) But I kept going back to Paul's statement:

 

"And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men."

 

I Corinthians 15:17-19

 

So, for me, because I could no longer believe in the resurrection, I could no longer be a Christian of any sort. Lots of people in all religions (Gandhi, for example) admire Jesus, but the thing that distinguishes Christianity is that is DEIFIES him.

[Jimmy]

Hi Bobo,

I am sorry at my delay in responding to your post. I have been trying to formulate a shortish response that is not trite. My search has involved exploring the question: Is Christianity, and thereby the Christian experience, subjective? (i.e. is experience something locked up in our heads). A tangental question is: Is not Christianity a cultural creation? I think that these are the most damaging questions to Christianity in pop culture today. Addressing these questions involves the exploration of the notion of subjectivity and the way in which we can create our worlds of experience. The common notions embodied in pop expressions today are often derrivitatives of historical philisophical forms. The problem is that, when you get down to these philisophical forms, the notion of creating one's own world is at odds with scientism - but both are invoked simultaneously in the pop critique of Christianity (this critique has not been so helpful in developing my understanding because it is self-contradicting). I have come to reject the distinction between subject and object (i.e. subjective and objective) because it cannot stand up to critisism from phenomenologists (e.g. Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein). You can see where I am gogin with this: the heart of your inquiry is an epistomological one: How do we know what we should keep? I don't think that this is much different from the general question of "How do we know anything?" This is all farily technical and it is not formulated in an apologetic argument. I need some time to put it together in an understandable package: it is not such an easy thing to articulate because it has involved a lot of thought and reading. Can you grant me a bit of patientce to finnish up some reading that I am doing this summer?

 

So as not to leave you empty handed, I will say that I think that the salvagable thing in Christianity is precisely Christ's diety. This is the central notion of the tradition and I don't think I'd be a Christian if I denied it. I didn't come to this conclusion through biblical revelation etc. but through study of social science and philosophy - especially ethics. My thought is largely derrivative of the philosopher who inspired the ethical system that I laid out above: M. Bakhtin. His philosophy has been called dialogism. Christ, in the gospels (accepted and otherwise) is profoundly dialogical. If you are willing to wait for me to form some sort of defence (or you can respond to this post and I can work it out in talk), I would recommend that you check out Bakhtin's 'Towards a Philosophy of the Act.' To understand the link between dialogism and diety, I would recommend that you check out Martin Buber.

 

For now,

Jim