For humanity, morality is a choice; and everything is a moral choice. That is why slavery is so terrible, because it denies the moral choice, and depends on both ends of the relationship upon immorality. Even Christians whose name means slave of Christ have given up with one moral choice the chance to freely make all moral choices. If you want to put the blame on God, it is that he put us in the way of knowledge, and we accepted that challenge to turn knowledge into moral good. Did we pay a price for knowledge and will we always? Yes.
It reminds me of a story I heard in a class in college, where a monkey in an experiment had to cross a charged electric grid to get food, so hunger drove him to make a choice. In the next cage there was a monkey who could freely have food, who was shocked every time the first monkey was shocked. The first monkey developed an ulcer, and the second monkey was unchanged.
We suffer our choices, and no less so that when they are better pain and worse pain. It is not the pain alone that damages us, but the choice, the stress, the doubt. We could have stayed monkeys taking from nature and suffering our natures with never a straight thought about it. We chose this path, and now we need to walk it like men, or women.
God as revealed to us in Genesis is more human, and he also stands among other Gods, and was not then, one. Goodness was not really a quality of God until Jesus made it so. Might, and in All Mighty, was a feature of God through the ages. All that: hear the word of the lord, and up stand the dry bones of Israel is an example.
You have to understand, that as we have grown more powerful in our knowledge that heaven has receded from our grasp. The tower of babel was built to reach heaven. Jakob reached it with a ladder, and Jack with a beanstalk, and now we can fly to the moon, but never land in heaven.
To me, the conclusion is that people are the problem, and people are the solution. That knowledge that will best serve each and every one of us is self knowledge. But look at the best training of this. Philosophy is the art of old men to avoid serious labor, but it is not like youth, and wasted on the young. Philosophy is wasted on the old who usually have every other reason to be moral and decent folk. Philosophy needs to be taught in the first stages of life.
The classification of knowledge into forms, and the divide between moral forms and physical would set the willing mind up for a life of disciplined education. I won't tell anyone what to think, but I can certainly say how to think. The rules of reason such as they apply to physical forms should be taught. Equally essential is to learn our weakness, the weakness of reason in regard to moral forms. But reason wears away at morality worse than acid. People are not born moral, but with moral tendencies to bond and love. All of that morality fits into a context of culture which re-enforces moral feeling. Reason attacks culture with the weapon of individualism, and all reason is based upon continued individual life as a predicate. Death may be the moral next step, but it will never be the logical next step. In any event, individual good set above social good is immoral and the basis of our modern individualism that leaves humanity suffering loneliness and meaninglessness like a plague.
Yes; the concept of one, which it is a perfect concept does have it flaws. One penny is not the equal of another. No one person is the equal of another. We are not counting numerical equalities but an equality of concept, which it the equality people share in a democratic society.
The ideas associated with God, as being an effect without a cause, a first principal, a prime mover all have faults; but the whole story is not to make people think or to question, but to not question and to be certain. Wonder is the enemy of work. Work is essential to survival, so take this just so story, and turn your gaze from the heavens to the furrow beneath your feet.
Thanks...Sweeney
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