Moral Axioms?

I'd think the person was being boastful, being selfish, or lying.

These seem to be ingrained traits of the human being don't they? The point is, it would cause bad feeling of some sort, this advantage thing that is within our makeup.

Reminds me of some dialog from The Beatles Anthology series:

PAUL: Somehow the helicopter came. It landed down by the Ganges. This was on the banks of the Ganges in Rishikesh. And it was like, one of this "One of you can go up for a quick ride with Maharishi. Who's going to?".

"Me, sir, me, sir. Sir, sir!'' And, of course, it was John. John always would -- he was good at that, you know. So it got to be him, anyway. And I was saying, "Why, why were you so keen, like, to get up with Maharishi?'' He said, "Tell you the truth,'' he said, `"I thought he might slip me The Answer.'' [laughing] It was very John.

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Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you.

I understand the point and scary though it is it seems an odd thing to say, but I guess it depends what Jesus defined as "knew". Considering that there appears to be a whole book written by humans somewhere on each word of The Bible, I wonder what human cogitation over history has made of this word here, knew. In Heaven doesn't Jesus gain omnipotency? Or is that ability reserved just for The Father?

I believe that Jesus definitely knows me -- at least in the way I would define "know" -- otherwise who else I have been communicating with? Now if He says to me "I don't know you" then I will spend eternity in Hell saying "Well then, who was I talking to all those years?" Assuming I can still think through the excrutiating pain.

Julian Barnes wrote a book The History of The World in 10 1/2 Chapters which for me is one of the greatest books ever written, and in there the protagonist ends up in Heaven and Hitler is there. "What!" he demands, "happened to Hell?" In the book it turns out there isn't any Hell, merely a theme park filled with skeletons and devils played by out-of-work actors. As his heavenly informant explains, "that's all people want nowadays".

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It is Saturday night and I should be home from G'burg. But my flight Friday evening was canceled and no flights were available until Sunday night. So I'm in a hotel near Dulles. And I'm in a foul mood.

Ouch sorry to hear that. Is there any way you can turn this to your advantage? I may have mentioned this before, I went on a 3-week long bike trip of France and Spain with a friend in 1992, aiming for London-Paris-Barcelona-Costa Del Sol-Seville-Madrid-Santander-Bordeaux-Back up through France to UK. Well those are the towns I can remember - we were in it to see the Olympics in Barcelona and the Exposition in Seville, both of which were excellent.

However, his Kawasaki 550 had a glass circle installed into the metal engine casing, a bright idea by some engineer, enabling the customer to look into the engine to see the oil level and if it needed topping up. Going North from Seville to Madrid we were behind schedule so were +100 mph all the way with temperatures approaching 50 degrees c! at points. This little glass dohicky blew out and that was the end of the trip for him, he was recovered to Madrid and then flew home a week later. Meanwhile I returned home alone, which was fun but would have preferred to have finished the trip with my buddy. That good old Suzuki 500 which a customer IT Operations manager loaned me :)

Anyway, while he was stuck in Madrid for a week he fell in love with the place, he spent one more year in the UK then moved to Spain permanently, he now has a French/Spanish missus and two kids, one of which I am Godfather to, the other to which I am an "uncle".

So if he had never had the "bad luck" - and at the time it felt disasterous - then his life would have been very different. Now, I'm not saying a 2 night delay is the same thing, but you get my point.

John Lennon said "There is no place you can be that isn't where you're meant to be". I find this comforting when I am late or held up in airports etc.

Yes I know he also said "I am the egg man goo goo ga choob".

PS. It seems that the flying economy has recovered from 9/11 anway - if the system is running at 100%.

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I'm trying to think of a case where morality would dictate one thing and reason clearly dictate something opposite.

Well the example I am thinking of is some cases of going to war. I'm arguing here that war is not rational of course. After all, people will die won't they? And typically the people that die will NOT be the people that send the others that WILL die into the war. But morally war may be the required action.

But only if I had a firm conviction of what was moral.

It's all about definitions and what we define to be "moral". Someone else (source unknown) highlights some of the issues here:

It should be clear that science and rationalism does not have any inherent value judgment in them.

Certain social views are not objective statements of facts, so are not dictated by rationalism. Examples of such ideologies are views on homosexual issues (like gay marriage), abortion rights, communism versus capitalism (in the sense of economic systems) etc.

On many issues on morality and ethics, one cannot take a rational stand without the help of some additional moral axioms.

In logic one draws a conclusion using valid rules of inferences starting from one or more premises (axioms). So to form a rational conclusion on an issue of morality one has to rely on some axiom or premise. An example of a premise may be to adopt "it is immoral to kill an innocent life" as a moral axiom.

Is the conclusion "abortion is immoral" then rational? If life is understood as defined in biology then it certainly is. If life is redefined as a human being after birth then it is not a rational conclusion. So the problem reduces to unambiguously defining "Life" in the axiom "it is immoral to kill an innocent life", to decide if the conclusion is valid or not.

Although science defines life unambiguously, that definition will not be acceptable to those who have adopted an a priori stand that abortion is not immoral, as that definition will contradict their ideological stand. At least we can see that taking either position on abortion is consistent with rationalism. But it will be inconsistent with rationalism to adopt one definition of life in one context and another definition in another context. That will be a fallacy of equivocation, and rationalism is inconsistent with logical fallacies.

In the case of abortion we saw that because of the ambiguity of the word "Life", it is not possible to assign a rational status on a stand on abortion. But in cases where a moral axiom is expressed in unambiguous terms and is universally accepted as an axiom, then it is possible to decisively judge if a conclusion based on the axiom is rational or not.