Hi Antoine. You need not worry about those warnings though. I did too but unless people are just exchanging one liners back and forth, no one really cares. Those are just guidelines.
Let me take this in and think about it on my walk. Normally I could just delay the walk but today I told my neighbor I’d pick her dog up and take her along with mine and I hate being late.
Thanks for this Mark!
I will enjoy your thoughts after the walk.
How frustrating. For some reason I got a message that the response I was writing was being edited in another window and shut down. I was a good way into my response and was feeling good about it. Now, when I look at my drafts, I can see the beginning of it but there is only one button available to “resume”. But when I press it, nothing happens. I’m not sure if there is any way to access it. @Mervin_Bitikofer is there any way you guys have to shake that loose for me? It would be fine to simply post what I have and I could edit it from there if that is possible.
Antoine I’m sorry for this.
I can try. But it depends if I can find and access what you lost. Those warnings can happen when you start a response, but then you switch into a different thread to check or find something. Then the system will want to know if you want your responses in your new location or back in the thread where you started it. Sometimes stuff can get lost too if your connectivity is flaky and the system for some reason wasn’t receiving what was displayed on your local computer.
Do you have any other clues (other threads where I should look?) to see if I can find anything?
My equipment is pretty old. Oh well, I got distracted by a couple incoming texts and may taken too long to get back to it.
When I click on my photo and then person-icon on the right, I get a drop down list that include “drafts”. The first one has the beginning of my response but I can’t seem to get if from there. If nothing else I’ll just come back to it fresh later.
I’m not sure I can help out here - but then again, even with all my time around here, I’m still not the most technically adept about what all we moderators can do. @Christy might have an idea about any easy places we might be able to look for lost drafts. Meanwhile - I feel your pain. I hate losing something that I just put some time into crafting.
Thanks Merv. I’m used to hitting technological walls and do not feel put upon. It happens.
Sometimes if you start a new reply, what was autosaved shows up. But I too have lost my brilliant responses on occasion due to bad internet.
No problem, Mark,
If your draft is no longer accessible, please try to reformulate your response again.
I warmly thank you for your work!
You needn’t worry about the warning that the thread will close in five days after the last post. If one wants to address something in a closed thread one can message the mods and one will reopen it. Leastwise they have for me on numerous occasions.
Oh and I will need to let a little time go by before I try again. Otherwise I’ll be caught between remembering what I wrote before and reconsidering the questions from scratch, which isn’t any fun. Much rather wait for all hope of remembering to be gone.
All right!
Then I reformulate my claim to facilitate your response.
The prohibition of homicide as formulated in Genesis 9:3,5-6 has been revealed by God to all humankind, and written on the heart of each human being.
According to this revelation there is a fundamental difference between humans and animals: Humans are in the image of God while animas are not. This revelation is the basis of the knowledge of good and evil, and thereby of all knowledge.
In my view, the importance of this difference as foundation of knowledge has been overlooked by many great thinkers (as well Greek philosophers as modern ones).
My proposal is that we should try to develop a new philosophy that takes this universally revealed difference between human and animal life as the very basis of knowledge.
“My proposal is that we should try to develop a new philosophy that takes this universally revealed difference between human and animal life as the very basis of knowledge. … Humans are in the image of God while animas are not. This revelation is the basis of the knowledge of good and evil, and thereby of all knowledge.”
Well, I have done that already, Antoine, but you haven’t yet listened. Maybe Teilhardianism has stood in your way? Informationalism likewise doesn’t convince peoples’ hearts.
I’m not sure what this means. I personally did not get that memo. 
I don’t agree. There are any number of differences between any two animals and of course I think we are animals too. We are certainly mammals and primates; if not “animals” then what? Certainly not mineral or vegetable or divine.
More importantly I don’t view being an animal as pejorative in any way. If we have a sinful nature it certainly doesn’t come from our being animals. Rather it is what really sets us apart, our ability to view the world as a mechanism to be exploited. It is only through our animal nature that we can return from the alienating fantasy of being intellectual phantoms apart from the natural world.
From what I’ve already said it should be obvious we do not agree. The importance of the difference is that we need to integrate our animal and human natures. We are different from other animals in important ways -many of them wondrous- but those differences can also estrange us from our true nature which isn’t and shouldn’t be one sided.
