JustAsking
Sexy Member
Hazel,Proscribe means to prohibit. I'm assuming you intended to use the meaning of prescribe in this case.
.If you discard such illogical precepts as mythological poppycock and accept human beings for the intelligent, emotional, social, and most importantly biological creatures that we are, you can understand that there is no cause for such warring with one's own nature. The cause for "good" behavior is a social idea, as is all morality. It has nothing to do with judgement of some intangible soul in an afterlife...this is merely the leverage by which religions have traditionally imposed their standard of morality onto the ignorant and superstitious. It has everything to do with creating and maintaining a viable social order. As such, it's highly subjective and localized within any given society.
I've always been fascinated with the idea of superposition of quantum states, a la Schrödinger's cat, and I tend to believe that such paradoxes would be difficult to conceive in a deteministic universe. When free choice is part of the framework, then every decision represents a branching point in the universe's shape...choose one option, and the resulting reality will be set in one manner; choose another instead, and the result might be completely different. Small perturbations in even the simplest choice might have tremendous and far-reaching effects on manifest reality (the "butterfly effect"). Entire fields of study in nonlinear dynamic systems exist to examine the nature of these phenomena.
If our reality were truly deterministic, such notions would be almost inconceivable....
Yes, I meant to say prescribe in that sentence, but proscribe is actually a better description of most of the religious law. Thou shalt not..., etc.
I love it when you weigh in on subjects like this. I leave some comments that I am all proud of and I come back and find them blasted to bits by a barrage of Hazel-logic. It reminds me that I am alive. But then again, pain always has that capacity.
I have some things to say about the second and third points you made. Briefley, I have to say that I see Paul's theology as barely distinguishable from what a secular humanist would say about the nature of man and morality. The God I believe in is a Grace-filled God and his "judgement" about human induced misery and suffering of others is not that much different than that of a devout secular humanist's judgement.
What I mean is that we are sad when people in general don't measure up to even their own ideals regarding justice and suffering. That self-interest dominates their life and prevents them from doing even what their own personal philosophy would have them do about it. A Grace-filled God knows more about this than any one of us would and can only forgive it all even through his disappointment. So its not that I see the human condition through the fog of some kind of old fashioned Catholic guilt or anything. I see it as a fact of life and I see Paul saying that God sees it that way, too.
I have to run, but I would like to comment on your notion of determinism in a quantum universe later. I have similar thoughts. In fact, I find this thinking in God's answer to Job at the end of the book of Job. Basically, shit happens, and the chain of causality in the universe is too vast for a human to comprehend, so it might as well be non-deterministic. The answer even works for classical physics. God is not a reductionist, it seems.