Ahhh, here we have a young specimen of the Nappy-Rash Shrew that has been disturbed in its habitat. Observe closely as this specimen defends its position by attempting to muddy the water by spraying arbitrary wikiguesses from its colon. It accompanies this defence mechanism by trying to scare its natural predators with high-pitched yelping while it digs itself deeper into the muck that constitutes its nesting ground...
Napoleon Ier wrote:No, I'm trying to tell you Finnis isn't the supreme authority on natural law.
Obv. Philosophy tends not to lend itself to 'supreme authorities'.
However, you'll struggle to find a 'natural lawyer' who has disagreed with the basic tenets of NLNR since its publication. Why will you struggle to find such a person? Well, it's because the work is such a phenomenally good update of the natural law tradition that nobody who supports it as a theory actually disagrees with it in any substantial way.
What's the point of the above your feeble mind enquires? Well allow me to tell you: The point is that the man who natural lawyers regard as their leading light does not support your bizarre opinions on the subject, and neither do any other respected jurisprudence scholars who believe in natural law as a doctrine.
In other words, you don't know what you're talking about, and anybody who does know anything about the topic thinks you are wrong.
How are those apples anyway?
Napoleon Ier wrote:The fact you've heard of John Finnis, maybe looked at his name on a wikipedia page after googling natural law, doesn't suddenly make him the only authority on a subject.
Heh heh, I'm afraid that I'm ever so slightly better acquainted with Professor Finnis than that... But please, feel free to argue in ignorance of who he is, and the importance that his works have in this field of human understanding.
I appreciate that in most subject areas the work of one individual scholar does not dictate the intellectual landscape. But your insistance on attempting to belittle Finnis' importance to natural law is a lot like trying to belittle Albert Newton's significance to motion physics. His works are simply so important to the topic that it's impossible to conduct a sensible debate without arguing inside their paradigm; I appreciate that you don't know anything about natural law, so this error on your part will take some time to dawn on you. But you really are sounding astoundingly ignorant here.
Am I impressing this on you sufficiently by the way? Do you understand the scale of your errors in this field? I'm really not quite sure that you're aware how enormously ignorant you sound to people who know the first thing about this topic.
Napoleon Ier wrote:You should know that natural law was addressed a long while back before the seventies by a fellow called St. Augustine of Hippo (look him some time, yeah?), and since by Aquinas, Hobbes and others.
Yes yes, I'm well aware what wikipedia has to say about the timeline of thinkers in this subject... but do you actually have a point here? Or are you just trying to imply that I haven't read any of those author's material?
The latter? Petty ad hominem again? Ought to have guessed really shouldn't I?
Napoleon Ier wrote:Now you're constant inability to understand Thomist principles and your repeated reference to "nature" in the context of this debate as having biological implication demonstrate clearly to me you have little understanding of the subject in which you are feigning intellectual superiority.
Feel free to explain which principles I'm not understanding here. Y'know, specifically. That shouldn't be so hard for you right, what with you being a bona fide expert on this topic area... should it?
Sorry, but I'm afraid that grand appeals to undefined ideas aren't actually much good to you.
As for the biological references, I'm well aware of how they do and do not fit into arguments of 'natural law'.
However, the biology references that I made in my last post were actually an entirely seperate attack on your box-fort of an argument argument, and were in no way connected to my jurisprudential arguments. Sorry that you didn't realise your defences couldn't be demolished from several different angles... but that's what happened.
Feel free to come back and cough up yet more meaningless verbage when you've actually understood my arguments though.
Hang on, what was that about feigning intellectual superiority? I didn't quite catch it, I think it got drowned out by the death rattle your pompous, fallacious, little argument just made.
Napoleon Ier wrote:Now both Aquinas and Augustine claim that natural law is the "essence of a substance that unify soul and body", and view it in a strictly ontological sense, and in it is found the virtue that marked perfection in man's pre-lapsarian state.
No shit Sherlock... I honestly had no idea.
Remind me what your point is again?
Napoleon Ier wrote:I argue, that homosexuality, being contrary to natural law, since it is a psychological phenomenon created by societal and enviromental factors
Evidence for that proposition? None again... should have guessed.
Also, aren't you running back to the biology references that you just tried to banish from this discussion? Pre-lapsian states be damned, you've no proof of what we did or didn't do to one another before we became city-dwellers, and as such this argument falls down.
No proof that homosexuality isn't 'natural' + No proof that it's induced by societal/environmental factors = No substance to what you're saying.
Once again, a windy pre-amble to divert our attention from the fact that you don't know what you're talking about, then a proposition supported by no evidence. When is your pre-pubescent mind going to understand learn that kind of bullshit just doesn't wash here. Try saving it for the playground eh? We've really got better things to waste our time with.
Napoleon Ier wrote:society cannot recognise a union of homosexuals as such a union furthers the damaging psychlogical and societal effects of homosexuality (which are real and measurable, homosexuals are more likely to become criminal or sociopathic, all the studies demonstrate it).
Sorry, but studies which you imagined and made up in your head don't actually count.
Show us the proofs you claim you have, and then we might start taking you seriously. But just bullshitting us with crap you heard your daddy say in the pub isn't going to work.
Napoleon Ier wrote:However, I would say a civil union contract is an acceptable recognition as the state has no right to impose it's dictates on individuals
Proof? Jurisprudential Doctrine? Logical supporting argument?
I agree that civil union is the very least that we should be permitting, but this is yet another example of you just spitting out bald assertions, and vainly hoping that it's going to be accepted as gospel truth.
Seriously, learn to actually rationally debate and argue before wasting our time with garbage. Just throwing long words you found on wikipedia around, and then following up with simple statements of your opinion isn't going to win you any arguments. You'll just get chewed up and spat out by people who actually know what they're talking about. Again.