Category: Morality in the Light of Religion
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Decent Man, Manly Man, Otherworldly Man
No morally decent man wants ever to have to take a human life. But no manly man will be unprepared to defend against a lethal attack using lethal force, or hesitate to do so if and when circumstances require it.* The first proposition cannot be reasonably disputed; the second can. How might one dispute the…
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The Euthyphro Problem, Islam, and Thomism.
Top o' the Stack. The problem is genuine but insoluble. Or so I conclude. What say you?
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On Blaming the Victim
Top o' the Stack.
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Paul Claudel
"The nearer we are to the mountain, the smaller we are. The nearer to eternal Sanctity, the more sinful we seem to ourselves to be." (Claudel-Gide Correspondence, p. 91)
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Neither Angel nor Beast
I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. The following observation from my Turkish journal is surrounded by quotations from him so he may have been the source of the idea. Angels were created with reason, brutes with lust, man with both. A man who follows reason is higher than…
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God and Morality
A short piece by Richard Swinburne.
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Death as the Muse of Morality Limits our Immorality
Substack latest.
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“My Conscience is Clear”
You deceive yourself : you cleared it when you should have borne its burden and bite, the just tax for your wrongdoing.
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The Witness of Maximilian Kolbe
Substack latest
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Forgive and Forget
Forgetting is the easier and more effective of the options if you can manage it. A wrong forgotten is a wrong unavailable for either forgiving or the opposite. But where is the virtue in a mere mental lapse? To forgive the unforgotten wrong — now there is the moral challenge, one rarely met, although almost…
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Death as the Muse of Morality Limits Our Immorality
How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts. 1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live. We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily judgment of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that…
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Moral Failure and Moral Capacity
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. So I had the thought: we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin…