West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary Pg. 145-6
Are certain beliefs and behaviors good because God commands them? Or does God command them because they are good?
….If certain beliefs are good only because God commands them, it means that God might change his directives at any time. Logically its possible that justice and charity would suddenly be foul and murder good. Incest and Child Molestation might be celebrated deeds…while the moral and ethical weaklings among us would succumb to such corrupt and contemptible temptations as love, generosity and hope.
Unthinkable, you say, that God would ever promulgate such an ethos? Why not—because it wouldn’t be right? If you think that way, you’ve slipped over to the other side. You’ve assumed that right and wrong, good and bad have a status prior to God and more fundamental than He. If God cannot, from his almighty and unknowable will, enjoin murder and cruelty as virtues, God is not limitless or omnipotent.
Thoughts?
1 comment:
AMERICA............ARE YOU LISTENING America, thirty years ago you abandoned us. You turned your back on us, forgot our sacrifices and classified us as losers, drug addicts and social outcasts. Hollywood gladly persisted in portraying us to a younger generation and to the world as drug-addled sadists, loners and borderline psychopaths.
You never welcomed us home with open arms or words of comfort for our wounds. Instead, we were greeted by sneering leftist, Communists and fifth columnists posing as students, professors and members of the almighty press, all anxious to document the return of its wayward sons to a country all too quick and pleased to forget us.
Our own families, force-fed a diet of lies by its trusted television newsmen, doubted the nature of our sacrifices and quietly, shamefully, accepted our unadorned return.
Faced with such singular ignominy, we quietly resumed our lives, jobs, educations and careers. The overwhelming majority of us succeeded in those interrupted lives and careers, becoming doctors,engineers,architects,lawyers,businessmen,accountants,and all other professions imaginable. We established businesses, became wealthy, raised families, paid taxes, had grandchildren. By any measure, we achieved the American dream-not because it was handed to us in payment for our service,sacrifices or victimization-but earned by us in spite of it.
For thirty years and more we quietly persevered in our march to heal the wound inflicted on our souls, not by the armed enemy we faced on the battlefield, but by our countrymen in our rear - some, but not very, very many at all, who had even worn the uniform. Such a deep wound had been healing slowly and without any help from those who gleefully inflicted it.
And then, one of the men who wielded the original knife...the dagger sharpened by his ideological masters in Hanoi,Beijing,Moscow and Havana...re-emerges from our past and begins to once again twist that knife he so deeply thrust into our backs. He now emerges, wearing the mantle of respectable member of Congress, who rode his once-shameful Vietnam service into the halls of political power...who now seeks the highest office in the land, professing to be one of us...the abandoned ones, the forgotten ones, the murderers, rapists and sadists he loudly and theatrically damned in front of a world watching, listening and reading in 1971. He now proudly proclaims shedding blood for a Nation whose service he condemned in 1971, whose medals he contemptuously threw on the Capital grounds and which he now wears, unstained by the shame of his rejecting them when his nation needed solidarity. He now claims heroism as his badge of honor in an army of savages not seen since the "hordes of Genghis Khan."
And he does all of this without shame, guilt or remorse in front of us, the forgotten ones, the abandoned ones...and what is most terrifing to us, the ones who were never ashamed of our service, who have quietly kept the faith of our fathers, who have faithfully remembered and honored our dead, who have never "cashed in" on our military service, and who had slowly and painfully learned to accept our anonymity - is the fact this opportunist, this sunshine patriot, this back-stabbing traitor to his uniformed compatriots...this elitist, gold-digger...may possibly become our Commander-in-Chief.
And you...America...our dearly loved Nation...who abandoned us so many years ago, and to whom we have remained faithful nonetheless...are you going to shame us once again?
A VIETNAM VETERAN
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