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Robert Tulip wrote: I wrote a paper on MacIntyre’s After Virtue in my undergraduate degree back in about 1983, but found it a totally confusing book. I found Heidegger’s axiology more congenial, interpreting his main idea that care is the meaning of being as a fundamental ethical axiom for a systematic existential philosophy. That generates the idea that our purpose is to care for each other.
MacIntyre's argument is that our ethics have become, in his words, "incoherent" because we have tried to escape teleology. There is certainly no conflict with Heidegger's framework in that.

I fear that the book can be quite confusing, because it is more of a critique than a construction. However, the reason it is confusing could be as simple as the breakdown in teleological language, in which "our purpose" is no longer a suitable topic for discussion by major philosophers such as Richard Rorty, for a variety of reasons intrinsic to modernity. We have, for example, the excellent ethical analysis of John Rawls still lacking a rich discussion of why we want to be ethical people. Why is that a vital part of living excellent lives? We are better at adjudicating than at persuading, let alone leading, because our material capabilities have so far outstripped our sense of who we are as social beings. It almost seems that analytical discussion is the only kind that highly educated people can engage in without throwing up our hands in despair.
Robert Tulip wrote:Your points from MacIntyre raise the question of which priorities are our purpose for religion. Is it to give glory to God? Is it to maximise human flourishing? Is it to promote the values of faith, hope and love? My view is that in some sense it is all of these, but the challenge of integrating faith and reason is to put these goals into a systematic existential theology that entirely coheres with scientific knowledge.
The good news is that a humbler discourse about living well has emerged from the margins, out of the void into which so many lives have fallen. Instead of a systematic existential theology, which still rings of adjudication to me, we have a vocabulary of resilience, of relation, of accountability, of loneliness and emptiness and companionship and joy. And lo and behold, from the marginalized has come the essential truth that ordinary people are not looking to leaders for final answers as to how life is to be lived, but rather are seeking examples to show that living well is possible in a life embedded in mutual obligation and caring.

When you know people who really care about giving glory to God, not in a shallow, cheerleading sense but in their considered inner core, who, day by day and year by year seek to reassure and accompany and appreciate other people, then you see that it is possible and worth the effort. It does not require any heroic or superhuman effort but just a continual willingness to turn one's face to the Good.
Robert Tulip wrote:Choice of values also happens through unconsidered inheritance of past values. Prevailing answers have a social inertia, which can be questioned in a systematic ontology. That problem of debate over values is a big part of the motivation for ex-Christians, to see how the social inertia of Christian values is often highly irrational and damaging.
Well, obviously I do not disagree, but I am shifting my thinking to a dissatisfaction with "worldview", in which the values are not the problem but rather the path envisioned for realizing our common values. The means, in other words, not the ends. To be as blunt as possible, I think the traditionalists still believe in imposed values. They are not satisfied with the path of persuasion, viewing it as an effete and empty pipe dream that is not capable of dealing with the turmoil of the world's fight for resources and status. They have not seen, as many of us have, the system of persuasion working quite effectively and satisfactorily. Mesmerized by the periodic eruption of conflict, they do not realize how much of the perpetuation of morality has always depended on merciful deeds and words, on caring and connection and cultivation. The research demonstrates it, but of course that is just science.
Robert Tulip wrote: To say care is the meaning of being means that human identity is intrinsically relational, standing in conscious relation to our familiar world and in unconscious relation to the entire fate of the earth. Our unconscious relationships are often where we participate in eternity.
More than that, to be human is to be internally relational. Trinitarian theology drinks deeply from the waters of id, ego and superego, and sees caring as the element that enables these three internal (but also social) processes to dialogue rather than just struggling amongst themselves.
Robert Tulip wrote:It is true that soul is generally seen as individual, and yet soul is also imagined at the level of the world – Yeats speaks of the Anima Mundi, the soul of the world, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet. You are right that our personal soul is intrinsically social, in the sense that no man is an island, so there is something highly damaging and perverse in imagining the soul as separate from our connectedness.
Well said. The American Transcendentalists talked sometimes about an Oversoul. Same idea. With our recent intimate experience with tribalism, we may long for a cool, individualized rationalism to slay the dragon, but there are reasons to think that is a futile quest. In teaching we talk about cognitive regulation, by which a person learns to recognize consequences for foolish behavior and to reason their way to moderation of their own emotional excesses. However, the opioid crisis and other revelations are showing us that this is a path that works best with the economic security of the college educated, while the path out of emotional chaos really depends more on a social system capable of offering material security and relational accompaniment to most of society.
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Boil it down to the bones boys. Boil it down to the bones. NONE of us know why we are alive. NONE of us know what our purpose is while we live. Individually or collectively. I'm glad you picked up this thread. There is only one answer for us. Try to understand as best you can how we got here and where we might be going. And in my opinion, the best way we can all work together is to deeply appreciate each of us and be grateful we are alive. That is the true definition of love. Sex, the worlds definition of love, is like a magnet that picks up all kinds of metal and doesn't have any holding power. No one has all the answers, that is why no one should impose his/her will on another. I'm sorry I don't have any authorities to site. It is all my own thinking. Thanks for reading.
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Lawrence wrote: NONE of us know why we are alive. NONE of us know what our purpose is while we live. Individually or collectively.
Thans for your good thoughts, Lawrence. They resonate with me.
I would add that "knows" is not even tapping the right set of questions. Is it the case that none of us cares what makes a life a good life? I sincerely doubt it. Is it the case that none of us is willing to quest toward greater understanding of what makes a good life? I doubt that as well. So we need to inquire teleologically: what purposes are good purposes? What principles make for a good "dance" by the whole of society, a lively and satisfying interaction between actions that are for others, and make lives better generally, on the one hand, and building of solid, sensible, integrity-compatible systems on the other?
Lawrence wrote: Try to understand as best you can how we got here and where we might be going. And in my opinion, the best way we can all work together is to deeply appreciate each of us and be grateful we are alive.
Practices of appreciation are actually a good way to "understand" where we are going. We should not be thinking mainly in terms of emulating heroes, but rather should emphasize thinking in terms of interacting in healthy and invigorating ways.

Deeply appreciating the uniqueness and "soul" of each individual is a big part of this. Because we intuitively understand that what is at the core of everyone, the needs and longings and functionality that do not distinguish us but rather reflect each other in our selves, those are what make for truly rewarding bonds. To soothe the wounded ego of another is to create a sense of nurture of our own need to be accepted and cherished. It objectively contributes to the ocean of mutuality outside of us, even while it shapes us toward being able to accept kindness and caring from others.
Lawrence wrote: No one has all the answers, that is why no one should impose his/her will on another.
Well, anyone who did have all the answers would know six or eight or more reasons why no one should impose their will. But humility about values, about what makes for human flourishing, is certainly a key to avoiding such abuse. There is actually a bonus received for accepting that we cannot "make" people live well. By opting for persuasion and demonstration, we hone our own skills at finding good ways forward, and find more satisfaction in our own choices.
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I feel pretty tenuous about some conclusions I have been reaching, but, in the spirit of Robert Tulip, I am going to toss them out for others to review, even if it makes me look a little odd.

The first is about Pentecost. Many of you have not thought about Pentecost in years or decades, but it rolls around for us liturgical Christians once a year. In Luke's "Acts of the Apostles" the story goes that the disciples, recovering from the trauma of the Crucifixion and not knowing what to make of the Appearances, were gathered and praying, and a powerful spiritual presence made them begin speaking in languages not their own.

Now, on one level that is just a story of the origin of the practice of glossalalia, the overflowing of speech centers in the brain that causes a language-like babbling and a feeling of ecstatic channeling of divine power. It does not seem to be lost on Luke that the traumatic division originating with the Tower of Babel was somehow undone by a new act.

However, I was musing on the frustration of dealing with "kids these days" who are often willing to just sit and stare at a wall rather than actually try an assignment in class. And I found it hard not to attribute cultural reasons for the intentional non-cooperators, who are largely Hispanic, by contrast with the ordinary foot-draggers and occasional enthusiasts who are mainly White or assimilated Hispanic. So I made an effort to empathize, and realized how much of the shame of impostor syndrome was at work. How all this academic stuff seems very foreign, and all the moreso if your family and most of your friends mainly communicate in Spanish, and still moreso if you are used to getting tones of voice and facial expressions that communicate "What's wrong with you?" from the foreign culture of teachers.

