The horror! The horror!

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What I want to address is the following: I'm talking to all these very knowledgable people and they are blythely telling me that my mind is physical, and that my morality is subjective, and that I have no free will, and I am wondering if tney understand the philosophical implications of what they are saying.

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They don't seem to understand that what they are saying is that we are mindless robots, living meaningless lives.

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...which is your personal opinion, nothing more.

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I hope they understand that, and I hope they understand that they cannot with any consistency be insisting on moral imperatives of any sort.

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Yet somehow, I and many others manage to live lives doing just that.

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I do not want to hear about your relative moralities, because, logically, they do not work. Anybody who looks at the question honestly will realize that. I do not want to hear that somehow our lives are meaningful if we are nothing but physical processes.

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Your narrow mindedness and prejudices shouldn't be given the weight of logical argument.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 01-15-2005 22:11 AM

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The first four commandments establish your allegience to the Biblical god, Jehovah and his book. If you get established into his precepts you will not abuse your child, your dog, your or anything of yours. Neither will you abuse or missuse anything of your neighbor's. You might eat your cow, but while it's living under your care, you will treat it humanely.

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Don't forget your slaves, buz.The Bible has rules about how much your slaves are worth and how you should treat them.

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Yes, slavery was tolerated by God, wasn't it?

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Tolerated? I've read the OT, buz. God positively endorses and encourages slavery. It is clear that slavery is a good and positive thing that is one of the perks and benefits of being God's chosen people. Slaves are the spoils of war, given to the Jews by God as a reward.This is very different from "tolerance".

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And since God tolerated it,

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Sanctioned and actively endorsed, buz.

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they were to be well treated.

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Do you mean like the virgins taken as the spoils of war were to be treated well? How is being married to a foreign invader that killed your parents be considered "good treatment"?Let's say the Chinese were to invade the US and win. They decide to enslave all of the US people. We have no rights, the virgins are taken as wives against their will (raped), we are slaves.They don't beat us up, but you are only a piece of propery, to be traded and used until you die.What part of slavery would you like the best?

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Slavery was tolerated by nearly all cultures that I am aware of in those days.

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So? Doesn't make it anything but barbaric, degrading and humiliating. ...and encouraged by God.

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Those protected by the tennants of the 10 Commandments likely faired the best of all, certainly better than the Egyptians when God allowed the Jews to be enslaved by Egypt. As slaves, they were terribly oppressed in Egypt.

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Uh, the Egyptians have no records at all of the Jews being enslaved there as far as I know.