dlawbailey

Forbearance, tolerance, compassion, forgiveness and good humor are all important virtues, but this is not what I'm talking about. "Love your enemies" is something different. It is an extremely strongly positive obligation. It is not about a reaction, but about an affirmation that positive bonding WILL work. Otherwise we fall into the logic that Anduin recountes here.


And this kind of thinking undermines atheist ethics. Loving your enemies is a very long-term even, dare I say it, transcendent strategy. It's really an essential idea. You can love an enemy because of the person that enemy *will become* if the imperatives of compassion are adhered to.

Jesus, of course, based the logic on the soul. You can love an enemy because there is a transcendent part of him with the eternal potential for redemption. I believe most ethical atheists embrace the idea, but it is a very easy concept to put forward if one believes in an eternal soul and much more difficult to come to if one simply talks about acting ethically in the here and now.

I think it's an absolutely essential part of an atheist ethics - and the fact that it comes from that bit about "the (religious) law says......but you must ....(something better)"

I'm not sure I've yet read a textual reference here that is really talking about the same idea. Again, the idea is "love". To assert that closest bond even with the human who is threatening you, despite his threats, knowing that ultimately that bonding will win out.

Oh, and please, folks, I really am an atheist. I'm not trying to backdoor some Christianity in here. I'm just trying to figure out the history of this concept. I don't need a God to embrace it, but I do have to admit that, so far, I think it's unique to Jesus' thinking. Doesn't imply a goddam thing about Jesus, other than the Sermon on the Mount may be the source and the idea of a soul may be the catalyst - historically.

dlawbailey

...just because I have a feeling it is going to come up, I do not believe in the existence of a soul. And if Jesus (or whoever wrote the Sermon on the Mount) did write "love your enemies" because he (or they) did believe in the existence of a soul, it makes no difference. "Love your enemies" is not an argument that a soul, or a God, or a Savior exists.

It's something an atheist could have come up with. But, as I say, it does seem that it was a notion helped along by a particular religious view - so far as I know. Could be wrong there.

Anduin

Which I find as completely useless, superfluous and impossible to adhere to. Atheistic ethics should be concerned with useful positive norms, not precepts which in reality cannot be followed.

Yes, because we all know many cases where enemies have been turned by love. Nazis gave up their machine guns and gas chambers and accepted their subject's love. Pinochet's torturers gave up their instrumentsm and embraced their captives before making them disappear.

Atheist ethics should recognise that there are evil people in this world who are immune to love.

Again, do you know of any situation where this has actually happened? Have you ever been hurt (phyisically or mentally), abused or subjected to prolonged suffering at the hands of an evil person? To believe that "love" will turn a terrorist, a torturer, a rapist, a child abuser, is to live in a world where ethical precepts have lost all practical application.

Ethical atheism works best on norms that are applicable. As I mentioned, I'm quite capable of respecting my enemies, or showing them compassion when needed, but I also strongly believe that I am justified in defending myself, and in holding those responsible accountable for their actions. Those are workable and useful moral norms, not all this fuzzy thinking about "love".

Might be, but as I said, I have rarely found moral precepts in Christianity that I found useful, and some of the good ones pre-date it. Nothing there about the true big ethical advancements of the last centuries. Nothing there about slavery (other than to say that they should be treated well), nothing there about women's rights (other than to explicitly order submission), condemnation of homosexuals, nothing about the environment, nothing about specific human rights, democracy and workable social justice.

Solo

It is interesting to note that none of these these sayings, nor Proverbs 25:21 ("If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink") which Paul read in a strange way in Rom 12, actually go as far as requiring "love" for one's enemies.

Loving one's enemies, strictly speaking, is pretentious, hypocritical nonsense which a clinical psychologist would immediately recognize as cognitive fusion of polar attitudinal opposites (affection vs. enmity). The saying transparently seeks to deny one's anger and frustration, by crossdressing it as max benevolence. But it won't work: one can be scrupulously fair to one's enemies: one can and should (as per various martial codes) avoid baseness, mistreatment, attempts at humiliation when dealing with them. It is far better winning them over than winning over them. But one cannot love (i.e. embrace unconditionally) that to which one declares himself (morally) opposed.

Jiri

stuart shepherd

As active atheists here all probably know Christopher Hitchens' standard question is : "Show me something a theist could say that an atheist can't."