And not long afterward, on another blog forum, I was confronted by an analysis of the way shame interferes with normal human interaction and cultural division fosters this kind of "zero sum" reaction where someone would rather deny the legitimacy of the culture with the upper hand rather than submit to its difficult and threatening foreign norms. And for some reason it got me thinking about melting pots and dominance, and the fact that the ancient Greco-Roman world would have been shot through with those conflicting norms, and Jews must have been in the middle of a dilemma between swallowing the humiliation by Romans and learned Hellenes, on one hand, and asserting their own moral superiority on the other. And you bring a bunch of these Jews back from the diaspora for a festival in Jerusalem, filled with the bile of feeling looked down on by profane Gentiles, and they encounter a group of zealously inclusive revisionists who believe sinners should be embraced and brought back into the fold, rather than excluded.

I could not help but visualize the electricity of that interaction. I think something happened, something quite out of the ordinary, perhaps the first glossolalia ever. The ability to conceive of releasing others from imputed shame, of seeing "we are all one human family", might have triggered a release from their own burden of having been mistreated and humiliated. I can only think it would have been perceived as supernatural.

Now, for those who don't care about Pentecost, that amounts to just a curiosity. But consider the fact that the Pentecostal revival in modern times had a component of African-American culture (particularly the Azusa, California branch). I am speculating that an electrifying sense of meaning, of higher (unselfish) motivation, will come when one experiences a release from a feeling of being bound and gagged by social disgust. We know that identification with others is a separate motivator, not part of any perceived calculation of advantage. I am guessing that the experience of transcending social hierarchy, of blitzing through it in a sudden rush of insight, is a mutually reinforcing identification in which one finds oneself in the other because they are finding themselves in you (and vice-versa, of course).

Combine that with the equally electric feeling of falling in love and you have, well, West Side Story. But potentially much stronger.

My other musing is even more over-the-edge, and I will give it a separate post.
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This is a quote from Marilynne Robinson, who is as enchanting a storyteller as ever cared about Christian themes. ("Gilead" is the right starting book, if you want to find your way into her writing):
"But once in a lifetime, maybe, you look at a stranger and you see a soul, a glorious presence out of place in the world. And if you love God, every choice is made for you. There is no turning away. You’ve seen the mystery—you’ve seen what life is about. What it’s for. And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have."

The key line is "you've seen what life is about." I read this after having been kicking around the difference between explanatory questions and teleological questions (those are questions of purpose). I believe we all have a sense that some purposes are "better" than others, in the sense that they are more satisfying. The odd thing is how differently we are wired concerning these issues of purpose from the way we are wired for factual, explanatory issues. There is a sense of "truth" in both cases, but a satisfying truth about purpose appeals much more to esthetic intuition than a satisfying truth of explanation does. In fact we seem to be using something like our "lie detector" sense when we reach a satisfying truth of explanation. The processes are much more along the lines of logic than along the lines of beauty.

And I decided that "what life is about" is likely to "strike" a person when they suddenly see a life as beautiful because it shares a core with their self, rather than because there is something distinctive about the person. Distinctively universal, is the idea. Now, I believe there is something behind that striking realization which is both wired into our brains and inherent in the process of "mind", which is the building of a model of how the world works, inside us. The key notion is that teleological thinking is neurologically different from logical thinking.

What is it that makes "distinctively universal" persons strike us with a sense that they are a soul, and this floods us with the impression that we have realized "what life is about"? I am coming to the conclusion that it is based on a connection being made between on the one hand, our basic motivation, the neurological field of caring which is present in every impression that anything matters, and on the other hand, some particular thing which reflects back to us our own personhood. We have a sense that wrongs done to us violate our personhood, that they are not right and in being not right they are different from simply bad luck. Something universal is recognized in my self, something which ought not to be violated. And when I apprehend personhood, that universal selfness, in another, there is no escaping the sense that it is sacred. That it encapsulates all mattering in the fact that it matters, so that my "background field" of teleological intuitions flows through with massive strength like water through a bursting dike.

Okay, so far that could just be the speculation of any post-modernist musing about mystical intuitions. Here's the "out of bounds" part. I think the "charge" that makes such a recognition so powerful is not just due to tapping our background field of mattering. I think it conveys the power of that field to our explanatory mind, by way of the foundational importance of the universal. Because we have built up a lifetime sense of right and wrong, based on the reciprocity of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", we also have a mechanical, explanatory sense that reciprocity is the basis of all right relation. And so the "distinctively universal" person who helps us recognize all mattering in the fact that a particular self matters, is also tapping the understanding that undergirds lie detection and suspicion and careful analysis of whatever matters. The motivational component that waits in the background of all reason is connected strongly to the universality of a particular other person.

