Are you naturally or inherently good?

What's your starting point?

Are you born good or bad or neither?

A blank sheet or a conscious being with inherent flaws?


Now we've discussed many times the moral argument and the following premises are necessary for it to coherently exist:

1. An ultimate purpose of life and author
2. A moral author to describe how we ought and ought not to live
3. A moral code from that author
4. A judicial system to judge if the moral code has been breached
5. A penal system to bring justice.

And how the God of the Bible provides all that and then introduces forgiveness of that breach of the moral code by justice being fulfilled by another, Jesus Christ, motivated by His love for us - to restore mankind to each other and God Himself.

You may not agree with these, but where is the contradiction ?

Moving on:

Are you perfect?

Is anyone?

When you say "no, I am not", what definition or benchmark or moral reference point are you using to judge that you are not?  It can't be relative. Perfection doesn't exist in relativism.  (if you say "I am perfect when measured, say against another flawed image or idea, then you're misusing the term - "without fault")

Immediately you recognise that (moral) perfection exists, then you are immediately accepting and recognising the possibility of its existence.  Who then could possibly be perfect?

God.

Have you ever read Genesis Chpts 1-3? Especially chpt 3?

God gives mankind 1 rule: don't eat from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil - the consequence if you do: death.  (separation from God).

Before that event, mankind was perfect.

Mankind can't even keep one law vs 1,000 laws.

If God gave you 100 ways to be reconciled with Him, do you think we'd have wanted 101 ways?  i.e my own way, on my terms ?
Do relationships grounded in love work like that?

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+5&version=NIV

Have you ever read Matthew Chapters 5-7? The Sermon on the Mount.

It's Jesus moralising. And there is a lot of it.

Would you disagree with any of his teaching?  Is Jesus evil or immoral for the content of his moralising?

The West for the most part has been grounded in Matthew Chapter 5-7.

It's not the enlightenment which was grounded in an imaginary "social contract" of "don't hurt me and I won't hurt you". A poor man's Golden Rule offspring.

Genesis 1-3 and Matthew 5-7 provide a pretty decent explanation of my current predicament.

I recognise the possibility of perfection by knowing I am an imperfect moral accountable being.

I recognise the depravity of my own autonomy to do it "my way, my terms, in my time". But in relationships that doesn't work.

And I admire true moral teaching when it comes up - because it speaks to my heart, mind and soul, but also make sense.

Do we have a moral responsibility to pursue the truth?

Now I can fully appreciate this sounds like a very very dry topic and tertiary based philosophical question, entirely unrelated to your day to day existence.

But bear with me.

It's actually incredibly profound and important.

Why?

There are two parts to this question actually, and it has a few presuppositions baked into it that also need to be accepted in order for the question to be valid.

The two parts are this:

1. Do we have a moral obligation to pursue the truth of a matter?

2. If we discover or uncover the truth of the matter, what moral obligations do we have to accept it?

Let me set the scene with a typical scene that we have seen repeated throughout history:

A man is falsely brought before a judge to be condemned for his crime.

The judge has been called in to judge the accused under a law that is not under his jurisdiction.

The man is flogged under the ancient Roman system with a whip akin to the "cat of nine tails", where they assign 40 lashes, but only do 39, because 40 can kill the person.

Before condemning the man to a brutal form of death that was designed to have death elongated through extreme suffering - the crucifixion, (which, by the way is where we get the word "excruciating" from  - ' out of the cross'), a conversation is had between the accused the the judge:

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"37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

38 “What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there...'

John 18: 37-38

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Now if you are a septic, you may scoff at the validity of this historical event or the authenticity of the exchange. 

So be it. 

But here's the rub gents :

Coming back to the question part a and b - what if it did occur? What if it is the truth? 

Do you have a moral obligation to find out? And if it turns out to be the truth, what do you do with it?  Are you morally culpable if you reject the truth of the matter?  Are you responsible for the consequences that follow? 

Is your presuppositions of skepticism or personal dislike a reasonable, plausible justification for either ignoring the obligation to pursue the truth of a matter or rejecting it outright? 

Let me put it another way. 

Play the same scenario out above and it's you in the dock. 

What is the obligation of the Judge? The accusers? 

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If there is no ultimate judge or arbiter, but just imperfect, fallible humans with evidence that is opaque. What is the obligation of the jury?

Have you ever been on Jury duty? What is your moral obligation?

