And now I have to get used to this keyboard again, just as I was finally getting used to the old one again, lol...anyway, on to FlemGem:
@FlemGem:
"1. Are you a doctrinaire pacifist (I happen to be), or is violence sometimes justified?"
The latter, though I'm against capital punishment (partly because of the cost, partly because I'm not wholly convinced it does deter people--not saying it doesn't, I'm just not wholly convinced one way or the other on that point--and partly because, though I do think violence is the last response and is sometimes necessary, I'd like to think that we can reach a state where we can act more morally than those we imprison as murderers.
One of the best lines in "Macbeth" (see, you shouldn't have gotten me started, dipplayer! lol) is "Blood will have blood," and it's true.
That was half my argument for "Titus" being moral and not merely crass violence, really--Shakespeare uses violence and revenge tragedies, but if he shows us anything in these tragedies, one of the most clear lessons has to be that, indeed, revenge is very, VERY rarely if ever the way to go in life.
It takes a whole play for Hamlet to agonize over this (And just about everything else.)
The revenge Tamora takes (letting her sons rape and dismember Lavinia) isn't just, isn't shown to be just, and in fact, leads to Titus' revenge (baking those two sons into a pie and making Tamora eat it)...thus, revenge helps rob BOTH parents of their children, their livelihood, and ultimately their lives.
And so on...about the closest it comes to a "just" revenge is Hamlet finally killing Claudius and Macduff killing Macbeth...and those aren't really moments glorified, they're treated more as the regrettable ends to a regrettable, terrible chain of events.
So for those three reasons I'm against capital punishment.
Even so, there ARE instances where war is necessary...but really, it follows that model of Macduff/Macbeth, ie, regrettable end to a regrettable series of events...case in point, after Pearl Harbor, YES, it was necessary and just for America to enter WWII...whether we should have dropped the Atomic Bomb is another matter (and WAY OFF TOPIC, so if you want to talk about that or steer the conversation that way, ye readers, PLEASE start a new thread instead of derailing this one, as that subject is so complex and so off on its own tangent that it really deserves its own thread rather than spinning out its course here) but yes, sometimes violence and force IS necessary.
In this regard, I'll say I'm far more pragmatic than you seem to be--
For instance, I don't think Israel is being particularly admirable right now, as much as I believe it has a right to exist as a state, but for all that, I'll take Israel and it's faults over a Hamas regime or Hezbollah or most of Israel's opponents...
Israel is by NO MEANS a perfect state or a state with a clean slate or conscience (though I think a lot of that has to do with the party and ideology in power there right now, not a great fan of the current regime) but, being pragmatic about it, I can be "for" Israel insofar as I'm for it on principle and insofar as I'm certainly against the alternative opponents.
"2. Are there any circumstances in which it is moral for one human to punish another?"
That's WAY too broad a question..."punish" can mean everything from "This is a verbal reprimand" to "Strap him into the chair and throw the switch."
Assuming you mean violent punishment...even there it's violent punishment, CONTEXT is needed to determine the answer here--WHO is being punished, WHAT the punishment is to be, WHEN this punishment will be carried out, WHERE it will be carried out, WHY this is person is being punished, HOW it will be carried out...
All of that and more needs answering first (but in context or in today's context, the chopping off of a woman's hand for crushing a man's testicles is wrong. Full stop. How can I be absolutist here and yet claim to be pragmatic? Because I've heard the circumstances and from that come to the conclusion that exactly 0% of the time is that punishment warranted...really ever--if you have a counter-example, go ahead and give it, when it'd EVER be acceptable to cut off a woman's hand as punishment for something--but even that broader claim aside, given this particular crime/punishment lineup...give me one good example of when and why it is OK to cut off a woman's hand--to permanently dismember her!--for crushing a man's testicles...and I'm sorry, but hurting a man's standing and pride in regards to a holy site or order does not equal a sufficient cause for chopping off her hand.)
"3. Given the basic tenets of secular humanism and some basic science: that the universe is impersonal; that life is an aberation, comsically speaking (and if it is not we will almost certainly never know due to the vastness of space); that life is the product of the impersonal plus chance plus time; that all life on earth will be gone in the blink of an eye, cosmically speaking; that life has no intrinsic meaning to begin with; that man is a machine; that we are biologically determined and choice is illusory; on what basis can we then speak /rationally/ about morality? Or about hope, justice, love, or beauty?"
