Sacrifice. (bring your own dagger)
Route 66 is (in the mythological songland version of the US) where you go in search of kicks, highs and all the great stuff that makes America great again and leads inevitably to Californicaton and the dissolute hippies.
Highway 61 is orthogonal to that dimension of satisfaction. Where the roads cross is (presumably) where the other Bob, Johnson, mythologically sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar virtuosity. But I'm heading South.
[quote=Bob Dylan]God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61[/quote]
This is the bible story that, even more than Job, popularises atheism. The very idea that there could be some principle adherence to which would be more important than one's own child's life is so repugnant on the face of it, that even in the bible, God has to relent once He has established His absolute authority.
It's a trolley problem of a story - your son is tied to the rails and you can switch the trolley onto another track where my three daughters are tied. (This of course is the devil's version.)
The reason I call it the devil's version is that it relies on a moral economic model of the world, where lives have additive value such that profit and loss moral evaluations can be made. Much of conventional religion panders (as I see it) to the general notion that a sacrifice only makes sense as a kind of investment - the way, eg. I sacrifice some income now to have a pension in the future.
So did you just kill my children there, or did you obey God and sacrifice your son? Are you on Highway 61, or route 66? You don't have to answer, it's rhetorical, it's an exercise in moral geography. It's a personal matter, a question of character, and a long way from the science thread that started me on this transportation saga.
Highway 61 is orthogonal to that dimension of satisfaction. Where the roads cross is (presumably) where the other Bob, Johnson, mythologically sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar virtuosity. But I'm heading South.
[quote=Bob Dylan]God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61[/quote]
This is the bible story that, even more than Job, popularises atheism. The very idea that there could be some principle adherence to which would be more important than one's own child's life is so repugnant on the face of it, that even in the bible, God has to relent once He has established His absolute authority.
It's a trolley problem of a story - your son is tied to the rails and you can switch the trolley onto another track where my three daughters are tied. (This of course is the devil's version.)
The reason I call it the devil's version is that it relies on a moral economic model of the world, where lives have additive value such that profit and loss moral evaluations can be made. Much of conventional religion panders (as I see it) to the general notion that a sacrifice only makes sense as a kind of investment - the way, eg. I sacrifice some income now to have a pension in the future.
So did you just kill my children there, or did you obey God and sacrifice your son? Are you on Highway 61, or route 66? You don't have to answer, it's rhetorical, it's an exercise in moral geography. It's a personal matter, a question of character, and a long way from the science thread that started me on this transportation saga.
Comments (57)
How about this, don't create the sacrifice in the first place.. Unless having children itself is some sacrifice to the gods of society and tradition.
Besides, when thinning the herd, you take out the females, so there's that.
In God we trust.
You go with Bob, I'll go with Randy:
[i]I burn down your cities - how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we
You all must be crazy to put your faith in me
That's why I love mankind
You really need me
That's why I love mankind[/i]
Brotherly love:
Human digits are formed in the womb by the selective death of embryonic cells in the limb ends. Incomplete cell death results in webbed hands/feet.
But the state of nature is what we have fallen from, as the story goes,
Quoting The Opposite
Well aren't we multicultural! Let me speculate on the rationale since your contribution is a tad telegraphic. We of the Christian tradition might have considered crucifixion an honour, even to the extent that the mythos has it that St Paul, (or was it St Peter?) preferred to be crucified upside down so as not to o.d. on the honour. which is to say that the highway 61 of ancient times continued right down to S America.
Your wisdom is necessarily the fruit of other's folly.
Yes. So what do you need old chap? That's where we start, isn't it? A bloodthirsty vengeful deity that has to be propitiated. And the Christian twist is that God sacrifices himself for us. So you are unsatisfied by God's sacrifice, and also by your own? I guess you better get back to route 66.
Pigs are jolly fellows, and i won't have a word said against them. Au contraire. I'll have a song sung in their praise.
This isn't fucking facebook! Say something, don't just post memes!
I felt that I could afford a little indulgence.
Didn't you advise against responding in the OP? The pictures are just decorations for your thread. Get a sense of aesthetics.