Why?

Here's my contention, in the case of Jesus Christ, it is recorded that Jesus said it 19 times "Truly truly I tell you...." ; he said many times 'very truly I say to you..."; he said "I am the Truth. (John 14:6)... he said "if you hold to my teaching then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free" John 8:31-32.

And finally, the Son  of God, is standing before a mere mortal, who is going to untruthfully judge him to a brutal death march and questions him to find out The Truth of Jesus' situation, to find out if Jesus had breached a moral law that was originally from God himself, the Torah.  And Jesus says : "I testify to the truth - and those who listen to me, are on the side of truth."

And what does the judge do?

He asks Jesus, the embodiment of Truth, "What is truth" .... and doesn't wait for Jesus's answer...

Is that what we do?

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Is your past important?

Is your past important ?

Does it have a role to play in the meaning and purpose of your life?

I assume there are many moments that you are proud of, would want to recreate, remember with affection, hark back to.

Inversely the same for moments that you'd rather forget, are remorseful, ashamed of, need forgiveness?

No?

Yes?

Do you regret ? For missed opportunities or in need of forgiveness?

If the past is important, is the future just as much?

Why?

There is nothing that can be done to undone, so why bother?

The future has yet to happen, so why worry? After all it's just an illusionary neurological physical state that you have no control over? Like this conversation?

Yet we have an innate sense of time.

Yet we have an innate sense of morality.

Yet we have an innate sense of seeking purpose, meaning, coherence, justice, mercy, truth.

We know injustice when we see it, we are perplexed or outraged when injustice occurs.

When a crime is found gone unpunished for decades and then finally brought to justice....

Why?

The past matters when seen through the prism of time, morality, truth, justice and the knowledge that we have a finite time.

Does it matter if justice is served now or a 1,000 years from now?

You often hear of an inmate saying he or she is "serving time".   Time being the currency.

A well respected 20th century philosopher Albert Camus once said that "death"was philosophy's only problem.

Could it be that the this thing called time alerts us to the immediacy of our futility and haplessness. We can't delay it, slow it.

We can't run from our past.

Yet in a world ingrained with a morality, a justice and penal system, time is inextricably married to it.

Malcolm Muggeridge a journalist who experienced two world wars, the rise and fall of Russia and lived in India and was a latecomer to Christ, said this of his past:

"Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful, with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo jumbo … the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal or trivial to be endurable. This of course is what the cross [of Christ] signifies, and it is the cross more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ."

In Romans 12: 17-19 it says: Don’t hit back; discover beauty in everyone. If you’ve got it in you, get along with everybody. Don’t insist on getting even; that’s not for you to do. “I’ll do the judging,” says God. “I’ll take care of it.”

Hebrews 9: 27-28:

Everyone has to die once, then face the consequences. Christ’s death was also a one-time event, but it was a sacrifice that took care of sins forever. And so, when he next appears, the outcome for those eager to greet him is, precisely, salvation.

1 Corithians 11: 25-26

“In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.…”

(There is a proclamation of the past, in the present, and looking to the hope of the future, wrapped up in this one re-enactment of Holy Communion)

Ecclesiastes 3:11

"Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end."

(While we know the past, the present and future, we have delude ourselves of our impending demise, yet hope for an eternity)

Could it be that God has structured the world in such a way that He's trying to get our attention in the most profound and loudest, consistent and persistent way?

Could it be that God has structured life that our past makes us who we are and that despite our protestations we wouldn't change it because we would not be who we are today?

Could it be that God is giving you and me the maximum opportunity to make decisions about life and relationship with Him and others ?

"We look back upon history and what do we see?

Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counterrevolutions, wealth accumulating and and then disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of the “rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.”

In one lifetime I have seen my own  countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favorite song, that “God who’s made them mighty would make them mightier yet.”

I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius.

I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of military weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests.

All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind.

England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and even bankruptcy.

Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy.

Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominate for some three decades.

America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victories of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate. All in one lifetime, all in one lifetime, all gone. Gone with the wind.

Behind the debris of these solemn supermen, and self-styled imperial diplomatists, there stands the gigantic figure of one, because of whom, by whom, in whom and through whom alone, mankind may still have peace: The person of Jesus Christ. I present him as the way, the truth, and the life."

—Malcom Muggeridge, “But Not of Christ,” Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, ed. Cecil Kuhne (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 29-30.