A short answer (gasp!) and then my own personal answer.
The short answer: Therein lies the question which the Platos and Pauls and Aristotles and Aquinuses and Shakespeares and Sartres ask.
The longer answer, ie, my opinion (brace yourselves):
Morality, Truth, Justice, and all that good stuff...
None of it existed before humanity--and therein lies the beauty of it.
When Shakespeare or Keats or Dostoyevsky or Dante or Homer talk of beauty...
It's their idea, that they came up with...
Based off of a cultural background and a patchwork of other human ideas and creations.
In other words, FemGem, Mujus--
God doesn't make you OR the idea of you beautiful...
YOU make the idea of God (in your own interpretations of that abstract human creation) beautiful...
Which is why you love God and I don't.
YOUR God is one taken from a patchwork of quotes and stories and thoughts and ideas that paint a picture, in very broad strokes, of a loving, caring God...
And MY God, reading those same texts but with different glasses than you (as it were) is a vindictive, incompetent, cruel, evil, sexist Big Brother who is neither loving nor caring and deserves neither from me.
I'd also like to add that if you're going to "speak *rationally*" about morality...
Given the example of morality from God's holy book that started this debate was "Should a woman crush a man's testicles in defense of her husband, chop her hand off and show her no pity"...yeah...not exactly a "rational" start to the conversation of morality or justice, is it?
What's more, there are a WIDE variety of godless/worshiping-different-deities folks out there, and surely they're moral with their guiding lights the same as you're moral with your created concept of God and godliness...yes?
If not...are you really suggesting, to play off Animal Farm again, that all religions are equal...but some religions and opinions are more equal than others?
This is part of the reason my two favorite characters in all literature are Hamlet and Sherlock Holmes--
At the end of "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," Holmes essentially asks Watson "what it's all about," life, the universe, and everything that just went into this rather-tragic crime they've just solved, and all the others...what's the point? That there is no point, Holmes goes on, seems absurd, and yet he can see no point to all this senseless violence and to all the quarrels of the world on the whole.
And then of course Hamlet basically spends an entire play asking such questions.
What's more, FlemGem, they both take very understandable, very clear routes--
Holmes, ever the logician, figures there HAS to be a rational reason for it all to happen, and so he approaches the question from that perspective, from the viewpoint of The Great Detective, skilled in all things crime, science, music and logic, and just from his statement you can tell he thinks there must almost be some sort of cosmic equation to it all, that This Plus Thus WILL Equal That, and That will lead to something else, and so on and so forth until finally there is an answer and, more importantly, that there IS an answer at all to be had.
Hamlet's route's very different; he hangs out with actors, after all, and is acting himself a lot of the play in feigning madness, so for him, the question "What's the point?" almost becomes performative...when he feels like the point should be to delay and to question, he takes that route and is intellectual...when he feels ashamed for delaying and feels he should be as moved to action as Fortinbras' army is, he gives a grand speech to that effect, and suddenly the point of life isn't rooted in high-concept ideas, but raw emotion and manliness and action...and back and forth, throughout the play he changes, inventing one new reason for life after another, and then, naturally, inventing one idea towards death, and then another, and another, and so on.
Holmes is very logical and linear; Hamlet's intellectual but impassioned.
And those are two ways to approach your question:
Either you can take life as set-sum sort of deal, and try and work out the equation as you go along, Kantian or Spinozan proposition by proposition, or empirical fact by empirical fact, until such time as the answer rings forth (and hopefully it's not 42, with the followup statement that, perhaps, the answer's wrong because you're asking the wrong question to BEGIN WITH)...
Or, as Hamlet swings rather violently from religious to atheistic and nearly nihilistic, life can be performative and all those concepts--morality, truth, justice, beauty--all of them can simply be defined as you go, and so long as your take on it sticks and is consistent and your performance of it catches on, your ideas might catch on, and so it's always in flux, but that means you're never really defeated, you can always redefine life, and yourself.
Take the REAL Holy Trinity, the triad on which the Greco-Roman foundations of literature and so much of culture are based:
The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid.
The Iliad starts it all and paints the Greeks and thus Greek society as victorious...
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus and his wife Penelope, and is more humanistic...
And the Aeneid tells all that from the Trojan/Roman perspective...
And suddenly those heroic Greeks are reinvented and are shown as treacherous,
The clever Odysseus is depicted as conniving and almost evil in destroying Troy...
The once-antagonistic Trojans are now sympathetic survivors of a diaspora...
And it ends with the foundations of the Roman Empire being laid...
And empire which, after all, conquered Greece, absorbed it into the culture, and saw the marriage of the best ideas of the two cultures.
For someone like Hamlet, that's one way to tackle life--constantly reinventing yourself and your ideas and shifting paradigms..
I think a marriage of the two approaches is best.
NOW.
From all this arises the natural question and response,
"But Obi, if we take Holmes' method, then you're claiming far too much subjectivity and too much of an open field if it's a to-be-solved equation, and if we take Hamlet's performative approach, then what right do you have to say that one "performance" of an ideal is lesser than or even flat-out wrong in comparison to another?"
My answer is that, again, since I'd like to think I can take something from Hamlet and Holmes alike in life, that the approach lies between their extremes:
There ARE wrong answers to certain questions, and that has to be accepted.
2+2 is 4 and, as Orwell put it, if you allow that, everything then might follow.
2+2 can't equal 42 no matter how much you "feel" like that's the right answer.
Likewise, there ARE moral boundaries which can be secularly derived...
Again, to take the running example, one should NEVER cut off a woman's hand.
How may I say this?
Because, generally, absolute statements of morality, if correct, apply to the fringes.
To put it another way--none of us (presumably) WOULD cut off a woman's hand.
Ever.
None of us would see that as a just form of punishment.
I'd argue no matter where you lived, that idea of justice--cut off a woman's hand--isn't natural.
It might be INSTILLED in you after birth via, oh, say, Deuteronomy...
If this were 200 B.C. we might answer that question differently after reading it...
But no person would NATURALLY assume that cutting off a hand is moral,
Partly because morality itself is a construct, so naturally assuming no hand = OK is absurd,
And partly because there'd be no impetus to do that in the absence of a law demanding it.
NOW.
Someone is probably ready to answer with "An eye for an eye" at this point.
And that DOES seem to be, perhaps, somewhat more natural of a response.
However, it's important to note that crushed testicles =/= no hand for the rest of your life,
So this punishment is not equal, the idea behind "eye for an eye," EQUAL retribution,
If there IS a "natural" impulse towards justice and morality, it's probably one built on
1. The basic idea of equality and 2. The basic idea of understanding and fairness,
That is "an eye for an eye" is/was popular as a theory of justice because
1. It's equal, 1 eye for 1 eye, there's no disproportionate charge being made here,
2. It's understandable WHY 1 eye for 1 eye is the ruling, it's equivalent, and
3. The idea that it's fair, ie, you take my eye, so I get to take yours, again, equal, so fair
All of those (#3 in particular) are troublesome cornerstones, and that's why we don't generally use eye for an eye anymore in the civilized parts of the world...
After all, some damn humanist in the back might pipe up "How is it FAIR to cause further suffering and deprive the world of one more eye...it won't bring back the eye lost, after all, so how is that just?"
So we can see why, rationally, an eye for an eye might fail (as Gandhi famously put it, it just leaves the whole world blind) and thus why we might discard all or part of it as a theory of justice, morality, or anything of the sort...
And if it's unfavorable or makes us feel ill at ease, or--even better--if we have a better solution, there's no performative reason to play out an eye for an eye if one eye (or even both) may be spared via negotiation, mediation, other -ations, and other mitigating forms and forces.
Now take the Bible. Take Deuteronomy.
Plug Deuteronomy 12 into the first test...is that a rational, equal response?
No...having your hand lopped off cruelly seems unequal to crushing testicles in defense.
Is it an ideal of justice or morality which speaks to some other idea and is thus desirable?
No...it doesn't seem to...and thus it doesn't seem to be a theory one would wish to put into performative practice.
So there's no good reason provided by either approach to carry out this particular law of the Bible...
Which brings us to Concept #3, besides Equality and Fairness/Understandable...
"Someone--ie, God--Told Me to Do It," better known today as "I Was Just Following Orders!"
