(September 25, 2014 at 4:18 am)fr0d0 Wrote:(September 24, 2014 at 8:18 pm)whateverist Wrote: Morally, Aristotle's formulation points at why perfection in the abstract doesn't really make a lot of sense. He would say the best way is always a "golden mean" between an extreme of excess and another of deficiency. So the brave person was somewhere between foolhardy and cowardly. So perfection, if it exists at all, is a tension between traits. To me that suggests that it is always situationally dependent as well.
What we're talking about here is humans trying to reconcile their innate failings. Perfection is unattainable. That's a fact. Dealing with the life draining aspect of that is what Christianity confronts with this central tenet.
I don't think sin - wrong thoughts or actions (?) - are what drains life. Life for creatures such as ourselves is simply not limitless. We live quite a long life for a mammal of our proportions.
We are very complex creatures socially and psychologically. We have competing desires and interests. We can never have 'it all' because what we would want would include that which is incompatible. You would call that imperfection. I just call it life .. and I'm grateful for it on its own terms. I don't seek more.
