RE: How to debunk the first cause argument without trying too hard
September 19, 2015 at 2:55 pm
(September 14, 2015 at 5:18 pm)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote: Cool story. Still missing the point. Also, given that the story of TGS is only mentioned in Luke, and not in the first/oldest couple of gospels (Matt and Mark) nor in the biggest/last collection of Jesus-stories (John), it's questionable whether such a thing happened at all, or was a tale written by the moralist who signed it "Luke", and attributed to the life of Jesus... but that's a side-issue.
There are three people in the story who encounter the mugged man: 1) a priest, 2) a Levite, and 3) the Samaritan. Priests were, of course, those called into the ministry and were considered holy, even as we consider them so today, and interpreters/enforcers of the divine will through theocratic law. The Levites were the holiest of the tribes, dedicated to religious duties and secular ones related to those duties, and in short were a sort of "theologian class" that were considered holy and "called by God". We might refer to Deacons of the protestant churches in the same way, today. On the contrary, the Samaritans were considered (by racist Judeans) to be almost sub-human, animalistic and immoral, the way a member of the Confederate States of America might have seen a slave. Jesus did not pick these three groups by accident in the tale.
He was asked how a person would inherit eternal life (be saved), in Christian parlance. He answered (via the guy questioning him) that the solution was to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself.
The question was put to him, "but who is my brother?", and he pointed out that it is not our nature, not our race, not our class that makes us brothers, but our choice of moral action. He chose the most hated, subhuman, immoral (according to the values of that religion and place and time) group by which to give this example.
In other words, it is a story against racism, it destroys the idea that a person of one race or class or religion is inherently more moral than another, and it defines "a brotherhood of man" (as John Lennon put it).
Remember how we got onto this discussion?
So I wanted you to see what your actual Ultimate Moral Lawgiver had to say about it. He agrees with one of the most fundamental of Secular Humanist moral concepts, which is that when you treat all human beings as your brethren, you are living up to the highest moral code, and the above-listed problems become impossible. But of course Secular Humanists didn't arrive at this idea by saying, "Hey, Jesus was pretty smart" (actually, I suppose it'd be Buddha or one of the other Golden Rule originators older than the New Testament), we arrived at it by seeing the horrors associated with racism, nationalism, greed, sexism, and every other form of "that guy is not my brother" that is required for atrocities to be committed.
So I'll leave you with the words of John Lennon, beneath this hide tag:
I'm happy you agree with that, and hope that will happen one day, except for no heaven and no religion. But lets see the way things are now.
We learn about history and how the Turks invaded the Balkan peninsula, destroyed churches and set up gigantic mosques facing the walls of Vienna. We learn about ancient battles and turning points, and saw our own brute potential to do massive evil. And we wonder who we are to have done that. And we feel guilt to the point of striving towards an ideal Europe not according to Jesus Christ at all, but according to John Lennon. The European constitution is a massive document of hundreds of pages. Never once does it mention Christianity when defining European identity. Instead, they moved towards a border free dream of utopia at the cost of national and religious identity.
There are problems. Something had to replace those things. In the former Yugoslavia, that was the personal cult of Marshall Tito, and the dream of Communist Utopia. All religious and ethnic differences were pressed. Lets just see how that turned out at the death of Tito with the implosion of the country along ethnic and religious divides.
In the modern European union the thing to replace religious and national identity was consumerism. Reproduction was cut off from sex, and universal contraception and the occasional abortion in case it failed, loosened boundaries of marriage, smaller and smaller families, and children growing up in families with absent caregivers. This problem intesified to the point of governments having to give monetary incentive to large families. Either that, or promote immigration to maintain the economy, to have a young labor force, and feed the hunger of the German companies for cheap labor. But the new generation of immigrants are generally not well integrated. The second generation of immigrants (the children of the first generation) are especially dissatisfied, not few are even going to fight for ISIS.
Why did they not integrate? Is it because of racism, and the color of their skin? Is it because of their differing customs? Or is it because having been uprooted from their old culture, they are ready to integrate into the new, but the new has nothing to offer them any more other than consumerism. They feel unfed by this consumerism. They feel they should have been fed, but they still remain hungry and dissatisfied. As a response, they are prone to returning to the old cultures of their parents, only in a more radicalized way. The new wave of Islamic radicalism is completely cut off from their traditional roots, but they see it as a new alternative to the consumerism that has not made them well, only sicker.
The reality is that there is religion, and there will be as long as we are human. There is national identity, just as people need a solid cultural base to thrive. How will the Europeans help the wave of migrants from Syria if they are unsure about their own identity?
We have governments and borders to keep from anarchy. Before Chrsitianity, civilizations used to maintain order based on scapegoating, even to the point of human sacrifice. If there is no religion to counter it, or of religion is not taught based on the tradition of the ages, if there is no culture to feed them, my fear is that people will resort to anarchy. And that is dangerous because we can destroy the world at the push of a button.
