also: laws exist whether people acknowledge them or not, and they are enforced whether they like it or not
eg: gravity, gresham's law, boyle's law, conservation of energy, etc etc etc
Discussion
Yes, the idea that getting rid of the State will free everyone from the pressure of being law-abiding is actually backward.
The State exists to reduce the individual consequences of breaking Natural Laws and spread the punishment more evenly across the population.
or in other words, it is a cloak to hide some percentage of criminal activity that would otherwise meet consequences
Laws of physics are not comparable with morals and therefore irrelevant in the discussion. Laws of physics are not even enforced, they just are. You can't choose to break the Ohm's Law it is imposible... To the other hand you can choose to kill someone and then you will meet the consequences.
Christianity means that moral laws are breakable, but never without consequences. That makes them more like physics.
Every moral failing results in an opposite and equal reaction.
the distinction that would make it clearer to her is the latency of the consequences
some things take a long time to circle back and bite you
Yes, Christians believe it might take until the end of the world, but it will then bite you.
the end of the world is probably only 12000 years in total though, so there's that also
yikes! so how much of following of the law should be driven by fear of consequences vs just being a better person? it feels like it's impossible to not fall into a useless obsession with following laws that's completely unhelpful to moral development. so then it's easy to make up excuses for why certain laws just don't apply anymore.
i'm always looking for excuses for why i can be pagan and christian at the same time...
And Christianity also just is. It’s not enforce. Just like if you jump off a building you fall due to gravity, if you sin you find yourself in worse and worse situations.
i would compare this to the latency of effects in physical systems, complex systems are especially good for demonstrating this, and so, yes, actually, these laws of physics even have such late consequences for actions
and frankly, if a person does not consider the possibility that their actions may have a long term effect, they are not competent human beings, they are acting as children
Actions of course have long term consequences. Consequences which can't be predicted or forseen. For example: A single conversation in the hallway of your university can completely change the course of your life.
The fall of the sparrow.
"can't"
no, actually, if you had the full snapshot of the state of the system and you understood the laws that govern its actions, you could
this is a fundamental premise of computer science
Not true, there objectively were times when Christianity did not existed... And to the rest of your comment. Define sin. Is it something society sees as something bad? Sure it will ruin you, your credit and your reputation. But do something the scripture forbids but society does not condemn and you will be fine... Or did you heard of someone getting into bad situations because of wearing linen and wool? Or someone enjoyed a sausage before Easter?
Sin is "to miss the mark".
I'm not sure I understand what that means. Sincerely. Can you please try to rephrase?
Every moral order defines a "mark" or "target" of the most virtuous, perfect human and moral people try to get as close as possible to that mark before they die.
To sin is to miss that mark and the gravity of the sin is defined by how far away from the mark it was.
Virtue is the greater and sin is the lesser.
So it is like in Plato's allegory of a cave. The closer you get to the ideal shape from the projection the better person you are? And the ideal in this case is to live eudaimonic life and hitting all the marks.
And any deviation is essentially a sin.
This is super interesting, because that would mean that someone with very strict morals and high sense for meaningful fulfillment can end up far worse than a person who is just trying to be "a decent person."
Well, "worse".
And part of the Christian "mark" is humility and eschewing self-righteousness and scrupulousity.
So, effective religions have their own internal checks and balances because humans can't hit the mark precisely, by definition, as that would make them into a diety.
Do you mean, that they feel worse about themselves?
That would mean that they are too prideful, probably, and expect superhuman results from a mere human. I suffer from this tyranny of high expectations.
lol idk what to say about a person who doesn't understand that the shadows in the cave are illusions
Thank you for rephrasing. I was really not understanding.
sin literally means to be without
sin semilla "without seed"
in german it's called "schuld" which is a synonym with "debt"
it literally means that your account is in the red
Yes, those are all translations, tho.
>>The word “sin”, as it appears in the Bible, comes from the Greek word Hamartia or the Hebrew word Hata, which both mean “to miss the mark” or “flawed”. The word was used in archery and spear throwing. When a person missed the center of the target, they erred, or “hamartia-ed”. So, as this applies to sin, we should ask, “What is the mark that we are missing?”
And the answer is: The holy righteous perfection of God.<<
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/e2medianetwork/2016/11/wwutt-sin-means-to-miss-the-mark/
well, this imprecision is unavoidable but through science can be reduced (ie, knowing the thing)
so, the essence of the meaning of the word sin is: Error
and promoting error is the business of Satan and his followers
whether they are sledging you when you are taking aim
or inserting rubbish into your data
they are agents of satan
Christ has always existed.
materialists are so boring
technically there must have been some period where there was only the Father though, but i'm not gonna get into the finer points
Because of the Trinity, they have all three always existed as one. Only God knows how God works, tho. Our minds can't comprehend it.
And you can't really say what is first, when They existed before time existed. Outside of time.
so do we, technically speaking, it's only our story that is time bound
So this is going to be a sophism, but we don't want to make the debate boring. If only God knows God and you can't comprehend God, how can you be sure about anything? How can you be sure that Bible is telling the true? What if it is yet another golden calf? What if it is yet another test if you would follow the book or your heart? How can you use something you don't understand and you can never understand in an argument?
You cannot be sure. You take it on Faith, out of Love and that gives you Hope, but the greatest of these three things is Love.
The Father has always had a spirit (Holy Spirit) and has always had wisdom. The wisdom of God is Christ (the Word, Logos).
this is a metaphor though
Our brains can't handle the reality of the Trinity. We only have metaphors.
just because the consequences of breaking a law have a time delay doesn't mean that the consequences are not enforced
this is the precise nature of the hubris of evil people
this is why i believe in heaven and hell (and hell is end of the line, not eternal stupid punishment)
in physics consequences can have time delays too...
injecting yourself with HIV infected blood won't kill you straight away either
You can't break law of physics. There are no consequences of doing the impossible. I can't decide to break gravity. I can produce more buoyancy to stay afloat, but that is not breaking the law of gravity...
Also heaven and hell are constructs beyond physics and have nothing to do with it. Check the origin of the word metaphysics.
you need to go study some chaotic dynamics about the consequences of actions in complex systems and how long the latency of consequences can be
just a simple example... the sun from time to time has explosions on its surface caused by plasma and electromagnetic effects
when one of those blasts happens, it takes 3-4 days before it gets in range of the orbit of earth
"metaphysics" is literally the entire category of things that are in the long to extremely long range of consequences of physical events
your short sighted view of cause and effect is completely ignorant of the fact that the more complex a system gets, the greater its latency, thus, this "can't break the rules" dictum only applies to the timescale of the event in question
gravity reacts in nanoseconds
what makes you so sure that morality doesn't react in a span of your life?
Semantics it is all about semantics. Physical processes and physical laws are not the same thing. If I slip on the top of the Empire State Building I fall and turn into a pancake it will be due to the physical process not because me being punished for breaking the law of gravity. Same as your Sun eruptions they have latency because they are a process.
Morality as a sum of personal beliefs is a fluid thing and it does changes all the time.
I think the sum doesn't change, the weighting of the parts shifts.
and setting arbitrary limits on the arrival of consequences is literally shortsightedness
and excluding any possible consequence that isn't obvious is simply stupid
but whatever they want to be allowed to have their homo pervert fucking and get away with their abuse of other people via indirect means like being at the front of the money spigot behind others who pay their cost
Yeah, sum might be a wrong word. Approximation is probably better.