Crickets are chirpin’, the water is high
There’s a soft cotton dress on the line hangin’ dry
Window wide open, African trees
Bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze
Not a word of goodbye, not even a note
She gone with the man
In the long black coat
Somebody seen him hanging around
At the old dance hall on the outskirts of town
He looked into her eyes when she stopped him to ask
If he wanted to dance, he had a face like a mask
Somebody said from the Bible he’d quote
There was dust on the man
In the long black coat
Preacher was a talkin’, there’s a sermon he gave
He said "Every man’s conscience is vile and depraved
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it’s you who must keep it satisfied."
It ain’t easy to swallow, it sticks in the throat
She gave her heart to the man
In the long black coat
There are no mistakes in life some people say
And it's true sometimes you can see it that way
I went down to the river but I just missed the boat
She went with the man
In the long black coat
There’s smoke on the water, it’s been there since June
Tree trunks uprooted, 'neath the high crescent moon
Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force
Somebody is out there beating a dead horse
She never said nothing, there was nothing she wrote
She went with the man
In the long black coat
-- BaBob Dylan
Had this been a total submission to God, @unenlightened?
I think that there's a certain truth to what you glean at of the so-called "hippies". The traded the marches and songs of the Civil Rights Movement for Happenings and Psychedelia, thereby effectively creating the various classes that exist within Pop Culture today. Though I like Happenings and Psychedelia, as well as every form of free expression, there's a way of interpreting political events following a series of events in 1968 as having resulted in the form of political suicide that is to engage in political terrorism. It's just a way of interpreting them, though.
If anyone actually plans on engaging in an actual conversation about this, I feel like this article could, perhaps, be somehow relevant.
With that being said, I should also like to quote Bob Dylan. "Keep a good head; always carry a lightbulb."
As to Kierkegaard's argument that this story shows faith in its purest form, I don't get it. Abraham didn't have faith in God, he had empirical evidence of his existence. God told him he'd allow Sara to become preggers at 99 years old, and then she did. That'd make me a believer.
Quoting Shawn
I reckon it's not the most interesting part, personally. It happens when you have actually got your knife out and bared the neck of your most prized possession. We haven't even made it to the right highway, yet.
This thread is too monocultural; Christianity doesn't even have a god of death - only evil. The Aztecs had a god of death who lived with his wife in a windowless house.
I prefer to do my own decorating.
Quoting thewonder
There's a lot of scope for interesting diversions there. But I'm going to rule out politics as doomed to failure to the extent that it attempts to solve moral problems with social structures. In the distinction I am trying to look at, politics belongs to route 66 - reward and punishment. If you want to reduce drunk driving there are two ways to go, you can introduce laws and breathalyzers, or you can stop drink-driving. It's not that politics is unimportant, but it is all amelioration of psychological/moral problems.
From my position, I would say that either you or Kierkegaard has misunderstood the nature of faith. Empirical evidence is irrelevant to faith. My belief in justice is not increased by the discovery that it occasionally prevails, or decreased by the observation that it commonly does not.
If you want to expound that cultural understanding, I am listening. But my own culture is what I speak from. But I suspect you are bullshitting and know not of what you speak.
Why do you have to talk from that?
Quoting unenlightened
I'm not bullshitting, but I'm not sure I'm contributing much. It's difficult to answer the question because I don't have any children. Although, if I did have a son I think I would switch the trolley - not sure which road that is... 66?
Because it is alive in me. As alive as opposition is in you. It's difficult to talk about Aztec religion because it is not alive; it is not practiced. It is, therefore only brought into the conversation through the modernist Western scientific lens of archeology. So the multiculturalism is a pretence, and you speak from the same tradition as me.
Luckily those other means were forthcoming. Two on-the-nose synchronicities today.
(1)There's a long lecture series I'm listening to, and today happened to be the episode on Christianity. The lecturer devoted about 1/3 of that to the discussion of agape, about 2/3's of that to 1 Corinthians 13.
(2) One of my daily rituals is to hit up a random-bible verse website and then read the full chapter that verse is from. Some days you get page-long censuses of tribes, but today, I shit you not, I got Romans 4 - Paul's take on Abraham
A preponderance of well-arrayed tea leaves incentivizes me to respond.
****
The first thing I would say is that I'm confused at the intensity of this moral reaction if its simply in response to my thread. That thread was about the systematic misuse of surveys in academia; this thread, which cites mine disapprovingly, is about willingness-to-sacrifice-children as proof of moral character. (and I'm not sure if it's intentionally leaning-into the Kierkegaard stuff I mentioned on the other thread, or if its a coincidence.)
