Nobody loves me but my mother
And she might be jiving too…
In the garden of Eden there were two trees. The tree of either/or and the tree of both/and. Eve and Adam ate from the tree of either/or. The rest is history.
I’m almost 100% sure that’s not how that story goes.
I see you though. You want to say that people are wrong without taking a position on whether they’re right or wrong. Which is an absurdity. But if it buoys your canoe.
I’m for it.
I disagree,
In the sense that asking or demanding sacrifices from a child, from a teenager, from an adult, from an old person, are all categorically different. For example, All-out war is particularly gruesome, when young men age 18-24 are called to do most of the frontline fighting and dieing. It’s not the same (Sacrifice) to call upon adult or older men to fight wars, for whatever Cause. Yet, the Cause is the point. To what is the Sacrifice owed? To what end and purpose? Note, by the way, that Women are not called-upon to do the same. (Because they are more Innocent than Men, and children are more Innocent than Adults)
When humanity is called to sacrifice, people heed the call willingly or unwillingly.
Was Christ’s Sacrifice willing, or unwilling? This should be common sense. And is His significance more or less, than the young men sacrificed in war? Or that a Father is called-upon to sacrifice his only-begotten son? And for what reason?
You have to keep-in-mind, as well, that human and child sacrifice were commonplace in the ancient Old World.
Christ is much the reason (or THE MAIN reason) that those such sacrifices have been ended, supposedly, today.
It was pointed out to me how important Christianity is to being able to see the truth of what’s happening in the world today. Atheists won’t be able to understand this.
Something about Christianity is really important or helpful, I think it’s multi-layered… Christianity enshrines truth to such a high point by equating God with truth, for example; to deceive or lie is always bad; being rich and loving money is very bad; the dominion over the world is currently run by evil, as God explains it is the devil who has temporary dominion of the earth; obsession with lust/pleasure/ the flesh is very bad; and to understand that evil does exist, is concentrated in evil beings and evil people who work for evil beings, this helps us to see behind the curtain of what’s going on in the world today.
By being Christian we come from an implicit perspective of: we already know that evil exists, it’s out there in the world, it has control over much of the world (powerful people/groups in the world are most likely to be evil), evil is deceptive, evil is connected to massive wealth and is also connected to any groups, movements or ideologies which espouse gross materialism or the decadent obsession with pleasure/sexuality (think lgbt movements and those who push them, for example).
This knowledge is all deeply encoded in the Christian as simply a natural and pre-requisite condition of being Christian. It’s not even yet translated into specific knowledge of specific groups/people/movements or situations in the world. The knowledge is structural at the psychological level, like a template.
You can probably see therefore how having this basic template makes it much easier to decode the specifics in the world and to understand what’s really going on. And this accuracy of the Christian template is, and I would argue this in a metaphysical and simply logical sense, strong evidence for the truth of Christianity itself.
So it’s no wonder the anti-human NWO/WEF global cult types really hate Christianity. Atheists and progressives too, they hate Christianity because their hate is like a psychological immune response they have to the approach of something that would shatter their own worldview and their own sense of identity, it would break their complacency by forcing the necessity of responsibility. Because truth is a responsibility, to have knowledge already means to have some responsibility which derives logically from that specific knowledge itself.
Knowledge necessitates responsibility. If I have knowledge something bad is going to happen then by simple moral understanding and the most basic conscious instinct I am also aware of the fact that I have a responsibility to do something about that bad thing or at the very least to avoid it. This is logically and inherently baked into the very value-statements of “good and bad” themselves including with regard to not only ourselves but to other people who we also care about for various reasons, including the basic recognition of equivalency between them and ourselves which recognition is sometimes called the golden rule.
Knowledge tends to imply something about how something in the world is going to impact ourselves or someone else somehow. Hence why morality and knowledge are so closely and deeply entwined, just as Christianity teaches.
If you have “is going to impact” and it’s combined with a “is good” or “is bad” then what you get as a result is the production of a responsibility. This is what is called morality. Morality can therefore be defined as simply the production of responsibility from the combination of knowledge with value-facts (with facts that are implicitly laden with either a good or a bad value).
This simple and accurate understanding of morality comes directly from the Christian template.
