mangotreeone1

It says a lot about you mangotreeone1, when you are more interested in the people who post about the "bag of dirty tricks" and LESS interested in the racist Muslims who filled the "bag of dirty tricks" for people to post about -

islamofacist leftist backwards-thinking where mere POSTS about racist islamic culture rape is worse than the actuall rape itself does not surprise me anymore///

///it is a long time now that mere posting about a racist hate-crime is taken by the islamofacists and leftists to be worse than the racist hate-crime itself... perplexing - until you realise the motives to protect racist criminals and not to protect the victims of those criminals - morally deficient indeed... SHAME

Interesting article. It does sound like the Education department might be being a little oversensitive here - provided the stories are told as stories and not revealed truth, then I can't see much of a problem. Judeo-christian culture is as valid as any other.

On the other hand, one only has to look at the posts from Boaz David and the like to realise that we need more religion like we need our arms cut off. Religion orders social behaviour through faith, not reason. We do not all share the same faith, so religion should not be used to order social behaviour. Reason should be used to order social behaviour. WE DO NOT NEED RELIGION TO WORK OUT WHAT IS RIGHT AND WRONG. It is people who need religion to distinguish right from wrong that have a problem. I challenge any poster on this site to propose a moral problem that cannot be dealt with by applying reason.

Is it morally right to centre one's life around Jesus as true God and true Man?

Is it reasonable to sacrifice one's life for the God of Abraham?

Faith informs reason. For if one aspires to smoke drugs or scratch an itch forever then when your behaviour conforms to that you're being reasonable. Reason = whatever is in one's self interest.

And uniting with God in Love is eminently rational. Our whole tradition teaches this.

Whence comes reason anyway?

Don't confuse fideism with Christianity.

Read Fides et Ratio - a wonderful letter written by the Catholic Church about faith and reason.

Euthyphro dilemma, which I'm sure someone will bring up, forgets God is not in 3D space time. The moral law and God are one. God is not a person in the human sense.

In fact this leads nicely onto what Heaven will be like. CS Lewis is very good here.

P.s. BOAZ is right pretty much all the time. If you tell the truth often enough no one will believe it.

Familiarity breeds contempt - we've had the Gospels for 2000 years, many of us don't think there is anything interesting there anymore.

A psychological pattern that we overcome with great reward when it comes to Jesus ! :)

Pericles! what would we do without you ? I do appreciate your searching analysis of various contributions, including mine. On the YungNluvinit rebuttal you made, I think you did not give enough weight to what Singer may have said when he actually spoke in person at YnL's school.

I note all kind and unkind words from various posters, and have equal appreciation for them all.

Hellothere,

I need to clarify something to you if you don't mind.
You claim that reason is enough to work out right and wrong. Well, yes, to a point. This works as long as 'your' version is not in conflict with 'Joe Bloggs' version.
I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but there is only ONE divine commandment on which all human behavior should be determined by,

"Love your neighbour as yourself" or, putting it another way "Do for others as you would have them do for you"
What we also say (As Christians) is that this is not only good common sense, but also has a divine mandate "Love God with all your heart"
Without that one, we are kind of like a rudderless ship in the sea of ideas.

But putting aside the Divine call to relationship and reconciliation, and just using the 'love your neighbour' bit. Would you like the world to see your daughter having sex with some man ? Would you have a few million eyes surveying your every move when you make love to your wife ? Make a movie using someone elses daughter ? Me.. no thanx, so, for me, I don't support the idea of showing sexual intimacy in movies. I prefer to 'allude' to it.

Perhaps this shows the area of contention between the secular and the religious ? Im using my letter writing and vote to rid Australia of xxx rated porn available by mail order from ACT. You might enjoy that kind of thing..I don't know, but my approach is that I don't believe people should be objectified, so I object to it :) and in a democracy, I can.

Boaz, from his writings, and from his interviews - Denton's was good, but there was also one from a rabid ultra-vegetarian dude which was quite enlightening - I think the chances of Singer actually saying, baldly, what is ascribed to him by YngNluvinit are extremely close to zero.

I suspect that if Singer did cover that territory, it was only the 120pt headline that YngNluvinit "understood", and none of the carefully constructed logic either side of it.

Singer occasionally - and these were good examples - argues from a classic Socratic position, essentially turning his audience's half-baked ideas into logical thought-sequences that turn out quite differently to that which was at first anticipated. No one expects that a discussion on bestiality can turn out the way his did, but it is very difficult to challenge the steps that took it there.

It may be a painful journey for someone to argue net benefit when talking of allowing - "encouraging" - a severely ill child to die, but the logical increments are carefully alignned to permit the conclusion. We may not want to get there, because all our emotions say stop!, as soon as we see where we are being led, but it is a worthwhile journey nonetheless.

The thought-route from contraception to euthenasia is admittedly one of the more challenging, but that isn't an acceptable excuse not to take it. You are free, of course, to disagree with the conclusion, but that is not the fault of logic, it is simply the intervetion of your emotions.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Incidentally, where does "love thy neighbour" fit in during a time of war? Is christianity suspended for the duration, like Test matches? Or perhaps merely rationed, like butter?