But the second thing: I just don't follow your OP - I get the threads of
[true moral courage versus moral mercantilism ( cost-benefit etc)]
[hippy hedonism versus the moral path]
[pop culture mythology]
& I feel the tone of the loom
but the last few paragraphs confuse me, and I don't think its just because I lack the moral character to grasp them. I think the general meme-y reaction is because of that - it's hard to parse the point.
----
We're both given to a sort of peacocking, i think. We both do it, the OP was doing it, and I've responded by doing it. I think we should cut through it here though, if we can. How would you sum up the OP in a few sentences? I promise to respond myself in a few sentences, in plainspeak.
What would you do if the trolley was on my son's track?
I'm not sure I can add much to your understanding.The op is a provocation rather than argument, along the lines you indicate, and directed at the usual suspects of post enlightenment thinking. (the clue's in the name). But for you, this is as formal as I can be bothered to make it.
P1. No good deed ever goes unpunished.
Therefore, virtue is sacrifice.
So the trolley thing is just a comment on the state of a certain form of consequentialism. What a feeble tale it is compared to Abraham and Issac on which to hang one's identity! Would you pull the lever or not? I really don't give a fuck if that's all life is about.
And of course, I am asking for help. Always I want to discuss what is beyond my reach; so as always I am frustrated by recitations of received wisdom. To be clear, I am not interested in Christianity at all, except in so far as it pollutes the environment, as it were. But I invite you to my funeral, and this is the hymn I have chosen
Why do we keep tying our children to the tracks? What's wrong with an altar and a knife?
-and I still think fixing academia requires restructuring academic incentive structures. But that is for the other thread.
Well on this thread I can perhaps present my position more clearly. The Academy resides on route 66 despite its monastic origins. So I grant your point for the reformation of the academy, simply noting how 'Jackal' that is. But down here on highway 61 where we get the killing done, and the dissolution of the monasteries and so on, there are no grades, and no tenure on offer. Say a true word or go straight to hell, as the Zen masters put it.
Science (as opposed to and distinct from the academy) only works if it is pursued religiously, and if it doesn't work, it's a steaming pile. So likewise, I am all for reforming the safeguarding policies of the Catholic church, but if the priests don't keep the faith, there is nothing left, and the congregation will drift away to some conspiracy theory that brings them comfort.
How unfortunate for it appears that it needs to be interpreted correctly for very important moral lessons in it to come through.
Quoting unenlightened
First things first, why is taking "...one's own child's life...", as you put it, "...so repugnant..."? Let me answer that question for you. Would you feel the same way, "...repugnant...", if it were another person's child? No, of course not! You may empathize with another parent who's put in a similar situation but let's not delude ourselves, the emotions involved are of lesser intensity or, sometimes, even absent. However, if it was really about the child, the child as a thinking, feeling person, brimming with great potential, you should feel the same way about another child as you would about yours. This isn't so. Ergo, feeling "...repugnant..." isn't really about your child per se but about you. That Abraham's situation is described as a sacrifice betrays this fact - Abraham (you) is losing his child but, for reasons provided above, the loss isn't the child's but Abraham's (yours). When I say "...the loss isn't the child's..." I don't mean that the child involved has nothing to lose (a full life is definitely something to lose); what I mean is Abraham's (your) pain as you're asked to make the sacrifice is not about a child but about Abraham's (your) child. In other words, the sacrifice and all its emotional accompaniments are all about Abraham (you). So, don't try to give people the impression that Abraham/you care about Abraham's/your child. It's utterly false. I know this sounds harsh on a parent, I'm one myself, but at times one must call it as one sees it. What does all this mean? In seven simple words, "morality requires you to surrender your ego." Abraham has to eventually come to realize that his "love" for his child is but self-love, vanity, ego, in disguise and God wants him to see past that disguise and recognize fact for fact which is that so long as one's ego, self-love, is allowed free reign, morality is going to keep its distance from our communities, villages, towns, cities, metropolises, etc.
