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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (10697)	4/7/2001 1:55:30 PM
From: Greg or e	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Very interesting read Karen. What really struck me as I read it was this. On the one hand, people hold to a ubiquitous and unshakable belief that somewhere, there exists some truly objective moral standard. Then they turn around, and in the next breath, attempt to make themselves somehow exempt from the very same standards, they fully expect, even demand, of others. I was recently talking about the "Fall of Man" and how that was expressed in "Total Depravity" and was told "just quoting Scripture was not enough to demonstrate it's reality. The ability of Humans to rationalize our way out of any moral responsibility while simultaneously screaming for moral freedom would be laughable, if it were not so tragic. We want to have our cake(of morality)and eat it to. I think Wolfe's essay demonstrates my point as he notes; "No matter how strong their religious and moral beliefs, nearly all people will encounter situations in which they will feel such a need to participate in interpreting, applying and sometimes redefining the rules meant to guide them. Are they somehow less moral if they do? Telling them that they are will cut no ice with a gay couple determined to legalize their union in an era of widespread heterosexual divorce, with women who find that a too-early marriage stultifies their desire to become more autonomous later in life or with religious believers who find that the best way to express one's faith in God is to reject traditional denominations." I agree with his point, while perhaps taking issue somewhat, with the idea that rejecting traditional denominations, is somehow necessarily, an act of rebellion, since many of those denominations are in fact no longer traditional, in that they no longer are even Christian. However, it is likely true in many cases, so his point was otherwise, well taken. Is it any wonder that having rejected any and all authority, save self, in the area of ultimate morality, that Americans are left with only this? "Our respondents are guided by subjective feelings more than they are by appeals to rational, intellectual and objective conceptions of right and wrong." The real kicker for me was in the closing paragraph, when he undercut the entire premise of his essay (the inevitability of moral freedom, as the next step) by admitting that the first two,(eco/politic, freedom) have failed to produce on their promises.. Why Wolfe is optimistic that moral freedom, divorced from responsibility to an ultimate moral standard, will fair any better, is a worthy question to ponder. Norman Geisler's critique of Paul Kurtz's "Forbidden Fruit" iclnet.org also applies to this essay as well. In it he says; "Throughout his book Kurtz fails to provide an explanation for the source of his many culturally transcended and highly commendable moral prescriptions. Indeed, given his assumption of atheism such a task seems to be a logical impossibility, since there can be no moral prescriptions without a Moral Prescriber. As C. S. Lewis so forcefully reasoned in Mere Christianity, there cannot be moral legislation without a Moral Legislator. So the central problem with the humanistic ethic is that while the humanist can believe in many good moral principles, he has no real justification for these beliefs. It is logically impossible to have absolute moral laws but no absolute Moral Lawgiver. And, despite his protests to the contrary, we have already seen that Kurtz too has universal, unconditional moral prescriptions." "Kurtz's own brand of optimistic humanism makes it difficult for him to accept that evil is endemic to the nature of man. Rather, he says: "I do not hold the doctrine of original sin. I do not believe that human beings are born depraved" (248). Thus he ignores the evils of man in general and even sweeps away the sins of tyrants in particular. Realizing he will be criticized for what he calls "excessive humanistic idealism," Kurtz says: "I prefer to believe that such horrors [as Hitler's] are aberrant and contrary to our deeper moral sensibilities" (251). So, in spite of his occasional flashes of realism, Kurtz is an incurable optimist. One cannot help but admire his unfounded optimism, when we remember that he neither believes in God nor an afterlife (235). Such faith is somehow admirable, even though it is groundless

To: Lane3 who wrote (10697)	4/9/2001 10:58:48 AM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Karen, there were a couple other interesting and somewhat related articles in the Sunday paper. First, there was Are You in Anthropodenial? . a review of 'The Ape and the Sushi Master' by Frans de Waal, nytimes.com De Waal shows how behavior among monkeys and apes depends heavily on social learning. He cites, for example, the research of a colleague who studied the responses of young monkeys when they were shown live snakes for the first time. These youngsters, raised in captivity, remained utterly unafraid of snakes -- until, that is, they were allowed to observe their parents, all born in the wild, reacting with fear. Ever after, the young monkeys expressed the fear they'd learned, not from any experience of their own but by emulating their elders. In another study de Waal himself conducted, rhesus monkeys, which are characteristically combative, were placed with stump-tailed monkeys, a far more conciliatory species. The startling result was that the rhesus monkeys ''developed peacemaking skills on a par with those of their more tolerant counterparts.'' The rhesus monkeys, even after being segregated later, remained less quarrelsome than before their exposure to more peaceable cousins. So much for the unalloyed influence of physical prowess. . . . What's particularly bracing about this book is that this insistence on ''observables'' hasn't led de Waal to think small. His narrative, in the end, is a remarkable journey of discovery to the heart of a profound question: what can we learn about the evolution of our own cultures by studying the behavior of our primate cousins? He broaches the possibility that generous ''helping responses,'' observed among animals reliant on close-knit relationships, have evolved into something more refined -- authentically unselfish behavior. If he's right, this book is a step toward outlining the evolution of our own moral codes. Oh no. Everybody knows our "moral code" came from God, the idea that it started with the apes like everything else has to be a heresy of some sort. More prominently placed was this front page article: Evolutionists Battle New Theory on Creation nytimes.com That particular theory being one that has been much flogged around here lately. This article places it in the rather obvious "creation science" context it belongs in. This time, though, the evolutionists find themselves arrayed not against traditional creationism, with its roots in biblical literalism, but against a more sophisticated idea: the intelligent design theory. Proponents of this theory, led by a group of academics and intellectuals and including some biblical creationists, accept that the earth is billions of years old, not the thousands of years suggested by a literal reading of the Bible. But they dispute the idea that natural selection, the force Darwin suggested drove evolution, is enough to explain the complexity of the earth's plants and animals. That complexity, they say, must be the work of an intelligent designer. This designer may be much like the biblical God, proponents say, but they are open to other explanations, such as the proposition that life was seeded by a meteorite from elsewhere in the cosmos, possibly involving extraterrestrial intelligence, or the new age philosophy that the universe is suffused with a mysterious but inanimate life force. God or some other unspecified Deus ex Machina, to some it just doesn't make sense if you can't appeal to a higher authority.