From: doug@testsys.isis.org (Doug Thompson)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage
Subject: Re: absolute truth
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 92 07:10:46 EDT
Distribution: na
Organization: SKAN Communications Inc.

In article <1992Aug13.132545.8697@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com> 
(Bonus, Iniquus, Celer - Delegitus Duo) writes: 

> In article <1992Aug11.233100.6385@tc.fluke.COM>, emery@tc.fluke.COM (John Emery)
> [...]
> > Perhaps they don't know what they are doing (they are insane).  Should we,
> > as people of this earth, allow insane people to kill people because they
> > don't know what they are doing?  Should we then refrain from stopping this
> > person from such killings because they don't know it is wrong?  A point
> > of clarification here: by claiming something as an absolute wrong, I'm
> > am not proposing that it is something that some do not violate.
>
> You are getting away from the point.  Are _you_ to be the one who decides?  And
> if so, what other issues do you then have the right to decide on?   When you do
> want to begin to control what other people think or even do in the privacy of
> their own homes or with another person.  
> 
> I doubt very much whether the issue is the killing of a random person so much
> as an argument from absolutes.  If x is wrong, then how about x + delta, etc.,
> etc.
> 
> What I think about your random killing example is not relevant in this case.  
> 
> Where and how do you draw the line and when do you begin to respect other
> people's approaches to their own religion rather than continuing to attempt to
> evangelize?  

I read this and had a good belly laugh! While basically arguing against
the value or validity of 'absolutes' you are doing so from an
'absolutist' moral position, postulating non-interference in the lives
of others as an 'absolute' moral value greater than the moral value of
protecting society from murderers.

Unlike the position you are arguing against - i.e., murder is wrong
and should be judged negatively and should be repressed - you are not
acknowledging that you hold and argue from an absolutist moral
position.

You raise the question "who is to judge?" as a problem with absolutes.
That problem pertains to all matters of collective social behaviour.
All societies have morals and norms of some kind and all societies act
to instruct children about right and wrong and alal societies *judge*
each individual and encourage what they consider right and discourage
what they consider wrong.

Judging and sanctioning are among the responsibilities of an adult in
society. Who is to judge? Everyone is to judge, though typically
certain members of society are recognized as being more astute than
others and are delegated the responsibility of doing that by society.

To observe that a particular society might be doing a bad job of
defining, judging, and sanctioning 'wrong' does not legitimately cast
doubt on the concept of 'wrong' or 'right' or the idea that some
things are wrong or right in all cases (the definition of absolute).

One might take the Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty and suggest
that morals, like natural laws, cannot really be absolute because
there may be exceptions - one time in a million when something like
the law of gravity doesn't work as expected.

I accept that argument as a legitimate challenge to the notion of
'absolute'. This is because *all* is a very big word. To say that
something is true or false in all cases is to make an enormously
sweeping statement that cannot really be experimentally verified since
you cannot test all possibilities.

However, since we are so hard pressed to find an instance of 'murder
in cold blood' for which any consensus of approval can be generated, I
think we can safely call such murder 'absolutely wrong'.


> > I would hope that calling it always wrong would be where the line is
> > drawn.  Is there anyone out there willing to agree with this one poor
> > soul?
> In what sense; in the sense of an absolute truth based on God's word, or  in
> the sense of respect for another human developed independently by humans as
> they evolved and now use as a rather pragmatic rule for getting along in the
> world?

Is there any difference between these two - "God's word" and
"pragmatic rule". Any institutional promulgation of "God's word" that
exists is at the very least an idea which has evolved within the life
of an institution within a society that is deemed by said institution
and society to have pragmatic value. Whether that institution really
has been the recipient of divine inspiration in developing the idea
appears to me to be a moot point since all human institutional
expressions certainly contain human input regardless of whether they
contain divine input such that the observer at one remove (me) cannot
clearly say how much of the 10 Commandments, say, were Moses' idea and
how much were God's idea and how much were Moses' paraphrase of his
understanding of God which was - whatever else it may have been - a
human understanding.

The appeal to divine authority must always be viewed with the
recognition that whatever divine elements may or may not be present,
there are certainly human elements involved by the time we read of
such a thing. It has been heard by a human, interpreted by a human,
paraphrased and expressed in a particular historical situation by a
human and therefore is subject to some amount of interference, shall
we say, in transmission. Finally, when I (a human) read it, my own
human understanding defines the limits of my comprehension such that
my idea of the thing in question is definitely human and subject to
all the imperfections and limitations pertaining to my human frailty.

Therefore an appeal to divine authority and an appeal to the
collective experience of a given community or society are quite
possibly pretty much the same thing. In any event, it's very nearly
impossible to make such a distinction even if it might actually exist.

In other words, we can only know "God's word" from the humans who
claim to convey it to us. Knowing they are human, we can be sure that
we're getting human words - whatever else might be mixed in. What they
have to tell us about God cannot be much more reliable than their own
human understanding of God. Ergo - it's not going to be perfect.

Which all comes back to the idea that all morals and values, whether
deemed absolute or not, are social phenomenon reflecting what a given
group of people in a given time and place judge to be valid and
worthy.

=Doug

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Newsgroups: talk.religion.newage,alt.alien.visitors,sci.skeptic