Secondly, my experience with hatred has been, quite evidently, very negative. I've heard people scream at those whom they hate (foes, enemies) with the words, "I'll kill you!!" What is god asking Abraham to do? Kill his son, right? With that one command, God puts Abraham in a tight spot - he has to treat that which he loves as that which he hates. After all, Abraham may have surely met someone whom he'd have loved to use his dagger on and relate that to what he's commanded to do, off his child with his dagger. God then is attempting to teach Abraham a moral lesson - treat the ones you hate same as the ones you love. Then God goes on to stop Abraham from actually following through with his decision to sacrifice his child. What this achieves is a sudden separation of hate (for your enemies) & love (for your child) from a point when the two couldn't be distinguished (kill your child as you would an enemy). This closing event in Abraham's tryst with God is surely going to send massive shockwaves through Abraham's sense of right and wrong and should've made him see the light as it were.
My two bitcoins worth. Warning! Idiosyncracy.
Because, as God commandeth -- Thou shalt have no other gods before Me!
What I don't understand is why you want to make a new interpretation and persuade us that you are telling a better story.
Quoting TheMadFool
It's not that I disagree with your seven simple words, but that is obviously not what this story is about at all, because if it was about that and everyone had got it wrong up 'til now, it would be a crap teaching story. There are stories that teach ego renunciation but not this one.
:chin:
Somebody never read Kierkegaard. :confused:
Principle of charity among other things I suppose. Put God and Abraham in the best light possible.
Quoting unenlightened
Take a long, hard look at Abraham's story. The obvious conclusion is god is being a really big jerk and Abraham too in his own little way manages to make the situation from really bad to worse for Christianity/Judaism/Islam. My gut-instincts, for what they're worth, immediately inform me that something doesn't add up. The whole episode doesn't make sense at all - a good god telling a faithful, pious man to kill his son. All I did was added what I felt was necessary to make it all hang together as a beautiful moral lesson, fit for all generations.
by virtue of his power,
and one who was great
by virtue of his hope,
and one who was great
by virtue of his love,
but Abraham was the greatest of all,
great by that power
whose strength is powerlessness,
great by that wisdom
which is foolishness,
great by that hope
whose form is madness,
great by the love
that is hatred to oneself."
I think the Hong's say "personal identity" at the end, which is obviously what he means, but it messes up the rhythm.
Fair enough, but being let to cultivate a person's way of life is what the Faustian bargain is made for. Highway 61 intersects Highway 66. I'm fairly confused by the rest of your original post.
It's probably my mistake. I just wanted to have a conversation about The Man Who Sold the World.
As to whether I have Kierkegaard right, I don't know, but I took his position that Abraham showed the perfect faith in God when he unquestionably agreed to sacrifice his son without objection. My point was that he didn't show faith as we understand it in a contemporary sense because Abraham had no reason to question God. God's existence didn't require any leap of faith. He was as obvious as the sun and sky in Genesis. The Old Testament figures didn't engage in an ongoing battle between theism and atheism. The question was whose god was best.
But to your other comment, do you not have a rational basis (as opposed to an empirical one) for believing in the existence of justice or must faith also play a role?
You have misunderstood Kierkegaard. In Fear and Trembling, he states that Abraham could only act upon "the strength of the absurd" and that it would be impossible to understand a person who has made the "movement of faith". God promised Abraham a son which he was given, Isaac. It was through Isaac that the progeny that was promised to Abraham was to come. God then demanded that Abraham sacrifice Isaac. There was no possibility of Abraham rationally believing that God would fulfill his promise. He could only act "upon the strength of the absurd". The story ought not to be interpreted as a moral fable about devotion as it commonly is within a Christian context; it is a way of calling to light what faith is like. People take it that Abraham must have had blind faith when that was precisely what he was denied.
I do not require justice to exist in order to believe in justice. Rather the inverse, it is the existence of injustice that demands that I believe in justice. The builder has to have faith in the architect's plans, because the building does not exist. What he does not do, my sensible builder, is complain that the plans are too thin to hold up the roof.
We can be faithful or unfaithful to justice.
If I grasp the story right, the ultimate destination of highway 61 transcends any notion or feeling of sacrifice and faith is realized. More realistically on highway 61, some comfort is better than none, and we can soldier-on without being undone.
Eventually, people who have consigned themselves to evil grow old and try to amend what plights they have wrought, which is all well and good and can restore a certain degree of faith in humanity, but, in the grand scheme of things is often too little to late.