Is that EVER a good reason to do something ALONE?
No.
If one of the other two reasons are conscripted...maybe...
If you're following orders and they're rational...maybe...
If you're following orders and they're for an ideal of fairness you wish to see...maybe...
If you're following orders and you have a rational fear of reprisal if you don't...maybe...
But if you're just following orders to follow orders, regardless of how you feel...
It's illogical, immoral, and unjust.
NOW.
By now, I'm willing to be the Bible-believing community would argue that this isn't fair.
After all, that's a pretty specific and warped law given in Deuteronomy, even by God's standards...and most believers don't believe that and, as dipplayer put it, MOST believers would probably rather focus on God's Greatest Hits, as it were, rather than these awkward miscues, in the same way dipplayer argued you'd teach Hamlet and not Titus Andronicus...
Which I disagree with for beginners, but leaving that aside, let me first say why, dipplayer, I feel that charge doesn't work for the Bible (as I feel that's a connecting strain in the thoughts you, FlemGem, and Mujus all have) and then we'll proceed to one of those Greatest Hits and be fairer about things.
But before we do that, again, why I don't think you CAN make that "Take the best, Obi, like you would with Shakespeare" argument here...
That argument only works IF YOU ADMIT THE BIBLE IS ONLY AS TRUE AS SHAKESPEARE.
You have to drop ALL claims of the Bible being divinely inspired at all (after all, if it's divinely inspired, why should we prune it or need to be selective, shouldn't a perfect, divine being creating a perfect Bible to communicate his word be able to have 100% hits and no misses?) or it being perfect (same reason) or that it can be taken as "Gospel Truth," as it were (Shakespeare's works are only the opinions of one man, after all, they don't claim to speak unalterable truths that you must agree or adhere to or else face punishment) and so on.
In short, it works for Shakespeare because Shakespeare doesn't claim to be holy or perfect.
I can toss away "The Merry Wives of Windsor" and never read it again...
And not say to myself, "My God, er, My Shakes, what am I DOING, I'm editing or not paying heed to some of the World of Almighty Will!"
;)
Obviously that's not a problem for Shakespeare, or for most literature.
I'd never destroy a work of fiction, we're all a little less whole when that happens..
But if, say, the Twilight Books suddenly all vanished one night...
Aside from the Twihards, few would mourn their loss of eternal or holy insight.
To be a bit more fair, Edith Wharton wrote "The Age of Innocence" of course, and good for her, it won the Pulitzer (she was the first woman to win it) but if, say, "Ethan Frome" was forever lost to us, I'd be unhappy, but only as much as I would be for any literary work being lost, because I really feel that work's as tedious and insufferable as...well...
One of my posts. :p
Let's be to the point--Shakespeare wrote 38 plays.
If, in that 38, I say "Most of these are great...but 'The Merry Wives of Windsor' is crap"...
I'M FINE.
I can still say I'm a Shakespeare fan and call that play stupid, wrong, a failure, etc.
You CAN'T do that with a work that argues it's holy, perfect, or otherwise eternally true, ESPECIALLY if you're arguing that earlier parts of it are necessary for later parts of it.
You can't say "I LOVE the New Testament, but the Old Testament is a load of sexist, racist, bigoted, violent garbage, there's no love there, who needs it, get rid of it!" if you're a believing Christian.
If you're a believer, heck, even the Gospel writers make clear that they're trying to tie their Jesus story to older stories and prophesies in the OT to keep and/or enhance the credibility of Jesus as the Messiah...
You're stuck with The Books of Kings and David, Jesus has to come from that line...
You're stuck with Exodus' Commandments and laws, whether you rework or redo them...
You're stuck with all the backstory that the Gospel writers try to retroactively make fit (which is quite often like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole, but anyway)...
And then of course there's all sorts of fun things Revelation takes from earlier books, Genesis in particular...
So you're STUCK with the OT.
You don't GET to say "Genesis is wrong, but Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are right."\
You need one for the other.
If you're Jewish, of course, you can reject M/M/L/J, and do, but that's all written after what you consider "holy," so it's OK; you couldn't, however, reject, say, the truth of Exodus or Genesis and claim to be a religious Jew.
And that's why you can't apply that argument to the Bible, dipplayer, the "take the best and evaluate THAT" argument...