We could say morality is the responsibility itself, or we could say morality is the production of that responsibility. This shows that the term “morality” isn’t even deep and coherent enough to capture what’s actually going on with the things that morality as a concept is trying to represent/define. Also we often use morality for the actions we take in response to a morally-impelling situation, so morality is also often used in the sense to mean the actual physical thing/action we do for either good or bad. Hence the three step process that is connected and integrated across the span of itself, going necessarily from: 1) the production of responsibility, to 2) the responsibility itself, and then to 3) the physical actions we take in order to act properly with respect to what is logically required as a consequence of that responsibility (namely by actualizing something good or neutralizing or cancelling something bad).
The supposed is-ought dilemma only exists for non-valued (non-moral) situations or facts, like for example “that tree has green leaves”, well there’s no moral implication as to the color of leaves so there is no “ought-to” generated as a result of the “is” here. But once the “is” is expanded to include affecting facts such as the tree is a living organism, the relationship between the specific tree and ourselves in our needs/goals, or another example how leaves might block some important view or might be food, any of those “is” statements can come into play and begin to reveal morality-facts. Once those kind of facts are revealed sufficiently an “ought-to” will naturally be produced.
Then we run into the possible problem of conflicting multiple ought-to’s. This problem is naturally resolved by taking into account the natural rank-ordering of affecting/morally-inducing facts, which can be confounded by the fact that often there are different hierarchies that can be adopted… but the task we have is to work on synthesizing all possible hierarchy structures into a single, most comprehensive and most truthful meta-hierarchy.
While that’s not easy and it’s certainly not something we really consciously and explicitly set out to do, it happens to already be exactly what we do naturally in the background of our everyday thinking and acting in the world. Some people do it better than others, this implicit generation of a kind of virtual image of the coherence structure of the meta-hierarchy of all possible rank-order structures of responsibility-producing facts.
I think this virtual or ideal, metaphysical background structure is a critical and key component of the human mind. It’s something the mind naturally does in the background and it’s also something that becomes a central part and substance of the mind itself, a determinant of how the mind operates.
With God and truth as the supreme absolute framework this allows us to contextualize the meta-hierarchy, meaning it is able to be delimited and thus come more concretely into our psychological experience, in the background and as more of a structural feature but also in the foreground as the actual content and salience of our conscious experience. Christianity provides this foundation, beyond the scope of philosophy itself but also linking back into philosophy to draw across vast distances and to concretize into reality what could only be called the will to truth, something inherently valuable as acting as a precondition for all sorts of authentic human modes and possible experiences/states. Power comes from the truth, from reality, not the other way around. The falsification of the nature of power, in the lust for personal power that betrays reality, is one of the primary cautionary lessons of Christianity.
That’s a very astute approach to Morality, from the vantage of Knowledge/Epistemology and Truth…
But let’s go further—the knowledge is not only of the World, but also of the Self within it. Are you an active participant in the World, meshed and merged within it? Or are you passive or resistant, disconnected and divergent apart from the world? I generally analyze and investigate people based on this differentiation. People usually want to reject the ideal of Responsibility. That it is never “their fault” for their own lives, for being born, or for any actions/choices/decisions they have made in life. The act of “taking responsibility” is then a very profound intent; and it is just as rare. Higher intelligence indicates a necessary connection between Oneself (your action) and Others (the world). This implies that the higher intelligence an organism is, the more it must subconsciously reject Accountability if it seeks to relinquish the idea of Responsibility. This can be positively or negatively affected through: parenting, education, religion, social/cultural history (ethics), indoctrination/propaganda, and countless other means of Coercion practiced by the State against the Individual.
Generally people are attacked concerning their sense of Self-Responsibility. This appears all over today’s Global World as the “Victim Culthood”. The more of a ‘victim’ you are, it’s implied (although it’s a simple lie), the more morally ‘Good’ you are. Or that a child’s “Innocence” is also “automatically-good”. But in practical reality, these are political methods of Classism—that there are ‘Protected’ classes, the Untouchables, which are immune from criticism and social attack or retaliation. These ‘Untouchables’ are always good, can do no wrong, eternally innocent, and “automatically-good”. These factors culminate across other political vectors: White/Black, Male/Female, Old/Young, Religious/Atheist, and then all political divisions: Left/Right, Liberal/Conservative, Democrat/Republican, etc. Those in power, stay in power, because of their successful manipulations and divisions of the populace, to play them against each-other, while they claim their Righteous title of Untouchables.
Therefore, in practical parlance, it is always somebody else’s fault, to scapegoat their political opposition, which results in this Bipolarized metanarrative.
Everything is boiled-down to “Us/Them” and “We are Righteous / They are Sinful”.
