In <lsjc8cINNmc1@saltillo.cs.utexas.edu> turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin)


I regard love as no more or less "benign" than any other Christian does.
You are merely expressing "approval" of the consequences I find therein.
Which says more about our politics and cultural trappings than about my
(or any) religion.  "Love" is a highly ambiguous word, of which Christians
can write both the "gentle" words Paul uses of it in 1 Corinthians -- in
a passage that even the "conservatives" will quote at you :-) -- and the
words of T. S. Eliot in his Pentacost Hymn, "Love is the unfamiliar Name
that wove the intolerable shirt of flame ..."

This is in any case rather to the side of what I was attempting to raise
in my note, as will become more evident below.


blechhh.  I think you are misreading me, rather seriously.  Though,
given my principle that one CANNOT force one's own notion of "sin" on
another, and my unshakeable "disestablishmentarianism", Russel Turpin
and others (believers and unbelievers alike) are under no threat of my
legislating my own understanding of Christian love.


You misread.  I can do (and have repeatedly done) a complete bill of
accusation against the Inquisition by exhibiting in as thorough a form
as anyone might want a demonstration of the harm it has done to human
beings (in the first place) and to respect for (let alone love of) "God"
in near succession.  Please go back to my quoted words above:

The "possibility that always exists" is that I (or, to revert to proper
time sequence, my predecessors over the last several centuries) could
persuade "Christian B" of my case that the Inquisition *does* indeed
constitute an egregious violation of the Law of Love.  I must also note
that the majority of Christians HAVE been so persuaded.  By Christian
argumentation, as well as by secular [both Christian and non-Christian]
prohibitions.

What Mr. Turpin alludes to is a trickier point:

	A.  I demonstrate the human pain and violation of love involved
	    in the Inquisition.

	B.  The Inquisitor responds that Mother Church must, however
	    painful this *seems*, "discipline" her children for their
	    own good -- in this case the salvation of their souls (or
	    if the tortured heretic will not recant, than by bad example
	    "deterring" others from the same loss-of-soul.)

	A.  I point out that this "justification" of a failure in love
	    depends on a highly speculative construal of texts and of
	    philosophical assertions that are quite undemonstrable.

	B.  Burns me at the stake.

My rhetoric has failed, but the point I am making is sustained.  What is
going on here has a *lot* to do with "cultural baggage."  In this case,
the baggage includes a (nearly universal, and absolutely secular) belief
that an accused person must prove innocence and that testimony is most
believable if taken under torture.  The elimination of Inqisitorial
practice (in those places where it *has* been eliminated, or at least
greatly reduced) has very little, if anything, to do with the discussion
of sin in the exchange between A and B.

Mr. Turpin is pointing out that, if I am A versus the Grand Inquisitor's B,
then my persuasion is not very likely to work.  I know this; and in what-
ever personal agony, I consign the issue to God and my ghostly defense
attorney.  So, "one possibility" fails in this case -- as it will fail in
may others.  At the other extreme, the "persuasion" will succeed when it
properly SHOULD not, if it entails mistaken assumptions I share with the
Inquisitor.  And that is potentially an even more troubling case, in that
many of the victims of Inquisition will have "accepted" that they were in
fact sinful (in such random cases as they may actually have been guilty
of charges brought against them.)

The point is that the "persuasion" breaks down when the parties do NOT
share enough to agree on all the cultural baggage -- and given the main
thrust of the Inquisition, against "heresy", it is *bound* to break down
in precisely the "worst" cases.  The "conservative" (I don't think that
is the right word, BTW) will take refuge in what I attribute to B above,
that he is "justified" in causing harm because he *thinks* that works to
a "greater good."  But this is a violent and extravagant REFUSAL to follow
the gospel, as if one's theories about "sin" entitled one to cast aside
Jesus' words on dealing with sinners (cf. Matthew 5:39ff).

I am a "radical" Christian *only* in that I take the gospel seriously.


Well, the whole *point* of making these the "base" commandments is that
they *aren't* reducible to rules.  A set of rules is a moral code or a
law code or an algorithm for acting.  Such things can be very helpful
to individuals or societies -- but not if they are used *instead* of a
personal involvement in and responsibility for one's actions.  The Great
Commandment is, more than anything else, a call to act *as if you were
God and accepting ultimate responsibility* in your every action.  A
demand that I, like most, would rather *not* hear, but it keeps popping
up nonetheless (along with the reassurance that it is more important
that I be open to trying this, than succeeding at it).  "Conservatives"
may twist this "act as if you were God" to mean "lay down rules for other
people and be as nasty to them as possible if they don't keep YOUR rules."
They are so insistent (and obvious) about this that they have convinced a
lot of people (who rightly reject the whole concept!) that such idiocy
IS how God acts.  That, after all, is the standard accusation "against
God" by the atheists here and elsewhere.  That the "conservatives" have
confused THEIR manipulative, hoop-jumping notions of coercing other
people with the Nature of God is almost the entire content of standard
American atheism -- and I quite agree with it on this point.


And different bodies of Christians have, from the beginning, urged
*different* "ethical systems" (or in some cases, none).  As a result,
it is bizarre to identify any one of these systems, however popular
(or infamous) with Christianity.  Christianity DOES NOT HAVE A TORAH.
It does not have a QU'RAN.  Specifically Christian scripture has very
little, if anything, in the way of "commandments" -- so little that
the "Christians" who desperately *want* commandments go "mining" for
them with almost no support (and thus almost no obvious limitation :-))
for their efforts.  The one, single, thing in the gospels which Jesus
specifically "gives" as "a commandment" to us is "love one another."

	[I will be expanding on this point in a reply to Paul Hudson
	 that I hope to get to in a day or so -- it is quite true that
	 SOME Christians infer LOTS of commandments from the NT; I'll
	 point out what has to be going on in these inferences, and why
	 there is a huge amount of "cultural baggage" involved.]

You are quite right that this is "goo" if one is looking for an ethical
system.

But why should anyone BE looking for an ethical system, since our
society is eager to hand us one or more no matter what we do?  It
may be that we need a principle for the CRITIQUE of ethical systems
-- in which case I will profer the _agapate allelou_ once again.


I think you are begging the question. Why don't I and the (myriads
of) other Christians like me tell you something about Christianity?
[Nor is this very new in Christianity -- you might want to look up
the origins and fundamental doctrines of the Quakers, from the 17th
century onwards, and they are not at all the first to understand the
gospel in a manner that is congenial to my case.]