Dear Dan,

Yes, I do believe that there is much more to Christ's teachings that we are no longer privy to. We must also remember that Jesus was preaching and teaching his individual disciples: a good teacher must speak at the level their students can understand, to where they are at, not above their heads.

So, and what I am going to say now can be dangerous if misunderstood and taken in the wrong context, some students/disciples need to develop their ego, they first need to learn to be selfish before they can learn to transform their selfishness and direct it towards God. I am talking about disciples who are lazy, procrastinating, apathetic, who have an indifferent "don't care" attitude - they should first be encouraged to make effort, to become achievers, even if it means that they become proud of their actions and successes. Only later on they should be humbled and made to understand that their success was only due to God's grace.

Longing for an afterlife is indeed selfish, but it is rare to find students who are so sincerely devoted to God that they are willing to forego the pleasures of both this world and even of the world to come. Under the circumstances, it is better to have them willingly delay the gratification of enjoying their life now: this should increase their devotion and free their time and mind to study further.

From the little Biblical evidence we have, Jesus' disciples (at least the 12 males among them) were not of the highest and brightest kind.

[continued...]

[...continued]

«As a mortal, he had the same necessity for daily survival as do we all. A very selfish pursuit. Thus the demarcation line between body and soul.»

Jesus was not a mortal. Sure, his bodily instincts were not much different to ours, thus they automatically took care of his physical survival, but mentally, Jesus did not consider his survival a necessity, he was willing to die at any time should his Father requires it.

Rather than between body and soul, the demarcation line should run between our emotions and our intellect. On its own, the body is just dead matter, it does as told by the mind. It is our emotions which make us selfish and it is our intellect which should keep our emotions in check.

Yuyutsu.

The deeper this dive into theology goes the further from the thread it gets.

If you (or I for that matter) would like to open a thread on the subject, it would be more appropriate, and the discussion can resume. We’ll see whom the spirit moves on that!

You’ve raised some intriguing points above. Especially the one Re Ego promotion.
I’ll give that some thought!

Dan.

thinkabit,
>But who is going to enforce the duress? In a selfish world the soldiers doing the physical arresting
>arresting (or whatever it's called in the army) and court-marshaling won't even attempt the arrest because
>they would reason that this is likely the sort of action that would provoke the deserter to harm them.

You seem to be forgetting that the risk of harm from the deserter if they follow orders is much less than the risk of harm from the rest of the army if they don't!

>Nope! The logical is flawless

ROFL!

> in this paragraph's hypothetical ALL people are COMPLETELY selfish.
> So as a result ALL people have the same aversion to risk.

You argument relies on the highly illogical premise that selfishness is in some way proportional to risk aversion.

>These days the majority of people make it to adulthood, even in poor countries.
But a simple majority is not sufficient. Survival rates are improving, of course, and as a result family size is falling. But in some places (particularly where there's a large perceived threat of war) family size is still high.

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Dan,
>Show me your evidence for that view.
The high proportion of Christ's teachings that dealt with how we should treat one another.

>The mission of Christ was to include the Gentiles into the Kingdom of God.
Though that was always Christ's objective, it wasn't primarily His mission. Christ started the process, but mainly left it for others. Christ's own mission was to the Jews first (Mark 7:27) and indeed Christ completed it (John 17:4).

Saint Paul's ultimate fate is not known for certain. The book of Acts ends with him remanded in Rome awaiting trial by an emperor known to be hostile to Christians, so there's a general consensus that he was condemned at the trial, but Clement of Rome wrote otherwise.

And John the Baptist was beheaded on the orders of Herod, not the Romans.

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LEGO,
There are no right wing socialists. Fascists hate socialism and socialists hate fascism, despite the similarity with some forms of communism.

>You seem to be forgetting that the risk of harm from the deserter if they follow orders is much less than the risk of harm from the rest of the army if they don't!

But the whole army doesn't arrest the deserter. It is only a few and considering that the deserter is almost certainly going to be armed (since the army themselves would have given them the weapon) and aware to the fact that they could be arrested (since they know that they deliberately disobeyed orders) there is a not inconsiderable chance that those trying to do the arresting will be seriously injured or killed.

By-the-way, this topic is actually more than just an intellectual waffle, it is playing out right now in real life. When I was a kid the army used to recruit people by showing them stirring images of macho men on caution to the wind heroic adventures all within a group of men linked by mateship. Such imagery was enough to stir people of join. But these days when the army advertises they rarely have anything like that- today its all rainbows and puppy dogs, warm and fuzzy feelings about how the army can look after you and foster your career. You wouldn't even know that when you join the army you might have to kill or even get killed yourself- they deliberately avoid advertising material that even remotely suggests such notions.
And this is mainly because over the last decades people have become more independent, more individual, less likely to blindly follow those in higher places, more inclined to put themselves first and get the most for them- or in other words they are basically more selfish and value themselves more and the groups they belong to less.

Oops, that last just posted got mixed up. I edited what I had originally wrote and moved text around due to the word limits and disrupted the flow completely.

The point I was trying to make is because only a few people arrest the deserter those few have a good chance of getting injured.

And now each soldier of the whole army (if they are all very selfish- and hence want to live) will not want to be one of the few that do the arresting- thus there is no overall threat from the whole army that is any greater than the threat from the few doing the arresting. And thus no arrest is ever made. But not only that- the original order can only ever originate from one person, and that one person will themselves be putting themselves in danger because they are asking others to put themselves in danger which could reflect back (because if you ask someone to put themselves in danger then there is the possiblity that they may refuse to do it and instead take it out on you- this is exactly what I'll do if I was forced into the army and asked to do something like a suicide mission- I'd shoot my commanding officer so at least that prick gets the same as I do!), so the initial order is never made in the first place.

But over and above all this, before you even get the arrest stage you will never have an army in the first place. Because no-one will voluntarily join the army, and no-one will ever try to force someone to try to establish an army.