Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utcsstat.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsstat!laura From: laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) Newsgroups: net.religion Subject: Re: Catching up Message-ID: <1552@utcsstat.UUCP> Date: Tue, 13-Dec-83 19:06:32 EST Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1552 Posted: Tue Dec 13 19:06:32 1983 Date-Received: Tue, 13-Dec-83 21:57:47 EST References: <678@qubix.UUCP> Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada Lines: 267 Shudder. thats what the whole article make me think of... shudder... Byron Howes cast doubts on any divine authority of Paul's writings. Why not take it a step further and doubt the authority behind anything in the Bible; after all, weren't the words written down by mere men? :-( The authority of the Bible is one of the two presuppositions of the Christian faith ("God is, and He has spoken in the Bible"). If each man can judge the authority of a passage, who needs God? On the other hand, there are instances in the Bible where one passage flatly contradicts the other. The Jesus in John goes out and converts a whole Samaritan village -- the Jesus in Matthew tells his disciples not to enter a Samaritan village. The Jesus in John seems to know very well that he is God at all times -- the Jesus in the synoptics *doesn't*. In John, John the Baptist knows that Jesus is the coming one -- in Matthew he asks while in prison *if* Jesus is the coming one... And we haven't exhausted the Gospels yet, and already you have to make some sort of judgement on which is "right". A book has no more authority than its canonizer(s). If the Council of Carthage canonized the New Testament, then it has only as much authority as the Council (and hardly that of the Word of God). To be the Word of God, with the authority of God, the books had to be canonical *when they were written.* All man can do is recognize what God has done. Paul recognized Luke's writings; Peter recognized Paul's; in the era just after the apostles, virtually all of the New Testament books had been de facto accepted. (The writings of the early church fathers prove most helpful here. It is noted that their writings include all but 11 verses of the New Testament.) But why do you assume that the Council "got it right"? How come they rejected the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary Magdelene or any of the dozens of Gospels that were floating around at the time? Clearly they made a descision. But they are men, right -- so they could have made a mistake... Paul was not writing "this is the Word of God as revealed to me"... What he was doing was writing letters to people of various communities. Suppose somebody collected all my USENET articles and later said that because I was right here, here, and here -- plus being a marvellous person -- they would consider my words on the subject to be inspired. I should be long dead by then, and so unlikely to be doing anything about it, but you can bet that I would be displeased! (Not that it is likely to happen). There are articles which I wish I had never written and articles which I am glad that I have written even though my beliefs have changed since I wrote them... How do you know that Paul is not feeling the same way? Before I get to those, some thoughts regarding powers in general. That which has the power to do you good also has the power to do you evil. This is a rather nice sounding general statement, but I am not sure that it has any truth in it. I think that love has the power to do me good but not evil, for instance, by definition. Breathing is an activity which does me good -- and how could it do me evil? In fact, anything which can be defined as "X which does me good" fits the bill -- you only have to define applications of this power which could be viewed as doing one evil as either not-applications of this power or confusion on the part of the observer in knowing where the evil lies. In our desire to ensure the legal rights of everyone and to keep the innocent from being punished, dangerous criminals are let loose because a fallible human made a mistake. The guy may be clearly guilty, yet in our efforts to protect a high and holy law, we sacrifice society and cause the non-criminal to live behind locked doors and barred windows. This is only good reasoning among those who view the law as high and holy. There are a lot of people who have no respect for the law at all. I am one of them -- the idea of respecting a law because it is a law strikes me as remarkably silly. However, to respect other people is a very good thing indeed. But then you have heard about my proposed overthrow of the legal system... The problem I have with this is that you have just defined law as a crude and clumsy kludge which needs respecting and which will fail in these gross manners that you mentioned. This kindof rips the floor out from the law reformers and the law changers... it also gives you something to fall back upon later. Don't blame me if the laws are atrocious and if innocent men are in jail and criminals walk the streets -- this is just the way that laws are.... Further, any right you have depends on someone to enforce it. No. This is the fatal mistake. Rights do not come from laws -- laws come from rights. If you get this backwards you are left concluding that we need a police state in order for anyone to get any rights at all. What we need is a different attitude towards criminals. They are not the things you catch to vent your spleen upon because you are so enraged that your rights have been violated that you demand bloody vengance. They are instead evidence that your society is broken. A perfect society would have no criminals. (Or very few. There are always the insane...) State welfare programs did wonders for eliminating that hardened criminal, the man who stole a loaf of bread. These days we can look at those men and think, geee, what an awful society they had which whould imprison a man for the great crime of hunger. Somehow this does not motivate us to discover why we have criminals today, though... Once you have caught a criminal, and ascertained his guilt, what should yu do with him? Fix his problem. Clearly, some people's problems are easier to fix than others -- and in the case where the problem is unfixable at present you will have a serious moral difficulty -- (Do you execute the mass murderer who cannot be cured? Sentence him to life imprisonment? Ship him to a colony in space? Let him loose after 20 years?) But this is nothing like the difficulty you will have if you think that you are manufacturing rights out of your ability to enforce them! People scream about fraud (welfare, employee, employer, etc.), yet because of privacy laws (to avoid Big Brother), background investigations which would have brought these to light are stifled. Maybe we should investigate why it is that people commit fraud and are anxious about their privacy. Simple answers like "greed" and "paranoia" are not good enough. And then there's the question of whether powers should keep secrets, or whether they should all be public knowledge. The latter is the height of naivete, for it assumes everybody, everywhere, is totally trustworthy. If