Matthew 6:9-10 (King James Version)
9After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

10Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.


stuart shepherd

Amedeo

P.S. to # 3
The "love thy enemy" precept [quoted by gurugeorge]


is consonant with the
The Beatitudes

The morality the Jesus taught is what has been called a "legalistic morality." This is not a good term, but it is meant to point out that a person should do or avoid to do certain things BECAUSE they incur either rewards or punishments. This is not the "freeman's morality" that emerged in the Gentile world (to wit, Socrates, the other philosophers I have mentioned, and the objective "what is right" or jurisprudence of the Romans) -- rightfulness [Jus/Jous, Jovis, Yoveh] is uncovered by the rational mind; it does not proceed from the edicts or laws of lords, either human or divine, and it is not, therefore, bound up with rewards and punishments.

<edit>

Jesus' specific morality (as in the above quoted passages) is one of the systems of legalistic moralities. It is the morality of the weak, who welcome being effaced, persecuted, beaten, and will offer the other cheek in order to eventually get greater rewards. This is the martyrdom or holocaust [sacrifice of the innocent] mentality, whose reward is the kingdom of God.

The Christic notion of the loving (not just the forgiving) of the enemies is clearly not a precept of authentic morality. If it were, then his God (presumed to be perfectly moral and the source of morality) would be loving His enemies, detractors, and disobeyers. On the contrary, what God the Lord instituted is a legalistic system. His punishments started from the first day humans appeared on the face of the earth (the Adam and Eve He created). And what is the very mission of Jesus to Israel??? To prepare them for the impending doom so that, after the resurrection of the dead and the divine judgment, the good and faithful will seat at the right hand of the Father, and the others... well, Jesus is not too clear about this, but they will either burn in hell or perhaps die again for good. (There is no such a thing in the Total Bible as an automatic immortality of the soul, for the soul is an Thracian/Orphic/Pythagorean concept.) The point is that for Jesus of Nazareth or the Galilean, there is an institutional divine punishment, rather than forgiveness, even though his God is El rather than Yahweh the Sabbaoth and Avenger.

So, it is abundantly clear that "the love of the enemies" is not taught as something which is the right (moral) thing to do, something which is felt in one's own conscience -- whether this be a particular or a universal conscience -- but something which is proper to do as a means for an end, that is, to get credits for a future reward. The Christic love of the enemies is the joyful SUBMISSION [islam] of oneself to the will of the enemies, just as the love of God is the joyful submission to His commandments. The Church's baptismal query of the catechumen echoes the Gospels: Do you love God? Then follow his Commandments. (Jesus' god is the El of Genesis-1 as well as the god of Abraham, the founder of Israel. The later prophet of El or Allah, Mohamet, taught the same thing: SUMBISSION [islam] to the will of God, but not to the will of other men. Allah is the Merciful, but only until you stand before His judgement. Once again, here we have legalistic morality.)
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All ancient theistic systems [usually misnamed "religions"] are characteristically "legalistically moral" in nature: the legalistic morality lies in the divine governorship of the world, that is, events happen not either by the whims of the gods or spontaneosly by the forces of nature ["nature" being a secular/philosophical concept], but by divine dispositions ultimately relatively to the legal or illegal behavior of humans. The sun rises every morning in order to make vegetation and life possible -- which things are for human use. The gods may withold the rains, when they want vegetation to whither and thus endanger human life. Rites of propitiation arose in all ancient cultures. For Saul of Tarsus, Jesus died on the cross in order to atone for Man's sin. Death was the wage of sin, but now death was abolished by his propitiation: men will resurrect just as Jesus did. (Meanwhile, people who accept Jesus keep on dying; they are not saved from the consequences of sin!) Needless to say, al the ways and rites which have been considered propitiatory have not worked, but belief is stronger than facts.)
All the ancient religions or theistic systems posit a divine lord whose domain or kingdom is our world. From the standpoint of the people in a given system, the whole world is seen in terms of the divine governance of their own god. So, for example, when Israel takes somebody else's city and territory, they have received a reward from God. The counterattacks of they people the attacked are called enemies, for they do harm and try to prevent Israel from being rewarded. So, an Israelite may complain to God: look at what our enemies are doing to us; they are persecuting us because we are your people or, in modern terms, because they are anti-Semites! Strike them dead, or: show that you are a stronger god their their god. // When the Israelites are defeated or suffer adversities, obviously God punished them for the disobedience of some law by some individual Israelite. Israel as a whole could be be a wrongdoer only in relation to other societies, but they are never wrongdoers, because their international deeds are either commanded by God, or taken up after consulting the priests of God. So, it is inconceivebale even in our days that Israel, the People/Nation, could do anything wrong to other nations or hosting nations; it is the others that persecute Israel. The Christians [Gentiles converts to Judaism through the sect of Jesus] in their native countries never did anything wrong to their country, but they were occasionally persecuted.... because they were Christians [neo-Israelites]; the Roman emperors were their enemies, just as the Philistines were the enemies of the invading and murdering Israelites. // There is no psychological "persecution complex" in Jews and Christians; their persecution interpretations are according to the logic of a "legalistic moral world" they inherited from barbaric times and their lack of an authentic objective morality whereby they could judge their own actions.

