Lives Sacrificed to Sexual Ideology

Every year since 1988 the joyful tidings of Christmas have been preceded by the increasingly upbeat message of World AIDS Day, December 1. This year’s theme of “Getting to zero” was launched last month by Hillary Clinton announcing that an “AIDS-free generation” was within grasp if the United States and countries around the world would team up on scientific advancements. President Obama threw an extra $50 million in that direction and he was joined by former presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton in promising greater commitment to eradicating the disease. The catch-line, “beginning of the end”, was scripted in the White House. Bono, Elton John and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy leant their faces to the cause.

Unfortunately, the promotion seems to have fallen flat. Pleading financial crisis, the governments that are the mainstay of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (US$21.7 billion pledged last year) have decided to cancel the next funding round and no new applications will be accepted until 2014. This certainly is tragic, since the Global Fund keeps alive nearly half (3.2 million) of the 6.6 million people living on life-saving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs, and efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission are said to have some success. Progress has also been made against the other big epidemics. However, there are still 7.6 million people who need ARV treatment, and many of those are now unlikely to get it.

But even without the defection of the cash-strapped rich countries there was always going to be bad news to report. AIDS might be on the decline, thanks to treatment, but HIV infections are on the rise again after falling for several years. About 2.7 million people were infected last year, which is double the number brought into treatment, according to The Independent, and people are now becoming infected faster than they can be tested and treated. In Malawi, a small African country with a population of under 15 million, 70,000 new infections are expected next year.

The truth is that there can never be enough billions to “end” an epidemic driven by the sexual ideology of the same parties -- or their partners -- that are supposed to be curing it. This was rather sharply illustrated a couple of months ago with the publication of evidence linking the widespread use of progestin injections as birth control with HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa. But even without such a direct channel, the “sex positive” approach of the family planning networks in developing countries guarantees that the behaviour basically responsible for disease -- having multiple sex partners -- does not change.

It is no accident, then, that this week thousands of experts and acolytes are gathered in Senegal for the second International Conference on Family Planning to push forward the global family planning agenda. They too will be demanding billions from the first world’s governments and foundations. The director of the Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, Dr Amy Tsui, who is also a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, is a lead conference organizer.

One of the things they are talking about at the ICFP conference is, according to one report, “the prevention of HIV through multi-prevention technologies (MPTs) that protect against HIV and act as contraceptives”. They don’t have these MPTs yet, you understand, but they are working on them -- for instance, a vaginal ring that releases both an ARV drug and a contraceptive hormone. What it would cost to provide such technology to African women is anybody’s guess. In the meantime what they have, mainly, is the contraceptive injection, and the condom. One seems to be contributing to the HIV epidemic and the other has never stopped it.

What has shown the potential to stop the epidemic is well known: behaviour change strategies used in Uganda and (less famously) in Zimbabwe. Uganda turned its epidemic around in the early 1990s with its ABC programme focusing on abstinence for the unmarried and “zero grazing” for the rest. This has since been undermined by aid organizations pushing condoms. Zimbabwe in the ten years to 2007 brought its HIV prevalence down from 27 per cent to 16 per cent -- mainly, according to researchers, through reductions in extramarital, commercial, and casual sexual relations”.

Edward Green, the Harvard researcher, who stumbled upon Uganda’s secret in 1993 has been trying ever since to get recognition for behavior change as the most effective means of dealing with the AIDS epidemic. In his recent book, Broken Promises: How the AIDS Establishment has Betrayed the Developing World (2011), he recounts how, at an AIDS conference in Washington in 2004 his presentation received muted applause. But, when a female college student came to the microphone and exclaimed, “I think people should be able to have as much sex as they want, with as many people as they want,” she received a thunderous, standing ovation.

That is what the people of Africa and elsewhere are up against: not only a deadly disease but an international community that has such an investment in its own doctrines about sex and population that it will use all its political and economic power to impose them where they are most destructive. Already in Africa alone more than 46 million people have been infected with HIV and 18 million have died.

The developed nations should be ashamed to stage another World AIDS Day, let alone project its end, until our responsibility for this avoidable epidemic is admitted.


Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

Crime of Simulating Catholic Orders and Sacraments

Patricia Fresen is not a Roman Catholic bishop, but another vagante. Fresen was excommunicated in March 2008 for “the crime of schism” for “having pertinaciously rejected a definitive truth of the faith,” and for “the crime of simulation of the administration of the sacrament of holy orders.”  The excommunication decree issued by St. Louis Archbishop Raymond L. Burke.

Fresen  was a Dominican sister for 45 years.  She studied in Rome at the University of St. Thomas and at the Gregoriana, where she earned a licentiate in theology.

She was ordained in a secret ceremony. “The ceremony she talks about was secretive,” Feuerherd said. “That is a problem. From my understanding, she doesn’t identify who that person is.”

Read more here.
 
 
Fresen belongs to an organization called Roman Catholic Womenpriests. It is a group that I've tried to engage in the past, but fruitlessly. They are not in pursuit of truth.  They are in pursuit of "equality" (power) and by their actions distort the True Priesthood.
Alice C. Linsley

Buttiglione: Judgment is Not Discrimination

This is the final in a series of posts from a chapter of Rocco Buttiglione's book Exiting a Dead End Road: a GPS for Christians in Public Discourse, published by Kairos Publications in Vienna, and edited by Gudrun and Martin Kugler. The book can be ordered here.  (The series includes Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.)


Rocco Buttiglione
Being judgmental is not discrimination

Let us stress once again that the right and duty to pass judgments does not imply an attitude of superiority in relation to the (other) sinners. We are not perfect. We know that we are poor and fallible human beings and that we are not better than those whose actions we affirm to be bad. We may easily be equally wrong or even worse on other issues. And we never know if, in a given situation, under the same pressure of circumstances, we would have done any better than the subject whose actions we censure. Nevertheless we know that his actions were wrong, that something has been done that should not have been done and we have a duty to say it in order to help the other to better himself and to better the human quality of our life together. This is also an essential aspect of freedom.

This cannot be confused with hate speech. Hate speech offends, demands the exercise of physical violence against the offender, wants to ban her/him from our society. In our case it is quite the opposite. If I am wrong, my best friend is not the one who lets me sink in my error (for example taking drugs, destroying his family, offending my friends, etc.). He should be the one who tells me the truth even at the risk of exposing himself to my outrage and my reprisals. This also belongs to the essence of freedom (freedom to tell the truth) and tolerance (we must tolerate the freedom of the other of telling the truth or at least what in conscience she or he thinks to be true).

We have gone a long way towards the complete destruction of the true meaning of freedom and tolerance. We do not want to emancipate ourselves from our instinctual drives and we have proclaimed the superiority of pleasure over conscience.

In this way we have lost the idea of happiness, that is the properly human way of taking pleasure not against the other human being or disregarding her/his dignity but together with her/him in a true community of love. We do not want to accept the self discipline and the virtues that we need in order to develop our potentiality for the greater freedom. The greater freedom is what St. Thomas Aquinas would have called a bonum arduum (something very valuable that demands a high price to be won). The reward of the efforts needed to acquire the greater freedom is the possibility to live a great love. As a consequence of our cowardice we, the people of this generation, live only small loves that are not enough to fill our lives, which therefore remain void and tasteless. We say we are tolerant only because we have no passionate interest in the lives of others and only want to be left alone. And we are left alone until our world peters out “not with a bang but with a whimper”.

Can we still have hope? Of course we can. The heart of man naturally longs for love, and for truth and for freedom and this thirst will never be quenched. There will always be martyrs and saints and through their witness the history of freedom can be renewed. We do not know how long the night will be but we do know that it will come to pass.

END

Buy Buttiglione's book.  It only gets better!

Buttiglione: Intolerance is Moral Amputation

This is Part IV in a series from a chapter of Rocco Buttiglione's book Exiting a Dead End Road: a GPS for Christians in Public Discourse, published by Kairos Publications in Vienna, and edited by Gudrun and Martin Kugler. The book can be ordered here.  Part I is here.  Part II is here and Part III is here.


Rocco Buttiglione
Freedom and tolerance

The idea of tolerance is directly connected to the idea of freedom. Man must seek truth in order to be a man but must be free from external coercion in order to be able to search for truth. The lesser freedom is an unavoidable presupposition for the greater freedom. If I am compelled to act according to freedom, because of the pressure brought to bear on me by an external power, then I am not a free subject but a slave.

A world in which people obey the objective truth because of fear and not because of intelligence and love, would not resemble paradise but rather hell. I am bound to act, moreover, according to the truth I have freely recognized. This means that I must obey my conscience, even in case that it be wrong. What is typical of our age is not the fact that we hold as true a lot of false presuppositions. This happens more or less in all historical epochs. What characterizes our current crisis is rather the fact that many of us use their lesser freedom in order to disengage from the moral duty of searching for truth. We think that there is no truth and it is not worth the while to search for something that does not exist. We cannot, of course, coerce the lesser freedom of others in order to compel them to be free according to the greater freedom. The only way open for a recovery of our civilization is the way of witness.

This means that we must tolerate error in order not to destroy freedom. Tolerance is the simple recognition of the fact that I cannot think truth in the place of another. I can help another to discover truth through argumentation, example and witness but I cannot recognize truth in her or his stead.

In an age, however, in which the idea of truth seems to have been abolished, some may argue that this is not enough. We are required not to be judgmental, that is not to pass any judgment since the distinction of good and evil seems to have been obliterated and has lost its firm foundation in the nature of things. This leads to a kind of tolerance that is different from the one I have explained on the basis of the nature of truth. One is not satisfied with the fact that I recognize his right to error. He does not recognize the right of someone else to think and say that he is wrong. Any judgment based on the presumption of the existence of an objective truth must be excluded from the public square and those who uphold such judgments are labeled as enemies of democracy.

It is apparent that this pretension is self-defeating. If there is no objective truth I have the right to my private truth but since there is only one world in which we all live I have also the right to impose this truth on others, if I have a chance to do it and if the balance of power is in my favor.

The very expression “right” is misplaced in this context. The lion does not have a “right” to kill a gazelle. It just does it. A world without truth is a world where the words right and wrong have become devoid of meaning. It never occurs, however, that a supporter of moral relativism really thinks his or her intellectual stands coherently up to the last consequences, since this is really untenable in real life.

In current cultural and philosophical discussion the aggressive side of moral relativism is usually set aside to concentrate on the pretension that the non-relativist has an inner drive towards the repression of the freedom of those who do not stand in agreement with him/her. We have already explained why this is not the case. The respect for the freedom of the other is a consequence of the reverence for the dignity of the person. I do not need to doubt my convictions to recognize your right to hold a dissenting opinion. It is enough to know that God wants you to come to truth through a free act of your conscience. If I do not have the right to compel, to coerce, to threaten the dissenters, I nevertheless have the right to argue with them and to try to convince them.

In the new mood of moral relativism this is not allowed and is considered as an intolerable offence. I am ready to accept, for example, that nobody has a right to compel gay people to change their sexual preferences or to mistreat them for this reason but I am also convinced that I have a right to think that homosexuality is intrinsically wrong and to argue this conviction in the public debate.


Two visions of tolerance

We therefore have two visions of tolerance. One concerns a tolerance without truth. We have already seen how contradictory this concept is. In one possible formulation this may exclude tolerance, in another it implies a prohibition to discuss the behavior of others. A new categorical imperative substitutes the old Kantian ones: the norm of your action must be to collude with the pretension of the other of being not what she or he is but what he fancies to be. There is a bridge between the two possible versions of the principle of tolerance in a society without truth. This bridge is the principle of self preservation and the desire to avoid conflicts that might expose this self preservation to danger. The imperative of the new science of morals is changed thus: collude with the pretension of those who hold enough power to impose their view of things and their interests.

The opinion of a grown up who pretends the unborn baby is just a piece of flesh colludes with the position of the child who pretends (although he cannot articulate this thought) to be a human being. If there is no objective truth then force takes the place of truth and those who are more powerful also possess a larger share of truth.

If we connect the idea of tolerance with the idea of truth we have a completely different outcome. Truth exists although I do not possess it and can see it only “as in a mirror”. I have the duty to tell the truth I have seen in order to help others to live in the truth. I must always be open to the possibility that others have seen sides and aspects of truth that I have not seen and must be ready to incorporate them in my vision of truth. I must never forget that truth is one but that there are many avenues leading to truth and, in one sense, each human being has her or his personal alley of truth. I must respect the conscience in good faith of the other even in case that she/he errs. And I must always remember that I can judge only facts but not persons and their conscience.

I can say: this action is good and this action is bad. I can never say: this man is (absolutely) good or this man is (absolutely) bad. Action has an exterior side that I can judge but also an interior side in the conscience of the person that only God can judge. But I have a right and a duty to pass a judgment on actions.

If we deprive the human being of this right we perform an amputation of the moral dimension of his life. We dehumanize her or him.

END
 
Gay activists do not grant me the right to think that homosexuality is intrinsically wrong and to argue this conviction in the public debate. They are not tolerant because they are not motivated by reason in search of the truth. They attempt to aggressively amputate what they term "homophobia" but which is more often moral conviction.

Buttiglione: Humans are Not Mere Animals

The following is Part III from a chapter of Rocco Buttiglione's book Exiting a Dead End Road: a GPS for Christians in Public Discourse, published by Kairos Publications in Vienna, and edited by Gudrun and Martin Kugler. The book can be ordered here.  Part I is here and Part II is here.


Rocco Buttiglione
Controlling the passions


In a certain cultural tradition the control of passions is equated with the destruction and humiliation of those passions. The will is opposed to passions and has to subdue them.

I think it is more proper to see the relation between intellect, passion and will rather in terms of education. The instinctive side of man is not bad; the body is not an enemy of the soul. The instinctual drives are not bad. In principle they are aimed at evolving the good of the person. They come nearer to this good through the world of emotions.

However, we cannot trust them completely. They have a certain leaning towards the individual self satisfaction and the oblivion of other values at stake in the action. In the moment of passion some values are seen by the soul with absolute evidence and force. In one sense, those values are really there. But the forcefulness of the passion can make us blind to other values that are equally at stake.

Passion is like a lens that makes some things more evident but changes the proportions of reality. We must educate our passions by widening their scope according to the real order of reality. This order includes not only the objective hierarchy of values (some values stand higher than others) but also the subjective order according to which they are given to me. All children have an absolute value that I must recognize but my children are entrusted to my care in a way that is absolutely unique. The task of education is that of making use of the force of passion in the service of the objective good. This demands, of course, also a certain measure of self restraint. Without self restraint there is no self possession and without self possession there is no freedom.

Freedom is not only the fact of not being subject to the will of another but also the capacity for making one’s own passions obey to one’s will oriented by the knowledge of truth. Here lies the paradox of human freedom. On the one hand freedom demands the absence of external coercion. On the other hand it requires the capacity to lead one’s own actions according to objective truth. Objective truth cannot be imposed upon the will; it demands according to its inner nature to be recognized and accepted and loved. Without objective truth, however, man cannot be free. Education is such a fascinating task, at the same time necessary and impossible, because it has to do with freedom and love. It has to do also with credibility.

Education in the truth

The child enters into the path of virtue (meaning by virtue the habit of searching for truth and acting according to truth) because he or she loves and trusts his or her parents and listens to them when they tell him or her what is good and what is bad and consign to him or her the life experience they have gone trough. The word tradition derives from the Latin word tradere and means to consign to the next generation the values that the ancestors have experienced as true. Tradition is not something fixed and unchangeable. The next generation accepts the spiritual heritage of the forefathers as a general hypothesis to be tested in their lives. Through this trial, what is really valuable and of permanent importance is distinguished from what is only linked only to the specific contingencies of the life of the other generations. A true tradition is continually tested, and challenged and renewed. Goethe tells us that “what you have received from your ancestors you must rediscover yourself, in order to possess it truly”. The critic is not opposite to tradition but is a part of its living body.


Our spiritual vacuum

Now it seems that this process has been interrupted in our civilization. After the war the generation that had made the war found it difficult, in Germany and in Italy, to tell their children what they had gone trough. Sometimes the horror was unspeakable. The generation of the fathers of those who are about sixty today, had earnestly believed in the religion of nationalism and that religion had failed, leading millions of men to war to sacrifice their lives and destroy the lives of others in a massacre without example in history. This has created a spiritual vacuum in which only material values survived. Our fathers worked hard for us and to rebuild Europe -- but the question on why this was worth the while remained largely unanswered. With the student revolt of ’68 this break between the generations became apparent: the older generation could not consign the values they cherished, because they could not explain the reasons underlying those values and could not make sense of their own life experience. And the new generation rejected them without having any idea what could be substituted for them. The living process of tradition was interrupted.

As I said, only vital values survived this devaluation of all values (Max Scheler speaks of the Entwertung aller Werte but we have lived this experience in a form that was much more radical). T.S. Eliot explains, that when all values are dead what is left is only “usury, lust and power”.

Under these circumstances it is easy to lose memory of the greater freedom and to reduce freedom to the lesser freedom. We do not feel bound to search for truth and we do not want to live the experience of belonging to a person (or to a community, a nation, a church or a great ideal) in an act of self giving love. We rather want to be left alone and to be able to follow the impulse of the moment. We are concentrated on ourselves and, at the same time, we are completely exposed to the manipulation of our sentiments and ideas (if we still have any) through the media. We do not seek our inner truth and we are prone to assume the imitation of the protagonists of the star system as core of our life experience. As a result, we do not really love our life and we are not really interested in entering into ourselves or to our true happiness.

The movie Avatar is an impressive representation of this condition of mind. We live another life that is not our real life and we play the role of the heroes of a legendary saga whilst we become emotionally starved, oppressed and depressed because of the absence of love and meaning in our real life. We have gone so far that it becomes difficult to remember or to understand the true meaning of the word freedom for many people. The indispensable effort of self control has been banned under the name “repression” and the result is the instability and precariousness of “frittered lives and squalid deaths” (T: S. Eliot) in a world in which “the word of God is unspoken”.


The essential difference between men and animals

I think that what I have endeavored to explain is what Benedict XVI means when he speaks of the “anthropological question”. If we lose the perception of the true meaning of freedom then we lose at the same time the “anthropological difference”, that is the element that constitutes the difference between man and all other animals, the greater freedom based upon the search for truth and the encounter for truth. Immediately linked to the “anthropological question” is another issue that frequently returns in the speeches of the Pope. It is the “emergency of education”.

The only answer to the anthropological question is an education leading to a full and uncompromising experience of true humanity. The chain of tradition may be restored only through men and women who incorporate in themselves the world of values in such a way that they coincide with their own lives. Only in this way values may become convincing and generate a true force for change. In one sense this means that we need saints. Also on other occasions, in other epochal crises, the continuity of our tradition has been challenged and has been restored through the witness and the teaching of martyrs and saints. God never abandons his Church deprived of the witness of martyrs and saints, but people (and first of all the clergy) do not always recognize the witnesses among them.


END

Buttiglione Responds to David Hume

The following is a Part II of a series from Rocco Buttiglione's book Exiting a Dead End Road: a GPS for Christians in Public Discourse, published by Kairos Publications in Vienna, and edited by Gudrun and Martin Kugler. Order the book here. Part I is here and Part III is here.


Rocco Buttiglione
Obeying reason

Now a paradox arises. Whilst for all (other) animals to be free means to act according to instinct, for man to be free means to be able to act according to reason. The instinctual side of man must be convinced to obey to reason.

Animal freedom can be defined against external pressure. If I am left to my instincts I am free. For man it is more complicated. Human freedom is defined in opposition to two different kinds of pressure: external pressure but also the internal pressure of the instinctual drives trying to avoid the control and disavow the primacy of reason.

Human freedom, therefore, demands the self control of the person, who can do what he or she sees to control his or her own passions. Immanuel Kant stresses the social relevance of his specific human freedom in his concept of the transcendental I. The transcendental I is the subjectivity in which man acts without the conditioning of passions only guided by the idea of the good (actually for Kant it is rather the idea of duty, but now we cannot deal with the difference between these two ideas). This subjectivity is easily directed towards the common good. Man cannot see anything as good if it is only his own individual selfish good opposed to the good of others. The so called Kantian imperative always tries to preserve the social character of the good.

The experience of the value of the person, and in particular the experience of the value of the other person, induces me to recognize that I cannot define my individual good in opposition to the good of the other. Hence the rule: consider always the person, in yourself and in others, always also as an end and never only as a means. A society in which this rule is not acknowledged cannot be a truly human society.


The drama of two freedoms

If we consider the complexity of human freedom we are forced to see that there are two ways in which we speak of human freedom. We could call the first the lesser freedom and the second the greater freedom. Luther differentiates in his theological language between the freedom of the flesh and Christian freedom.

In one sense we can speak of the freedom of man in the same way in which we speak of the freedom of animals, meaning the absence of external interferences. If we are slaves of our passions, however, this freedom will not be real human freedom. If we are manipulated by others through the offer of different kinds of pleasure so that we renounce the use of reason and behave as if we did not possess an autonomous capacity for the knowledge and the recognition of good and evil, then we are not free.

Aristotle goes as far as to say that for such men it is better to be slaves of other human beings than of their own passions, since they are unable to be free. The specific human freedom arises out of the human capacity to recognize values and to know truth. We could also see that in human beings freedom is ordered to love. When we recognize the value of another person and choose to belong to this person in love than we make the proper use of our freedom and become truly free.

A man who never makes the experience of love leaves this world as void as he was when he first entered into it. His freedom becomes slavery.

A necessary consequence of the nature of human freedom seems to be that our freedom needs to be educated. We are born free, but at the same time we must become free through the control of our passions and the search for truth.

END
 
Again, I like what Buttiglione has to say.  Relativists will argue that since the search for truth leads people in different directions, the search creates greater divisions and potentially less tolerance.

Humans Live According to Reason, Right?

This is Part 1 in a 5-part series from a chapter of Rocco Buttiglione's book Exiting a Dead End Road: a GPS for Christians in Public Discourse, published by Kairos Publications in Vienna, and edited by Gudrun and Martin Kugler. The book can be ordered here.

Rocco Buttiglione is an Italian Christian Democrat politician and an academic. He is a professor of philosophy and political science at Saint Pius V University in Rome, and member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. From 2001 to 2005 he was minister of European affairs, from 2005 to 2006 minister of culture. Since 2008 he has been a vice president of the Camera dei deputati, one of the two chambers of the Italian parliament. In 2004 Mr. Buttiglione was nominated for a post as European Commissioner but did not succeed due to a campaign of radical political groups opposed to his Roman Catholic views.


Rocco Buttiglione on Human Freedom

What is freedom? At a first sight the word freedom seems to indicate a space void of any external intromission. The etym dom, that we meet in other words like king-dom or the Latin domus means a space determined by a border. The word "free" characterizes the absence of an intromission. We can also find the etym dom in the Latin word dominus, the lord. The space in which all external intromissions are excluded is the space where the dominus, the lord, exercises his will.

The phenomenon of freedom seems then to imply on the one hand the absence of coercion, the absence of a foreign will. On the other hand we define freedom in relation to an interior will. An animal is free when it can roam without the restraint of a chain according to the interior impulse of his instincts that exercise in it the function of the will. Shall we say of a human being that he or she is free in the same sense?

In the case of man the issue is a bit more complicated. We are inhabited by many impulses and drives and instincts. We possess as personal beings, nevertheless, a specific capacity that is called will in the proper sense of the word. It is a sense different from that we use when we say that a dog is free. A dog is free when it is not enchained. We all know, however, that we can control a dog also without a chain. We can train the dog making use of its instinctual drives so that it responds to our will even better than if it were at the chain. We can manipulate a dog. Is a manipulated dog still free? Here we usually do not make a distinction between a free dog and an unfree dog. We rather make a distinction between a domesticated dog and a wild or feral dog. We think it corresponds to the nature of a dog to be domesticated and therefore a domesticated dog is, in one sense, more free than a dog without a master. A dog needs a master who takes care of it because it cannot take care of itself. If we think about a wolf instead of a dog our conclusions could be different. We wouldn’t describe a wolf as an animal that can be domesticated. We rather speak of a tamed wolf, which seems to indicate that it corresponds more to the nature of a wolf to be savage than tamed. We have here introduced the concept of nature.

The way in which a being can be free strictly depends on its nature. A dog is free under conditions that would make a wolf unfree. This concept of nature is not strictly biological. Biological drives and presuppositions are here very important, however there are other factors that are equally relevant. Biologically a wolf and a dog belong to the same species but they are different because of a different historical development.

Shall we consider human freedom in the same way in which we consider the freedom of animals? In one sense yes, in another no. For man as well as for all animals to be free means to be able to act according to nature. We cannot say what is human freedom without considering human nature. Human nature is different. Not only from the nature of any other animal species but from the nature of all other animal species considered together. The difference is so great that in one sense only of man we can properly say that he/she is free. Let us see why.


Man’s unique freedom

Like all other animals, man has in himself instinctual drives that incline him towards action. We feel hunger and then look for food. We are afraid and run away from the source of our fear. We are angry and attack those who make us angry. We feel sexual desire and try to copulate with the subject of the opposite sex that arouses our desire. But is this an accurate description of the properly human form of behavior? No, it is not. Other animals behave in that way. Humans do not. At least humans do not always act like this.

Whilst we all feel the instinctual drives of other animals we are also subject to another law, the law of conscience. We ask ourselves questions like: is it good, just, proper, correct, to act in this way, to follow the pressure of our instinctual drives? Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. Humans have a moral conscience. They are really free when they obey the inner voice of moral conscience and are not subject to the absolute preponderance of their instincts. Human nature encompasses a quest for the moral good that is foreign to mere animal nature (even if some forms of behavior of higher animals might bear a certain similarity to humans).

The first one to discover and describe this typical form of humanity was Socrates. He describes the world of values and, in particular, within this world, the value of the good.

Let us make one example, let us consider the sexual instinct. Max Scheler has described how the animal drive is directed towards the sexual organs of the other. The animal concentrates on its own urge and wants to discharge it. With humans it is different. Humans consider the form of the body of the other and are attracted not just by the sexual organs but by the beauty of the form. There is a moment of unselfish purely esthetical admiration in typically human sexual attraction.

Scheler continues to describe the phenomenon of eye contact. Through the eye one lover is introduced into the personal intimacy of the other and appreciates the other not just as a body but as a person. That is not enough. Human love has not only a distinct esthetic but also an ethical dimension. I do not only consider my pleasure but also the pleasure of the loved one. I wish to receive pleasure but also to give pleasure. Moreover, I am interested in the true good of the other. I take a responsibility for this true good and subordinate my personal satisfaction to this responsibility. Is it good for her to have a sexual relationship with me? Would her personhood flourish or be impoverished in this relationship? This question cannot be answered without considering not only the couple of the two lovers but the general environment in which they are set. Would, for example, this act disrupt her (his) relationship to other persons, spouse, children etc…?

All these considerations enter into a properly human love relationship, giving it an esthetical and ethical dimension that is missing in the purely animal drive. We want, of course, satisfy our drives -- but in a way that is compatible with our human dignity and enhances it. We see a world of values and know that our lives would be qualitatively different if we remain faithful to this world of values. We know also that we have to subdue our drives to the world of values. In the center of the world of values stands the value of truth. There can be no world of values without truth.

Try to ask the question: does she love me truly? If her love is not true it is not love at all. A false love is no love. No value is valuable if it is not true. The world of values (the properly human world) is animated by the search for truth. This world of values is not given to us all at once. It manifests itself step by step and we have to follow its unfolding investigating at the same time the sense of our human experience. Truth and good and beauty are the ordering principles of the world of values and they determine what the proper conditions for the satisfaction of our instinctual drives are. St. Augustine calls the faculty to order the world according to the principles of truth, good, beauty and wisdom. We could call it also reason. A human life is a life led according to reason. (Read more here.)

