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Politics : Should God be replaced? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (3108)	11/3/2000 12:16:11 PM
From: Greg or e	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 28931

Morning TP "Arthur Leff makes the assumption that either God sets morals or it's every person for themselves. That is not all of the alternatives" Groups can easily turn into mobs. What happens when two or more groups disagree? If every group has their own island, then there's no problem except that no man (or culture) is an island. Your not going to say because its "normal" to have sex with children in some places that it is therefore right, are you? I think Johnson's comments are insightful, and his logic inescapable. "What Leff said is fascinating, but what he failed to say is more fascinating still. If there is no ultimate evaluator, then there is no real distinction between good and evil. It follows that if evil is nonetheless real, then atheism-i.e., the idea of the nonexistence of that evaluator or standard of evaluation-is not only an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect, it is also fundamentally untrue. Because the reality of evil implies the reality of the evaluator who alone has the authority to establish the standard by which evil can deserve to be damned. When impeccable logic leads to self-contradiction, there must be a faulty premise. In this case the premise is that because God is dead, "it looks as if we are all we have." Why not reexamine the premise? Why not at least explain why you refuse to reexamine the premise?" Why not reexamine the premise? Why not indeed? I don't think he was saying that this leads to anarchy and nihilism, but that nihilism leads one to hold things that are obviously false, namely, there is no such thing as good or evil, when or very being screams that there is. Have a good day Greg

To: TigerPaw who wrote (3108)	11/3/2000 6:45:26 PM
From: Solon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 28931

Johnson's article is difficult to read, as his brief references to Leff seem to get confused with his own commentary. Leff, of course, does not believe in God, and was setting out to look at some of the problems that present themselves to the legal profession as a result of having no absolute authority for morality (and thus law), and that we must rely on First Principles from humans which will always admit of some diagreement. He equated deicide to Goedel's theorem in term of it's impact on knowledge vs. the impact on ethics of deicide. Here is Leff's full article for those interested: A decent article, but not really new in any way. home.earthlink.net Of course, this has been a challenge in philosophy since before Aristotle: How to define a comlete social ethic in the absence of an ultimate dictator. Certainly, an average child can now voice a more consistent and reasonable ethic that that found in the bible, so that is something to rejoice in. I dare say that there are millions of people in the world today, that, allowed to separate from the rest, could live in peace and mutual accord for all time. Unfortunately, there is no place to run from all the myriad religious people that have absolute Truths in absolute contradiction one to another...and which hold moral precepts and articles of dogma, that literally make one sick in spirit. Here is a home page for these debates: home.earthlink.net Here are some criticism's of Johnson's thought: talkorigins.org Here are Johnson's on-line articles. I have read some of them and find them vapid, but to each their own. id.ucsb.edu