Your crypto-Fascist spy within the Metal scene grows tired of the drug trade and his long black beard begins to show a touch of grey. He uses his place in the sun to keep his many wolves at bay. Some of them know of how he got there, though, and their long black beards grow before they come to do the same.
Are we going to get to talk about The Man Who Sold the World in this thread or not?
I'll understand if no one is interested in doing so, but, in passing conversation, I have previously been known to have been willing to invoke "Glam eschatology".
Well, I was standing at the intersection when an elegant gentleman offered me a deal...
I think there is a global trend from nature to technology, yes. Developing cities look a lot like Dubai with skyscrapers and all. I think at some point people will realize that a fully artificial life isn't fully satisfactory.
We already know that a wholly natural life is unsatisfactory, so my guess is a symbiosis between the two.
I don't know what human digits are. Do you mean that humans are numb, number, numbers? I don't think life is an equation to be solved.
digits = fingers and toes. Sorry, English is a wretched language for non-native speakers. The human form develops in part through selective cell death. Thus human sacrifice is "natural". What I mean is that Nature is cruel or kind, makes sacrifices or cooperates, according to circumstance and according to its nature. One can to an extent imagine human nature as somewhat like that of chimpanzees and bonobos, but the question of what one ought to do must presume that one's nature does not dictate, and nor does the environment -physical or social.
To put one's faith in God is to harken to a moral voice that has no material existence and is utterly mysterious. What I ought to do is not what has to be, or what I want, or what you want; rather it is "the space at the wheel's hub that makes it useful" as Lao Tzu put it. The no-thing of creativity.
Is abortion human sacrifice? Compare and contrast the story of Abraham and Issac with that of an unmarried woman of small means considering abortion. Speak for God.
Quoting unenlightened
It's very poetic. Yet I wonder how this translates to a functioning government. Or any other form of authority. How do you create laws based on nothingness?
I'm with you that academia is something different from science. At the same time most of scientific practice requires significant funding. This is an extreme example, but: while it's possible to go into great solitude to meditate and pray, it is not possible to build the Large Hadron Collider this way. And whil there are solitary regions of science- say, Einstein doing gedanken experiments in the patent office - even these solitary pursuits bloom out of - and require verification by - the whole intricate expensive, apparatus of equipment, peer-review etc. (I'm sure scientists, if any were to see this, would probably roll their eyes at how clunky my understanding is...but the general idea I think is right.)
I agree that none of this works if its only institutions, and no one believes or cares if the findings are accurate. But we're all really good at self-deception, and I think people skillfully and effortlessly rationalize slippages as being ultimately in service of truth. I think a perhaps useful analogy is a relationship: you can have real faith in the relationship, and true love for the other person, but that is a guiding light that orients you while you go through the difficult work of figuring out what the snares and difficult patterns of any relationship are, and how to work together to overcome them. In failing relationships, you often have people who still have faith in (a progressively abstract idea of) their love, even as they're unconsciously choosing to rationalize (or ignore) problems that feel too intractable to overcome.
One idea that's gaining a lot of steam in scientific circles is pre-registration of studies. That means you let everyone know in advance when you're going to do a study, and exactly what your methodology will be. The idea, as far as I understand it, is that it prevents doing multiple studies until you get the results you're looking for, or adjusting methodology when you get the data to better suggest meaningful findings. (I don't think this is mostly scientists lying for prestige. I think it's usually more a matter of self-deception. You're going to get a ton of noise when you do studies, especially if statistics are involved, and I think they see it as trying to frame the findings to best convey what they believe the data imperfectly shows.) With things like pre-registration, you have a community working together to collectively overcome the traps they've got caught up in. This doesn't seem to be enough yet - but it's that kind of thing that seems like the way out : institutional reforms that come out of dedication to the ideal of science.
To tie it back to the thread's operative metaphor - travel (and sacrifice) usually requires taking a whole bunch of different roads
I would answer these,
Q1 save my child
Q2 save the 3 girls
Q3 I don't sacrifice my child
Q4 I don't sacrifice the girls.
What matters is how we prioritise these questions. I've layed them out in order of importance, according to me, personally.
Most people would save their own son, I think. The relationship between a parent and child, is built heavily on trust and respect. Also, its our duty to protect our children from harm.
The difference with Abe, is that he is doing his son a favor. Hes sending his son to God sooner. His Son doesn't have to risk going to hell by fault of his own sin, he gets a free pass.