I thank you for the civility present in your last post, Nate. I was getting the impression that everyone was growing fatigued of my idiocy and I questioned the motivations I had behind my continued action. If you, at least, enjoy this, I'll drop in from time to time and inject some new ideas I might have come up with so that you can be more confident in your faith and worship God more devotedly.
MR. Nate wrote: I'm not arguing that desire free action is not action, I'm arguing that it is not the only moral type of action.
I'm glad you admit selfless action could exist, Nate, and be distinct from inaction; you just question now whether selfless action is moral, a very reasonable position to take. This isn't quite what I understood you to be arguing before and I was prepared to go into a whole extended comparison with creativity and how you don't choose intelligent thoughts, they appear half-formed, ready to be analyzed. I was going to say how true action could potentially be the same. Now I can skip this and directly question your definition of good.
You have certainly created an ideal definition of good in that it can never be directly questioned. If I understand correctly, you say that only God can truly know what is good and as our desires approach that of God, we will desire to do the work of God. Additionally, you say that all behavior is righteous in God's eyes if done for the glory of God and all God requires of us is faith and genuine remorse for the wrong that we have done in our lives since he cannot expect us to be perfect.
What is the purpose of having a definition of what is good? I claim one of the most important repercussions of knowledge of such a definition is the ability to create a system of ethics. What is ethics? It is the acknowledgment that some forms of competition are only negative--that if everyone partook in them society could not possibly function. I have talked about negative competition before in this thread and how it relates to self interest, but that is besides the point. What are some examples of negative competition? Theft, random murder, resource depletion, and arms races.
What does this have to do anything? If we have created a definition of good, it is only worthwhile if it simply leads to an ethical code. Your definition of good is one that is readily implemented (all desire is potentially righteous desire) but difficult to access (only God can know what is truly good). My definition is impossible to implement (you cannot will yourself to have no will once you already have free will) but easy to define (be selfless). We cannot possibly say that the Bible will accurately describe every minutiae of how to be ethical--it cannot list the correct action in every situation. You must love your neighbor as your self -but- only when your neighbor desires the same things as you do. You must treat people how they want to be treated -but- only when that is compatible with the interests of everyone else. The list of clarifications of this sort we can tack on to everything from the ten commandments to the gospels is endless. Additionally we cannot know how much of the Bible is God's message, word for word. How much is the partiality of the translation being used affecting our perception of the text? How much of the Bible is the work of ancient scholars revising the text so that it adhered more closely with their own personal belief? We cannot follow the mandate of any organized religion either--each branch of Christianity claims to follow God while having slightly different interpretations of morality. So what are we left with? Objective ethics that are impossible to know or define.
I'm not criticizing the actual definition of good you provide, I'm just saying it doesn't lead readily to objective ethics and is therefore less than ideal. You place less of an emphasis, however, on ethics because you believe (I'm assuming) that the concerns of this reality are partially irrelevant or illusory. You think devotion, faith, and remorsefulness are lofty enough goals for mankind and all God really needs you to have. I say these are all necessary to have but God requires perfection as well. This may be unrealistic and it may be pessimistic but I think that every unethical action we commit not only makes society less efficient but lessens the extent to which God's perfection permeates because of that loss of efficiency.
Onto more points, in defense of intuition, I claim that the more complex a purpose is, the less significant it is. When compared with the serenity and immortality of the universe, the arbitrary justifications of mankind seem trivial. The more convoluted a motivation is, the more absurd it seems in relation to the brief of flicker of time it is lasting for. This is why I think that the only purpose simple enough to be universal is intuition. The only reason why the universe exists is that it created itself "due" to intuition. The only purpose we need to pursue in life is to intuitively pursue God and good, objectively perfect, ethical action. Furthermore, one can only be infinitely happy when you desire no further amounts of happiness so infinite happiness can only be achieved when you have no desire.
I don't know how much any of this has helped you or not, Nate. I tried to come up with new arguments. I do not believe that starving alone in a cell is the highest attainment of religion. You try to eradicate your desires but you must also act ethically, I would argue that once you have eradicated all self interest you will do good for intuition's sake. I certainly do not believe that being a Buddhist monk is the greatest possible achievement one can make and knowing you think of me as one does not lend clarity to my thought. I realize that it is a paradox of sorts to desire to eradicate desire. I have already made mention of this many times in this thread (you cannot will yourself to have no will) and it is this paradox that leads me to believe that getting into heaven is nearly impossible and surely cannot be achieved through self exertion alone. The two main reasons I am not a Buddhist are that it believes Nirvana is possible through self effort alone and that it has no conception of God. You also point out that it seems pointless for God to create humanity with the goal of extinction, this is a valid point from your point of view but I do not believe God created life. I believe that life exists because it created itself due to consuming self interest and desire. God possessed intuition and so the universe "began" while life possessed desire and came into existence due to its want for life.
Finally, I would say that the motivation behind action does not need to be unnecessarily complex as you assert. Action doesn't need a whole host of emotions and desires to ponder over it and evaluate it in order to make it moral. The simplest purpose is the most significant and so intuition is the most significant, incorruptible motivation one could have for action. I still maintain that if you are truly selflessly intuitive, you would always be ethical in your actions, not self-centeredly apathetic. If you prefer the term faith, then I'd like to make it clear, if it wasn't already, that faith and intuition are practically the same concept. I shall return to this thread with more arguments when either I have thoroughly read the Gospels or when someone else makes an interesting point. Until that time, happy philosophizing!
by Frigidus on Tue Mar 04, 2008 11:49 am 
Anyways, I'd better get out of this thread before I dumb it down to much.
Frigidus
