rationalizing vs reasoning

I think children do know which is which as far as right or wrong in the sense of do unto others, they seem to know right away if somebody is being treated wrongly and they don't like it.  Not that I am endorsing it, but I don't see what is intrinsically wrong with cannibalism.  Killing people is wrong, but eating them afterwards doesn't make it any wronger.  It's kind of icky and that's why I don't think we see it in more advanced countries, but I don't see it as any kind of sin at all, except maybe ftpotd if you thought it was wrong and did it anyway.  i suppose it would be a sin for you, but it wouldn't be one for me.

Rationalizing is wrong first of all because it is lying, it is bending the truth, and you know how I hate that.  It is bending logic to serve some personal desire rather than seeking out the truth, it is warping the crucible.  The regular person, the good member of the St Nicholas flock, would go out and sin, say go out and get drunk and spend a good part of his paycheck buying drinks for floozies, and the next day, would realize that he had done wrong and would work overtime the next week and use the money to buy his family a new tv.  The not so good member, the rationalizer, would think, well the boss had been riding him unfairly and that had built up a bunch of stress and rather than go home after work and take it out on his family, he went to the bar so that the floozies could comfort him, so really he did the right thing, and there would be no new tv for the family.

I don't know about your rationalizing before the fact.  It doesn't sound like you were actually rationalizing if you couldn't find a clear path to what you were trying to do.  That sounds more like reasoning, for which I can only applaud you.  And I guess this only strengthens the fact of your being without sin.

So the stories you heard about sex were inconsistent and contradictory so you went to the bible, the stories of polygamy and slave girls and rampant sleeping around, and dare I say inconsistency and contradictions, and you came away with nothing,  And then you say you read everything you could get your hands on (is that another little joke like slipping in the back door?), and then you decided that sex was a good thing.  Was it possible that it might have turned out to be a bad thing?

I've heard of the missionary position, but I have never heard of the honest and responsible position.  Of course we should be honest and responsible in all our relations with other people, but I don't see where it relates to sex.

You think it would have been preferable to be celibate and rich?  What would you do with all the money in Beaglesonia?  Would Beaglesonia be even bigger, would you be eating caviar instead of deer and fish?  I expect you could have funded your campaign and become mayor or something and ruled over Cheboygan with your enlightened philosophy so that it would be a wonder for all to behold.

I've got the Lost City open to page 112, and I was going to go on about the St Nicholas flock, but it's already a little late in the morning for me, so maybe tomorrow.

Preemptive Rationalization

The reason there is no Social Contract (capital "S" capital "C") is that there is no Society with a capital "S". There are, in fact, lots of societies and they each have their own social contract. My committee was allegorical, but the members of each society collaborate with each other in some fashion to develop their social contracts over time. Then there are societies within societies. There are probably some things which all Americans believe to be wrong, although sometimes I wonder anymore. Then there are other things that are considered wrong in one American subculture and not in another, and you will find even more moral diversity if you go international.

While human children may have an inborn capacity to understand right and wrong, they don't know which is which until somebody tells them or shows them. If an American or European child were to be kidnapped at a young age and raised by cannibals, he would grow up thinking that cannibalism is perfectly normal. I'm not talking about starving in the wilderness cannibalism, I'm talking about tribal cannibalism where they eat their fallen enemies as a religious rite. I'm not sure how young the kid would have to be, but I'm guessing under the age of five, because most of us can't remember much about our lives before that. If the child had any memory of his former culture, it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the cannibals to condition him to their way of thinking.

I don't know a lot about infants either, but my impression is that they are pretty self centered. I think you're right that language has a lot to do with their eventual socialization but, for the first year or so, they aren't very good at it. They probably pick up on non-verbal clues, and will attempt to communicate but, until they can speak in complete sentences, you can't really reason with them. You can teach them simple commands like a dog, but that's about it.

8/22/15: I've given it some thought, and I think I've got this sin thing figured out. What you said about rationalization put me on the trail. I know that rationalization is supposed to be a bad thing, but I don't know why. Maybe it's because people tend to rationalize their actions after the fact. They believed it was wrong before they did it, and now they want to justify their behavior rather than repent of it. Looking back on it, I think what I used to do was rationalize the thing before I did it. If I couldn't convince myself that it was right to do, then I just didn't do it. Of course, if you want to do something bad enough, and you really put your mind to it, you can probably rationalize it eventually.

