Hieronymus
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User ID: 419
Hieronymus
2d ago
How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.
Original sin perhaps, but not actual sin. In any case, the child is obviously innocent of any offence that would justify his death at human hands.
How do you believe in the hereafter and still attach so much sentimentality to the body here and now?
There is a sense in which it's worth weighing temporal things against eternal ones. But, ironically given the question, Christians usually apply that principle to endure the suffering such killings are meant to avoid. Death in this fallen world is sometimes a divine mercy, but there are only a few situations where men are entitled to deal it out.
I don't know if I've managed to get at the underlying disagreement here. It's not a matter of weighing utilons.
There are many examples in the Bible of God commanding people to kill.
Agreed. I am not a pacifist.
Murder is a particular type of killing that doesn't seem to apply to voluntary euthanasia or abortion of people who would not want to live anyway.
Why not?
(As an aside, the discussion started with the abortion of a Down syndrome child, and Down's patients usually do not want to die. But the principle is worth discussing anyway.)
Hieronymus
2d ago
Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer.
Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.
Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.
People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.
There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.
To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.
Hieronymus
7d ago
Nice! I didn't realize that. I haven't played CounterStrike since the original Half Life mod, so I only knew what I'd read.
Hieronymus
7d ago
I never played it myself because I prefer to get headshotted by the sweats in CounterStrike...
Didn't they shut down CSGO when they launched CS2 (which was actually CS5)?
Hieronymus
12d ago
I, once adjusted for differing sexual morality standards, don’t particularly disagree...
Isn't that adjustment extremely relevant here, though? If I were to define statutory rape of a teenager, I'd just call it seduction of a minor. Sexual morality is fundamentally tied up in defining the crime. The fact that much of secular society can't admit this muddles the conversation a lot.
Yeah, the practical consequences of seduction will vary for boys and girls, but in practice that seems to be (more than) adequately covered by consideration of mitigating factors in sentencing.
Hieronymus
14d ago
Man, here, will say that men (or at least attractive or otherwise high status men) will fuck promiscuous women but never marry them. But that isn't really true.
I think that this used to be far truer than it is today. Yes, some men in the past married their mistresses. But for the most part mistress and wife were steps on different relationship tracks.
I am the least qualified person to summarize modern courtship mores, but the progression looks to me like this: sex, then long-term relationship, then moving in together, then marriage. In old-fashioned terms, most men in the early stages are asking, "Will she make a good mistress?" Only once that works out will they ask, "Will she make a good wife?" The wife filter is happening late in the process, and the function of marriage then is to cement a relationship that already exists.
By contrast older mores encouraged men to check for wife material earlier in the relationship, and a man who was expressly looking for mistress material wasn't putting her on the wife track.
I seriously recommend either a good intro class or a good book for self study. (My recommendations on those would be pretty outdated now, so I can't offer any names myself.)
What WhiningCoil says about programming being a diverse set of skills in practice is true. But there is a core aptitude of thinking algorithmically. Some people can do it off the bat, some people can't do it at all, and some people need to try it from several angles before it clicks. This isn't really a matter of being smart enough; once you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, there just seem to be some people who are wired for it and some who aren't.
So I'd start with that. If it clicks, you can move on to study the other stuff in whatever way is best for you. If it doesn't, you can know that you gave it a fair shake.
Edit: As an addendum, I recommend learning your second programming language soon after your first. Some people fret about this and think it will be harder than it is. But it isn't that hard, and having experienced it will change how you evaluate your tooIs.
Hieronymus
24d ago
Page not found for me, so I'll just use the featured comments.
OP's quotes are accurate but not fully representative. Fortunately Gillitrut posted an archive link below, if you want to read the whole thing.
Hieronymus
24d ago
In between logical proofs and personal experience, don't neglect the category of publicly available evidence, of which historical evidence is one important species. ( @WandererintheWilderness gets into this a bit below.) If you are convinced by the evidence for Jesus' resurrection, you can get at the existance of God that way.
Separately, if you are trying to understand how people work through these things in practice, it is helpful to think about how and why people move in both directions: theist to atheist as well as vice-versa. There is extra-rational movement both ways.
She is trying to break down a set of problems as she sees them among American converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. I don't know the situation there. I am inclined to give her more credit because she acknowledges the reasons we'd expect the facts on the ground to be different. On the other hand, she pattern matches to someone who treats the other sex's read of the vibes as a core part of the problem and her own sex's read as objective truth, which is a common failure mode for analysts of both sexes. So I don't know.
I think it is a mistake to take her analysis for granted and then extrapolate from her niche to the broader church.
But, in any case, the church exists to preach the gospel, to worship God, and to edify believers. None of those goals is really compatible with choosing your members to maximize your impact as a social club. If a church heeds Scripture in choosing its leaders, those will be men who have their acts together, judged by Christian standards rather than by secular ones.
Hieronymus
28d ago
The kind of people who insist on VIM over an IDE and will argue for days about whether Python private functions should be prefixed with underscore.
My people! If the world loses them, it will be poorer for it.
I am not a professional developer. But in my IT experience, it’s helpful to have a mix of wary skeptics and early adopters for many kinds of technology. Strongarming your skeptics before you have to is a mistake. And while I believe much that I’ve heard about the benefits of coding agents, nobody knows what the final picture will look like. The grumpy old fogeys aren’t prophets, and I am not saying that they are, but they come by their battle scars honestly.
"Actual sin" is a theological term to describe sin one has committed personally in contrast to original sin. It doesn't imply that original sin isn't real. I just mean that no human being has just cause to execute someone for original sin.
If there is a logic to your objections of inconsistency, it relies on an unstated premise I can't quite get at. Maybe you're working from the basis that killing a human being is an offense only against him, whereas in the Christian view it is a sin against God also.
As for the state, God has delegated to the state some authority for capital punishment. Within those parameters, it has some wiggle room. But it's not carte blanche.
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