What the!

Well, I think that all of us can conclude that we hate Nazis and racists? Right?

 

It's easy to look at a murderer or a rapist, or even a Nazi with hatred, and overlook the liars, the gossips, the adulterers, the greedy, the ungrateful, the hate-mongers, etc. This is the hight of hypocracy, to judge the sins of another, because we are all equally guilty. There is no grey area between right and wrong, and to call bigotry more evil than hatred is foolish.


I'm not saying everyone has racist feelings deep down, I'm saying that everyone has spitefull feelings about people of one stripe or another, whether it be because of their skin color, culture, beliefs, financial status, education, sexual orrientation, whatever.

 

Common sense!

Common sense however is an idea. Based on the vast majority of mankind (hence the common part! Oh really?), however, in the mind of a person that is considered a psychopath by that majority, in that 'psychopaths' persons mind, his sense is the right sense, the sense that should have been common sense, and the rest of the world are psychopaths. Common sense is not per se the right sense.

Still, it is widely accepted as a valid arguement. Follow the masses and be the sheeps we are.

 

People here are enjoying talking about geopolitics and psychology nowadays. Very well, I will give my 2 cents about it:

It is really undeniable that deep inside, people have some.... some MONSTRUOUS tendencies.

Once I set a guy on fire. :roll:

Of course I was to be blamed, for I was the direct perpetrator of such insanity, but was I the only guilty on the case? I was provoked, I was at a
very unpleasant situation, and being influenced by another N other circunstamces. If you analyze it, they were guilty too. Of course I was wrong for not managing to bear with it all, but I would never had done such thing if I weren´t DRIVEN to that. And with all that shit said, I mean that we can´t just blindly hate somebody or something just because of It´s "affiliation". Im not saying that I was not guilty or that the NAZI were not guilty, Im just saying that almost always, the perpetrator of the horrenduous deed is just a weak/ignorant guy.

Adicionally, if we try to backtrack the true culprits, one could be led to something like "Hitler" or "oppressive school atmosphere", but that is not the case. If you keep backtracking still, you will notice that the true culprit is GOD. :-o

So, before everybody begin flaming me for anti-god theories, I just wanted to re-state what I meant at the beggining, that it is not so easy to judge somebody guilty without involving a plethora of other things. Think "the butterfly", the scout girl that sells candy may somehow be connected with you untemely and horrendous death.

*Throws crack stone at the floor and steps on it*

*Looks around and run away before rroyo comes around*

 

Uh-huh..

You know, you are ABSOLUTELY right, yup yup..

 

Heh, I won´t even struggle to make people believe that I once set a guy on fire, I know I won´t manage to do that. But if it makes it a bit more believable, the guy didn´t became a living ball of fire and died right in front of me, He just burned his arm and chest a bit.

And with "the butterfly", I meant "the butterfly effect" or whatever its called on his english version. That was just a metaphor to illustrate how much things are involved in a occasion of fatality.

 

You know what I won't struggle to do? Care, or listen to you. Did I tell you to speak, no, shut the fuck up.

Japes, I think you're mostly right, under the exact wrong stances of morality, at least that imo, and assuming your belief in God is more traditional than my particularly complex version of faith, I can understand why. My belief is that it's also both wrong and unwise to judge others, not because right and wrong is black and white, but because it's all shades of gray with black and white being relative to your position.

You can do evil, and you can do good, but think of it this way: if you are a man trying to protect your family in Kansas, and you're not the most educated, but you know there's a group of people who want to blow you up if given the chance, you might join the military to fight to protect them. That is the good thing to do.

Let's transfer it to the most hateful thing that an American mind can think of, so you can just imagine everything else that must lie in between, to the right and left, up and down, and slightly at an angle: you're born in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia now, in a very small town controlled by Mujahadeen. You grow up 'knowing' that the Americans want you, your family, everyone you love dead. You might easily make a choice we as Americans would find repugnant, solely because, being in our situation, it puts you at odds with what WE must do in the name of goodness.