You claim:
And also:
Where do you get these moral principles from?
Who really knows? I don’t think we learn them formally any more than we do the rules of language use. Presumably we are socialized by our families, communities and the broader culture toward these values. But now, they are cooked in. It isn’t as if once I realize the way values are transmitted I might just decide to change my mind act antisocially instead. Our values aren’t simply a list of oughts and nots which we choose for reasons. I can’t imagine violence toward others without a feeling of revulsion; wherever values come from, they’re mine now. Perhaps (and I think probably) some of it is probably hard wired. We’re probably not born entirely tabla rasa.
Of course as we mature we might note internal inconsistencies which we will struggle to rectify. For example if we live in a time when slavery is common, we might find the blatant double standard between how enslaved people and others are to be treated. Or in our own time we might feel the same way about the way women are held back or the way people who are sexually different are treated. I think it is pretty natural to want some consistent in our values as it generally feels wrong apply a double standard without good reason, and perhaps there is never a good enough reason?
Could you please summarize again the main tenets of your proposal?
I am not aware of “having not listened” to it.
In my view, what you are stating here (specially the “feeling of revulsion” you refer to) reflects what God writes on the heart of each human being and the corporate (“collective”) subconscious of humanity. So, you may find uncontacted people that apply moral rules similar to the Biblical Ten Commandments.
However, these universal moral principles can easily degenerate when someone or a group in power decide to act selfish and apply a double standard. So, one finds as well ancient civilizations practicing human sacrifices, as modern highly civilized nations perpetrating genocide.
God’s Son Jesus Christ, by his teaching and death on the cross, makes explicit and publicly accessible to all peoples what God has written on our hearts. And in the light of the New Testament we can also see what in the Old Testament corresponds to what God has written on the human heart, as for instance the sanctity of marriage (Genesis 1:27; 2:24), the prohibition of homicide (Genesis 9:3,5-6), and the Decalogue (Exodus 20:2-17).
In summary, I dare to say that, by the very fact of being committed to humanity, you are implicitly acknowledging that “God made humankind in the image of God” and “the Word became flesh”.
You can establish that “there are number of differences between any two animals” because you first come to realize that there is a fundamental difference between humans and non-human animals.
And you realize this fundamental difference because God has made your heart in such a way, that “you cannot imagine violence towards others without a feeling of revulsion”.
This “feeling of revulsion” is part of “the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). And this knowledge leads you to fully realize the difference between humankind and other species, which is the first act of knowledge in the history of humankind (Genesis 2:19-20).
In summary: Since the very moment God made humankind in the image of God, God calls humankind to share God’s divine life, and orders each human being to live respecting and loving the others. In this sense we are not animals, or vegetables, or minerals. This is the main assumption of the whole Bible, since the first chapter of Genesis to the last of Revelation, and especially the teaching of God’s Son, Jesus-Christ.
I’m not sure morality is the best place to look for what makes us distinct. That we rely so heavily on culture in adapting to environments and make so much use of verbal (and later written) representation might be more to the heart of what makes us distinct.
However I think these distinctive adaptions are not a gift from God but rather the reason for His emergence in our lives. Language as we use it has great power to allow us to coexist in greater numbers than any other vertebrate species and exhaust the capacity of our environment to sustain us as well as putting great pressure on other specues who share our environment causing many to die out or adapt. The crowding we are capable of combined with our increasing reliance on the representational world given to us by language is truly what separates us from all other animals. To some extent it is also what separates us from nature in the Biblical sense of being ‘cast from the garden’. Being outcast from the garden is also symbolic of loss of equanimity and feelings of alienation. It is this condition which creates man’s recognition of his need for God and disposes him to seek God.
Though life in the substitute world of representations can lead to a feeling of unease, it isn’t as if man ever truly lost the animal capacity for equanimity. Being lost in the substitute world of representations doesn’t entirely replace what we were before language. Rather, our active involvement/obsession with the representational world merely redirects our attention from the old ways. I think God belief and religions are adaptions which can help us regain our balance in the world. I think prayer is a way of turning our representational minds toward what is beyond them.
It looks like you are stating the following:
We are actually NOT an invention of God’s mind and love to the aim of sharing God’s divine life, but rather the other way around:
God is an invention of our human minds to the aim of balancing our negative evolutionary feelings.
Am I understanding you correctly?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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