Indeed, the idea of telling a classroom of children that it's their fault that an earthquake happened and 50,000 people died is pretty revolting. The irony is that the Vatican supported the corrupt dynastic regime that ruled Haiti well into the 80's, and Mother Teresa even accepted the Haitian Legion of Honor award from 'Baby Doc' Duvalier, calling his parasitic relationship with Haiti's impoverished people a "beautiful lesson."

I agree. That's why I posted it.

Sorry, Pletho. You don't get to make up your own definition of words. Christianity is a religion. Sad.

It's more of a science really.

please don't. Its going to hurt the brain.

That was not quite the message and I do not have a problem with it. I have tried to teach my children that they have a responsibility to help others.

I know very little about Mother Teresa but that was not relevant anyway. At least you refrained from the pedophile priest rant so that is a start.

and what makes u do

I agree with the bolded, and I, too, have tried to teach my children this. But I have never suggested that such a responsibilty implies complete fault for a natural disaster - of anyone. And I would never leave my kids believing that they were responsible for something completely beyond their control.

I suspect that you, like me, would talk about shared responsibility - many people have a role to play in making the world better for all. But there is still the challenge of what to do. The priest talked of imposing our standards on Haiti. Beyond the naivete of assuming that Canadian building codes would even make sense in Haiti - there is still a very large problem in deciding what is best for someone else, let alone a sovereign country.

Canada does not have the resources to raise the standard of much of the world. The US can do more, but look at the criticism they are getting for helping after the disaster. Imagine the reaction if the US engaged in a massive program in Haiti before the disaster. Or just look at the reaction to US efforts in other countries.

I believe the priest weakened his message with this approach. I don't expect a comprehensive solution to the world's problems in a thirty minute homily, but I (and my kids) expect more than: it's all our fault, and God's not at all.

I do not completely disagree with your point. A parish priest is not a world leader and engineer rolled into one, so finding elements of his homily to be less than world class political thought should not be surprising. To the extent that the message is that we should help others through aid in disaster and education in stable times, it is a good message IMO. Obviously we do not have either the right or the capability to impose solutions on others. To that extent we are somewhat absolved from the responsibility for the misfortune that occurs due to others lapses. Also, to the extent that we have been selfish or lazy, the responsibility is there.

The other part of the message ie. "Do not blame God" is a good one also. I would think everyone could agree to that. This world, imperfect as it is, is our responsibility now and trying to deny that is an immoral path IMO.

But RLK, if we agree that even our kids share some responsibility for the state of the world, shouldn't God share at least some, as well?

With the at the end I am not certain you expect a reply.

My issue with that point of view is frame of reference. For myself and my kids I have to view my questions of responsibility within the framework of the world I perceive. If one postulates God, the frame of reference is much broader and the question of Good and Evil could be very different.

I will give an anecdote that contains an analogy IMO. I was injured in a sports accident once and bleed out badly before my situation could be stabilized. After the fact a doctor told me I had lost half of my blood and was in pretty serious condition. The injury was to my facial area and an ENT specialist arrived to try to close off the last area of bleeding in my nasal cavity. He told me he had to remove some scar tissue from a previous injury and that he could not use an anesthetic because my depressed blood pressure put me at risk of coma or death.

Enough background, now we get to the key point. For 5 minutes that surgeon cut into my nasal area without anesthetic. Those are arguably the worst 5 minutes of my life. If one could only view that 5 minute period of my life, it would seem like my life was sheer torture and the surgeon was consumate evil. However, if the full story of my life is examined and the surgeons activity is put into perspective, you can see that all in all I would change nothing. I enjoyed sports all of my life and the injuries were unfortunate but far outweighed by the enjoyment of the activities. The pain under the knife was bad but the life I have possessed since that day is a result of that pain.

Our situation in life is analogous in that our view of life is limited to a snapshot of what may be. Judgments that we make about responsibility, Good, and Evil are potentially 180 degrees from reality due to those limitations. What responsibility God bears and what the ultimate Good and Evil is in natural disasters are speculations without firm foundation. We need to focus on our responsibilities and the Good and Evil within us and stop worrying about other people and nature so much.

I think Keller in his book The Reason for God in his chapter "The Knowledge of God" gets at the core of some of Megenoita's argument.

