(April 7, 2014 at 9:42 am)fr0d0 Wrote: Isn't the thought crime thing meant to be extreme? We get the principle, and as usual, people can take that too far and distort the message into something the opposite of what was intended.As a principle, it works in that it teaches that if we refine our attitudes, it becomes much easier to maintain self-discipline. If taken literally, it is extreme in that it makes man's struggle to control his nature meaningless: if you are to be hanged just for thinking of wrongdoing, then you may well decide that it's worth it to commit the crime you are being punished for. After all, there is a mechanism for wiping the actual sin off of the books.
I think where the teaching breaks down is in the all-or-nothing, you-can't-be-trusted-to-figure-this-out-yourself approach of teachings like the golden rule and turn-the-other-cheek. In essence, Jesus is telling people to let the world do as it will to them, because in the end god will fix everything up all neat and tidy. I think that even most Christians see through that and don't just let people run roughshod over them in their day-to-day lives. It's the sensible approach, but it requires that god have a bit of faith in you.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