It ALL has to count or stand together if it's to be taken as a holy text.
If you want to take it as just literature...sure, I can take it book by book.
THEN it's no longer holy.
THEN it's no longer professing to be perfect or professing to have eternal, perfect truths.
THEN it's no different than the Greco-Roman myths of Homer, Ovid and Virgil.
No problem.
But the second you bring in any semblance of religion or the idea that these texts are in any way holy or sacred, that argument becomes invalid, as if you're to make the argument it's a perfect text, it ALL has to be perfect.
So that's that.
BUT, as promised, let's take one of God's Greatest Hits, as it were, and see if it stands up to the dual tests of morality and justice (ie, is this rational/equal and is this something I'd like to do/should do performatively) as laid out earlier.
Let's take the Ten Commandments.
In order, let's test them:
1. "I am the LORD thy God, Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me"
Rational/Equal? Well, nothing's really equal/unequal here...but nothing's really rational here unless you believe the religion...and in fact this commandment really doesn't have anything to DO with morality or justice, it's just reiterating what anyone who was going to believe this list already believes, ie, that God exists and is in charge...and you can't really "perform" this commandment one way or the other, either you believe the premise or not...so not really immoral, but nor really, well, moral either, because it's not a moralistic commandment, more of a self-affirming (and rather extraneous if you already believe this) commandment, so no harm done, I guess, but likewise, no moral-plus here.
And then on the "no other gods before me" part...
Rational/Equal? I'd argue no, as that's rather against freedom of religion, now, isn't it? Which, of course, is why we have #1, as unless we buy that God IS the one, true, and only God, this commandment from a moral standpoint makes little sense (and if there ARE other gods, it just seems a way to limit their business, as it were, and make sure your clients don't change providers, to stretch the metaphor.) So unless you can PROVE God exists (and thus win the Nobel Prize for Pretty Much Everything Ever in Mankind's History) this commandment isn't rational or equal, as it prohibits freedom of religion, and that's certainly not equal, allowing some religions but not others. As to whether or not you'd want to perform this one...well, I assume most believers here do, but only for themselves, I hope, as to infringe upon the rights of others to pray to their conceived-of deities seems unfair...so it IS performatively-desirable, but only to the already-converted.
Thus, this is not a just commandment, as it prohibits freedom of religion, it isn't really making a moral claim either way, and is only desirably-performative in a very limited scope, ie, yourself.
2. "Thou shalt not make any graven images or likenesses"
...This one is just...bizarre? I don't think I need to waste time saying WHY this commandment has no bearing on morality or justice, and it seems rather counter-performative, telling you something you shouldn't be doing rather than something you might endeavor to do...obviously this one's stemming from cultural traditions that are against creating idols of worship and the like...though this says just images, really, so if that's the case...well... Michelangelo's in big, BIG trouble if God does exist, isn't he?
3. "Thou shalt not take the name of thy LORD thy God in vain"
Rational/Equal? ...Equal, maybe, but as what it means to "take the name of God in vain" has been subject to debate for centuries, this isn't particularly helpful or clear, and again, it's counter-performative, what can you really perform here but NOT perform an action...an action which is itself muddled and confused as to what it's meaning is...and again, this has nothing to do with morality or justice.
4. "Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it Holy"
Rational/Equal? If you believe, sure, if you don't believe...seems an unfair commandment, to force you to honor a day you don't take as holy (how would everyone here like it if everyone was forced to keep Ramadan, believer or not?)
5. "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother"
No complaints here of any substantial measure, equal, rational, and something that clearly can be desirable in a performed sense, so +1 for God here.
6. "Thou shalt not murder"
(And I put "murder" as that's the version I learned as a kid growing up, I understand some translations have it "kill," but hey, I'm the one typing this, and "kill" raises a whole host of problems for the God side, so I'm being as fair as possible here.)
Yeah, again, nothing unequal or irrational about that, abstaining from murdering people is probably a good performative action (or inaction?)...the only problem here is God seems to want a lot, a lot, a LOT of people killed or murdered throughout the Bible, so this one may as well receive the Animal Farm treatment...when the pigs needed to carry out executions, they changed the law so No Animal Shall Kill Another Animal "WITHOUT JUST CAUSE," and that may as well be the addendum here as well, as unless you believe there was a "just cause," God was perfectly alright with those little Amalekite children being brutally massacred and murdered...so good moral and judicial commandment, even if God and his followers have had trouble following it themselves sometimes.
