spin

ETA: This is really what the thread is about: understanding the verses dealing with the king who has someone he'd forgiven tortured. You haven't said anything about it in this response of yours. You've simply gone off on a tangent because I objected to your lame attempt to try to take moral high ground, something you're incapable of doing. Can we get back onto the topic or would you like to start a new thread somewhere else?

Start with Deut 21:18-21, or 13:6-10. But then there's other reasons for stoning that you probably wouldn't really condone these days. If someone worships some other god, or gathers sticks on the sabbath...

Yeah, sorry for expecting you to read the bible. I shoulda known better.

Oh, I see slavery is bad, unless it's voluntary, ie someone is forced into slavery because of financial difficulties is ok. Hypocrisy.

It's the same fruit. If you renounce one, if you had any moral fibre you should renounce all.

The context has escaped you. I was looking at the benefits of modern science, a science that you would like to pick and choose with. It's all the same methodology, whether it is investigating the structure of the universe or the development of species. Would you have lit the fires for Giordano Bruno's pyre?

I have no interest in your jingoistic ravings. I'd just like to get you to focus a little, sugarhitman. Try and get continuity of thought for more than half a second in order to understand what is said to you.

Could you parse this sentence for me?


spin

neilgodfrey

What other ancient philosophers and teachers taught forgiveness was a virtue? Or at least where else in ancient lit can we see this precept taken as granted as "a good thing"(*TM)?

How many used the "or else" threat to undergird their or this precept's authority?

Steven Carr

No. Nobody has the right to have people tortured.

And , according to the parable, the servant no longer owed the king anything.

If we forgave the large debts of African countries, would we have the right to bomb them, if they asked us to pay for the coffee they exported to us?

neilgodfrey

Does anyone doubt that if this parable were in the Koran it would be added to the list of other "offensive passages" posted on some websites?

What ought be said of any society that underpins, without the slightest sense of irony as indicated in the responses quoted above, the noblest of its ethics with the threat of eternal torment?

That may have been moral progress 2000 years ago. I'm reminded of a famous bridge in Prague, built a few centuries ago, that displays statues of the highest representatives of its culture standing on the roofs of dungeons with windows opening on the tormented and screaming incarcerated.

So long as a society's highest ethics are embedded within threats of torture -- how many in the ancient biblical texts that are not? -- a society is given permission to practice all forms of brutality to enforce its "higher calling".

A big reason I am a humanitarian philosophically and a utilitarian ethically is because I find no need for threats to make me want to do my bit for fellow-humanity, and because I sense the same biological nature and impulses with most others I encounter.

The need for threats to teach ethics is SO pre-18th century.

reniaa

The fact is this parable is making a point on different issues! that the king uses torture is a side issue and not advocating torture at all but that we still have USA among most countries using torture as a normal practise means rulers haven't changed in 2000 years so the parable is just being accurate in it's content on ruler practices but the message of the parable is very different.

neilgodfrey

The Bible's conclusion to the parable -- presumably the conclusion contains the moral it wants readers to take away -- is as follows:

It is the warning of what will happen to you if you do not obey. How on earth can anyone call that a side-issue?

But I am enheartened that you and others I have quoted in this thread are apparently embarrassed by the thought of torture. That's good. We are of one mind in that respect. So why bother with any text that uses torture as its motivation to "higher ethics"?

reniaa

The main issue is about forgiveness and the king is an example showing that God's expect us to forgive others, if I use an example does it mean i'm going to be the example or am I just using it to strengthen my point?

neilgodfrey

I added the following to my original post while you were typing your reply:

Look again without blinkers. You wrote, and no doubt believe, "The main issue is about forgiveness and the king is an example showing that God's expect us to forgive others . . ."

If you read any other text where a king mercilessly tosses a servant aside to the torturers, as here,
. . . let's assume a western reader sees this in an Islamic text, would you, or wouldn't you, expect them to be revulsed?

scotsmanmatt1

Matt
1. Where in Matthew 18 is there reference to the king being 'wicked'?
2. Is anger, and acting upon it, always a bad or wrong thing?
3. Where in Matthew 18 is there reference to the king forgiving the people 'everything'?

Matt
Either that it proves that you are completely unable to recognise the difference between an actual event and a parable written in the context of the age in which it was spoken.

As a further point, what makes torture wrong?

<snip>

Thanks
Matt

neilgodfrey

I think I am living in a nightmare. People in the same world as I don't really say this, do they? Even Rumsfeld went into denial. Or am I a victim of an interplanetary joke? I know I used to suffer from sleep paralysis and some pretty way-out interpretations of that experience years ago, but surely the internet is real, isn't it?

Matt, if you are a real person (sorry, I know I've had a whisky or two), I do hope you can drop by a bookstore and request "A Question of Torture" by McCoy some time, and after having read that explain to me in monosyllables anything or any situation that torture can justify.