END
 
I like what Buttiglione says, but I can anticipate the argument of David Hume fans that what motivates humans isn't reason but our passions.

American Fable: Locke's Nightmare

Once upon a time, I was invited to the White House for a private dinner with the President. I am a respected businessman, with a factory that produces memory chips for computers and portable electronics. There was some talk that my industry was being scrutinized by the administration, but I paid it no mind. I live in a free country. There’s nothing that the government can do to me if I’ve broken no laws. My wealth was earned honestly, and an invitation to dinner with an American President is an honor I checked my coat, was greeted by the Chief of Staff, and joined the President in a yellow dining room.

We sat across from each other at a table draped in white linen. The Great Seal was embossed on the china. Uniformed staff served our dinner. The meal was served, and I was startled when my waiter suddenly reached out, plucked a dinner roll off my plate, and began nibbling it as he walked back to the kitchen. “Sorry about that,” said the President. “Andrew is very hungry.” “I don’t appreciate...” I began, but as I looked into the calm brown eyes across from me, I felt immediately guilty and petty. It was just a dinner roll. “Of course,” I concluded, and reached for my glass. Before I could, however, another waiter reached forward, took the glass away and swallowed the wine in a single gulp. “And his brother Eric is very thirsty.” said the President.

The President is testing my compassion, I thought. I will play along. I don’t want to seem unkind. My plate was whisked away before I had tasted a bite. “Eric’s children are also quite hungry.” With a lurch, I crashed to the floor. My chair had been pulled out from under me. I stood, brushing myself off angrily, and watched as it was carried from the room. “And their grandmother can’t stand for long.” I excused myself, smiling outwardly, but inside feeling like a fool. Obviously I had been invited to the White House to be sport for some game.

I reached for my coat, to find that it had been taken. I turned back to the President. ”Their grandfather doesn’t like the cold.” I wanted to shout- that was my coat! But again, I looked at the placid smiling face of my host and decided I was being a poor sport. I spread my hands helplessly and chuckled. Then I felt my hip pocket and realized my wallet was gone. I excused myself and walked to a phone on an elegant side table. I learned shortly that my credit cards had been maxed out, my bank accounts emptied, my retirement and equity portfolios had vanished, and my wife had been thrown out of our home. Apparently, the waiters and their families were moving in.

The President hadn’t moved or spoken as I learned all this, but finally I lowered the phone into its cradle and turned to face him. “Andrew’s whole family has made bad financial decisions. They haven’t planned for retirement, and they need a house. They recently defaulted on a subprime mortgage. I told them they could have your home. They need it more than you do.” My hands were shaking. I felt faint. I stumbled back to the table and knelt on the floor.

The President cheerfully cut his meat, ate his steak and drank his wine. I lowered my eyes and stared at the small grey circles on the tablecloth that were water drops. “By the way,” He added, “I have just signed an Executive Order nationalizing your factories. I’m firing you as head of your business. I’ll be operating the firm now for the benefit of all mankind. There’s a whole bunch of Erics and Andrews out there and they can’t come to you for jobs groveling like beggars.” I looked up. The President dropped his spoon into the empty ramekin which had been his crème brulee. He drained the last drops of his wine. As the table was cleared, he lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He stared at me. I clung to the edge of the table as if were a ledge and I were a man hanging over an abyss.

I thought of the years behind me, of the life I had lived. The life I had earned with a lifetime of work, risk and struggle. Why was I punished? How had I allowed it to be taken? What game had I played and lost? I looked across the table and noticed with some surprise that there was no game board between us. What had I done wrong? As if answering the unspoken thought, the President suddenly cocked his head, locked his empty eyes to mine, and bared a million teeth, chuckling wryly as he folded his hands he said: “You should have stopped me at the dinner roll”.

END

Why We Can't Legislate Morality

“You can’t legislate morality” has become a common turn of phrase. The truth, however, is that every law and regulation that is proposed, passed, and enforced has inherent in it some idea of the good that it seeks to promote or preserve. Indeed, no governing authority can in any way be understood to be morally neutral. Those who think such a chimerical understanding is possible could hardly be more wrong. For, in fact, the opposite is true: You cannot not legislate morality.

It is of course true that some laws will be better conceived than others, and many may fail entirely to achieve their purpose. But that they have a purpose, and that the purpose includes at least an implicit moral element, is incontrovertible. One need only ask of any law or action of government, “What is the law for?” The answer at some point will include a conception of what is good for the community in which the law holds. The inversion of the question makes the point even more clearly. What would provide a rationale for a law or governmental action apart from a moral purpose?

Read it all here.

John B. Rawls: A Pernicious Influence?

Rawls is widely recognized as one of the leading political philosophers of the 20th century. He was born in Baltimore in 1921 and went to Princeton as an undergraduate. He considered entering the Episcopal priesthood, but lost his faith after his experiences fighting in the Pacific theatre in World War II. Eventually he ended up at Harvard where he taught for more than 30 years. Amongst his students are some of the leading names in American philosophy -- Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, and Susan Neiman.

Rawls’s incredibly influential first book was A Theory of Justice published in 1971. Nearly 600 pages long, it has been translated into 27 languages. Only ten years after its publication a bibliography of articles on the author had more than 2500 entries. Personally, he was a modest and unassuming man but he became a one-man academic industry.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempted to derive the fundamental principles of justice for a liberal, democratic political order from nothing but “our own considered judgments.” The first task he set himself was to express what the citizens of a liberal democracy already believe implicitly. To do this we must imagine ourselves deliberating under a “veil of ignorance,” that is, with no knowledge of the individuating particulars of history and biology, no knowledge of the age, sex, class, wealth, status, philosophical and religious views, etc. of our deliberating partners.

In this “original position,” we would discover the right principles of justice to which we could consent as free and equal citizens in the society in which we live.

Rawls’s critics pointed out that this notion of justice was the product of a particular, comprehensive worldview. Specifically, they discerned in his ideas a Kantian conception of human rationality and moral autonomy which is not shared by all citizens in today’s liberal democracies.

In his 1993 response, Political Liberalism, Rawls claimed to have articulated a theory of justice which is genuinely universal and acceptable from our present, pluralistic, political perspective. It is “political, not metaphysical,” that is, absolutely detached from any particular comprehensive doctrine, religion or secular.

The “new” Rawls contended that the principles of justice governing the coercive force of the government in a liberal democratic society like America must be based upon principles of justice to which every citizen could freely consent.

Since we do not agree about what the good for man is, these principles have to be derived from a political and not from a metaphysical conception of justice. It would not be a good for a powerful elite to establish utilitarianism, or Marxism, or Judaism, or Protestantism, Catholicism or even secular humanism as the official religion from which the principles of civil justice would flow.

Political Liberalism appears to deal with the fact of religious pluralism fairly and justly. Rawls assures us that it poses no threat to the integrity of religious belief: “Political liberalism does not question that many political and moral judgments of certain specified kinds are correct and it views many of them as reasonable. Nor does it question the possible truth of affirmations of faith. Above all, it does not argue that we should be hesitant and uncertain, much less skeptical, about our own beliefs.”

However, despite Rawls’s good intentions, his influence has been pernicious because it separates justice in society from the truth about man. It is fundamentally an attempt to shape an orderly society based on moral relativism. To show this let me examine the three main features of Rawls’s system: the “priority of the right over the good,” “reasonableness,” and “the inevitability of ideological pluralism.” These ideas are now firmly ensconced in American politics and culture.

The priority of the right over the good

Here is what Rawls means by the priority of the right over the good: “We should not attempt to give form to our life by first looking at the good independently defined... For the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it… We should then reverse the relation between the right and the good proposed by teleological doctrines and view the right as prior.”

If members of society accept this, Rawls believes, the danger of religious persecution, discrimination, or any other societal threat to one’s religious identity and integrity vanishes.

However, this is morally disastrous for individuals. Could one hold both the religious identity of Christian (or Muslim or Jew) and also the moral identity of an autonomous self who must “freely choose” the meaning of his existence? This would be a kind of schizophrenia. Christians and Jews believe that God loved us first, and so are morally obliged to respond to this love. They cannot choose otherwise and still consider themselves good persons. The theist’s “self,” then, is not chosen in arbitrary freedom, but recognized in grateful love.

Reasonableness
The second major component of Rawls’s system is what he calls “reasonableness.” This is the primary public political virtue and the necessary complement to the primary, private moral virtue of the “right over the good.” Rawls writes: “What justifies a conception of justice is not its being true to an order antecedent to and given by us, but its congruence with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations, and our realization that, given our history and the traditions embedded in our public life, it is the most reasonable doctrine for us”.

Rawls admits that there may very well be a God’s-eye view of things which is more ordered to justice than our strictly political (not metaphysical) conception of justice. But to establish this kind of revealed order in a religiously-pluralist society would be “unreasonable.” Even if the vast majority of citizens believed in it, it would still not be compatible with the political priority of the right. The priority of the right over the good is a political non-negotiable.

Reasonable persons, as Rawls puts it, “are not moved by the general good as such but the desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept.” He continues: “A fundamental difficulty is that since under reasonable pluralism the religious good of salvation cannot be the common good of all citizens, the political conception must employ, instead of that good, political conceptions such as liberty and equality”.

What are we to make of this? For a “reasonable” citizen it might seem virtuous to proclaim the right of citizens to deny their religious faith, but vicious to proclaim the absolute good of unwavering adherence to it. It would seem more courageous to shout from the rooftops that the citizen who apostatises from his religion is still “reasonable,” than to shout the truth that God exists!

Rawls might respond by saying that one is not required to hold the priority of the right over the good in one’s private life but only in political life. Reasonableness is required of a person a citizen, not as a religious believer. These values need not have any place at all, let alone priority, in one’s sacred books or magisterium.

Here is an even more difficult question. Is a theist who believes that our nation should truly be under God reasonable? A consistent follower of Rawls would probably say No. If the right has priority over the good, a commitment to God’s commandments, in both private and public life, is “unreasonable.”
The inevitability of ideological pluralism
In the Rawlsian framework, the right-over-the-good is the irrefutable, theoretical first principle; the desire for consensus is the hallmark of a secular saint; and a belief in the inevitability of religious pluralism is the sign of the true believer.

Rawls writes: “The diversity of reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines found in modern democratic societies is not a mere historical condition that may soon pass away; it is a permanent feature of the public culture of democracy… This pluralism is not seen as a disaster but rather as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free institutions… A continuing shared understanding on one comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrine can only be maintained by the oppressive use of state power.”

Rawls is convinced that religious pluralism is the inevitable condition of a society that is just, that permits and promotes religious and political freedom. The absence of an agreed truth is the touchstone of a just political order and the triumph of the right over the good. To stay “reasonable” one would have to reject being “under God” in any real way—past, present, and future.

It seems to me that it is difficult to square Rawlsian pluralism with Christianity.

Surely if the Church could keep its members united on a specific conception of the good without unjust coercion for 2,000 years, a political order, if constituted by a vast majority of Christian citizens, could do the same. But once one denies a priori the possibility of justly managed, societal religious unity in truth, the historical fact of the Church’s religious unity begins to smell unjust. A Christian Rawlsian would feel obliged to subvert this unity and to reject the traditional Christian project of evangelisation.
A mirror of injustice
In a society which is becoming increasingly diverse, intellectuals are grasping for a guide to negotiate the reefs of potential conflict. For many of them, John Rawls serves as a pilot. He is often quoted by politicians and lawyers, and even by judges. I think that Judge Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic member of the United States Supreme Court, gave a good example of Rawlsian thinking in public in his opinion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” American academic J. Judd Owen unmasks Rawlsianism for what it really is: “The irony is that the proposal of the so-called religiously-neutral state as the only way to deal with deep pluralism itself establishes a religion and a set of values. This is the religion of liberalism.”

Thaddeus J. Kozinski is assistant professor of humanities and philosophy at Wyoming Catholic College and the author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It.

What Makes a Good Society?

There are numerous marks of a good society: justice, equity, rule of law, economic opportunity, reciprocity, prosperity, critical thinking, ethical standards, concern for good citizenship, right to defense, right to private property, etc. But where does the value of Goodness for Goodness sake come in?

Alice C. Linsley

As Americans watch the political stalemate in Washington, we can’t help but notice the conflicting views on what makes a society good. We might agree that it takes good people to make a good society, people reaching out to people. We might say that it takes good leaders to design a good society. Lyndon B. Johnson spoke of the "Great Society" which for him meant social reforms designed to eliminate poverty and racial injustice. Johnson's vision was formed by the radical changes of the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement. He saw the nation's greatness in terms of economic prosperity and opportunity.

The Founding Fathers spoke of a society in which there is "liberty and justice for all". Such a statement could be made by left-leaning Democrats as well as old-guard Republicans. It rings with the shallow “truth” of a slogan. It reads well on a banner carried by activists on both sides of health reform, campaign reform, education reform, etc, but this ideal can be achieved only by embracing the Good. 

Plato was right that one can't live the good life unless one knows the Good. The hard part is defining “good” apart from self-interest. For many, good is what I perceive to serve me best. Society is good if it features personal comforts and benefits and generates a standard of living that I feel entitled to enjoy.  But the reality and the dream are very far apart! We are a nation of overworked and underpaid wage slaves whose debt dampens our passion for the Good.  Many are just trying to survive.  Our standard of living never will be high enough to satisfy us.  There always will be another convenience or techy toy just beyond our reach. We are no longer free. We are ruled by schedules, technology, taxes and our own discontent.  And we tend to think our discontent is someone else's fault. No wonder many Americans are angry!

Aristotle believed that free men are responsible for their voluntary and involuntary actions and behaviors. He did not include slaves in this scheme because to him the society of ruling men was the basis upon which to build a good society.  For Aristotle, a society or state is held together by friendship more than justice. He regarded men with many friendships as good men. [1]

That friendship, or natural affinity, is the basis of a good society is evident to children who determine who is included and who is excluded from their group. No matter how often their mothers tell them to be nice and let everyone play together, children form groups according to their own rules. (And their parents don't "play" with everyone either.) Yet children are more egalitarian than Aristotle's society.  Children slip in and out of different groups quite often.  This is how they discover where they fit best.  But in Aristotle's society a person could never escape from his caste. Slaves were at the bottom of the caste system and they had no rights except those granted to them by their masters. Some slaves were highly skilled in medicine, arts, reading and writing, etc. These were generally treated well by their masters because they had valuable skills, but they were not regarded as the equal of free men like Aristotle. So all the things we like about Aristotle - the attitudes which seem fair and democratic - really apply only to men of his Athenian social class.  There is little application to America, a society of myriad communities straining in diverse directions to achieve a good society .

We grow up hearing that America is the "Land of the Free" but we know from daily experience that people aren't treated as equals and many, though not slaves in an institutional sense, bear the heavier load of work and for the least amount of pay.  It is no surprise that our nation produced a thinker like J. B. Rawls who articulated a way for a person's execution of a rational long-term plan of life to remain fair to other people's life plans under the "veil of ignorance".  The veil is to keep people from tilting the balance of justice in their favor. But Congress, reflecting the nation, is a community of communities, each working to tilt the balance in their favor.  This is not the balance of justice, but the balance of power. Winning the votes, passing the porked bill, getting the dirt on one's opponent - these are what tilt the balance.  These are what break bonds of friendship.

Sociologist Amitai Etzioni has written, "the quest for a good society points to one that allows communities to maintain some limitations on new membership while at the same time greatly restrict the criteria that communities may use informing such exclusivity. The criteria for exclusion cannot be race, ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, or a host of other criteria based on ascribed statuses. Rather, the bonds of good communities, it follows, should be based on affinities whose nature remains to be defined." [2] 

Contrary to political correctness, the good society limits membership by law.  It is predicated on affinity, not on grand schemes or social engineering.  Societies are organic. They develop according to their social DNA and can't be designed. (Socialists neglect this truth.) Unless natural communities can be connected in friendly ways, nation building is impossible. The good society works as a confederation of tribes, each honoring the other's right to exist and all responsible for the most vulnerable and the poorest.


NOTES

1.  Aristotle intended authentic friendships, not fair-weather friends.  Authentic people tend to attract authentic friends. That being the case, the larger the network of friendship, the greater the measure of a man's virtue.

2.  The quotation is from Etzioni's essay "The Good Society" found here.  Etzioni is a communitarian.  As such, he views institutions and policies as reflecting values passed from generation to generation.  "These values become part of the self through internalization, and are modified by persuasion, religious or political indoctrination, leadership, and moral dialogues." Read more here.


Related reading:  Critical Thinking and Good Citizenship; Revising Good and Evil; Teaching the Benefits of Capitalism; Moral Obligation

It's All About Me, Isn't It?

Humans are unique among living creatures in that we attribute meaning to events and to objects.  Attributing meaning involves complex functions such as memory, emotion, reflection and speech.  For some, every other object (humans included) are meaningful only as extensions of Me, Myself and I.  This is true for many in our generation.  Consider how products are sold by playing to such narcissism.  Burger King made a fortune by telling the individual customer: "Have it your way!"

The question of my importance has been taken up by many philosophers. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche address the question from different outlooks on life. They agreed that anything meaningful must come from within the individual. In Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, each explores the importance of ego and the role of human freedom, but they come to different conclusions.

For Nietzsche the “will to power” is the secret of life and the destiny of humanity. He wrote, "The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape, and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student's rag.... When a man is capable of commanding, when he is by nature a "Master," when he is violent in act and gesture, of what importance are treaties to him?..."

Nietzsche's "Messiah" will bring perfection to the world by predation and biological engineering (eugenics) of human populations.  He will replace traditional morality with concepts borrowed from zoology: the taming of a beast and the breeding of a more advanced species.  Nietzsche's savior is a narcissist, who according to Nietzsche's ethical view, believes that "No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. "  This amorality of the animal kingdom is what constitutes freedom for Nietzsche.

Kierkegaard takes a different approach to human freedom. For him, freedom involves surrender to God-initiated events. Drawing on John Climacus’ understanding of spiritual enlightenment, Kierkegaard argues that learning involves a mysterious change that takes place in the learner at a specific moment of his existence - a moment of enlightenment. In this moment, the learner is absolutely certain that he/she has grasped eternal knowledge. Kierkegaard maintains that this is miraculous and supernatural because it can only be initiated by God through a series of historical/temporal events. This learning (or enlightenment) is highly individual and subjective, and it is unique for every learner. Kierkegaard argues further that individuals are unable to know anything that is certain except through this supernatural intervention in history.  So while the individual is important, the individual's freedom involves relationship with the source of enlightenment. 

Where Nietzsche admits nothing greater than himself, Kierkegaard holds that his own greatness depends on One greater than himself.  What do you think?

Did Hobbes Change the Meaning of Justice?

Alice C. Linsley

The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) wrote Leviathan, a book which influenced John Locke and the Founding Fathers of the United States. His idea of a social contract between citizens whereby each agrees to surrender rights to the state is considered one of the best ideas of the Enlightenment. Rarely do people consider how Hobbes' contractarian philosophy departs from and has little in common with the wisdom of antiquity. 

In the ancient world, the citizens' well-being depended on the virtue or righteousness of the ruler.  Hobbes argued that the sovereign's power is what makes the citizen's comply with the contract. This being the case, justice is not a possibility until sovereignty has been created. By this argument, we conclude that justice is a product of coercive power and contracts are validated by the ruler's power, not by the ruler's virtue or righteousness.

In the ancient world, the citizens' well-being depended on the virtue or righteousness of the ruler. That is why the ancient Afro-Asiatic rulers tried to deal with their sin by having priests who offered sacrifice for them. They believed that how they lived before the Creator would affect their entire kingdom. In other words, there could be no real justice in the king's realm unless the king were just in his actions. Justice and righteousness are the same word in the Hebrew Bible. Are there any politicians, rulers, or presidents thinking like this today?


Hobbes changed the idea of justice. No longer did it have to do with the virtue or righteousness of the ruler, but it had to do with a contract that citizens worked out among themsleves to give up certain rights to a ruler. Hobbes argued also that the ruler's power makes the citizen's comply with the contract. This being the case, justice is a product of coercive power, and contracts are validated by the ruler's power, not by the ruler's virtue or righteousness.

In developing his contractarian idea Hobbes often quotes Genesis, the first book of the Bible. It is strange that he should do this since Genesis speaks of a fixed binary order in creation. God is the supreme ruler over all and isn't interested in artificial agreements such as the social contract. Hobbes himself recognized that the social contract, as an artificial entity, does not find its basis in the natural order of creation. It does find a basis in the individual's desire for security in the face of human cruelty and brutishness.

Let us consider some of Hobbes' ideas and their implications.

Children’s Consent to Parental Governance
Hobbes wrote: “Dominion is acquired two ways: by generation and by conquest. The right of dominion by generation is that which the parent hath over his children, and is called paternal. And is not so derived from the generation, as if therefore the parent had dominion over his child because he begat him, but from the child’s consent, either express or by other sufficient arguments declared.”

By this argument, we may conclude that the child’s consent to be governed by his parents is essential to the proper exercise of parental authority. By consenting to parental authority the child receives protection, material provision, training, guidance, nurture and perhaps sufficient bounty to make a marriage. In Hobbes’ view, children who are abused by their parents do not owe them consent to governance, as none can be compelled to obey an authority that commands self-injury or endangers without just cause.

We find in Hobbes’ view the beginnings of children’s rights. Later Bentham would adapt this principle in his promotion of animal rights.

On the Supremacy of Fathers
Hobbes wrote that the dominion “over the child should belong to both [mother and father], and he be equally subject to both, which is impossible; for no man can obey two masters… In Commonwealths this controversy is decided by the civil law: and for the most part, but not always, the sentence is in favour of the father, because for the most part Commonwealths have been erected by the fathers.”

By this argument, we may conclude that the child must obey as his first authority the governance that is established for him by civil law. But doesn’t this overthrow the child’s “right” to consent to be governed by the parent? Do we have here an inherent contradiction in Hobbes' thought?

By this argument, we also may conclude that patriarchy is not a natural order but the artifice of male law makers. This is not supported by anthropological research, as no true matriarchy has ever been found to exist. It is no small point that order of creation reflects a fixed reality while artifices, even those endowed with authority, reflect malleable realities.

Justification for Absolute Monarchy
For Hobbes, the ideal government is a monarchy perpetuated by rules of succession that keep control within the royal family. He quotes I Samuel 8:11-17 as an authority for his view of monarch’s power over lands, harvests, flocks, populace, militia and all judicature, “in which is contained as absolute power as one man can possibly transfer to another.”

By this argument, we may conclude that not even a prophet of God has authority to question the ruler’s will. The ruler is the supreme authority on earth, usurping even God’s authority. While Hobbes argues that the power of the ruler is established by God on earth, he does not recognize the equally authoritative offices of the prophet and the priest. This being so, he justifies civil authority as superior to ecclesial authority and develops a comprehensive Erastianism.

The young Charles II, Hobbes's former pupil, granted him a pension of £100. The king’s protection was important to Hobbes, especially when he was accused of heresy. Terrified of being labeled a “heretic”, Hobbes burned some of his papers and set about to examine the law of heresy. He presented the results of his investigation in three short Dialogues added as an Appendix to his Latin translation of Leviathan. In this appendix, Hobbes argued that, since the Restoration had put down the High Court of Commission, there remained no court of heresy and nothing could be heresy except opposing the Nicene Creed, which, he maintained, Leviathan did not do. This definition of heresy served Hobbes well, but it ignores the question of whether Hobbes’ political views contradict the orders of creation.

Hobbes’ fear of societal chaos convinced him of the necessity of absolute regal powers. He wrote, “And though of so unlimited a power, men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbour, are much worse.”

It is Natural for Man to Honor Valid Contracts
In Leviathan, Hobbes develops his third law of nature: that men must honor valid contracts. Were this reality, the only occasion for war and turmoil would be a vaccum of power. Hitler's Third Reich refutes this principle. After concentrating both executive and legislative power in his person, Hitler exercised his coercise power to destroy millions of people and to wage war on two fronts. He regarded coercive power as a necessity in renewing German nationalism.

On Judging Good from Evil
Hobbes wrote, “For the cognizance or judicature of good and evil, being forbidden by the name of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, as a trial of Adam’s obedience, the devil to inflame the ambition of the woman... told her that by tasting it they should be as gods, knowing good and evil. Whereupon having both eaten, they did indeed take upon them God’s office, which is judicature of good and evil, but acquired no new ability to distinguish between them aright.”

Hobbes concludes that humans take God's role as judge upon themselves without having God's ability to judge good from evil. Since this is the case, free will must be determined by material, not metaphysical or theological concerns. He wrote, "The universe is corporeal; all that is real is material, and what is not material is not real." Here he tosses out the final piece of Christian Tradition and prepares the ground for the materialist philosophies of later centuries. He treats freedom as being able to do what one desires and he treats the Creation as matter in motion.  There is nothing except what we can see, taste, touch, hear and smell.  Since we can't perceive of God, heaven or the soul by these senses, they can't be said to exist.

Conclusion
Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely on Good Friday in 1588. It is said that his birth was precipitated by his mother's fear of the invasion of the Spanish Armada. He lived through the most tumultuous and bloody times in English history and this shaped his worldview. Unfortunately, his misconceptions also shaped western political ideas and have moved us with tidal force to the brink of a new totalitarianism.  For if justice is a product of coercive power and contracts are validated only by the ruler's power to enforce them, then we are speaking about a very different kind of justice than that found in the Bible.  The Hebrew word for justice is tsedhaqah or tsedheq; and the Greek word is dikaiosune.  The Hebrew and Greek words are also translated "righteousness."

Related reading:  The Corporeal Universe Needs Metaphysics

Are We in a New Renaissance?

Alice C. Linsley


The Renaissance began in Italy and spread to the rest of Europe, reaching England by the 16th century and northern Europe by the mid-17th century. This period must be viewed against the backdrop of religious upheaval and bloody conflict, the Bubonic plague, interest in Pagan mythology, and the imperialism of the Ottoman Turks.

In many ways, the Renaissance was a time like our own. We too face religious upheaval as is seen most recently within the worldwide of Anglican Communion which has split over the issues of women priests and ordination of non-celibate homosexuals.
 
We have seen renewed interest in Paganism, especially in the mysterious Druids of Celtic religion and in Native American spirituality.

There are so many religious groups in America that one can find a group that will allow you to believe and act according to one's personal preferences.  Ignorance and/or dismissal of the authority of Holy Tradition (with its binary features) is the general rule.
 
We live with new diseases such as Ebola and HIV/AIDS, and the resurgence of resistant strains of old diseases such a Tuberculosis and Polio.
 
The discovery of the New World expanded geographical horizons and stimulated European imaginations and economies. Today we look to the heavens to discover new worlds and for the first time have chartered space travel. Space exploration may lead to the discovery of earthlike planets in other galaxies. The very thought stimulates the imagination and nurtures technological development.
 
In education, parents are seeking alternatives to public schools, such as charter schools, home schooling and classical education schools.
 
As Muslims of the Ottoman Empire sought to expand their territory and didn't hesitate to use violence means, Jihadists today seek to establish a world empire under Islamic Law (Sharia).

Ruthless or Machiavellian politics are practiced in our own country. Washington's inner Beltway has a reputation for "dirty" politics, back-stabbing, and secret deals that work against a healthy political system.
 
Today we share many of the ethical concerns of the Renaissance.

• The Dignity of Man
• Responsibility of the Wealthy
• Reform of Education and Healthcare
• The Power of Rulers
• Religious Intolerance
• Insistence of one's own interpretation of meaning

The Renaissance made way for the Enlightenment and for modern industrialization, modern sciences and the proliferation of scientific theories and ideologies, the establishment of democracies, organizations such as the World Council of Churches and the United Nations, and globalism. 

What do you think our time will give way to? What will our children's world be like?


Related reading: Ethics of the Renaissance

Philosophy and European Union

In 1693 William Penn published his Essay on the Present and Future Peace of Europe. In this pamphlet Penn called for the establishment of a European Parliament. He argued that the voting system should be based on the demographic and economic importance of the various countries. Therefore Germany would have twelve votes whereas France, Spain, Russia and Turkey would have ten each, Italy eight and England six, an so on - a total of ninety votes in all. Penn suggested that decisions taken by the European Parliament should be enforced by a European Army.

Little interest was shown in Penn's and it was not until the end of the 18th century that the subject was revived. In 1795 the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, wrote Philosophical Project for Perpetual Peace. He suggested that to achieve this it was necessary to create a "federation of free states".

Kant's views were supported by the English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. In 1798 he wrote Principles of International Law where he argued that universal peace could only be obtained by first achieving European unity. He hoped that some form of European Parliament would be able to enforce the liberty of the press, free trade, the abandonment of all colonies and a reduction in the money being spent on armaments.

In 1814 the French philosopher Claude-Henri Saint-Simon published On the Reorganisation of European Society (1814). In his book Saint-Simon argued that Europe was in "critical disequilibrium" and would soon undergo reconstruction. He argued strongly for a planned economy. He suggested a framework of three chambers: one body made up of engineers and artists to propose plans, a second of scientists responsible for assessing the plans, and a third group of industrialists whose task would be that of implementing the schemes according to the interests of the whole community.

In 1851 an International Peace Congress was held in Paris. At the conference Victor Hugo called for the creation of a United States of Europe. "We say to France, to England, to Prussia, to Austria, to Spain, to Italy, to Russia, we say to them, 'A day will come when your weapons will fall from your hands, a day when war will seem absurd and be as impossible between Paris and London, St. Petersburg and Berlin, Vienna and Turin, as today it would seem impossible between Rouen and Amiens, Boston and Philadelphia."

Pierre Joseph Proudhon was also a supporter of European Unity. In Principle of Federation (1863) he argued that nationalism inevitably leads to war. To reduce the power of nationalism Proudhon called for a Federal Europe. Proudhon believed that Federalism is "the supreme guarantee of all liberty and of all law, and must, without soldiers or priests, replace both feudal and Christian society." Proudhon went on to predict that "the twentieth century will open the era of federations, or humanity will begin again a purgatory of a thousand years."

In 1900 there was a conference at the Institute of Paris on the subject of European Unity. At the conference the French lawyer, Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, argued: "It is no longer only the dreamers and philosophers, men in love with a perhaps superhuman ideal of peace and justice, who long to realize the old Utopian idea of a European union. It is also more positive minds, concerned above all about material interests or political advantages and preoccupied with the damage which its hates and internal divisions could bring to ancient Europe."


After the First World War, the Italian industrialist, Giovanni Agnelli joined the campaign against the formation of the League of Nations. Instead he urged the establishment of "a federation of European states under a central power which governs them." He thought this would maintain peace in Europe. Agnetti also argued it would help economic growth: "Only a federal Europe will be able to give us a more economic realization of the division of labour, with the elimination of all customs barriers."

Giovanni Agnelli eventually became disillusioned with this idea and became a supporter of Benito Mussolini. Figures on the far left also embraced the idea of a a united Europe. In his book, Perspectives of World Development (1924), Leon Trotsky urged the formation of a United Socialist States of Europe in order to resist the power of American capitalism.

In 1926 Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi published his ideas for a united Europe in the Pan-Europa. The same year he established the Pan-European Union. People who joined included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ortega y Gasset and Konrad Adenauer.


The first leading politician to propose a united Europe was the French foreign minister, Aristide Briand. In 1929 he published a memorandum where he advocated the establishment of a European Federal Union. He gained support from Edouard Herriot but the idea stimulated little interest and was not taken up by other political leaders.


In 1945 Jean Monnet was appointed as Planning Commissioner in France. In this post he became responsible for economic reconstruction. He began working on a scheme that he eventually proposed to Robert Schuman, the French Foreign Minister, in 1949. The Schuman Plan, as it became known, was the basis for the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) that was established in 1952. It was agreed that the six countries that signed the Treaty of Paris, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany, would pool its coal and steel resources.


In 1958 the European Coal and Steel Community evolved into the European Economic Community (EEC). Under the ECC attempts were made to achieve harmonization. This included measures in areas such as indirect taxation, industrial regulation, agriculture, fisheries and monetary policies. The Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) was introduced in 1962.


Britain made attempts to join the EEC in 1963 and 1967. This ended in failure, mainly due to the opposition of President Charles De Gaulle of France. Britain, under the leadership of Edward Heath, was finally admitted in 1973. Denmark and Ireland also joined at the same time.

In 1975, the new British prime minister, Harold Wilson decided to hold a referendum on membership of the European Economic Community. Wilson allowed his Cabinet to support both the "Yes" and "No" campaigns and this led to a bitter split in the party. The Conservative Party was also divided over this issue but the British people eventually voted to remain in the EEC.


In 1979 the EEC introduced the European Monetary System (EMS). The lost-term objective of the EMS was to achieve currency union and the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), a system of semi-fixed exchange rates.

Greece joined the EEC in 1981. This was followed by Portugal (1986), Spain (1986) and the former East Germany (1990). In 1993 the organization was renamed the European Union (EU). Austria, Finland and Sweden joined the EU in 1995.


In January 2002 the euro becomes the sole currency within the twelve participating Member States (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain).


From here.

Moral Guilt: Original or Ancestral?

Alice C. Linsley

The term “original sin” was unknown in both the Eastern and Western Church until Augustine (c. 354-430). Prior to this, theologians used different terminology when speaking of the fall and its effects. The phrase the Greek Fathers used to describe the tragedy in the Garden was “ancestral sin”- from the biblical term amartema – which refers to an individual sin for which the individual is morally responsible. Original sin, on the other hand, holds all humans morally responsible for the sin of Adam and Eve.

The word amartia (also a biblical term) means “missing the mark” and refers to the common condition of all humans. The Eastern Greek-speaking Church, unlike Western Latin-speaking, never speaks of guilt as being passed from Adam and Eve to their offspring. It regards this idea as contrary to God’s justice. Each individual is responsible for their own actions and can't be made to bear moral responsibility for another's intentional sin. 

The early Church Fathers also recognized the possibility that Adam and Eve may be archetypes (in the Platonic sense) rather than historical persons. They are symbols of how men and women succumb to temptation when they desire the things of creation more than fellowship with the Creator. (The book of Genesis does permit the interpretation of Adam and Eve as archetypes. See this essay.)

Within Christianity the earliest idea of moral guilt involves the individual person, not the whole human race. God’s just nature means that each bears the guilt of his or her own sin. So what has humanity inherited from our ancestors? According to the early Church Fathers and 1 Corinthians 15:21: we inherited mortality or death, because our nature has become diseased and disease leads to death. So it is not that moral guilt or sin is passed on; it is that a condition or disease is passed on.

What do you think?

Aristotle's Observation Didn't Penetrate Beyond this Life

According to Socrates, the ultimate object of human activity is happiness, and the necessary means to reach it, virtue. Since everybody necessarily seeks happiness, no one is deliberately corrupt. All evil arises from ignorance, and the virtues are one and all but so many kinds of prudence. Virtue can, therefore, be imparted by instruction.

The disciple of Socrates, Plato (427-347 B.C.) declares that the summum bonum consists in the perfect imitation of God, the Absolute Good, an imitation which cannot be fully realised in this life. Virtue enables man to order his conduct, as he properly should, according to the dictates of reason, and acting thus he becomes like unto God. But Plato differed from Socrates in that he did not consider virtue to consist in wisdom alone, but in justice, temperance, and fortitude as well, these constituting the proper harmony of man's activities. In a sense, the State is man writ large, and its function its function is to train its citizens in virtue. For his ideal State he proposed the community of goods and of wives and the public education of children.

Though Socrates and Plato had been to the fore in this mighty work and had contributed much valuable material to the upbuilding of ethics; nevertheless, Plato's illustrious disciple, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), must be considered the real founder of systematic ethics. With characteristic keenness he solved, in his ethical and political writings, most of the problems with which ethics concerns itself.

Unlike Plato, who began with ideas as the basis of his observation, Aristotle chose rather to take the facts of experience as his starting-point; these he analysed accurately, and sought to trace to their highest and ultimate causes. He set out from the point that all men tend to happiness as the ultimate object of all their endeavours, as the highest good, which is sought for its own sake, and to which all other goods merely serve as means. This happiness cannot consist in external goods, but only in the activity proper to human nature - not indeed in such a lower activity of the vegetative and sensitive life as man possesses in common with plants and brutes, but in the highest and most perfect activity of his reason, which springs in turn from virtue. This activity, however, has to be exercised in a perfect and enduring life. The highest pleasure is naturally bound up with this activity, yet, to constitute perfect happiness, external goods must also supply their share. True happiness, though prepared for him by the gods as the object and reward of virtue, can be attained only through a man's own individual exertion. With keen penetration Aristotle thereupon proceeds to investigate in turn each of the intellectual and moral virtues, and his treatment of them must, even at the present time, be regarded as in great part correct. The nature of the State and of the family were, in the main, rightly explained by him. The only pity is that his vision did not penetrate beyond this earthly life, and that he never saw clearly the relations of man to God.

