First Principles

Quote: FrGamble

I think you are trying to make the easy to understand by complicating things. Human rights are true or not. Treating human beings equally and fair is truly a good thing. Why do you try to deny that and seem to suggest that equality and fairness at some point became good things? I agree that our understanding of what this means evolves over time, but there was never a time when inequality and unfairness was a good or virtuous thing.

What I am trying to understand is, why should treating human beings be any more consequential than how we treat God's other creatures? It just seems very selfish and wrong. Shouldn't all of God's creatures be treated the same?

Quote: FrGamble

I'm sorry but you can't just make up your own truth.

Sure you can, we all do it. You
want to believe subjective
reality is objective when it
come to things like good and
evil. Objective means things
that exist outside our minds,
like stop signs and trees.
Subjective means things that
exist in our minds only, like
feelings and opinions. Good
and bad are subjective, they
exist nowhere but inside our
heads. You can pretend they
are objective, but they are not.

Quote:

Providing a service for those who have lost a loved one is a good thing. Making money for your business is a good thing. However, killing someone by drunk driving is a bad thing.

Let's just stick to this example. Drunk
driver kills a pedestrian. Bad thing
for the person killed and his family,
bad thing for the driver. However,
it's a subjectively bad thing, so it
can spawn good things down the
line. That's because to the universe,
it's just a neutral thing, it's not
good or bad. It's us who label things
so there is order in our lives.

That's why good things can come
out of bad events, because labels
are not real. They're just post-it
notes we stick on things to get
some kind of order out of chaos.
You can think good and evil exist
outside our heads, but it only makes
it true for you, and others who
believe it. Doesn't change the
objective universe a whit.

Quote: DRich

What I am trying to understand is, why should treating human beings be any more consequential than how we treat God's other creatures? It just seems very selfish and wrong. Shouldn't all of God's creatures be treated the same?

I think it is true that human beings are uniquely special and have special roles and abilities that set us far apart from everything else in the world and therefore should be treated very different.

Quote: Evenbob

You can pretend they
are objective, but they are not.

There are opinions and feelings that are subjective. There are also opinions and beliefs that are objectively true or false, good or bad.

Quote:

Let's just stick to this example.

Again you conflating different things together when they are not the same. I am glad you see that killing someone when driving drunk is a bad thing. The fact that the funeral home profits from serving that family is a good thing. However, the funeral home's profit does not transform or change the action of drunk driving from a bad thing into a good thing.

Quote: FrGamble

There are also opinions and beliefs that are objectively true or false, good or bad.

Yet you can't name any. Slavery
existed in the time of Jesus
because it was the only way
the extremely poor could live.
It was an integral part of
society. Jesus never spoke
against slavery, Paul spoke
for it. To them slavery was
not a bad thing, it was a
needed thing. God or bad
always has a context, it never
stands alone because it's
an opinion, not a fact.

Quote:

he funeral home's profit does not transform or change the action of drunk driving from a bad thing into a good thing.

A truly bad (evil) thing cannot
give birth to good things. It's
impossible. Therefore a drunk
driving accident is just a drunk
driving accident until WE label
it bad. In and of itself it's just
another random event.

Quote: Evenbob

Yet you can't name any. Slavery
existed in the time of Jesus
because it was the only way
the extremely poor could live.
It was an integral part of
society. Jesus never spoke
against slavery, Paul spoke
for it. To them slavery was
not a bad thing, it was a
needed thing. God or bad
always has a context, it never
stands alone because it's
an opinion, not a fact.

I'm glad you are making distinctions in regards to the history of slavery. Jesus did of course speak against it as did Paul, in fact he wrote an entire letter to Philemon in the Bible against slavery. The one example of racial slavery in the Bible where the Jews were enslaved because they were Jewish and forced into cruel labor leads to the Passover event an obvious central story of the entire Bible. Yet that is neither here nor there. I have given many examples. Racial slavery, rape, murder, killing and eating people, and we can think of many more that are objectively evil acts.

Quote:

A truly bad (evil) thing cannot
give birth to good things.

Why do you say this? Love always wins in the end. Forgiveness a good comes from evil as does conversion and change. They are seperate acts. There is the evil that is done and then there is good that can come out of it. However, the good act doesn't change the evil act into a good one. Why do you insist on making two distinct and different acts into one?

Quote: FrGamble

Jesus did of course speak against it

I see where he spoke about it,
I see no place where he said
it was bad and there should
be no slaves.

Quote:

Why do you say this?

Because it's obvious good and
evil are the opposite sides
of the same coin. One cannot
exist without the other. They
compliment each other. That's
why good things can come out
of bad, and bad things out of
good. It's a continuous movement
of events that we label so we
can keep track. The events have
no meaning until we give it to
them. We create the concepts
of good and evil, it doesn't
come from the outside.

This is a funny anecdote from
today. Store was out of heavy
cream, as was the next store.
I was bummed all day because
I needed it for a recipe. I looked
up heavy powdered cream on
Amazon and it's just what I need.
You can make as little as you
like as you need it, you don't
have to worry it will spoil in the
fridge.

A bad thing for me turned into
a habit changing good thing, One
is connected to the other and
neither were good or bad until
I labeled them. A bad event
had a good outcome. Two sides
of the same coin.

Wait, I'm confused. You said a truly bad thing can never lead to a good thing. I disagreed;... and now you are agreeing with me. See another good thing has come.
I feel like you are playing semantics a little. A drunk driving accident is a bad thing whether or not we label it so. Also when slavery was labeled a legal and good thing in this country that did not make it a good thing, still bad. There are many things that are objectively good or bad or true or false. Just because we label them something does not mean we are correct. Once again I am sorry to say but you, me, the majority, the rich, none of us truly get to determine what is good or bad. We can pretend to but as they say, "the truth will out."

Quote: FrGamble

Wait, I'm confused. You said a truly bad thing can never lead to a good thing. "

Exactly. Therefore there are
no 'truly bad' things, only
our interpretation of them.
We call them truly bad, but
if they really were, no good
could come from them.

Look at the number of people
worldwide who won a lottery,
a good thing wanted by all,
and it absolutely ruined their
lives in countless ways. How
did such a good thing end up
so badly. Winning was neither
good nor bad, obviously, it
was a neutral event. A tree
falling is a neutral event, unless
it falls on your house. then it's
evil. There is no good or bad
'out there', it's all inside our
heads.

Why do you think good cannot come from bad things? Or why do you think bad things cannot happen after good things occur? Where do we get the labels we universally put on events? Do we just make it up and willy nilly declare some things good or bad? Can we change something like racial slavery or murder and think of them as good things?