And so I conclude that what makes a person a soul is not so much, as Kierkegaard analyzed things, the spirit that is capable of choice about its own motivation. Rather the soul of another is an attribute more of me, and anyone else capable of recognizing the sacred quality of their personhood, than it is any particular attribute of theirs. The soul is universal, and in its universality it is constituted by the value we all sense in the universality of reciprocity.

And that is what life is about - not just that all mattering flows from a "me" whose value to others, to the grand scheme of things, depends on its universality - but also that mattering finds an overwhelming esthetic appeal in that sense that every "me" is a sacred process. It's like the light without which everything is at best a shadow and a barrier. Any quality of mattering, of value, which is devoid of the sacredness of the universal is reduced (by contrast with that which does touch on the universal) to the "merely" esthetic, the flattened esthetic of arbitrary preference.
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So, are you saying we live in "God's" ground school and live life taking our hits and learning our lessons to give us the ability to live in peace in the next life?
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I don't believe in the next life in any descriptive sense. Interestingly, there is modern scholarship that questions whether Jesus thought of an afterlife. It depends on how certain key phrases are translated, including the one for "eternal life". Apparently the term we know as "eternal life" actually refers to life that is timeless in quality rather than endless in extent.

There is some good thinking going on that encourages those of us who are religious to think in terms of such language expressing "telos" or purpose, rather than being descriptive. What is life for? To learn to regard others as being necessary to our sense of self. To learn to give ourselves over to the welfare of another, or others, in the same way parents devote themselves to the welfare of their children. To get lost in this pursuit to an extent that one's own advantage or gain is seen only as a means, not as an end, with the nourishment of souls being the only end that achieves a certain quality of aliveness that leaves the ordinary in the dust.

A non-Christian expressed to his wife "I used to find it incredible that anyone would risk their own life to save another person's child. Now that we have a child, I not only understand it, I can't imagine not taking that risk." If you have been a parent, you probably understand. It just means so much more than ordinary life, than the choice of what to watch on Netflix or which car to buy.
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Then you believe our collective activity should be like the communists claim. All for the good of the party.
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Lawrence wrote:Then you believe our collective activity should be like the communists claim. All for the good of the party.
"Should" is a word freighted with heavy baggage. We should be guided by shoulds when it is a question of not doing damage to others: not stealing, slandering, heedlessly seducing. Our activity to enhance the lives of others, and to foster a collective, community life, is for the sake of the quality of life that can be achieved.

We have been conditioned by our advertising-driven public communications to think in terms of having more toys and more types of excitement as the only way to enhance our life. But most of us have actually experienced that the best things in life are free, and yet we don't set our minds to developing that. We leave it off on the side as an observation about occasional moments of clarity, rather than thinking how to build it into our ways of living. Pretty sad when we are willing to let the advertising industry tell us what makes life better.
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Harry Marks wrote:I don't believe in the next life in any descriptive sense.
The next life is lived by our descendants. As well, the complex energy of the soul is something with durability that we cannot explain in a simple empirical way. The whole bundle of memories and influences and identity surrounding a person can be seen as producing a persistent existence past the physical, even if the simple myths of personal immortality are not accurate.
Harry Marks wrote: Interestingly, there is modern scholarship that questions whether Jesus thought of an afterlife.
My view is that all the stories of the Gospels are parables, not to be taken literally. The most vivid afterlife stories are the parables of Dives and Lazarus, and the Last Judgement.

Dives is a rich man who goes to hell for being selfish, while Lazarus (modified Osiris) is a poor man who goes to heaven. The meaning is that heaven is all about relationship, and that material possessions do not substitute for care about others.

The Last Judgement has a very simple story, that if you care for other people who are in most need and at the margins of social inclusion you are saved, while if you ignore these most needy people you are damned.

All the stories about going to heaven or hell are just imaginative parables about the type of future society we can create by our choice whether to care or not care about other people and the world.
Harry Marks wrote: It depends on how certain key phrases are translated, including the one for "eternal life". Apparently the term we know as "eternal life" actually refers to life that is timeless in quality rather than endless in extent.
The meaning of eternal life (αἰώνιον - aionion) can be seen from this verse out of the Last Judgement, seen in the interlinear version that directly compares the original Greek with a literal English translation word by word. “[The careless] will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matt 25:46)

My view of the meaning of eternity derives from Platonic philosophy. In the original Academy, the three subjects of study were logic, physics and ethics. In logic, eternity is timeless in quality (outside time) in the sense that mathematical relationships do not change as a result of any events. In physics, the idea of eternity as endless in extent does appear, in the sense that laws of physics such as gravity and the structure of the periodic table of the elements are permanent features of our universe. Ethics picks up on the Christian vision of the timeless eternal values of the good, the true and the beautiful. As we move now into Advent, the eternal moral ideas of love, joy, hope and peace celebrate the timeless message of Christ as the symbol of human connection to God and faith in the enduring presence of divinity in our world. True religion is the ‘rebinding’ to eternal unchanging moral values.

