From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Thu, 23 Jan 1997 08:10:36 -0800 (PST)
To: snow <snow@smoke.suba.com>
Subject: Re: Dr. Vulis' social engineering experiment
Message-ID: <199701231610.IAA18740@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


snow wrote:
> Thorn:
> > Alec wrote:
> > The idea that "sin" and "evil" are abstract and somewhat arbitrary is
> > merely a human (and therefore faulty) perception.
> > If God can be perfect by definition (for sake of argument), then "sin"

> Somewhere in the above three lines, someone is making a hell of an
> asumption. See also "The Euthphro Question", plato.

Humans do OK with simple issues, example: 1 + 1 = 2.  Especially true
if the issue has no inherent moral/ethical tie-in.  Once you get past
the simple, however, you start seeing motivation, personal imperative,
etc., which leads to hidden agendas and lies.  When I speak of God,
I'm not surrendering any personal power, or subscribing to your God
concept necessarily (e.g. Plato), I'm just defining an object of
pure reason that is free of human self-interest, for sake of argument.

> > A gentleman wrote to Southern Partisan magazine a few years ago and
> > said "Real freedom is not the license to do whatever you want, but
> > rather the liberty to do what you ought to do".

> No, real freedom is being able to decide for yourself what you ought to
> do--or--who the hell decides what I ought to do?

My example shows that real freedom goes hand-in-hand with
responsibility.
A person could interpret my example in a way that "what you ought to do"
is defined and controlled by external parties, but that was not my point
or the point of the original author.