i.e. why doesnt’ your analogy tell one to try to ask questions like ‘waht is God like? what makes him work that way? what is responsible for him?’ If you tell Muffti we can’t really ask those qustions, IMuffti will ask you why teh analogy doesn’t work on god as much as is it works on the basic elements that were aroudn when the universe began.

The point is: at some point, given that expalnation doesn’t go on forever, the second responder who sounds foolish here has to be saying the right thing. Why is God teh right place to stop?

Answer the following simple question. Try to keep your answer as brief as possible.

If I taught 2 children or two aboriginis how to tell time from a clock. The two both marveled at this thing that was ticking and telling time- they haven’t seen such a thing before.

One of them tells the other that one day he will study the clock and figure out how it works. Why does it tick? How can it tell time without slowing down or speeding up?

The other one responds and says: what are going to waste your time for-it just works by itself.
The first responds and says ‘By itself? how can it work by itself? come with me and together we will study why and how it works’; The second responds back and says ‘studying it is a waste of time because you can simply say that it works by itself’

Which one of the two would you say is right and which one is talking foolishly and why?

The downside of quoting him apropos Jews is leaving the unintended impression he was anti-semitic. In fact, he was a philo-Semite.

(btw, looks like you steered clear of the great child molestation debate. Good move.)

Incidentally, Joe, Muffti would be curious to hear what you think regarding the euthyphro dillema that Muffti mentioned earlier.

Happy passover JM.

“It is only that sometimes He sends us difficult, unpleasant challenges. But, (this thinking says,) we are learning and strengthening as we deal with this seemingly bad stuff. But it is not really bad.” That is the theory. That G-d does not really do any evil, it just LOOKS that way.

I have personally lived this – but who has not; you know, like, they wouldn’t let you on the Titanic, and you cried at the time. Then later you were glad.

Or the pretty girl somebody else got – who, years later, turned out to be not so cool after all. A bad one. Ran off with the milkman.

But you have to get old to see this. And it is never easy. Especially in the middle of a toothache.

Happy Passover.

Ive explained before that the very laws of nature the very fat that things fall and that the winds blow are caused at every moment.

Nothing can happen by itself -ever.

You have more courage than I do, Muffti. I don’t trust us to arrive at satisfactory results from a “complex,” utilitarian approach to moral judgments. Some outcomes seem safely predictable– incest is bad– others, perhaps not (African slavery is ok, benefiting even the slaves themselves; expropriating Jewish property is ok, at least for the “greatest number”). Ol’ Nietzsche saw the utilitarian outlook on morality as an exercise in question-begging.

It’s very hard, I think, not to resort– sometime, somewhere in one’s analysis– to some non-utilitarian basis for ‘good’ and ‘bad.’

To paraphrase Churchill, religion may be the worst approach to this, except for all the others.

Getting rid of God is, among other things, a pain in the ass:

“It was the Jews who, with awe-inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value-equation (good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved of God) and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying, ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, the impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone– and you, the powerful and the noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed and damned! . . . One knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation.”
(Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, 7)

Hey, the Aztecs were really big on sacrificing and eating people. Now, there was a stratified culture with rigid ethical norms.

Is polygamy ‘just’ good or bad? Homosexuality? Today’s erstwhile taboo? How about tomorrow’s?