The best example I can think of is sex. Even before I became aware of my own sexuality, I heard other people talking about the subject, but they didn't seem to be making a lot of sense. As my awareness developed, they still didn't seem to be making a lot of sense, probably because the stories I was hearing were inconsistent and contradictory. So it came to pass that I searched the Bible for answers, because the folks at Elsdon had told me that the Bible had an answer for everything. When my Biblical search proved inconclusive, I read everything else about the subject that I could get my hands on. It took me a few years, but I finally convinced myself that sex was a good thing as long as you did it honestly and responsibly. Convincing the girls proved to be much more difficult than convincing myself, so I finally had to leave town and find some different girls who didn't need convincing. All told, I spent the better part of a decade on this project and, to this day, I wonder whether or not it was worth it. If I had spent all that time and energy learning how to make money, I might be a rich man today.

Has Beagles ever sinned ftpotd?

What is this ur committee on sin somewhere in the mist of time deciding the rules of morality?  Sounds like the social contract, wasn't that a favorite of Locke, and isn't Locke a big figure in deism and in libertarian theory?  But anyway he knew the social contract never actually happened, in the sense that people got together and made an agreement, it was just a figure of speech, so to speak. 

Likewise you surely don't believe that some committee long ago hammered out some kind of list and passed it around, and bingo there we got our morality and we have been living it, or variations of it, ever since.

Of course the concept of right and wrong is inborn, how could you think otherwise?  We are a social animal, it is in our genes.  I have had precious little experience with newborns, but there have been those experiments where they display bad behavior to babies and they don't like it.  Just from being around pre k's I can tell that these kids have an instinctive feel for right and wrong.  It's like language.  If people are isolated from their societies they develop their own languages.  We are born to talk and we are born to distinguish between right and wrong.

Not that we don't also talk about morality, not that we don't analyze it and come up with different formulations, but there is a simple kernel, something like do onto others that all the big religions contains, that simple altruism which highly socialized species such as ours requires for survival.  And stuff can be twisted around, and people do that, and self interest is always there, and there is that great enemy of progress, rationalization, where you already know what you want to believe and you just make arguments that lead to that conclusion and pretend that you have thought it through.

But you know what?  We have reason, which is a result of language which comes in our genes, and we can figure things out.  People can make up all these rules and lists and whatnot, but we don't have to accept them at face value, we have reason and we can put them into the crucible and decide whether we accept them as true or not.  People do this all the time.  It's why we don't believe in witches and demons anymore.

You seem to think that the only reason that people think anything is because they heard it somewhere, and I say no, no, no.  You seem to think that whenever public opinion changes it is the result of Them Who Rule Everything pulling some strings, and I say crazy man crazy. 

I didn't accuse you of being without sin, I thought you clearly implied it by questioning why anybody would ever do anything that they thought was wrong, and if you couldn't understand that it rather followed that you had not, and you certainly didn't confess to any, and even in last night's post, you admit that you might have done wrong, but only because you didn't realize that it was wrong at the time, so therefore it would not be sin ftpotd.

Why would anybody commit sin ftpotd?  Back in my wayward days when I used to shoplift books I did it so that I could take them home and not have to pay for them.  I did it for personal gain.  That's generally why people commit sin ftpotd.

Okay then I am taking The Lost City down from the shelf and putting it somewhere where it will be in my way, so that I will reread that part of the book over the weekend, ah, here it is, Part 2, Chapter 5, page 111.  And maybe in tonight's post Beagles will answer the question of whether he has ever committed sin ftpotd.

Definitions, Definitions, Definitions

I don't think that homosexuality is a sin, I just think it's wrong. Why do I think it's wrong? Because I am repelled by the very idea of it. If other people like it, I suppose it's none of my business, but that doesn't mean I have to vote for it. I would be willing to live and let live on this issue if they hadn't brought gay marriage into the equation, I think that was just a step too far. Marriage is a contract between two people, with the government putting their stamp of approval on it. I do not approve of gay marriage, so I voted against my government putting their stamp of approval on it. Would it have been more logical for me to have voted contrary to my own beliefs?

 In keeping with your definition of sin, it's not a sin unless you think it's wrong and do it anyway. I think homosexuality is wrong, but I don't practice it myself, therefore it's not a sin for me. I don't know if the people that do practice it think it's wrong, probably some of them do and some of them don't. If they don't think it's wrong, then it isn't a sin for them to do it. It appears, then, that it's a sin for some people and not for others. Going back to the religious context of sin, if your religion says it's a sin, then I suppose it's a sin for you to do it. If I am not a follower of your religion, then what your religion says about it is irrelevant to me. Since neither of us are religious, our concept of right and wrong must come from somewhere else.

Since newborn infants don't seem to understand right and wrong, the concept must be acquired rather than inborn. Well they might be born with a genetic predisposition for it, but it still takes some kind of outside influence to bring it to the surface, and that influence seems to come from other people. This raises the question of how do those other people acquire their concept of right and wrong. From different other people of course but, if you follow the chain back far enough, you should come to one person who started it all. Where did that person get it from? Without bringing religion into it, can we solve this one? Well, maybe it wasn't just one person who started it all, maybe it was a committee or something like that. Could a committee come up with something that none of it's members would have ever come up with by themselves? My experience with committees suggests that one member usually kicks out an idea and then the others toss it around and see where it lands. A single person, therefore, might have come up with the idea that, if we have a list of rules for our people to follow, it might make it easier to resolve disputes without resorting to violence. Then the committee would generate nominations for the list and discuss each one until they decide to either add it to the list or forget about it. When the list is complete, the committee would then have to find a way to get the rest of the tribe to accept it. They might vote on it, or they might just impose it by power of their authority. Either way, the list would become binding on all tribal members. You don't like it, leave the tribe and go start a tribe of your own, if you can persuade anybody else to join you. (I don't know where I'm going with this, I'm just speculating.)

Okay, back to real time: You have accused me of being without sin, as if that was a bad thing. I, on the other hand, can't understand why you would deliberately do something that you believed to be wrong. Not just you, anybody. Why would anybody deliberately do something they believed to be wrong? Don't forget, I didn't say that I've never done anything wrong, just that I believed it to be right before I did it. Of course it doesn't always turn out to be right and, when it doesn't, I add it to the list of things that I regret doing and vow to never do again. If I do indeed repeat the mistake, it's usually because I forgot what happened last time. A certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age, you know. Another way I might repeat a mistake is if it's not exactly the same situation and I don't realize that the same rule should apply. There are probably other ways a guy can screw up like that, but screwing up is not the same thing as saying, "I know this is wrong, and I'm going to regret it later but, fuck it, I'm going to do it anyway." How does that work?

Beagles the illogical tempter

It was probably late in July when I wanted to talk about the difference between the stoics and the utilitarianists with conservatives being stoics and liberals being utilitarianists where the former tend to think of a sin as being in the act  itself, that is certain acts were sins regardless of the circumstances or consequences, whereas the latter judged acts on their consequences to determine whether or not they were sins. 

But sin, an unfortunate word, so many different interpretations, but then all those words, those ethical words, those the difference between right and wrong words, they are all, well so loaded.  We could have a discussion on oh, baseball or hunting, whether or not this guy was a good shortstop or whether this or that was a better rifle, and perhaps it would evolve eventually into heated words, but not necessarily, but if it was some ethical question, emotions would quickly rise.

That whole ethical thing is close to the bone for us big apes with the enormous brain.  Little kids, even before they can talk, react to it, have a sense of what is right and wrong, religion and politics quickly grafted morality into their systems, and it's just big with us big apes.

I thought maybe it would be an aid to a logical discussion of morality if I could come up with a pretty good definition of sin.  I thought that defining it as doing something wrong even though you knew it was wrong, would be a good start.  But I didn't realize that Beagles was without sin, had never done anything he thought was wrong in his entire life. 

Frankly, I was a little suspicious of this, it just didn't seem likely, more frankly, I suspected rationalization, which I hate more than sin because sin is a logical thing whereas rationalizing twists logic into a mobius strip.

And then we were back into gay marriage.  Probably my fault, probably I brought it up.  Well I thought it was a good example of the difference between the stoic (homosexuality is a sin period.) and the utilitarian (homosexuals are no threat to the well being of the nation so let them have the same rights that straight people have). 

See you tempt me Beagles.  Sometimes you say that you will believe something is wrong until you can be convinced that it isn't.  And I foolishly take you at your word, much like Charlie Brown racing towards that football, present my meticulous logical case, and then, like Lucy pulling away the football, say you don't care about any stinking facts, you think it is wrong because you think it is wrong and that is your right and there is nothing to be done about it.

See here you have the discussion well framed 

By giving the same benefits to gays, the government is saying that gay marriage is just as good for the country as traditional marriage, and I disagree with that assertion. 

and then at the end you disagree.  One would well expect that this would be followed by a because, but there is no because because it's just because you think so.  So how does one discuss something with someone like that? 

This is kind of like gun control which I almost never discuss with you any more either.  The difference there was that you used kind of a shotgun approach, throwing out all these arguments from the NRA playbook whether they made any sense or not.  In this case you just say this is my belief and I am sticking with it come hell or high water or any hot air from anybody.

Fine.  I won't mention it again.  Quit tempting me by pretending to be a logical man.

The weekend is fast approaching and I have been meaning to reread that Lost City thing about sin.

"I'm Against It"

That's what Mark Twain said when somebody asked him what he thought about sin. I think the reason this is funny is that the person who asked the question was hoping Twain would launch into an elaborate discussion about the subject, and he didn't want to do that at the moment, so he just said, "I'm against it." and went on to talk about something else. While I don't mind launching into an elaborate discussion about anything, when it comes to sin, I think Twain's statement pretty well sums up my position too.

The reason I launched into that Bible study last night was that you asked me what the folks at Elsdon thought about sex. I don't remember them talking about it much, but I got the impression that they were against it. I, on the other hand, was very interested in exploring that subject in depth, so I looked it up in the Bible, which is what the folks at Elsdon told me I was supposed to do when I had questions about moral issues. Quite frankly, I was looking for a loophole, but it turned out that I didn't really need one because, while the Bible prohibits certain kinds of sex, I was unable to find where it said that sex, in general, is a bad thing.

I seem to remember that the part about Mary and Joseph came up at least once in a Sunday School class, and that's where I got the idea that they weren't completely married at the time Mary became pregnant with Jesus. Our instructor explained that marriage and divorce did not mean exactly the same things in Biblical times as they do today. This accounts for Joseph resolving to divorce Mary when he found out she was pregnant. If they had been truly married, Joseph wouldn't have been so concerned because he would have had every reason to believe the child was his.

Now you have asked me what the folks at Elsdon thought about sin. Well, I'm pretty sure they were against that too but, if you want to understand the difference between the Catholic and Protestant views on sin, I will have to go beyond the hallowed halls of Elsdon to give you a complete answer. The short answer is that Catholics confess their sins to a priest, while Protestants skip the middle man and talk directly to God about their sins. Will that answer suffice, or do you want me to elaborate?

I suppose you're right that I should try to be more logical about that gay marriage thing, so I'll try. As I understand it, one reason gays wanted to get married in the first place was so they would be eligible for certain tax and insurance benefits. I believe those benefits were designed to encourage people to get married and make it easier for families to stay together. Somebody must have decided that traditional family life was good for the country, and that it was the government's job to encourage it. By giving the same benefits to gays, the government is saying that gay marriage is just as good for the country as traditional marriage, and I disagree with that assertion.

Another reason was so that gays could adopt each other's children. I have never believed that gays should be allowed to adopt children, or be given custody of children produced by a marriage they were in before they discovered that they were gay. I guess studies have been done that indicate children growing up in a gay household are no more likely to turn out gay themselves than kids growing up in a straight household. While that may be true, they are surely more likely to approve of the gay lifestyles of others, and I'm against that too.

ill tempered sinner Uncle Ken

I meant doing wrong by your own definition was what sin was.  Somebody elses's idea of what sin was would have no bearing for the purpose of this discussion (ftpotd).  Of course our opinions of what is right or wrong is subject to change especially for those of us who examine our lives periodically.  So what if you had been raised in a cannibal cult, and partook of the butchering and eating in your young years?  As long as you truly believed in cannibalizing at the time, I believe you haven't committed any sin ftpotd.

My example with the pizza thing was that if my Catholic pals didn't know it was Friday they could have devoured that pepperoni with no repercussions because they didn't know they were eating meat on a Friday.  Actually they don't believe it anymore, but that's not important for this discussion. 

Of course it would be wrong to trick them into ordering the meat pizza, that is kind of the point, you get to eat the whole pizza, and they get none ftpotd assume that they have to pay for the pizza up front.  We are not all as pure as Beagles the stone caster, who turneth away whenever sin rears its ugly head.  God what a goody two shoes.  You know some of those Catholic kids would have eaten the pizza anyway.  I assume they would have admitted it the next time they went to confession, and done something to atone for it.  See that's what I like about the Catholics in the book.  When they sinned, they knew they had sinned and they would atone for it, they had a nice little sin bookkeeping system. 

What was the advice of the young methodists on how to deal with sin.  Well of course you should avoid it, but we can't all be as pure as Beagles, so what do you do when you have sinned?  Do you have to atone?  Is it a chain around your neck that you will carry to the grave and I assume St Peter, oh wait we didn't have St Peter.  I'm sure we had somebody, probably some modest clerk would say hey, what is that black mark on your soul and you would have to explain it.  Just my guess I never made it to those heights of theological discussion.

Again I guess that vote on gay marriage, that is never going to happen anyway, is what this blog has been revolving around for the last couple weeks.  You say if I can convince you to change your mind you might change your vote, but then you also say that your vote is not based on logic, it is something you want to do because you want to do it and you will never change your mind, so who is the fool here? 

And then you go off blathering on about what the good book says about things, or rather what you think it says about things, because everybody who reads the damn thing comes away thinking something different.  And I don't believe a word of it, and I think you believe much of it, as being the inerrant word of that god who you don't really believe in either, so why is so much of this blog taken up with fucking bible study?  There are a lot of holy books, you could pick any one of them and it would have something to say about something.  Who cares?

I'm a little pressed for time this morning and maybe that's why I sound a little ill tempered, but I guess ill tempered has a place in this blogU