Somewhere someone claimed that of the seven deadly sins: pride, covetness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth…. anger is the one left out by many of those who try to remember them. Could that be because anger, unlike the others, can be righteous and justified?
On the notion of being “chosen”:
Face it : Uriah lost his wife and life unfairly: a morality of exceptionalism; a different morality for rulers vs. no one is above the law and yet, the law is just carving in a rock or scribbling on a piece of paper unless it is backed up by priests and police. See Yuval Harari’s Homo Deus
Plato and Christianity triparted us, Descartes divided us in two and soon we shall be quartered for Cybercabbage!
Catholic St. Thomas deduced the existence of god from His (sic k) Creation/Product. Protestantizing Kant pointed out that the product is both discoverd and created by us, driving god out of philosophy and into the arms of Nietzsche who laughted at Kant’s temerity and held a funeral for the Fantasy.
And speaking of telling the Transcendental to take a hike, or at least stay put in the Temple and stay out of the State House….. Credit for that goes to Plato’s Socrates who asked the question: Is something good or right because the gods say so, or do the gods say something is is good or right because it is? –Euthyphro
…..But there simply must be a MotherMaryf***** in charge who can see me masturbating behind the barn and punish me by making hair grow on me palms.
Tolerance: a parasitic relation between a virtuous person and a less virtuous victim/pain in the ass. Are we tolerant because we believe there is a long term gain for both?
Lots of death is stored and preserved and thereby cultivated in the churches in Southern Germany and Austria: animal skulls and the bones of saints tortured and killed for worshipping Sweet Baby Jesus. In the nearby castles there are exquisite torture machines. Reminders of our mortality and how salvation requires sacrifice and suffering.
Contrast this sort of salvation with the living seeds stored and saved as offerings in ancient temples in the East, where some have turned out to be the last living members of otherwise extinct varieties. The sacred here keeps death at bay.
Is it true Socrates and Plato fasted – that Pythagoras fasted forty days before his exams and Christ forty for fortitude some five or six hundred later – that we are now in the time of Jude and the Revelation comes next? Oh dear, what can the matter be…..?