My philosophy also involves the belief that while these things, and a million other, matter, they are essentially irrelevant to us, because that which you or I must do to fulfill our roles and be good people is not affected by the motivations of the man inside our crosshairs. To protect his family, he needs to kill me, and to protect mine, I need to do the same to him. May the best man win. One day, maybe, if we both wind up in Heaven or Hell, we can sit down and talk things out. I could elaborate, but I wouldn't want to bore you.

 

My God...someone else thinks this way? I thought I was alone. I can't even relate to friends on such a level. Maybe there's hope out there, Blinky.

I once talked to a man who was a devout Christian. I told him that I had no religious preference, but that I felt there was something to look forward to when my time was up. He told me that I had to accept Jesus Christ as my saviour or I would never go to heaven.

"Ok," I asked, "What if there's a man in the middle of the Amazon who has never heard of Christianity. What if he's simply an amazing person; he builds people's homes, he helps the sick, and he never succumbs to anger and attacks another human. Wouldn't that man, who is just an outstanding individual, go to heaven? He had never heard of Christ."

There was a long pause, and finally,

"Yes. He would go to heaven."

"...Alright, but I need to acknowledge Christ as my savior or I can't go to heaven?"

"That's right."

I understood his point, but it still baffled me.

"The man who has never heard of Christ gets to go to heaven for being good, but I can't go because I'm a good person who has no religious preference?"

"Yes."

"Alright. Nice talking to you."

 

Mankind judges the 'wrongness' of a crime by its detriment to the good order of society. Murder is obviously very detrimental good order, and is therefore cast as a worse crime than, say, thievery.

Blinky, the concept of 'situational ethics' is what makes things so complicated, because it says that an action that in one case is wrong, is right in another. For example: I shoot and kill somebody. Was I wrong to kill them? You have to look at the situation. Was it murder, self defence, or something else?

 

'Devout Christian' does not mean he had sound doctrine. Your hypothetical 'Outstanding Idividual' would not necessarily be a shoe-in. This is one of those points of doctrine that makes 'Traditional Faith' as complex as anything Blinky might cook up.

Human beings were created thousands of years before the advent of Christ, so how did pre-Christ humans find salvation? Obviously, they had never heard of Christ, so there must be another way to salvation. This is only half true. Salvation in those days was still based upon faith in God, repentence and forgiveness of sins, not on good works. Christ was the means of that forgiveness, for all who came before and after, so essentially, they were saved through Christ though they had never heard of Him.

So what of the people who have never heard of God? There aren't any. All of creation speaks of a Creator God, and if you seek Him with all your heart, He will not leave you in the dark. All are without excuse.

To sum up: If our Amazonian friend repents of his sins before God, and has faith in God, then he will have forgiveness and salvation through Christ, though he has never heard His name. If he does not, he is lost.


EDIT: Sorry for the double post, Gross posted while I was writing the first one.

 

That was my point. The guy I talked to, apparently, "well versed" in the Bible, said I couldn't go to heaven unless I accepted Christ. I know there's a God, or something, to look forward to, or to pray to, and the guy would look me point plank in the face and tell me I was hellbound.
I never said that man believed in a hereafter, or in any one omniscient force.

 

I apologize for morality being complicated, Japes, but as I have seen it, that's the truth. Why you shot and killed that person might be a difficult question, but it's exactly the kind of question that should be asked in that situation.

I never intended 'complex' to be meant in a derogatory way, I meant it to mean simply that; more complex, not better in any way. I'm fully away of the Christian tenets, and there are a great deal of fine points in it, although I do have to correct you, assuming you're a Protestant-ized form of Christian.

As posited by Martin Luther, I believe, Jesus Christ is the savior of all those humans guilty of original sin, visa vee, all those humans. The original Catholic Church's stance was that people needed both good works and faith to get into Heaven, but Luther's argument was that since Jesus Christ suffered, died, and rose for the dead to atone for the sins of mankind, implying that anything more than faith in Jesus Christ as the son of God was necessary to enter the Kingdom of Heaven meant that the power of Jesus was and is finite.

