Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Rick Shelton on December 10, 2012 at 4:33pm

There are cultures that do not name the child until much later in life. Why is that? Simply because of the high infant death rate in those cultures. To name a child is to care for that child and a cause for grief for the mother, which takes time to recover from that could be 'better' used for survival activities such as finding food.

Permalink Reply by Nick H on December 10, 2012 at 5:28pm

until a child is born it uses its mothers blood and is therefore its mothers life and not its own.  

Not gonna go near the rest of your comment. Too much for me. But this is anatomically wrong. The fetus' blood and the mother's are separate and in a healthy pregnancy, they are kept apart by the placenta. The fetus forms his own blood and its composition is even different from the mother's. For one, it has a different type of hemoglobin (the fetus' has a "stronger pull" on oxygen to take it from the mother's. The placenta does such a good job that by giving a HIV mother anti-retrovirals before delivery and delivering via caesarian, you can protect the baby from getting the virus.

Permalink Reply by Titus Techera on December 10, 2012 at 5:34pm

This is just another one of those ways in which modern science has proven how laughable the Bible is! Consider another Jewish thing--not eating blood! As if blood were life & banning the murder of man somehow requires this ban, or else meat-eating is too close to cannibalism. Crazy talk...

Permalink Reply by Nick H on December 10, 2012 at 5:53pm

I think you are joking but sometimes I can't tell. Its funny but I was reading a bit from Leviticus the other night and thinking how advanced the Hebrews were. All those rules about washing and being unclean when one has discharges and the like. And the stuff on skin diseases and contagions. To think that modern socirty didn't figure that stuff out until the 19th century.

Permalink Reply by Titus Techera on December 10, 2012 at 6:18pm

You have a point there, but I would bet the Jews are not the only ones to have taken cleanliness to such extents.Egyptians were far more exacting, so far did their disgust with nature go... Cleanliness is a matter of keeping healthy, but it is not just that, it has to do with God. Man has to purify himself of his baser nature in order to stand before God. Perhaps the evil which naturally occurs in man has something to do with the filth that occurs in nature...

Permalink Reply by Nick H on December 10, 2012 at 6:22pm

Do you think man at his root is evil?

Permalink Reply by Titus Techera on December 10, 2012 at 6:33pm

Root is a strange for word to use for man. I am not sure whether to interpret it as a temporal beginning (the root of the tree) or as a fundamental cause (the root of all evil).

I'll tell you this though: I try my damnedest to learn from the Bible, & I am persuaded by the argument of the wisdom of the story of Noah: There is no point in uncreating creation (undoing the separation of the primordial waters from the beginning) to change man: Man is evil from youth--it's natural. Somehow, the first account of creation already suggested that by refusing to call man good when God called other created things good. But now it's clear, it seems like this is the basis of all politics, which is why political knowledge has an inherently conservative turn.

The story of Noah distinguishes the continuous evil of man & the evil from youth. The first is what gets God to bring on the deluge. The latter is what causes the deluge to fail. Such is man: All anger at injustice leads to revolutions, political or cosmic, which are an attempt to go back to the beginning, in order to begin again, the right way this time. But it is always too late: No new beginning can eradicate evil from man.

Together, the two kinds of evil spell nature almost, a thing that happens both spontaneously & regularly, predictably even. Nature, though, is not a Jewish way of thinking--it's Greek. I cannot tell you whether man's evil is due to lack of knowledge--curable or not--or to a problem with the world--mortality. But that man is evil is too obvious to deny. Man's evil, reflection teaches, is incurable.

What can be done to palliate it may be done, sometimes wisely, but no political order that does not face the facts that lead to this reflection can be taken seriously.

Permalink Reply by Nick H on December 10, 2012 at 6:46pm

I was going for "root" as in tree. But I guess with the more popular use of the phrase I should have picked a better word. I would disagree with you though. I don't think man is evil naturally. I think some get twisted in life to be evil, just like others get twisted to be good. I think at his root, man is just selfish, as in self-serving. The way I see it, if he wasn't, he wouldn't have lasted this long. Being evil or good to others can be beneficial depending on the environment.

Who's youth are you referring to in the story of Noah?

Permalink Reply by Nick H on December 10, 2012 at 6:49pm

I also think God brought the flood, not so much to destroy man's evil (since he saved Noah and family), but to wipe the environment that brought it into man.

Permalink Reply by Titus Techera on December 11, 2012 at 2:17am

As for the wisdom of the story of Noah, so it begins & ends:
Genesis 6:5-7 & God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, & that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
& it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, & it grieved him at his heart.
& the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, & beast, & the creeping thing, & the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
Genesis 8:21 & the Lord said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

Creation was undone--but it did not make man evil; man, however, shows his inclination to evil in the account of creation. Man had the power of evil even in the beginning--because man is disobedient.

As for man's self-interest, I believe that is only part of man. Self-interest, first of all, is a very modern, very derivative concept; it is abstract.
'Selfish' is an older way of thinking, more faithful to our natural awareness of ourselves & of the world. 'Self-serving,' however, implies serving one's good, which implies knowledge of the good. That man had such in the beginning is doubtful. Man must have not known much, nor known well what he did know. Man is a very needy animal. Man is also unusually clever. What was man like before civilization? Does it bear watching? But even in tribes man showed some of what he would be: That the powers of speech & thought are specifically human emerged; that anger & fear of death teach man about God also; that some arrangement among many men was necessary for man also.
Man's evil is not reducible to man's neediness--which is what is abstractly meant by environment. Man's evil is not reducible to man's anger either. That man knows to seek God & yet is evil proves that man is naturally evil. That the powers of reasoning are such an aid to man's evil also suggests that man looks for his own good primarily, but also that that somehow distorts his understanding of the phenomena. Selfishness is not to one's good because it does not teach man what is good. Man is therefore evil. It is in his nature, though it is not all of human nature-

Permalink Reply by Rick Shelton on December 12, 2012 at 2:30pm

I don't believe that man is inherently evil. When we are born we, each, have a selfishness or self-centered-ness; after all we are all we know, our needs and our wants are our universe anything else is unknown. We then meet our mother who tends to our every need, proving that we are the most important. Only later are we, maybe, taught that selfishness is not culturally acceptable. In that sentence the key word is "culturally" because we are not born with knowledge of our culture but must be 'encultured' or taught our culture. In modern times, especially more modern times, we don't enculture our children to selflessness (for the most part), we dote on them, spoil them, and give them everything we never had. The result is what we see today.

Permalink Reply by Shane on December 10, 2012 at 5:45pm

I know.  What does that have to do with the Rabbi's?

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