[Vision2020] Seeking some definitions -- just what do you mean?

[Christopher Witmer]

(My comments interspersed below. -- Chris)
-----Original Message-----
From: Nicholas Gier wrote:

[[ Using the example of the Ik people, who lived under extreme
circumstances, is a tad misleading. ]]

Is it really? I was only trying to show that the Golden Rule is not truly
universal. Even if they lived under extreme circumstances, it makes my
point. Also, it behooves us to ask whether their morality resulted from or
caused the extreme circumstances under which they lived.

[[ Only very few schools of Hinduism or Buddhism following the theory of
absolute monism, so that generalization is false as well. ]]

I have been living among Buddhists most of my life, so I think I know a
thing or two about Buddhism. I grant it would be false if I tried to apply
it indiscriminately to everyone who is a Hindu or Buddhist, but that's not
what I'm trying to do. "Only a few schools" establishes my point quite well.

[[ Hindu and Buddhist societies are generally more moral if one takes crime
statistics as a basis. For example, a census taken in the 1880s in British
India founded that one in 3,000 odd Buddhists, one in 1,700 odd Hindus, but
one in 700 odd Indian Christians had committed a crime. . . . How does
Witmer account for the fact that the most evangelical Christian society in
the world (the US) has the highest crime rates, and a post-Christian Europe
has very low crime rates and a general incarceration rate that is is
generally ten times lower than the U.S.? ]]

When child prostitution is legal in a society, I don't call that moral. When
baby girls are killed by their parents because they are girls, I don't call
that moral. When caste discrimination is built into a society, I don't call
that moral. When helping people who are suffering is declared to be a
criminal activity because it violates the law of Karma, I don't call that
moral -- regardless of what the official crime statistics might be. I would
turn the question about the most evangelical Christian society in the world
suffering from a high crime rate and ask, does anyone seriously believe that
the more people emulate Jesus, the more the crime rate will tend to
increase? Does anyone believe that the huge numbers of people in America's
prisons are there because they were emulating Jesus? That's what
evangelization is all about, and it means that America has a long, long, way
to go with regard to evangelization. By the way, I strongly suspect that
most people in American prisons are there for drug-related crimes, and an
awful lot of people are in prison because they are black. That last
statement has a number of possible meanings and many if not most of them are
probably correct to varying degrees. I don't paint blacks in American
society purely as victims, but as a group it is true that they were
victimized by chattel slavery and they have also continued to be victimized
by their "emancipator" dishonest Abe Lincoln and the statist American
society that steadily emerged in his wake -- a society that has come to
actively encourage black dependency, which might be thought of as just a
different form of slavery. The failure of race relations in the USA is the
single greatest failure of our nation, and as a society we are nowhere near
to properly identifying the cause of the problem, let alone solving it. I
see it as a failure to complete the evangelization of American society.
Jesus is the answer. God does not want to settle for a nation of halfway
Christians. If you go halfway and falter, God is going to deal with that,
and it seems to me that He has been dealing with that, and it has not been a
bed of roses but we are, as a nation, proving to be slow learners.
Apparently God has got all the time in the world to keep teaching us until
we finally get it figured out. Finally, with regard to European crime
statistics, we can point out that a lot of actual crime never makes it into
the official crime statistics in Europe. In some supposedly civilized
countries the negligence of the authorities in this regard is notorious.
Statistics can prove just about anything . . . 

[[ Jesus was very late in declaring the Golden Rule. It is found in
Confucianism, Buddhism, and Socrates, all pre-Christian sources. ]]

Yes, Jesus arrived out of breath and he apologized for not arriving sooner
before everyone else had already stolen his thunder, relegating him to the
role of copycat . . . Seriously, some nutty folks (folks who talk about
pre-babelic this and pre-Noahic that) actually believe that the second
person of the Trinity created the world and gave man special revelation
(i.e., the scripture that eventually became the 66 books of the Bible) from
the very beginning of history. In which case the Golden Rule would certainly
predate Confucius, Buddha, and Socrates. For example, the Golden Rule is
codified in Leviticus, which precedes all three of those personages. Since
the second person of the Trinity is the divine author of Scripture, that
means He beat them to the punch after all -- not that I expect you to agree
with that, but it is certainly the perspective of Trinitarian Christianity.

[[ I also object to Witmer's very objectionable thesis that a small number
of Jews in Babylonian captivity had that much effect on the general morality
of the region.  He leaves out the profound influence of Zoroastrianism,
which was the first monotheism religion based on personal responsibility. ]]

Sorry, it was just me believing what's written in the Bible again. I keep
forgetting that it's all mythology and not to be regarded as fact. And
please don't take my silence on Zoroastriansim to be a dismissal of its
significance or influence. But when you consider that the general consensus
is that Babylonian Captivity predates Zoroaster, by now you've just gotta
know how someone like me is going to account for it. And if you want to take
the positon that it is much older -- conservative Zoroastrians would say
their religion dates back to 6,000 B.C., which according to my
understanding, predates the creation of the world by about 2,000 years -- I
might be willing to accept that it represents at earliest a post-babelic
corruption of the true global religion that came to an end at Babel. Going
back much farther than that would be a bit of a problem since I don't think
Noah and his family were Zoroastrians, and they are the only ones who
survived the flood. But in any case the bulk of scholarship seems to be in
agreement that Zoroaster postdates the Babylonian Captivity.

Best regards,

Chris Witmer