Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Jay — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 11:15:55 -0000

Try this:

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9802/pannenberg.html

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Jay — Mon, 09 Aug 2004 10:13:28 -0000

Good and evil are not finally self-evident.
Some kind of a 'leap of faith' is made in defining them at all...

"Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it." (Pascal)

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Tony — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 06:58:31 -0000

"The minority are called sociopaths or narcissists and become lawyers or middle managers. They are commonly hated and reviled, but their evil is controlled to a degree by the majority."

Evil is controlled by the majority? Very dubious assertion, that. Ask a slave if evil is controlled by the majority, and he'll agree, it is controlled, but not in his favor.

It's true, as Micha says, the current lack of bodies on your DC sidewalk is not to be taken for granted.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Matt Frost — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 03:15:06 -0000

...and I should add- the lack of corpses isn't attributable to theism, either. I'm not out to make that case.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Matt Frost — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 20:08:39 -0000

You suffer a certain failure of imagination. There are some among us who would be more than happy to step over corpses every day, provided the dead were from the right tribe, or religious group, or social class.

The current lack of bodies on your DC sidewalk is not to be taken for granted, nor is it to be attributed to the innate self-correcting properties of the human conscience.

Would that it were the case.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Micha Ghertner — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 14:04:13 -0000

Why? People don't need to believe in fairy tales in order to explain their natural predilictiosn to care about the common good. It's just a natural instict that most of us have, and some of us don't.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Micha Ghertner — Tue, 03 Aug 2004 13:42:01 -0000

Why? People don't need to believe in fairy tales in order to explain their natural predilictiosn to care about the common good. It's just a natural instict that most of us have, and some of us don't.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

John T. Kennedy — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 07:25:35 -0000

"If people stop beliving the story you can't just order them change their minds.

I would argue that there is in fact something in human nature that causes most people to care about the common good."

My point was that the common good won't do as a standard, but if you're on the right track at all then perhaps it was premature to dismiss natural rights as a story.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Anon — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 13:06:21 -0000

J Kennedy,

I'll agree with your latest post, but then how do we add a greater incentive? If people stop beliving the story you can't just order them change their minds.

I would argue that there is in fact something in human nature that causes most people to care about the common good. If it were otherwise I don't think civilization would be possible at all. Even people who give up Christianity tend to either go to some flaky new age stuff or else they are like Will and come up to some other solution. The minority are called sociopaths or narcissists and become lawyers or middle managers. They are commonly hated and reviled, but their evil is controlled to a degree by the majority. In other words, I think it is human nature that makes people care. In their desire to rationalize they may create god, but god is secondary.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Will Wilkinson — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 09:24:40 -0000

Ruling: It is indeed from the Holy Grail.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

John T. Kennedy — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 08:25:29 -0000

Whether or not the individual will have to "step over corpses on the way to Starbucks" has next to nothing to do with whether that individual behaves well or not. Good behavior by an individual won't make the general chaos you deplore significantly less likely and bad behahavior won't make it significantly more likely.

So the desire to avoid that consequence is obviously not sufficient incentive behave well.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Tamfang — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 18:04:11 -0000

Isn't it from The Holy Grail? (If I could find my copy of the script I might be able to say for sure.)

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Evan McElravy — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 16:56:30 -0000

That terrifying Godhead is a Monty Python illustration, isn't it?

Beats me, all of M.P. I know is the John Cleese silly walk and "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." I would have guessed album art. Can we get a ruling on this?

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 14:28:18 -0000

How do you tell a pretty girl from an ugly girl?

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

John T. Kennedy — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 14:13:20 -0000

How do you tell what's good and what's evil?

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 14:05:31 -0000

You think so? I think they sound pretty normal. There's a lot of good and evil on an average Friday.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

John T. Kennedy — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:33:28 -0000

And what's that? Good and evil sound special.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:28:08 -0000

That which is good, and not evil.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

John T. Kennedy — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 13:00:20 -0000

"...well, it's just plain as an Amish girl that you don't need to believe in anything special to do the right thing."

Without reference to "anything special", what's the right thing to do?

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

John Sabotta — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:58:43 -0000

(From STALIN'S LAST CRIME: The Plot Against The Jewish Doctors 1948-1953 by Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov)

Stalin is Godot, absent from an empty landscape. We wait, we guess, we attribute motives, but in the end he will not reveal himself, and there is no direct way toward understanding him as a "person."
When asked whether Stalin ever appeared in his dreams, Molotov answered, "Sometimes. In extraordinary situations...In a destroyed city...I can't find a way out and I meet him. In a word, very strange, confusing dreams."
It is in a destroyed city of man from which no one can find an exit that Stalin appears.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

John T. Kennedy — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:14:51 -0000

"To which I usually sit with a stunned and expectant look on my face. Because the next step seems perfectly obvious to me. If chaos is so terrible, isn't that reason enough for people to, you know, avoid it. No one much wants to step over corpses on the way to Starbucks, or hose the blood off the sidewalks each morning. We'll all be much better off if we constrain ourselves in certain ways, and if we exert a little extra effort in certain cases.

So isn't this all we need to believe: that being good is a net winner over baby-raping anarchy?"

No. In the absence of objective morality virtue produces public goods while vice produces private goods.

"God, natural rights, or whatever, don't seem to get you anything extra. The horribleness of immorality does a pretty good job of making morality look pretty good without any special help. So why all the insistence on overdetermination? Insurance? "

Under objective morality virtue produces private goods for the individual while vice results in a net loss of private goods.

This is not an argument for objective morality, it just explains why your expectations are unfounded.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Anon — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 17:32:14 -0000

The whole point of positing a monotheistic god in the first place is the universality of that god's edicts. They are axiomatic and so you end the chain of questioning.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 12:45:40 -0000

The realization that having a god doesn't actually add any purpose or transcendent moral system was actually a big part of what led me to become an atheist (I am ashamed to admit - since it is irrelevant to the question of whether god belief is true). Hell is all well and good, but it's just prison writ large. The moral edicts of a god are just as emotive (in the sense that they do not refer to moral "facts") as those of a human.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Brendan — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 10:27:40 -0000

My own opinion is that when people say 'But if people stop believing in God they will go off and rape babies!' what they actually mean is 'If I didn't believe in God I would go off and rape babies, because I think about it all the time.'

The classic example is Dostoyevsky, who apparently raised the question in those terms: ie if there is no God what is to stop me raping a six year old girl? To which there are two answers: first, because let's face it, it wouldn't be that much fun and
second: because if you do a policeman will come and find you and beat you to death.

We don't need Hell: we have prisons, and that's as close as anyone should want to come.

Finally, I feel i should quote John Waters, who pointed out that much as he tried to understand all sexual perversions, paedophilia was always the one he couldn't get. Since everyone knows (he pointed out) that the best bit about sex is having the cigarette afterwards, how could you enjoy it afterwards watching a six year old cough and splutter their way through their first Lucky Strike?

You see, we don't need God. Simple logic suffices.

Re: If God is Dead, Everything is Permitted . . .

Anon — Thu, 29 Jul 2004 09:24:48 -0000

Maybe Will, just maybe, there are a shitload of people who really like playing make believe anyway. So sad...have a look,

http://www.muchosucko.com/video-fanimecon.html