Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 4:01 pm
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Dec 06, 2023 3:01 pm
You can only say that man, relatively recently, achieved a state of mind where *free choice*
became possible.
I don't think anybody would say that at all. The entire history of the human race shows men and women making choices -- some good, some awful, and all constrained by the fact that we are limited, mortal and, at times, quite foolish as well. But the making of choices, good and bad, is evident from the very start.
Primitive men, and proto-man, were entirely constrained by nature like animals are.
Now we've just lapsed into Evolutionist storytelling, for which no data exists.
::: sigh :::
The point here is to reflect back to you, and to describe to others reading here, what are the constraints of your thinking. Not that these are not seen by others. They are. But what you cannot see is that people are trying to help
you whereas, according to your preaching mission, you envision yourself helping
them.
Sit on this little stool, child; shut your mouth; and be taught a thing or two. My learning will help you
to grow.
You can believe, or pretend that you believe, that God dropped man down into the Garden and no one can stop you. If such a belief, in your mind, resonates with your notion of reason and rationality, keep on with it. No one else writing here can.
So what I say is that Man, men on this planet, certainly have a long history here, and at one time -- certainly and beyond doubt -- lived similarly to the animals, in primitive conditions, constrained far more by nature, and according to very primitive social laws and in accord with extremely different ethics. But of course there was no conception of ethics. There was no self-reflection. There was no *seeing oneself from a position outside and above oneself*. The being of man was far more immediate and non-introspective.
And that is why I say that such a man, and Man in that state, cannot be held
morally responsible for his way of being. However this is what you believe. Why? Because you hold to an absurd, religiously determined mythology. In this sense it
determines you. You are determined by a sort of intellectual fore-structure you place in front of your perception. It is comparable to a lens. Oddly, I am uncertain if I can hold you
responsible for the errors of perception and understanding that rule you. You are like a man with a physical or mental impediment.
The primitive man in primitive circumstances I just described had to achieve consciousness in order to have the *moral sense* that we all have now. The moral sense we have had been inculcated in us over a thousand years+. I thought that Nietzsche explored this thoughtfully in Genealogy of Morals. The inculcation of moral, and the creation of a man who can feel guilty and obligated, came about through centuries of education. And education as a type of punishment. Education therefore -- one can imagine schools -- is inculcation through punishment. Do what is *wrong* and get caned. Eventually, what is *right* is established as social conduct upheld by deeply set conventions. But then think it through a bit further, while examining our own selves, and see that the values we hold to -- our moral sense -- has become intrinsic to us.
Now we must recognize that our *moral sense* has been determined in us by 1,000+ years of Christian education (here I refer to those of Europe naturally). But here is an interesting fact: the former ethical system, that understood and *felt* to be true and right by the primitive European prior to the advent of Roman/Christian education systems and education/punishment, lived in accord with ethics that would to all of seem utterly strange. See for example
The Culture of the Teutons by Wilhelm Grönbeckh.
To see ourselves, and to conceive ourselves,
as responsible for the Fall that you describe, is an idea of such astounding strangeness that one really must take time to stand back from it, to see it, and to allow one's realization about it to sink in. It is an utter imposition (a word I often use) and by that I mean an insertion just like an optical lens. It is part of an ideological structure but a conceptual metaphysics. It requires first the picture -- in this case the child's picture in the Family Bible -- to be able to visualize the First Parents. And once the metaphor is combined with *how one sees* it becomes, I gather, a way of seeing that cannot be relinquished. It is, naturally, related to the notion of Fallen Angel. It can be taken in different senses though. Like a memory of some other state from which one, through events one cannot conceive or comprehend, had been exiled from.
I do not seek to destroy your perceptual lens, I merely am trying, with incredible patience, to help you to examine your own self! By *self* I mean that to which your ego-self has become wedded. Try just a wee bit harder, Immanuel. Please.
I would say that you *deliberately misunderstand* but then I realize that you don't. It is not deliberate. You operate through conditioned concepts and these determine your *description* of the world. So when you say "the entire history of the human race shows men and women making choices" I notice that you failed to understand at a meta level what I try so hard to teach you. You are so naughty, so stubborn, that I break out the whip, then the cane, and finally more severe education/punishment paraphernalia. But all necessary tortures are administered from love.
Animals 'make choices' but they do not make moral choices. Men who have little or no education also make choices, but these are not moral choices as we understand the term. What they choose, and why they choose what they choose, is determined by desire, immediate gain, what we might call selfishness or self-orientation.
To be able to make 'moral choices' requires a carefully
prepared man.
Now, I just explained it all again and though I know you won't get it -- you cannot get it -- I really do it just to clarify my understanding in relation to your absurd, determining doctrines.
You're not capable, AJ. You're an empty vessel. And like all such, you bounce a lot of sound around, but nothing comes out of you. I just don't bother with you anymore...can't you tell? What you offer is not worth anybody's time. It's just attempted pedantry that turns out to be mere posturing. Frankly, it's deadly dull.