My own view on the Biblical idea of eternity reflects the authors' connection seen between the word ‘aionion’ and the visual astronomy of zodiac ages (aions), which form the stable eternal structure of terrestrial cosmology. I am now writing a paper on the astronomy of this topic, which seems to be immensely difficult psychologically for scientists and theologians to engage with due to their irrational hatred of cyclical patterns that remind them of astrology. The paradigm shift here requires analysis of Jesus Christ as the avatar of the zodiac ages of Pisces and Aquarius.
Harry Marks wrote: There is some good thinking going on that encourages those of us who are religious to think in terms of such language expressing "telos" or purpose, rather than being descriptive.
The word ‘telos’ (purpose) is highly controversial due to the simplistic and stupid restriction of it to the debate about intentional design in creation. The untrue idea from conventional young earth creationists is that God somehow magically designed all creatures with a teleological purpose that operates in some supernatural way, separate to the observed processes of natural biological evolution. That old false metaphysics is a simplistic 'flat earth' model, meaning it extrapolates from naïve experience without taking into account any scientific knowledge. Traditional simple teleology of creation is just a distraction from any genuine philosophical and theological effort to find a sense of purpose in life.
Harry Marks wrote: What is life for?
The purpose or telos of life can be seen in the moral value of complexity. Complexity is a scientific idea in the theory of evolution that observes how stable evolving systems gradually adapt with ever greater depth to their ecological niche. All the genetic factors of cumulative adaptation constantly push on the doors of available mutation. The doors which open, reflecting natural causal possibility, allow organisms to sustain a more complex genetic code.

The moral implication is that evolutionary complexity is good. This means we should work to enhance complexity, treating biodiversity as an eternal sacred value. In this framework, the meaning of life is the good of the future, and enhancing the flourishing of life on earth is our highest moral purpose.

Looking at the universe as a whole, the earth is the most complex known place, and the human brain and its products are the most complex known things, just in terms of detail of networking.

Most of the universe is near-empty space, and many galaxies have nothing but hydrogen. Our solar system has amazing complexity, serving to provide our fragile and sensitive planet with a stable and durable and fecund home. The flip side of complexity is its fragile susceptibility to destruction, indicating the moral urgency of climate change, and the evil of denial of scientific truth and promotion of false fantasies.
Harry Marks wrote: To learn to regard others as being necessary to our sense of self.
Care, concern, connection, relationship, these have all been corrupted as the ground of identity and morality by the prevailing attitudes of American Individualism. This pervasive way of thought has infected the whole globe, through its seductive imperial roots in the highly traumatised and ignorant philosophy of British Empiricism.
Harry Marks wrote:To learn to give ourselves over to the welfare of another, or others, in the same way parents devote themselves to the welfare of their children.
Serving others is an important moral principle, but has to be placed in the context of the good of the whole, which creates highly complex moral dilemmas regarding the consequences and principles of rival actions. For example, the tension between caring for your own children versus other valuable moral actions.
Harry Marks wrote: To get lost in this pursuit to an extent that one's own advantage or gain is seen only as a means, not as an end, with the nourishment of souls being the only end that achieves a certain quality of aliveness that leaves the ordinary in the dust.
“Nourishment of souls” is certainly a high moral goal. How personal prosperity can be a means to this end is again a challenging vision, putting economics at the focus of morality. Market capitalism can provide the talents and resources needed to create wealth and skills for distribution to those who lack the advantages of others, but only if both government and civil society focus on the enabling environment for this goal, through a combination of moral or spiritual guidance and formal regulation.
Harry Marks wrote: A non-Christian expressed to his wife "I used to find it incredible that anyone would risk their own life to save another person's child. Now that we have a child, I not only understand it, I can't imagine not taking that risk." If you have been a parent, you probably understand. It just means so much more than ordinary life, than the choice of what to watch on Netflix or which car to buy.
Having a stake in the future through the continuity of our personal genetic code with the river of time touches deep instinctive psychological impulses that have a rational foundation in our moral care for the good of the future.
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