In <lsjc8cINNmc1@saltillo.cs.utexas.edu> turpin@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin) writes:  >In article <C554F5.3GF@panix.com> mls@panix.com (Michael Siemon) writes: > >> The issue, then, is this: >> >>	Christian A says, "Behavior such-and-such is sinful."  What is >>	Christian B supposed to *do* with such a statement? >> >> One possibility *always* exists:  A may be able to persuade B that the >> behavior in question *does* exhibit a failure in loving God or neighbor. > >Michael, modern liberal that he is, reads a fairly benign meaning >into this word.  He then constructs his religious beliefs around >this understanding, reading *other* scripture in the context of  >these commandments, with "love" benignly understood.  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.  >As a non-believer, I find Michael's Christianity kinder and gentler.  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.  >If I take him at >his word, he cannot condemn the Inquisitors, because they were >also following these commandments as *they* understood them.  If  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.  >(Or, for that matter, what does it mean to love one's fellow >man?) And what is the "right thing"?  And how does one go about >loving god?   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.  >Ethical systems are not differentiated by the nice sounding goo >up front, much of which sounds pretty much the same, but by the >*specific* acts, procedures, and arguments that they recommend.  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 am glad that a few Christians, >such as Michael, find a benign meaning for the goo, and then >interpret the usually ugly specifics in a more constructive >fashion.  On the other hand, I do think that this tells us more >about Michael and Christians like him that it tells us about >Christianity.   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.]