Re: I Am Homophobic

On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, Kendall Clark wrote:

[snip]
> Yeah, there's always been a tension between the things people were
> happy to attribute to God (creation, acting to reconcile godself to
> the world, and so on) and things people were unhappy because *when
> attributed to human persons* they were monstrously evil. The earliest
> intutions about this matter -- as represented for me by Origen --
> where that according to our moral lights God ought to be morally good,
> not a monster. (Of course there is an alternative rendering, which I
> always found unsatisfying since it left me mute and wordless: "God
> sees more than we do so God's moral lights are different than ours, so
> what God does that seems evil to us may well not be to God" -- a line
> I've always found deeply unsettling and, to be honest, grotesque.)
> 
> This tension is nowhere better explored than in Kierkegaard's Fear and
> Trembling.


Sure it is. Although F&T is pretty good (the breastfeeding stuff
is...odd).

I'm not sure about the grotesquery of the "big picture" argument. In the
Republic, Socrates argues that generally you don't make something
beautiful by making each part as beautiful as it can be after its
kind. So, the happiest city may have some lest than perfectly happy
classes (e.g., the philosopher kings would be happier as philosophers than
kings).

Which really means that god chooses the *overall* good, in some weighted,
prolly Moorean way.

HOWEVER, Plato's the Euthyphro is the place where the (epistemic,
at least) priority of determining morality over holiness is
established. (In the Western philospohical tradition.)

(Although, it seems likely that *ontological* priority of the good over
the holy is argued there too.)

Cheers,
Bijan.