Keller writes, "In many cases I have to put on my philosophy-professor hat in order to be a good pastor to people. A young couple once came to me for some spiritual direction. They "didn't believe in much of anything" they said. How could they begin to figure out if there was even a God? I asked them to tell me about something they felt was really, really wrong. The woman immediately spoke out against practices that marginalized women. I said I agreed with her fully since I was a Christian who believed God made all human beings, but I was curious why she thought it was wrong. She responded, "Women are human beings and human beings have rights. It is wrong to trample on someone's rights." I asked her how she knew that.

Puzzled she said, "Everyone knows it is wrong to violate the rights of someone." I said, "Most people in the world don't 'know' that. They don't have a Western view of human rights. Imagine if someone said to you 'everyone knows that women are inferior.' You'd say, 'That's not an argument, it's just an assertion.' And you'd be right. So let's start again. If there is no God as you believe and everyone just evolved from animals, why would it be wrong to trample on someone's rights? Her husband responded: "Yes, it is true we are just bigger-brained animals, but I'd say animals have rights too. You shouldn't trample on their rights, either." I asked whether he held animals guilty for violating the rights of other animals if the stronger ones ate the weaker ones. "No, I couldn't do that." So he only held human beings guilty if they trampled on the weak? "Yes." Why this double standard, I asked. Why did the couple insist that human beings had to be different from animals, so that they were not allowed to act as was natural to the rest of the animal world. Why did the couple keep insisting that humans had this great unique individual dignity and worth? Why did they believe in human rights? "I don't know," the woman said, "I guess they are just there, that's all."

The conversation was much more congenial than this very compressed account conveys. The young couple laughed at the weaknes of some of their responses, which showed me that they were open to exploration and that encouraged me to be more pointed than I would ordinarily have been. However, this conversation reveals how our culture differs from all the others that have gone before. People still have strong moral convictions, but unlike people in other times and places, they don't have any visible basis for why they find some things to be evil and other things good. It's almost like their moral intuitions are free floating in midair - far off the ground.

Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz spoke of this:

What has been surprising in the post-Cold War period are those beautiful and deeply moving words pronounced with veneration in places like Prague and Warsaw, words which pertain to the old repertory of the rights of man and the dignity of the person. I wonder at this phenomenon because maybe underneath there is an abyss. After all, those ideas had their foundation in religion, and I am not overly optimistic about the survival of religion in a scientific-technological civilization. Notions that seemed buried forever have suddenly been resurrected. But how long can they stay afloat if the bottom is taken out?

I don't believe Milosz is right. I think that people will definitely go on holding to their beliefs in human dignity even when conscious belief in God is gone. Why is this the case? I have a radical thesis. I think people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know."

He says alot more about moral obligation, the evolutionary theory of moral obligation, the problem of moral obligation and the difficult issue of human rights, the argument for God from the violence of nature and the endless, pointless litigation of existence, but its too long for me to type or summarize cogently.

The wink smilie was intended to mark my post as humourous, but with a subtle and revealing kernel of truth. But since you got all serious on me, I'll have to come up with a serious reply.

First, you have my sympathy for the injury you suffered, and my delight that you came through it well. I get your point, and I absolutely agree that perspective matters. I posted recently in another thread that the answer to many questions is: it depends.

I think you have underestimated the strength of your analogy. Yes, we do not know the full picture, and so any speculation about God may be mistaken because of that narrow view, but your anecdote shows that is true of each individual as well. We never have complete information and as we get more, our interpretation can change - but at some point, we go with what we have. Granted the shortfall will be greater with God than with any human, but I think it's also fair to say that God's role is also so much greater that such speculation is appropriate.

Now there may be theological reasons that make it wrong to assign a role to God, but the fact that our speculation may be wrong is not sufficient reason to me. At its simplest level - if all God did was trigger the Big Bang and then sit on the sidelines ever since, it still bears some of the responsibility for the suffering in Haiti. As the level of intervention grows, so does the level of responsibility. And that is all true even if the earthquake in Haiti is ultimately part of some greater good for all involved.

That concludes the serious portion of my reply. And no need to reply just because it was serious - I suspect we're not all that far apart on this - other than me not believing in God and all...

In your last sentence, you said we need to stop worrying so much. Could you talk to my wife? She, and her family, worry about everything, every minute, of every day. My greatest responsibilty as a parent is to ensure that our children are not consumed by worry before they reach adulthood.

So the only reason atheists can be moral people is that even though they don't consciously believe in a god, they unconsciously know that there is a god.

We couldn't possibly derive moral conduct from simple reason, from observing the world and seeing that all living creatures desire security and safety, and fear suffering and death, and since we all have that in common and we all know exactly what it is like to have suffering inflicted upon us, we should afford others the common freaking courtesy of not doing to them what we would not want done to us, and we should help others attain the same comforts that we also desire.

Nope, even though that makes perfect sense to the conscious mind, there must be a god in my unconscious mind telling me this, right?

So...

Since there's this unconscious understanding of god in me that makes morality make sense to me, why do I have so many other questions about god's nature that neither the god in my unconscious nor any of his followers can reasonably answer?...

If there is a God who created everything including things like hurricanes and earthquakes, how can God escape any responsibility for a natural disaster such as this?

This. Splendour: I'll ask you the same question I asked that guy in the morality thread: do you think that the moral rules in the bible could only have been conceived with the help of divine intervention? Or do you think people could come up with those rules on their own? If the former, then why?

Well the repression idea is Keller's.

This is where atheist belief inconsistency comes in:

Why did the couple insist that human beings had to be different from animals, so that they were not allowed to act as was natural to the rest of the animal world.

There is the possibility that God prepared the way for biblical ideas prior to the physical recording of the bible. There is a bridge from the OT laws to the Spirit and divine grace in the NT period.

The Sermon on the Mount seems way ahead of its times with its attitudinal teachings.

Even more than the actual rules though the historical context and continual themes of the bible stand out. At least to me. Moral rules are so commonplace in life that their origin and nature tends to be obscured by their every day usage.

I've even read people (maybe C.S. Lewis was one) that claimed the modern novel was only possible because of the bible. The bible is the first work to record things in detail like: a person sighed, etc. Giving lifelike portrayals to figures written about in the bible particularly in the Gospels. In ancient antiquity no other ancient writings, poems or epics had this "lifelike descriptive quality".

That's not inconsistent. Humans have decided to live in civilized societies where activities such as murder and theft would make life less pleasant and safe, and are not tolerated for those reasons. No other animals have explicitly made this decision, so killing amongst themselves is more common, although some animals, and primates in particular, have demonstrated cooperative and sympathetic faculties similar to our own. Moral behavior will evolve perfectly naturally whenever it makes life easier for those who practice it.

Sure, but you quoted it as some sort of evidence.

To clarify, it is you, not me, that believes that man was created in God's image, and is therefore different from the animals, yes?

So if you can point again to the "atheist belief inconsistency" I'd appreciate it, since I don't really see your point?

Only if you're unfamiliar with philosophy from around the entire planet that predates the Sermon On The Mount.

It might be a worthwhile question for you, or any other Christian, to ask -- Did Jesus ever say one single thing that was original?

Would it matter to you if he didn't, if nothing that ever came out of Jesus' mouth was an original thought that no mortal being had come up with first?

It's an interesting question...

But I didn't ask if it was possible if God prepared the way, I asked if it was possible that no God prepared the way. As TexArcher has pointed out, much (most? all?) of Jesus' actual messages can be found in earlier works but even if that's not the case, do you really think that the messages in the OT/NT are so extraordinary that man couldn't have conceived them on our own?

This really is getting pretty far from my point in this thread which was that judging the morality or ultimate good or evil of a natural disaster is not possible given our constricted perspective. Assigning responsibility is not really a very useful exercise. For a theist, God created us with free will so the ultimate responsibility is for us to do the best we can with that free will. For an atheist, the entire exercise is moot except for the persistent effort by some atheists to create some reductio ad absurdum around the concept of God, an effort that has failed since Epicurus and will always fail IMO.

I didn't quote it as evidence. I just included the whole passage before he segued into another aspect of his argument on morality.

If you can't understand the inconsistency from my post above. I suggest reading it again.

Sry I just don't see this as all that significant a question. The historical, prophetic, moral, and revelatory sweep of the bible and how it connects to our best and most recent revelation: Jesus Christ, is too extensive to worry over who had the Golden Rule first.

Worrying over morality rules is important in the practice of your faith but using it try to upstage God is quite a weak argument because its tied to time points and obviously if there's a God he existed before any of these earlier cultures you want to assign importance to.

Logical arguments are often too weak because they have to go up against biblical scholarship and history and its just too long a chain for these little time point arguments to break that chain of events.

So, to be clear, you don't think there are any messages regarding morality in the bible that could not have been, in principle, conceived of by mortal human beings on their own? Provide an example of one if you disagree.