that were the case, who would need governments? Reality speaks otherwise. But if the governments are as untrustworthy as everyone else, then you have just passed the buck. Actually, I can't fault you on this though -- it is preceisely through this train of thought that i came to the conclusion that *nobody* needs governments. Somehow I do not think that you are going to get there. Finally there's the matter of real religious freedom as the country stands now. I hear so much about "you can't legislate morality." BALONEY! Every law on the books is legislated morality! That's what legislatures are for - to determine right and wrong, and associate punishment with the wrong. That bit about the punishment is telling. I don't want to punish anyone -- I just don't want to share the streets with murderers and rapists. I would rather fix the people so that they would not murder or rape -- but if I cannot do this I will settle on incarceration or imprisonment. But not TO PUNISH them -- anybody who is so unhinged that they could murder someone else already is living a life of hell. Punishment is only useful when it acts as a deterrant. If I got to set a law which said "rape is now punishable by death" and there were no rapes, then that would be a highly successful law. If, on the other hand, you get a rapist whom you have to execute, then you have firm evidence that the society is failing. Not just *him* (except perhaps in the case of the born insane) *everybody*. If you have to mete out the punishments then either you are not responding to the needs of the criminals (long before they commit the acts that make them criminals) or your law is unreasonable, or both. Every criminal should bring about a reevaluation of both the society and the law. Alas, people tend to sit around smugly, rejoicing that the "rotter got what was coming to him". Hardly a Christian attitude, one might say? Before considering (2), let us consider the opposite of (1), which is also illustrated in the Bible: essentially, anarchy, or (Judges 21:25) "In those days, there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes." That pretty well summarizes the whole book of Judges. Yet in the press for personal "freedom"s in this country, this is what we are headed for. And it only takes one with a mind to misuse "freedom" to make the rest regret. So we have the same problem as before - untrustworthiness of people. It sure seemed to me that the book of Judges was about the rules of the various Judges -- one per tribe, more or less, and th allainces they made and how they did what their leaders did or did not want. Sounds like an overview of life in a large area with a lot of countries. This does not really seem like anarchy. Of course, if you are writing from the point of view that the ideal condition was a united Israel, you might call it anarchy -- as Canadian historians often write about the time before confederation, even though it was anything but anarchy. (2) re-establishes "one nation under God." It acknowledges that our "rights" are not ours innately, but are granted to us by the One who also laid down the guidelines for the law. Whoops. you just contradicted yourself there. before it was that right came from our ability to enforce the law, now they come from God. You can't have it both ways, you know... The emphasis would be on responsibilities, and the need for each of us to fulfill our particular one(s). So far, so good.... It establishes a morality profitable to the majority of the well-intentioned. Nope. you just blew it. sorry, Larry, but setting down a morality which is good for the majority of the well-intentioned just isn't good enough. The majority of the well-intentioned aren't the problem -- they are the trustworthy ones. It is the people that fall through the cracks that are the problem, and you have not done anything for them yet. Your morality based on God will have the same problems as the current one -- same girl, new dress -- with the added disadvantage that it is highly likely to become "morality is from God, is from the Christian God, is whatever is said in the Bible, is ...." Why do I hear the sounds of people gathering kindling and finding a stake? Tell me that I am over-reacting.... It would change the judicial system from the current adversary system back into a quest for truth. Now, earlier you described the Bible as Truth... I can see where this one is headed... Certainly, there are more possibilities for abuse than the current system, yet I think the reward is worth it: a safe and sane society, peace in the streets, a respect for those in authority, an active discouragement of wrongdoing; a resulting benefit is that those in positions of potential abuse would realize that abuse would be more dangerous to themselves and thus not worth it (Economics of Crime 101). This looks like what was promised for the legal system we got NOW. Guess what? It ain't working so good... Would witches have problems? Probably. Although worship of God could not be compelled, it would be made evident to all that the basis for both law and government is God, and that practice which would place another above the law-giver shows disrespect for the law. Pam, they're gonna burn us. I'm *not* paranoid -- but here is where the kindling comes in. Perhaps they are going to use the more modern techniques of electroshock and brainwashing. I guess that means I won't get to go down to North Carolina any more -- you are welcome to move up here if you like. I think that you could claim refugee status from what is being proposed. Would public-school children be compelled to pray as their teacher does? Even as the school day begins with the Pledge of Allegiance, so the teacher can also ask the class to pause and remember the Source of the laws, freedoms, and privileges they have. This stikes me as a very good way to finger out those on the burning list. I have read histories of Germany in the middle ages. Why do I think that I have been here before? And with the emphasis on responsibilities, we would see a lot of things that the government is unnecessarily involved in (but placed there because we can't trust others to do them) placed back in the hands of the people - education and welfare among them. It would be to the advantage of high-tech business to sponsor educators, so that the stream of bright young minds doesn't dry up. Supply-and-demand would ensure that we would have the training we need in the fields where it is needed. This sounds good. So why have a government at all? Why not put *everything* back into the hands of the people? Is it *only* to keep your State religion going? And for your law enforcement? What would it mean if the reason you needed your government was to pay people to dodo whatever you would do to Pam and Tim because "the people" would not do it? How would you find out if that was the case... Actually, I don't think that there is going to be an American State established as you described. There is thankfully too much opposition. But boy it makes me shudder sometimes. What would happen if Falwell ran for president? I can tell you one thing -- if he won I would be looking to get a lot of family and friends out of the USA... Laura Creighton utzoo!utcsstat!laura