re christian meta ethics in lsjc cinnmc saltillo cs utexas edu turpin cs utexas edu russell turpin writes in article c f gf 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 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 ff 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 th century onwards and they are not at all the first to understand the gospel in a manner that is congenial to my case michael l siemon i say you are gods sons of the mls panix com most high all of you nevertheless or you shall die like men and fall mls ulysses att com like any prince psalm