The difficulty of higher intelligence and moral responsibility is the degree of factors involved to locate Oneself within a social polarity, a Populace, over the course of history, to accurately describe and account for the widest range of Moral/Ethical/Political dilemmas, challenges, and considerations, of the time, place, and people.
Most of humanity can only deal with a small amount at a small time. Very high intelligence is required to keep up with these methods of ever-increasing sophistication of political, moral, and religious indoctrination and propaganda, which are all used to ensnare and captivate the masses, for the welfare and benefit of a small few.
If somebody is highly intelligent, young, and from an early age accepts that “I am responsible for myself, my actions, their unintended consequences, and even possibly be made responsible for others’ actions” then this will most certainly result in a debilitating Neurosis. You immediately would be inundated with a sense of Dread for all the factors applied to your life, those around you, and then those which you believed yourself separated from as strangers. Then the deepest concepts would strike your consciousness: “How much can a single person be/come Responsible for?”
History already records this lesson: Jesus Christ.
Cannot a Man become responsible for All others, or for All time??
If it can happen once, can it happen again? This is the Key to Christianity and the Christian Religion/Morality.
Intelligence is linked to Moral-Responsibility, as is Knowledge, Awareness, and Truth.
That is also what is generally behind what is called “the angst over the pointlesness of life.”
Where’s Zoot when we need him most?
What a better example of a Man-child actively and willingly living his life by complete renunciation of personal Responsibility???
A Child cannot remain Innocent forever, or even for long, when thrust into the Machinations of the world.
Everybody must Choose for themselves, to accept it, or to reject it. But lying about this choice, lying about Free-Will, is repugnant.
_
When did Jesus usurp God, in the benevolent-love department? I thought that was God’s remit/his plan. 
Perhaps Jesus is an icon for males… a Saint for the sinners, like Mary Magdalene or Mary are… for females.
Jesus didn’t usurp, he shares in God’s nature just as do we all. Only Jesus shared in that nature much more than we do, for being the actual son of God conceived directly by spirit into flesh and inheriting no original sin.
Jesus followed God’s plan, even though in the end he didn’t even understand it. His faith in his father and his love for humanity allowed him to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Jesus was basically the quintessentially perfect human being. A role model as you said. Someone who never sinned, who never violated morality and who never short-changed himself or the truth in order to pursue a laziness, an excuse or a personal desire. I suppose women can look up to Mary, I know a lot of Catholicism is about that.
The Rosary invokes/aids prayer to Mary, and The Lord our Father… apparently the Rosary is a Catholic aid, to prayer.
What is the most famous prayer?
“The most common prayer among Christians is the “Lord’s Prayer”, which according to the gospel accounts (e.g. Matthew 6:9-13) is how Jesus taught his disciples to pray”.
Who exactly was the Lord, in Jesus’ eyes, that he spoke of?
Jesus himself is Lord, he is the Christ, the son of God and son of man.
So you’re saying, he was referring to himself? Or are you simply opining here…?
Not a philosophical response from you, I must say… we are all said to be children of God, but Christ spoke of the Lord, not that he was the Lord. This is a discussion board, not a place to preach.
In addition to Magsj’s question:
What does your proposition mean?
In what sense is Jesus Lord?
What does Christ mean and how does the term apply to Jesus?
What does Son of God mean?
What does Son of Man mean?
What is your relationship to the proposition?
If you believe it, why?
felix dakat said :
"So I ask: What is the purpose of you? Unless you know that, how could you possibly know the purpose of Christ?
The purpose of You is to love one another.
The purpose of Christ is to teach that hard earned lesson.
A lord is someone you obey, and look up to. Follow what they say. Christians do that with reference to God and to Jesus. Some Christians have the concept of the trinity and think God = Jesus = Holy Spirit, others reject that idea and see them as distinct.
Either way, “lord” is indeed how Jesus referred to himself, and how others referred to him. Because he was holy and because he has authority. It’s not that complicated.
And yes, we are all children of God made in his image. But there is only one Christ who is the literal son of God in a unique way, because he was conceived directly by the Holy Spirit and conceived immaculately (Mary was cleansed of all sin, and Jesus had no human father, so he inherited no original sin). That’s the story anyway. Jesus therefore shares in the essence of God in a way that no other human did. He is literally God made human, God come down to earth in human form to experience human life and to teach and show us the way, and then to sacrifice himself bringing the weight of all sin with him to hell, in order to save us from the spiritual ramifications of our sins. Again, at least that’s how the story goes.