What took up most of my afternoon today:

I spent a fair number of hours today having a rather... spirited (yes thats a good word) discussion on various topics on my guitar forum of all places. check it out, the link (click on the title of this post) is about where it started, the rest is about the moon landing conspiracy and other such things.

If any of the guys from the forum want to continue disscussing stuff then you can do it though the comments feature on this post. (I need to get a chat room on this thing!).

Christian Ethics

[if have decided to publish this article unfinished and update it as I work on it so anyone can give me ideas/criticism as I write. Enjoy:]


It might be noticed that my position on ethics stated below (Absolute Theistic Morality) is a vague concept that needs to be explored further.

Various ethical theories have been suggested in the past, functionalism and divine command theory being the main ones. While both these theories have huge problems as complete ethical theories, including being incompatible with scripture, they do have limited usefulness. For example: sexual morality can be understood under functionalism (eg. God created men and women in a particular way and for a Particular relationship and it is wrong to go against this); and specific moral events can be seen as instances of divine command theory (eg. Adam and Eve eating form the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was wrong and was punished, not because there was anything intrinsically wrong about the fruit, but simply because God said not to.) A different theory, however, is required to describe the complete ethical system of the Christian.

"'You must love the lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and with all your mind.' this is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: love your neighbor as yourself.' All the other commandments and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments." (Mathew 22:37-40 NLT)

The command to "love the lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and with all your mind" and to "love your neighbor as yourself" is what I will call 'the Love Principle'. However, it cannot serve as a sole ethical principle by itself because it lacks motivation: just why should we obey this principle? One answer seems both obvious and obviously wrong: "If you love me, obey my commandments" (John 14:15 NLT). As the Love Principle is a commandment then this verse applies to it; but this is clearly circular. The verse says that obedience follows from love of God but we are looking for motivation for loving God (note that this verse can apply to the second aspect of the Love Principle, namely to "love your neighbor as yourself" but it will still lack motivation if an agent doesn't already love God).

Fear is another possibility; we should love God because we fear his wraith. This however seems to be an impossibility: how can we genuinely love God out of fear? Note that we still can and should fear God, but this fear cannot act as a motivating factor in loving him.

Just what can motivate our love of God? I propose that loving God is a natural response to who God is and who we are in relation to Him. God is an omni-benevolent being and we are his creation; loving God is a perfectly natural response to his love of us and and superiority to us.

The metaethics aside, what does the Love Principle mean and what does it say about right and wrong?

Love, especially as the christian understands it, is very complex, so firstly I will outline some things that love is not. Love is not an emotion (although it may have corrosponding emotions). As DC Talk put it: "Love is a verb". Neither does love require emotion or even a attitude of 'like', in fact love could be discribed as acting as though you like someone even when you don't (perhaps even especially when you don't). Love is more than that however, as it requires complete selflessness, always acting in the best interests of others.