(August 10, 2020 at 12:47 pm)Greatest I am Wrote: No argument on your last. That is a subjective call for each of us.

If love of the good does not create the hate of evil, then where does the hate originate? What causes it?

Do you see us living in a dualistic world? 

I sure do.

Regards
DL

I'm more a pluralist than a dualist I believe. But for the purpose of this conversation you can consider me a non-monist.
A biblical literalist would say that God created everything, including hate. I personally would say that God has given Humans the ability to feel emotions of a full range that includes hate. In that sense I would agree that God creates the opportunity and ability to hate. God also hardens the heart, according to scripture. I believe people can also harden their own heart.

I believe that there are 3 primary affects in the mental space for emotion: reward, punishment and fear, I believe hatred forms from from a combination of the later two.
Love of good, is just that love of good, is doesn't precipitate anything necessarily. Historically I would say that typically Love of good is followed by tolerance of the bad, rather than hatred of it. Hate originates the same place it does for all of us, in the mental.

Have you ever considered applying that pluralism to the hardening of hearts?  Perhaps god doesn't really harden hearts, as an active comment.  Perhaps god created a world that, through pluralist values, could harden a heart to one or more of the value making items.   

(in error, or not)

If the heart is the mind in this case then yes. Perhaps God doesn't directly harden the heart. God, through the Holy Spirit, influences our mind to harden our heart. He could also indirectly harden a un/believers heart because he understands the heart and what impact different interceding events would have on that heart. That all seems quite in line with my beliefs. I even suppose God could forcibly harden the heart if He desired as well. I suppose that by showing and then following Jesus' example God would be indirectly affecting the hardnes of the heart as well.

-and do you entertain the notion that god may have hardened a heart in vain?

-Very different lenses, I would assume.

I guess we would have to get into “in vain”. Could u be more descriptive?

Sort of bleeds into our other convo, as things often do. Let's suppose that a god exists, that it;s the christian god, and let's suppose that god hardens hearts. Let's suppose that god isn't an irrational force that acts in a random fashion - that it has a plan, and we can agree that plans are ultimately referent to goals.

The goal of human salvation has a plan, and the hardening of hearts must be of service to that plan - but if by hardening a heart god has annihilated any possibility of salvation by those metrics...what has that god accomplished?

(August 10, 2020 at 1:02 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Descriptive moral statements refer to how things are or how things have been, not how they should be or whether they should be.  Your disagreement is with the latter, not the former.  

Your question assumes that slavery is an instrumental good.  That it's good-for something.   I'm noting that people commonly find the instrumental good, which is a moral bad, compelling.  For most of us...hopefully, slavery isn't the instrumental good being considered - but it doesn't really matter which real or perceived instrumental good is being weighed against it's own moral badness.

I am dealing with the here and now. Not ancient history.

Regards
DL

In this regard there doesn't seem to be a difference between today and ancient history. We routinely decide that an instrumental good outweighs a moral evil. I'm wondering aloud about precisely that with Tack in two threads. There's nothing particularly new or radical about it - but it's not an artifact relegated to museums, either. It's only a question of how much we want the real or perceived deliverable, and what arguments or rationalizations we'll find compelling or serviceable to that end.

If I understand you correctly, you're insisting that we shouldn't do that, or should approach it with more caution than we do, at the least. I think there's definitely an argument to be made there, and we won;t be hard pressed to find cautionary examples.

(August 11, 2020 at 5:39 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Sort of bleeds into our other convo, as things often do.  Let's suppose that a god exists, that it;s the christian god,  and let's suppose that god hardens hearts.   Let's suppose that god isn't an irrational force that acts in a random fashion - that it has a plan, and we can agree that plans are ultimately referent to goals.  

The goal of human salvation has a plan, and the hardening of hearts must be of service to that plan - but if by hardening a heart god has annihilated any possibility of salvation by those metrics...what has that god accomplished?

Hardening of the heart doesn't annihilate the possibility of salvation. Hardening of the heart produces the opportunity to be broken. The breaking of stubbornness for example. It doesn't exclude love either. Here's a practical and current example. My son does stupid shit. I love him. and always will. I don't always like what he does. When he decides to go 100mph to get home on time his priorities are certainly not right. What he does tempers my reactions to him and shows how I feel about what he's done. It doesn't mean I stopped loving him, but that my heart is somewhat hardened by what he does. His heart may be hardened to his patriarchal oppression. For him to grow part what seems a permanent way of being into other areas he can't see because his heart is hardened, it might require some cracks and breaks in that hardened pride and ego. When you're broken you can be malleable and more open to possibilities.

I may want to give everyone in the world 20 bucks, but that won't happen. Some won't hear about it, some won't trust it, some won't want it, some will take advantage, etc.. It ceases to matter why or that I do want to give $20 to the world, the more others get involved, because each participant brings their perspective, action and judgement into the equation. I did state that God can harden a heart, but so can people. People's hearts are hardened every day. Things like normalizing atrocities, indifference and apathy, the bystander affect, etc.. Some people even do it purposefully like learning to let a baby self soothe requires that hardening. hardening isn't intrinsically bad, just another mechanism or tool that is a feature not a bug.

To get back to the OP and paint some lanes for the conversation, I consider tribalism exactly one of those heart hardening things. To some degree it is helpful. Dealing with years of oppression and mistrust requires a certain amount of tribalism to weather that storm. However being too hard that you mistake the kind officer reaching out his hand to help you up for a mean "other" looking to oppress you is too far. It's also driven by emotionalism and instinct rather than intellect and reason, making it hard to suss out the details during the experience.

-Rationalizations such as the above.

Hardening of the heart can most certainly annihilate salvation. You insist that it provides the opportunity to be broken, but we don't all break, and there are a great many of us who respond to attempts to break us with an even greater hardening of the heart.

I presume the author of creation knows this. Here again, though, you present another compulsion to instrumental goods in spite of their moral evil. he hardening of hearts is good-for salvation, you contend, while assiduously avoiding the very real possibility and actuality that the hardening of hearts is not only bad, but will predictably fail to achieve it's own goals. We do bad things on the notion that they might help us to achieve some desired end, which we think is good. We insist that god is like us in this regard.