From here.

Plato's Debt to Ancient Egypt

Plato studied in Egypt for 13 years under the Horite priest Sechnuphis. Many Greek philosophers had studied at Egyptian schools. Iamblichus wrote that Thales of Miletus insisted that Pythagoras had to go to Memphis to study because the Egyptian priests were a veritable source of knowledge and wisdom, especially when it came to the natural sciences, medicine and astronomy.

Plato


Alice C. Linsley

Judaism and Christianity draw from ancient Nilotic and Proto-Saharan beliefs, religious practices, and cosmology. This should not surprise us since Genesis 4, 5, 10 and 11 names the Horite Hebrew rulers whose ancestors came from Africa.

The Horite Hebrew were devotees of Horus, who was called "son of God." His totem was the falcon so many of the oldest stone altars were built in the shape of the falcon. These ruler-priests were also great astronomers who influenced the Greeks. They are the founders of sidereal astronomy.

The early inhabitants of the Nile and Mesopotamia regarded the Sun as the symbol of the High God because it was the source of light and life. They observed that whereas the Sun is the source of light, the Moon merely reflects light.  This is why the Bible criticizes Mesopotamian moon worship and why Abraham's father was regarded as an idol-worshipper (Joshua 24:2) since he maintained households in Ur and Haran, cities dedicated to the moon god Sin.

Note the binary distinction between the source of light (Sun) and the reflection of light (Moon). This observation is the basis for Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave. Those in the cave are able to see only passing shadows, not the true objects that cast those shadows.  Yet they believe that the shadows are the real objects. They continue to do so until they turn toward the cave's opening and walk out of the cave.

Plato believed that the eternal soul existed in the realm of eternal Forms before it entered the body. He believed that we are able to recognize a tree as tree or a mountain as mountain because our souls knew the true Forms of tree and mountain in that place of eternal Forms. What we experience in this world is only a reflection of the true Forms which are in that realm where body-less souls exist. (See transmigration of the soul.)

This seems strange to us today because we think that something exists because we see, taste, touch, hear or smell it. However, though our senses suggest that something exists in the temporal realm, the senses don't explain how we re-cognize the essence of that object. Plato argued that we are able to re-know (re-cognize) the essence of an object because the soul knew it first as an eternal Form.

Might Plato have borrowed these ideas? It certainly seems likely that his "Forms" correspond to the ancient Nilotic understanding of shadows reflecting the eternal world. The ancient Egyptians were concerned about the afterlife because they believed the soul or "Ba" to be eternal. To avoid being counted among the damned of the afterlife, one had to live by a high moral code and standard of righteousness. In the Egyptian view, the soul or personality, called "Ba", lives after the body dies. Ba is sometimes depicted as a human-headed bird flying out of the tomb to join with the 'Ka' in the afterlife.

The unification of Ba and Ka happened after death by means of the proper offerings, prayers, and mummification. There was a risk of dying the second death if the unified soul and life force were condemned in the afterlife. Dying the second death meant not becoming an "akh." Only as an akh could one enjoy the resurrection life.

Ka is the life that animates the body. Ba is the eternal soul and Ankh is the Spirit of Life. The Ankh for the ancient Egyptians was the hieroglyphic sign of life. It is symbolic of the Sun's daily course from east to west, with the loop representing the Sun.

The horizontal crossbar symbolizes the path of the sun from east to west. To put this in terms more familiar to Christians, life is possible where the Sun, the Creator's emblem, sheds light and warmth. The ancient Egyptians believed that these elements - Ka, Ba and Ankh - became separated at death. By mummification, with prayers and sacrifices, they attempted to keep the KaBa together and prepared to receive Ankh in the afterlife.

Plato’s Application of Egyptian Cosmology
Here is but one example of how Plato's thinking was informed by Egyptian cosmology. Another example involves the development of the Greek alphabet from the Pro-Canaanite alphabet which was based on Egyptian hieroglyphics. To understand how the alphabet expresses ancient Egyptian-Sudanese cosmology, consider the Teth (or Tau) below.

The sphere with the cross represents the precession of the equinoxes (image below). This would have been observed by primitive peoples who studied the heavens carefully. The cycle takes between 25,000-28,000 years to complete and is called  "Earth's Great Year."

Plato regarded a complete cycle as the "perfect year" because it meant the return of the planets and the fixed stars to their original positions. He wrote: "And so people are all but ignorant of the fact that time really is the wanderings of these bodies, bewilderingly numerous as they are and astonishingly variegated. It is none the less possible, however, to discern that the perfect number of time brings to completion the perfect year at that moment when the relative speeds of all eight periods have been completed together and, measured by the circle of the Same that moves uniformly, have achieved their consummation."

According to Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend there are over 200 myths from ancient cultures that refer to a Great Year.

Paul’s Application of Platonism

Saint Paul enjoyed a classical Greek education in his hometown of Tarsus, a recognized center of learning, with a famous university that the Greek geographer Strabo considered better than the academies of Athens and Alexandria. The Stoic philosopher Athenodorus lived and taught in Tarsus before Paul was born, and Paul likely was acquainted with his teachings on the conscience. Athenodorus said that, “Everyman's conscience is his god.” The conscience does not occur in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), which instead uses the word “heart”. Paul makes abundant use of the Greek word for conscience in his letters to the early churches, so it is evident that he was influenced by Greek philosophy.

Paul's training in Greek philosophy is evident also in his Platonic allegorical approach to Old Testament figures. Consider 1 Corinthians 15:20 and Romans 5:12 in which Paul speaks o the first man, Adam, as imperfect and the second Man, Jesus Christ, as the perfect and the true Form of humanity. God made humans in God’s image and likeness, but sin marred that image so that the first is imperfect. In Platonism, types are imperfect reflections of the true eternal Forms. Paul is using Platonic language to explain Jesus Christ to Corinthians and Romans who would have been familiar with this language. He wants them to see the pattern of revelation.

Platonism regards the symbol or “Form” as more real than the its material reflection, so the Apostle Paul who would have learned a great deal of Greek philosophy in Tarsus, teases out the pattern of sin and death in reference to Adam, and forgiveness and eternal life in the New Adam, Jesus Messiah. 

In Galatians 4:21-31, Paul uses a platonic approach to explain the relationship of Grace and Law. Sarah represents imputed righteousness (grace) while the bondservant, Hagar, represents the law. Paul writes, “There is an allegory here: these women stand for the two covenants.” A covenant was accompanied by a sign of blood. In this case, we have familial blood in Sarah as opposed to a contractual relationship in Hagar. The familial bond is always the stronger. So Sarah who was both mother of Isaac and sister to Abraham is the closer blood relative. Hagar, the Egyptian, is more distant. Sarah, as wife and sister, cannot be put away, but Hagar, as bondservant, can be put away and is. St Paul uses this binary method of interpretation to show that grace is better than law.

Using this same method, we are able to discover that Noah, Abraham, Moses and David are all types of Christ. All fail to accomplish righteousness, yet point to the One who does fulfill righteousness. Both Abraham and Moses met their wives at wells. So Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well speaks volumes. She is the symbol of the Church, the Bride of Christ.

The relationship of type as mere reflection of the true Form is found throughout the Bible. Consider these examples:

Abraham and Moses were blessed by noble priests: Abraham by Melchizedek, and Moses by Jethro (his father-in-law). Jesus was blessed by Simeon, a man of great faith who had yearned to see the day of Israel’s deliverance.

Using the Platonic approach, we find that Christ is foreshadowed throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. This is what Paul, John, Peter, and the early Church Fathers found in the Scriptures. As with Isaac, Jesus’ sacrificial journey required three days. As with Isaac, Jesus carried the wood upon which he would be sacrificed. As with Isaac, the sacrificed one was bound. As with Isaac, the Son was sacrificed on a mountain. Only with Jesus, no ram was substituted (contrary to what the Quran claims) because Jesus is not the type that points to the Form. He is the true Form, if we accept the Church's teaching.


NOTES

The Sun was often spoken of a the God's chariot, as in the Psalms. The Sun was also associated with Horus, who was called "son of God".  Horus is a very ancient type of Jesus Christ. Note that the cross is evident in this symbol of Horus.

The image above shows a cross atop the head of the "Son of God". The seeing eye of Horus is shown in the sun, the emblem of God Father and God Son among the Horite Hebrew. Other images associated with Horus show him with the body of a man and the head of a ram or the head of a falcon. The falcon was a symbol of divine kingship and the totem of Horus. Horus (HR) is called "lord of the sky". HR in ancient Egyptian means "the one on high" or "the most high one". The name appears on Egyptian hieroglyphs at the beginning of dynastic civilization (c. 3000 BC).

For more on ancient symbols that speak of God's nature go here.



Related reading: Ethics of Ancient Greece; Ancient Moral Codes;  The Impact of Ancient Egypt on Greek Thought; Petra Reflects Horite Beliefs