[Peace-discuss] Bellicose rhetoric???

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Ratiocination is good.

It's that sometimes t3h ratio between rampant ratiocinators who 
ratiocinate routinely and non-ratiocinators who rarely ratiocinate
but routinely rant about ratiocinations seems irrational.


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> All this preaching on this list!  Perhaps I can insert the opinion 
> that "God" (or gods) are totally empty concepts, explaining nothing, 
> but giving rise to endless ratiocination.  --mkb
>
>
> On Nov 10, 2008, at 10:35 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> God is not a necessary component of morality for the simple reason 
>> that God --
>> the answer (which we do not know) to the question, "Why is there 
>> anything
>> instead of nothing?" -- is not a component of anything.
>>
>> God is not a thing in the universe -- we can't point to something in the
>> universe as the reason for the existence of the universe -- and God 
>> and the
>> universe don't add up to two. (Two of what would that be?  Two 
>> things?  But God
>> is not thing in the universe, etc.)
>>
>> Morality is a component of human nature (for the existence of which 
>> God of course is the reason, as for everything), as grammar is a 
>> component of
>> language. Just as an intelligent visitor from Mars would think that 
>> all humans
>> were speaking one language with regional variations, so human ethics 
>> might be
>> regarded as the rules (or grammar) for humans' being together -- with
>> some interesting regional variations... (That's what makes horse 
>> racing, or at
>> least philosophical argument -- and literature.)
>>
>> Well over a thousand years of Christian philosophical reflection took 
>> it as a
>> commonplace that the Decalogue is not a set of rules imposed from 
>> outside, as it
>> were, that might have been different, but rather rational conclusions 
>> from
>> reflection on what it is to be human.  (They did think it was a 
>> little hard to
>> derive the 3rd/4th Commandment -- there are different numbering 
>> systems -- this
>> way.)
>>
>> Christian theologians thought that, although ethics could be descried 
>> rationally, that took effort (and time) -- hence all that literature 
>> -- and so God generously provided in the Ten Commandments as it were 
>> an operating manual ("documentation," we would say) for being human.
>>
>> More on this from me (quoting others), if you want, at "The Subversive
>> Commandments," <http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook03292005.html>.  
>> --CGE
>>
>>
>> John W. wrote:
>>> ... I'd be more interested in hearing one or both of you Bible 
>>> scholars explain to Jenifer why God is a necessary component of 
>>> morality.  Or conversely, how one can be moral without a belief in God.
>>> John Wason
>>
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