The Christian 'mystery of faith' revolves around this 'paradox', one that my old pastor used to assure me was mind-boggling, although I've always thought it makes perfect fucking sense, that of the triune God, the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, 1 God in 3 entities, 3 faces of the same, essentially. This means that if Jesus' power is limited, than God Himself's power is limited. Now THAT is a paradox. Hence, Martin Luther disapproved of the dogmatic belief that both faith AND good works are needed to enter Heaven, stating that faith alone in Jesus was sufficient.

I don't say my theories of existance are complex out of any feelings of superiority, Japes, I just believe they are simply that. I hold a great many Judeo-Christian-Islamic beliefs, and I have combined them with my own particular feelings on morality and my understandings of the universe, science, law, etc, as well as subsuming a few far eastern ideas such as Confucious and Lao-tzu, not to mention having found a way to weave almost the entirety of Buddhist philosophy as the binding thread that brings the whole thing together. As you can guess, it gets pretty hard to explain it all.

 

Of course we should strive to be moral, ethical, and good in all we say and do, because it's the right way to be. What I'm saying is that, at the end of the day, your good works will never meet God's perfect standards, and you and I are no less hellbound than the genocidal Nazi. It is God's grace that gives us the opportunity to wipe the slate clean and be perfectly sinless in His eyes, whether you be a murderer, or just a 'good person.'

And Gross, I am saying that you can only be saved through Christ, because He is the only one who can take your punishment upon himself.

EDIT: Blinky, did your last post just get longer, or did I somehow miss the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th paragraphs?

 

No, I only posted one, but I was doing a few other things, so it took me awhile to get my thoughts down, and by the time I did, you and gross had another, and so I edited to responded to your response to me... yea.

Or they just grow like that.

 

Isn't Christ essentially the same as God? The triumvirate puts three entities in the same space, so wouldn't faith in God be faith in Jesus, regardless of whether or not you had heard His name?

 

Well, according the the Christiantity it is.

I think.

And Japes, Killing someone is always the wrong thing to do.
The problem is that not everyone has this thoughts.
I mean, I everyone walks around being nice to eachother and not wanting to kill another, then it's all fine, no problems.

The problem comes when we notice that mankind don't work that way, and that there are people who acutally wants to shoot other peoples.

And there all morality, good biding, law and everything goes to hell.

It's only you, and the guy who wants you dead. You self have to decide if you think that your life is worth more then his, is you are willing to kill him to save your own ass. And since we are in the end only animals, our instincts tell us to pull the trigger, that yes, our life is worth more, because it is our own. So there is no think like morality. It is made up by humans, just like common sense, and when it's 'peace', you can talk very much about not killing people and shit.

But when you are put in the situation where your life is on danger, it's ethier you or him, everyone reacts the same.

 

In all cultures, killing without reason* is reprehensible.
*war
As much as we pride ourselves in being civilized, people still follow the evolutionary doctrine of "only the fit shall survive."
All animals fight over territory, and sometimes these conflicts escalate to a fatality, sometimes more than one. Humans are the only animals that fight on a global scale, and it's probably due to the amount of people on the planet. Maybe we're supposed to kill each other to reduce the numbers, or to weed out the strong from the weak.
However, since we're only sending the strong to war, only the weak would benefit (if at all), and even Jesus said that the meek would inherit the earth.
Bah, I bet I'm getting ahead of myself. Unless this turns into a Muslim versus Christian war, I don't think it'll happen. We might be well on our way, though. Besides, nothing would capture headlines more than a modern Crusade.

 

That falls into the "playing God" category. If he wants that person to suffer, he's either punishing them or he simply wants them to suffer.
Personally, I'd be a "mercy angel" and kill the person if they asked me to*, but only if the disease was uncureable and the person was in a coma.
*In a will. My grandmother had a stroke, and in her will she said that should she fall into a coma, she did not want to be kept alive indefinitely. We granted her request.