Posted on 10/10/2013 6:04:05 AM PDT by NKP_Vet
There’s an odd backwards moral reasoning to which our modern age seems particularly susceptible. Surely you’ve heard it:
Y does X. Y is a basically good person. Therefore, X must be okay.
You hear it from all sides of the cultural divide.
“Joe and Fred are married. They’re good people. How can you say that that kind of relationship is wrong?”
“Cindy does that. She’s a good person. So how can that be racist?”
Think back a bit, and you’ll see that a huge number of the casually-made moral arguments one hears these days boil down to this.
There are a couple big problems.
For starters, what exactly is a “good person”? Often this seems to be a category with as little meaning as “someone I like” or “someone who’s not obviously engaged in genocide or kitten torture at this moment”. And yet, the way the argument is deployed, once someone is determined to be a “basically good person”, every action that person takes in now “basically good”. It is as if each person is now a good or evil deity, and all the actions of the good deities are necessarily good because good deities can not do evil.
But of course, each person performs many actions. Surely not all the actions of “bad people” are bad and of “good people” are good, if only because “good people” and “bad people” at times do the same things.
A bit of this ties in with the issue of moral fashions. Sins which are currently in fashion..........
(Excerpt) Read more at the-american-catholic.com ...
Well, I know that I’m trying to be trustworthy, loyal, kind, friendly, helpful ... all that good Scout Law stuff. If I don’t assume that other people are doing the same, then I’m saying that I’m better in some way, and I don’t feel like that’s true at all.
That is not correct. The philosophy is that righteous behavior is what God tells us is righteous behavior for us and sin is what God tells us is sin. God is not bound by the rules he imposes on us humans any more than adults are bound by the restictions they impose on infant children. Thus, there are things God "does" which would be a sin for us to do.
This is the root “split” of worldviews.
“basically good” is the humanist worldview,
“inherently sinful” is the Judeo-Christian worldview.
(Skip to 2:00)
Some believe that men are basically good and with enough laws, rules, threats, love, compassion, etc. etc. that we can create a heaven on earth without God.
Other believe that man is basically no good and that the inevitable fate of mankind will be destruction. There will be no heaven on earth until Christ returns to set the world straight.
An equivalent argument is:
Y believed in X. Y was an evil person. Therefore, X is evil.
Often used with Hitler or Stalin as Y, atheism or evolution as X.
It's actually more complicated than that. Most people assume Calvinism's "innate total depravity" is the "Judaeo-chrstian worldview" when that's not necessarily so.
Judaism teaches that whereas G-d created the evil inclination and gave it to man (along with the good inclination), after the sin in the Garden (which was committed by the "perfect" first man, not a "fallen man") he became disordered and the evil inclination became stronger than the good. This isn't the humanistic "man is basically good," but it isn't Calvinism either.
Eastern Orthodoxy is what you might call "semi-Pelagian." It rejects the very concept of "original sin" in favor of "slavery to the devil through the passions." Yet they have a very high view of "pre-grace" human nature, to the point that they often claim that all western chrstians (including Catholics) are Calvinists. (Eastern Orthodoxy is strange. It makes absolutely no sense to anybody from a "western" background and I don't know if it can be made to.)
Catholicism teaches that after Adam was created he was given grace in addition to nature. The "original sin" deprived him of grace and wounded his nature, but did not render him "totally depraved." If it held to this, of course, it would have to abandon its sacraments and ceremonials. No sacramental/ceremonial religion can accept "total depravity" because "total depravity" calls for an antinomian loophole as its only rectification.
There’s what I call the “Dog-and-a-Picket-Fence” argument. It goes something like this: “I mean, we have a dog and a picket fence.”
The core of the classical curriculum was grammar, logic and rhetoric. Yes, the curriculum of the benighted Middle Ages.
Look how far we’ve come.
Close. The Christian view is that man's nature is "fallen", but has free will and therefore can choose between good and evil. Man is neither basically good nor basically bad. He can choose his destiny.
I would say that the biblical view is that there is none good. Man does have freewill. But the only real "good" choice we can make is to subsume our will and follow the will of Christ.
Unconverted people can certainly make choices that can, by comparison, look "good". But ultimately those who don't follow Christ are following something or someone else...and that's not good.
Denial of original sin like Pelagius.
You certainly see a lot of this mindset in politics, i.e. Y supports liberal policy X. Y is a "conservative" Republican. Therefore X must be OK as long as Y is doing it.
Fortunately, people are starting to wake up from this lazy mode of thinking, i.e. "Y is OK, therefore his policies are always OK."
This line of argument is specious for several reasons. First, there's the fact that just because somebody is good/evil doesn't mean that everything he does is automatically right or wrong. If Hitler or Stalin say that 1+1=2 or the sky is blue, should we oppose these claims?
Another, more trivial point, is that Hitler was not an atheist. Christian Fundamentalists use him as a posterboy for atheist materialism, left-wing atheists like to use him as a posterboy for Fundamentalist Christianity. He was neither an atheist nor a conventional Christian in any sense (from what I can tell, he was some sort of Deist or pagan Theist with a strong superstitious belief in the occult).
That's not entirely true. The Marxist, left-wing humanists believe that humans are innately good and altruistic. Secular right-wingers believe that human beings evolved to be selfish and competitive, or at least limit their goodness and altruism to members of their own family or "in-group" (religion, nation).
Cases in point include Social Darwinist libertarians from Herbert Spencer to Ayn Rand. If anything, they hold a far more pessimistic view of human nature than do Christians.
Somebody does me.
I'm okay.
Hurray!
-- x
_______________
Seriously, though, when people say some one is "basically good" they don't mean that person is without sin or vices.
They're saying "So far as I see or can tell, so-and-so doesn't seem to be evil or malicious."
And they're not making that claim about humanity as a whole, just about somebody they've personally met or seen.
Original Sin is NOT a Jewish concept.
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