7. "Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery"
No essential complaints here on the moral side of things...as far as the judicial side, however, things become trickier, as, well, it IS still someone's choice to be an adulterer as long as they don't harm anyone else...and yes, it harms their spouse, but you can hardly outlaw something based on the emotional pain it might do to someone, as just about everything we do can somehow hurt someone someway emotionally....and outlawing it would seem to be an infringement on civil liberties--it IS your right to sleep around and screw up your own marriage and morality if so you wish--and what's worse, if this is applied to law, we get into the territory of "The Scarlet Letter" or Islamic stoning territory, and that's not AT ALL just or moral...in a performative sense, it seems like good advice, but then again, it's also everyone's choice.
So, good moral groundings here, but you can't use it as the basis for law.
8. "Thou Shalt Not Steal"
Obviously a +1 on all three measures, though I'd point out that just about every culture has this rule (no civilized culture endorses stealing...well, I guess except for viewing full videos or listening to free music in YouTube, but that's another story) so good job here, but I'm not crediting God with being particularly insightful or original here. ;)
9. "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness"
This one's tricky...on the surface "Don't lie" seems a good moral standpoint...but I've already said I'm a pragmatist, and I think already pointed out absolutes really only work on the fringes of idealism and humanity (ie, of course I can say "Chopping a woman's hand off" is wrong, that's an extremist, fringe view, and not one natural to humanity in general) whereas lying...that's not really a fringe area AT ALL, there are a LOT of grey areas where it's not only acceptable to lie, arguably, it's morally reprehensible not to...the now-overused example of this probably being "If the Nazis came at your door and asked if you had any Jews hidden, would you honestly tell them the truth and give them up?" Kant says yes via his Categorical Imperative, and I think, and he, are dead wrong here, and have to think most here would agree with me...NO WAY would anyone here do that, I hope! It's not only acceptable in that situation to lie, I'd argue it's almost morally required, as surely preservation of innocent life ranks higher on the moral scale than telling a lie to a murderous totalitarian enforcer? You may say that's on the fringe level of things as well, but consider that this is an absolute...no lying means no lying when your mother asks what you got her for Christmas, or telling your kids a fat man in red clothes delivers toys to billions of people in one night. ;) So morally, lying is problematic, I'd say, there are enough cases where it's acceptable and even some where it seems the moral thing to do to call the matter a grey area for me...then again, obviously in COURT you have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that's a good judicial practice. Performatively, as stated, it can go either way, depending upon the situation...
So this one has a nice (if again not at all original, I mean, what society says "Go ahead, lie, lie your ass off to the government and in court and on your taxes!") idea behind it, but is nowhere strong enough for the absolute claim it makes.
10. "You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.”
FIRST of all, on the subject of equality...I just love that women (and to be fair, men) are being put on par with oxen, donkeys, houses...so man IS just on par with a material object...but anyway...
Not rational or equal, not performative and not just...
I agree with Orwell and Hitchens here--it's an early example of Thought-crime.
It's not condemning you for what you DO, but for what you THINK...
Which is inexcusable any way you slice it, you can't control or ban what people THINK.
That's simply not fair, not rational, and not in keeping with any sense of liberty, which generally stems from the rational and fair.
Even if taken at it's most generous--ie, "Don't be jealous of others/want what they have," it still doesn't work because 1. It's still Thought-crime, 2. That's KIND of what keeps the economy going, I see someone with a brand new blazer or some of my favorite cognac or--even better!--a stable job, and hey, I want that too, and work for it!
NOW, if the intent here is "Don't covet it lest ye STEAL," that's already covered by #8, now, isn't it...so applying that here is superfluous and, again, done worse as, again, it's banning what you can think, and that's a problem.
So.
Not exactly a stellar outing for the Decalogue.
#5, #6, and #8 are reasonable and alright, but not exactly original...
The rest are either theology-dependent and not really morality in practice,
Or else have mixed or even bad morals at their root, and are in no way--pardon the pun--to be set in stone as absolutes.
So, we've taken on one of God's Greatest Hits now, dipplayer.