What IS good, and how do we determine it?

[The Grand Nudger]

So.....the paper you found.......Catholic Girl, starts off with a few qeustions to set the tone...lets go ahead and answer them real quick.

is it immoral to have one’s safety assured by someone else?

It can be, yes.

 Is it immoral for most of us in a society to have our peace and tranquility assured by the sacrifice and even death of others?

It can be, yes.

 Is it immoral to have one’s debts paid by someone else?

It can be, yes.  

But we're not talking about any of that...lets not forget we're talking about torturing a human being and then stringing him up on a post to die because we did bad shit.  

The author continues for a couple of paragraphs, pitching straw but, amusingly, getting it right on accident, without seeming to realize it...and leaving that question unanswered for a few more paragraphs of shameless straw.....but....finally, some meat.....so here we go.  

So Hitchens must mean that there is something abhorrent and immoral in our benefiting from the suffering of others. Perhaps he knows the line from Francis Thompson’s poem “Daisy”: “For we are born in others’ pain, / And perish in our own.” Being human would seem to entail benefiting from what others do all the time, from first to last, and often what they do involves self-sacrifice and pain.

No, Hitchens meant exactly what he said....ignore that the author still has his fork in hand...the comment he weasels in here is fucking sick.  We're born in others pain, and perish in our own.  He's not commenting on the morality of the situation at all...just excusing it on the grounds that it happens all the time.  Well, you know what...that's a problem too, jackass, perhaps we should work to see it happen less often, and we can start by ceasing to hold it up as a shining example of love and virtue when it does?  Sure, there is pain and suffering in the world that can't be avoided....but I haven't scapegoated anyone today...so apparently -that's- the kind of pain and suffering that -can- be avoided.  

I am no theologian, nor is this idle boasting, but even I know that Hitchens’s second point exhibits a radical misunderstanding of the human situation. He seems to be suggesting that the moral thing for me to do would be to save myself. I am the one who sinned so I should redeem myself. Well, Pelagius was a Briton, so I suppose Hitchens comes by this mistake honestly. There is a lot more involved here than an apparent shifting of the burden onto someone else that I could have carried myself.

Again, he does not comment on the morality of the situation...he just asserts his faith position that this is the only way to salvation, that a human being can't get it, without vicarious redemption.  Well guess what....if you can't manage to get salvation for what you've done..maybe you shouldn't have done such horrible shit?  At what point does whining "but how else am I supposed to get the lollipop" make it okay to torture and murder a person, or to accept as payment the torture and murder of a person, or to accept a persons torture and murder as payment by another -on your behalf-?

His closing remarks, here

So of Hitchens’s two objections, the first involves a rejection of an ineradicable feature of human existence, and the second is a Pelagian misunderstanding of how redemption can come about.

suggest that he sees these two points that I've addressed as his strongest.  You?