What is Reddit's opinion of Justice: Rights and Wrongs?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

As far as I understand rights, they are obligations grounded in respect for a being's worth and because of the type of relationship that being shares with another being. I believe human beings have rights because they bear the image of God and have the property of being loved by God. A good example of this is when God gives Noah the command not to shed the blood of another human being. Because of humans' worth (being in the Image of God and being loved by God) they have a certain right (the right to not be killed by another human being). [Genesis 9:5-6]

So it seems like the idea of rights for humans is compatible with Scripture, but what about God? Well if rights are grounded in worth, and God has infinite worth, it seems like it is possible that God has the right to receive the worship of his creation because of the relationship they stand in with each other (Creator to Creation).

Nicholas Wolterstorff is a Christian philosopher who writes a lot about the topic of rights and it is how he understands ethics and justice in the Bible. Here is a link to his book about the subject that I have read, and where arguments similar to the one I presented are outlined in much greater detail.

> Okay... is this some sort of continental thing where you don't actually believe in any sorts of supernatural things, and that God is the zeitgeist and that Christianity is forced to be true for us because we're in the west and that you find its truth through Lacanian psychoanalysis of the bible, or something like that?

No. I believe Jesus was the God–man, fusing divinity and matter–energy in a way that offends many, was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of the Jews, died, and was bodily resurrected three days later. None of this requires that I believe 'divine inspiration' works like you appear to think, how the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy folks think, etc. One doesn't have to be continental to reject the possibility of comprehensive 'clear and distinct ideas' in all of life. One doesn't have to be continental to think that hermeneutics are a critical part of social and psychological life. (Otherwise we could replace judges with algorithms.)

> I'm concerned with whether the text of the bible was inspired by a being that transcends our physical universe and created it, and that damns people to hell or sends them to heaven after they die in part on the basis of whether they believe in him.

Taking only the text up to the comma (ignoring afterlife bits), what constraints can you put on how such a divine being could/​would possibly interact with us? The afterlife bits do constrain things further, but I happen to believe that the NT doesn't teach eternal conscious torment. In fact, if there is a deity who punishes via eternal conscious torment, I want to be one of the eternally tormented. There is simply no reason for that and I do not want to spend eternity with a being who does such a thing. There is more to say here but I'll turn it over to you.

> Most people obey laws, though. It's just a statistical inevitability that some of them will break it. If we take the bible as a guide, you have things like Sodom and Gomorrah where literally every man, woman, and child in a city was a depraved rapist and needed to be destroyed. This is another example of how inaccurate the bible is as a description of human nature. Nothing with human beings is ever that cut and dry.

Your first two sentences are nowhere near always true. In plenty of countries around the world, the amount of corruption is incredible. From what I've read, scholars doubted whether the Code of Hammurabi was very well followed. Rather, it seems to be a way of bragging about how awesome Hammurabi was. In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott tells of how all sorts of games could be played with the sacks and baskets of grain peasants used to pay their lords, and the sacks and baskets the lords used when giving milled flour back to the peasants. (27–29) Do you heap it, or make it flat? That alone could raise the volume by 25%. Do you pour from a lower or higher height? The latter would pack the grain more. There is incredible room for manipulation, within the formalities of the law. This happens absolutely everywhere. Some university faculty are permitted to get away with a lot more sexual harassment and perhaps worse, than other faculty. It ain't stochastic.

The rest goes back to your [praiseworthy] ideal of individual justice, which was barely a concept in Israel's time. (Ezek 18 does push in that direction.) Nicholas Wolterstorff tells the story of the shift from justice as 'right order of society' → justice as 'individual rights' in his 2008 Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Like it or not, God treats people as far more responsible for each other than we do, such that failures to live up to that responsibility results in a lot of unnecessary suffering. In this day and age, we pass far too much of this responsibility off to the state. That will not end well, because the state cannot do nearly as good a job as communities. Then again, communities can become so terrible at it that some states are better.

> How is aiming too low being a sin compatible with the Fall being caused by eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? The whole thing that got Adam and Even kicked out of Eden was aiming too high.