Huon

God exists.:devil1:

Amedeo

P.S. to # 16 (an addition)

The more we read or remember about the Scriptural Jesus, the more we see his contradictory nature.

The forgiveness preached by Jesus is inconsistent with the morality of his God, as I have already pointed out. Now I add: Jesus positively state that one sin will not be forgiven: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. (Mark 20:29)

Blasphemy is a verbal offense of the Holy Spirit, and I am trying to fathom why such a verbal offense becomes unforgivable, in addition to trying to figure out what/who this Holy Spirit is.

Before departing to heaven, Jesus promised his apostleshe would send them the Holy Spirit -- who appeared in the form of flames and made them speak in languages they had never learned.

The personified Spirit that was added by the Church to the Father (the creator) and the personified Word (Logos) is simply the personfied BREATH of God that made the Adam-statue alive. The Spirit vivifies -- renders something alive (and as such it has been equated with "soul," but in the synoptic Gospels it is more like the ghost of God that gets infused into favorite men [and into today's pentecostals]). It was the Spirit of God that made Mary pregnant with Jesus [in one fatherhood story]. In Catholic theology, the third person of the Trinity (the Holy Spirit) is generally identified with the divine Love and that toward which all things tend (or the Divine Magnet, one could say). The Divine Love transfixes the heart (and practically the sexual organ) of the mystic Theresa, not to mention many others. (In the story of St. Rosalia, the lover if none other than the heavenly and bodily Jesus, but this is an exception in the history of God.)

The Galilean or Judaean audience probably would not know what Jesus was talking about, if he mentioned the Holy Spirit. They would understand only that blasphemy is against the divine father.

There is hardly any writing by anybody who was an apostle or a disciple of Jesus. The epistles of Peter and a few others say almost nothing about Jesus; they present some moral precepts. Paul repeats a few earsay and is big as a theological inventor. The Gospels are the only source of Jesus' world-system, morality, and his own person. The contradictions abound in all of these three sectors. (As I stated in some specialized posts, the Gospels are redacted collections of anecdotes about three people: Jesus King, Jesus Messiah [constructed out of Bible prophetic prefigurations of the messiah], and Jesus Dionysus [evident in the Last Supper, etc.] and founder of a new Church [people of God]. The third Jesus comes from Greek theologians. The Athenians had raised a monument to the Unknown God; Paul delivered them a new God, and they eagerly joined in the myth-making.

The Greek evangelists who formulated their own biographies of Jesus out of three sources were certainly not logical analysts or philosophers; they were happily unaware of their absurd literature.

stuart shepherd

Dear Amedeo,
I figured out what the Holy Spirit is.

Compare these two gospel accounts of the same incident.
If you are careful you can see the identity of the Holy Spirit.

Matthew 12:25-28 (King James Version)
25And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand:

26And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?

27And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges.

28But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.

Luke 11:17-20 (King James Version)
17But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.

18If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom stand? because ye say that I cast out devils through Beelzebub.

19And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast them out? therefore shall they be your judges.

20But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you.

Did you see it? Same incident....but in Matthew's gospel, Jesus casts out devils by the Spirit of God. ....but in Luke's gospel, Jesus casts out devils by the finger of God.

So you can be sure that you have the Holy Spirit when God gives you the finger.

stuart shepherd

TCPHumanist

I really don't see where such a distinction can be drawn. The only definition of "love" that I can think of, that doesn't encompass any of the above virtues, is erotic love - and, somehow, I don't think Jesus was referring to that...

I refer you to the Buddhist teaching of "loving-kindness":

Also, if we accept my above non-distinction between love and the other virtues you mention, I refer you to the Jain teaching: