Well, I basically agree with you – God does not have a choice about what’s good or bad, since what is good and bad flows from God’s nature, and God does not control his nature. But then I don’t understand why you have assiduously avoided the terms “good” or “evil”, or why you have tried to relativize them to human desires. That is a very difficult way to do ethics, and it’s unnecessary if you really do believe in a universal moral law.
I avoid reification, and it is all too easy to reify “good” and “evil”.
Is killing evil or is it just murder that is evil? Murder is relative to the laws in force at the time, while killing is not. Is the death penalty a universal evil or not? We can get into a lot of useless and unresolvable arguments about universals.
OK, just keep them as adjectives, then, as *ways *that actions can be. Surely actions can be good or evil. We don’t need to posit some Form of Goodness to claim that actions can be good. But the property of goodness is nevertheless an objective quality of certain actions.
Only by the legal definition of murder. But there is another definition of murder: “wrongful killing.”
That’s why philosophers use the term “prima facie” – “on its face”. There are usually, but not always, exceptions to a certain generalized action being wrong. But each particular instantiation of this action is either right or wrong, depending on the specific circumstances. Lying is usually wrong, but in some circumstances justified.
Which is why I avoid universals and absolutes in the area of morality, because of the exceptions and specific circumstances.There are usually, but not always, exceptions to a certain generalized action being wrong. But each particular instantiation of this action is either right or wrong, depending on the specific circumstances. Lying is usually wrong, but in some circumstances justified.
But I don’t see why morality is any different than science, in this respect. There ARE universal and absolute laws of nature, but almost any way we try to specify them ends up being somehow insufficient. The law of gravity is extremely hard to specify, for example. But the exceptions don’t make us think that there *is *no law of gravity; they just make us think our statement of the law of gravity is not quite accurate.
Correct. All such scientific “laws” that we actually use are provisional, and are open to being replaced by a better approximation, as Newton’s approximation to gravity was replaced by Einstein’s better approximation. Science calls such approximations “theories”.
Such absolute laws may or may not exist. All we can ever have is our current best approximation to whatever the law might currently be. We cannot even be sure that moral laws are fixed. It used to be moral to stone adulterers to death; that is no longer the case.
Well, if you are Catholic, it does conflict with your beliefs, because the Church considers civil marriage to “count” as valid marriages. They are simply not sacramental.
That is not true. The children of Adam and Eve were not married sacramentally because sacramental marriage was not possible for humankind after the Fall and until the Incarnation. Everyone married prior to the Incarnation had a holy, natural marriage. The sacrament of marriage was instituted by Christ, well after the advent of written history. The Church accepts natural marriage as fully valid marriage separate from the sacrament.
Jesus commissioned us to go out to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel. That is one reason why it is important for us to stand up for God and against evil. The fundamental problem here is that masturbation is a mortal sin and we should help people to fight the temptation toward that behavior. Acquiescing to or even sanctioning any type of evil makes us, to an extent that only God can determine, a participant In that evil.
Really, no one was forced to embrace anything? Tell that to the bakers who got sued for refusing to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding.
Kitcat - as a Catholic, would you at least **prefer **to see the State adopt pretty much the same definition as your Faith does?
Are you limited to only one spouse at a time?
I read this article, and it does lay out pretty well where the current trends are taking us. To me, the whole push for gay marriage seems irrational, since it simply ignores the biological facts of men and women and procreation.