Adam and Eve were already "like God"; recall Gen 1:26–28. The serpent insinuated that they weren't "like God", and the only thing they needed to do to become "like God" was to distrust God, to believe that God was intentionally holding them back with the prohibition on the tree. So, they transgress, and find out that the only deliverable is that they're now ashamed at being naked. Understanding that 'nakedness' ∼ 'vulnerability' for the ancient Hebrews and you find that where vulnerability was not shameful before (Gen 2:25), it had become exactly that. And so, A&E blame-shifted when God cross-examined them, refusing to acknowledge that they did what they did, and perhaps refusing to believe that God might be gracious, merciful, and forgiving. They didn't aim too high, they aimed too low. If you read Gen 1:28 and Ps 8 together, you should see a connection. Then see how Heb 1 elevates Jesus and recall that Jesus is a prototype for the rest of us, showing us how to be truly human.

> What point are you even trying to make here? That it was wrong for them to try to build a tower and they were aiming too low, so God made things even harder for them?

They were terrified of becoming god-like; compare Gen 1:28 and Gen 11:4. 'Pride' can be defined as "insecurity covered up by false confidence". That's a perfect description of the tower-builders. They preferred safe, pretend-deity. Kind of like the Letzter Mensch, today. You're omnipotent if you can consume whatever you want. The state & corporation are fantastic at shaping our desires. See The Persuaders and Nina Eliasoph 1998 Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life.

> The answer to the bold is simple: an understanding of human nature includes an understanding of mental illness.

Mental illness is a really big problem today, so I can understand the temptation to retroject that on Jesus' time. But I see no reason to think it was actually a huge issue back then; there were bigger fish to fry and once they were fried, we humans could go on to figure out the finer points.

> So, the bible was divinely inspired because it told people that mental illness was caused by demons

It makes no such statement, nor implies it. Nowhere is all behavior we associate with mental illness, associated in the NT with demon possession. To really pursue this line of thought, we would have to look at the historical take on demon possession, and compare it with the alternatives on offer. That's quite the endeavor. My sense here is that you're trying to find anything and everything which could possibly conflict with my claim that the Bible presents a fantastic take on human & social nature/​construction—far better than what you see even in the 21st century human sciences. The next step I would suggest is taking a look at Liah Greenfeld 2013 Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience; she contends that the big three of bipolar, major depressive, and schizophrenia have crucial social components—a thesis psychologists toyed with back in the day, before settling on a model of mental illness which they could possibly address from within their own profession. (You have the most influence over the patient sitting in your office.) So for example, how much anxiety in our country is due to people being treated unjustly, knowing it, and doing all that they can to protect themselves and their families against it?

> The natural inclination is to think you're less powerful than Jesus and to try to find some other way of getting the demons out.

And yet, Jesus said "greater works than these will you do". People deviating from Jesus' ways would cause all sorts of badness. If you refuse to admit failure, you're just going to cause more and more harm until someone with balls (I care only about the metaphorical meaning, here) comes along.

> labreuer: Alternatively, Jesus is saying that you can work with the enemy, when the enemy is working against itself.

> ReiverCorrupter: Maybe. But that has no bearing on false flag operations because in those cases the enemy either isn't really working against itself at all, or is using loyal members as unwitting sacrificial pawns. And, at any rate, exploiting strife between your enemies is nothing Sun Tzu didn't already say, and is frankly just obvious, so it's not evidence of divine inspiration.

You went from raising this as a serious problem for me to dismissing it because someone else said the thing. Okay. One less item to discuss is a win.

My area is epistemology, however ethics is very closely related to this discipline, so here are some authors which may put you on the right track.

You will enjoy Nicholas Wolterstorff. His most popular work is Justice: Rights and Wrongs.

I am not very familiar with Christian philosophy concerning virtue ethics, however I have read this book, which has a short section on Virtue Epistemology where he mentions Linda Zagzebski and Jonathan Kvanvig (both virtue epistemologists).

You may also enjoy Esther Meek, who has developed a thesis that all knowledge must be preceded by love. She is an interpreter of Michael Polanyi. Her Opus is the aptly titled "Loving to Know"