Free will thingy:
An idea which appeals to me is that the universe is made up of infinite parts, but it did have a beginning because the parts were not always expressed in the way the universe expresses them. Regardless, the only way there could be a "first cause" in creation is if it existed atemporally and created the rules of time and causality without being restricted to them itself.
You don't explain how a cause can be at once a cause and also be outside the "causal system". If it caused something (even the universe and time itself) then the causeal system exists. If the causal system doesn't exist then it isn't the first cause. This seems like an ad hoc theory designed purely to get causality into the picture, but as I think we have shown causality is an incoherant system. The answer I would subscribe to is Kant's notion of a trancendental aesthetic. Stuff like causality is produced by the way we view the world. To be rational beings requires us to order things spatio temporally, and causality comes from this ordering of the world. It has no real existence outside of our perception. Attepts to explain causality as something that exists externally to us are just incoherant.
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Some of you have wanted me to elaborate on Spinoza, and there seems to be a lot of skepticism that his pantheism equates to the Christian/Jewish God.
- Who was he? He is some enlightenment philosopher who is famous for a rational proof of God and his system of ethics : (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoza)
He offers a view of an immortal omnipotent omnipresent God, who works above our understanding. What constitutes a deity is a subjective judgement, wheither or not this is compatible with the Christian/Jewish/Muslim God is a question for individual believers. I think they are viewpoints that compliment each other.
His conclusions follow from what everyone seems to be describing as "formal" reasoning or something equivalent, and the implication seems to be this is incompatible with common sense. To me it is quite the reverse, the way of setting out an arguement in a formal manner if anything makes it that much more cogent and easy to accept. To use formal reason is to use what it is that makes an arguement compelling. People seem to be dismissing this with no real explaination why.
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A person only ever acts because he/she chooses to do so, a person only ever makes choices based on his/her own values (in the broader, not necessarily ideological sense), a person only ever values something because it benefits him/her from his/her own perspective (I didn't mean objectively).
I don't think we are always this rational... In my experiance people frequently do things becasue it "feels right", not because they are thinking about the action and its concequences.
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About the spread of Christianity being stained with blood -
It's spread wasn't clear cut. Normally what would happen is the local king or lord would accept Christianity and the people would follow. The early church integrated a lot of old beliefs with the new Christian ones and on the whole it was accepted. Most the fighting happened once Christianity had already spread, and was between different Christian factions.
The missionarys during the period of European imperialism were equally mixed.
Ultimatly I think it is hard to win true converts if you use force, and the strength of the church in places like Africa is testament in my view to the fact that the missionaries won a lot of true beleivers. Of course attrocities happened but I don't think this is indicative of the message of Christianity.
I still have a problem accepting that there is any fundamental difference between pre and post Christian morality, the idea that, to use your example, killing someone became inherantly wrong only after the arival of Christianity seems mistaken. The wrongness of killing seems to me to be due to the way as humans we place value on other human life. This is however a common theme in many cultures, to take one example, the idea of killing for a Buddhist is totally wrong. I don't think Chrisitans can claim to have invented the notion that a human life has inherant value.
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Now for the crux of the arguement:
Posting here right now could potentially help people out of a stagnant mindset as far as I'm concerned (though my primary reason for it is to strengthen myself via my own learning, as I think we're too late in trying to save this civilisation to make it the primary objective). Giving them pleasure and comfort would not. Even if I were to shower them in it, they would be able to repay me with nothing of worth.
As humans we posess free will and a blank future in which to exercise it, this alone gives us almost unlimited potential. However this is only possible with a healthy and balanced mind, and I think many people lack this. A "stagnant mindset" would be one where someone is locked into a way of thinking that starves their potential, and is therefore self-destructive. I don't want to tell people what to think or how to live, but as a pure observation, the people I know who have a balanced and healthy mind are very much the ones who "flourish".
Ultimatly living well is a personal thing. People have to walk for themsleves, and while it may seem you are doing them a favour by carrying them, in reality you merely allow them to stagnate. Then again even the strongest people sometimes need help. True compassion is knowing the difference and helping people enough to allow them to walk for themselves. Showering someone in pleasure and comfort is probably the worst thing you can do, as it breeds stagnation in the highest degree. However the answer is surely not to totally starve people of any sort of emotional contact? This would just produce the other extreeme of a society full of people living in the lonely dispair of unafirmed existence.
The main critisism of Chrisian morality seems to stem from examples of apparently helping people when really you are harming them. I don't however think that this is a flaw in Chrisitanity, but more people's ignorance of the implications of their actions. Did Jesus make the cripples rich men so they could be waited on hand a foot for the rest of their lives? no he healed them so they could walk on their own and help themselves.
