LAW IS NEITHER OBEYED DISOBEYED NOR BROKEN / AN EXISTENTIAL ONTOLOGICAL DISPROOF OF LAW

[Giuliano]

If I can freely kill you on account of misconduct toward me you will not misconduct yourself, you will absolutely maintain civility. . . .

This is pure abstraction with no relationship to reality. The opposite is shown to be true in reality.

People can be notoriously biased and jump to conclusions. When the former Yugoslavia broke apart, all kinds of people who had lived together peacefully suddenly got paranoid. Some had intermarried, many lived in the same apartment buildings. But suddenly, nationalistic fears were roused; and people grew suspicious of other nationalities. The idea became it was safer to shoot them before they could shoot you, and every act of violence added to the paranoia.

Cultures without governments that look after the rights of their citizens are frequently tribal. If your tribe is more powerful and the neighboring tribe has assets you want, you go kill the people and seize their assets. With no government at all, anyone who wanted your house and land could come kill you and take them.

The United States went a period of something similar in some areas where government was weak -- where families would fall into feuding. The feuds would go on and on.

I subscribe to John Locke's idea on government. We start with the individual's right to own property and to defend himself. In practice that sounds great, but it doesn't work that well; so people form a social contract to give up their right of self defense because a government can do it better. A government should exist then, not to oppress people, but to protect them from aggressive neighbors within the country and from military aggressors. If it does this well, people are happy. If it does it poorly, people will become dissatisfied and want to revolt.

In theory courts can be less biased than individuals who are involved in conflicts. Both parties in a conflict think, "I'm right and he's wrong." Both are apt to be biased in favor of their own interests. Again in theory courts can be less biased; but we see in practice they often demonstrate this bias or that. That kind of breakdown in the impartiality of the courts also leads to discontent with the result that people often feel they won't find justice in the courts, encouraging them to take justice into their own hands.

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

Your reasoning is often so limited, that I thought I would take a look to see how peaceful Australia really may have been. A short search quickly turned up this list:

17th century[edit]
1629: The Dutch East India Company sailing ship Batavia struck a reef near Beacon Island off the Western Australian coast. A subsequent mutiny and massacre took place among the survivors.

18th century[edit]
1790–1816: Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars

• 1795: Battle of Richmond Hill
• 1797: Battle of Parramatta

19th century[edit]
1804: Castle Hill convict rebellion

• 1808–1810: Rum Rebellion
• 1821–1827: Bathurst Wars
• 1824: Bathurst massacre
• 1828: Cape Grim massacre
• 1828–1832: Black War
• 1830s–1840s: Wiradjuri Wars
• 1830: Bathurst Rebellion
• 1833 or 1834: Convincing Ground massacre
• 1834: Battle of Pinjarra
• 1838: Waterloo Creek massacre
• 1838: Myall Creek massacre
• 1838: Faithfull massacre
• 1839: Murdering Gully massacre
• 1839: Campaspe Plains massacre
• 1840: Battle of Yering
• 1843: Warrigal Creek massacre
• 1840–1850: Gippsland massacres
• 1845: Battle of One Tree Hill
• 1849: Avenue Range Station massacre
• 1850s: Richmond River massacres
• 1851–1854: Eureka Rebellion
  • 1851: Forest Creek Monster Meeting
  • 1853: Anti-Gold Licence Association
  • 1853: Bendigo Petition
  • 1854: Ballarat Reform League
  • 1854: Battle of Eureka Stockade
• 1857: Hornet Bank massacre
• 1857–1858: Massacre of the Yeeman
• 1860–1861: Lambing Flat Riots
• 1861: Battle of Yindurupilly
• 1861: Cullin-La-Ringo massacre
• 1865: La Grange expedition
• 1867: Goulbolba Hill massacre
• 1868: Flying Foam Massacre
• 1873: Battle Camp massacre
• 1874–1875: Blackfellow's Creek massacre
• 1874: Barrow Creek massacre
• 1879: Cape Bedford massacre
• 1884: Battle of Battle Mountain
• 1880s–1890s: Arnhem Wars
• 1890: Speewah massacre
• 1891: Australian shearers' strike

Like I said, predominantly peaceful. Compare this Australian inventory with America's; Britian's; both of which would of course be infinitely vast in comparison...
Have you ever seen any early Chaplin movies, where there is a man dressed in a black cape, crouched in the corner of the room, taking everything down in his notepad, you are alike that guy.?! My reason is far from being limited, after all, I am an omnipotent deity...

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

This is pure abstraction with no relationship to reality. The opposite is shown to be true in reality.

People can be notoriously biased and jump to conclusions. When the former Yugoslavia broke apart, all kinds of people who had lived together peacefully suddenly got paranoid. Some had intermarried, many lived in the same apartment buildings. But suddenly, nationalistic fears were roused; and people grew suspicious of other nationalities. The idea became it was safer to shoot them before they could shoot you, and every act of violence added to the paranoia.

Cultures without governments that look after the rights of their citizens are frequently tribal. If your tribe is more powerful and the neighboring tribe has assets you want, you go kill the people and seize their assets. With no government at all, anyone who wanted your house and land could come kill you and take them.

The United States went a period of something similar in some areas where government was weak -- where families would fall into feuding. The feuds would go on and on.

I subscribe to John Locke's idea on government. We start with the individual's right to own property and to defend himself. In practice that sounds great, but it doesn't work that well; so people form a social contract to give up their right of self defense because a government can do it better. A government should exist then, not to oppress people, but to protect them from aggressive neighbors within the country and from military aggressors. If it does this well, people are happy. If it does it poorly, people will become dissatisfied and want to revolt.

In theory courts can be less biased than individuals who are involved in conflicts. Both parties in a conflict think, "I'm right and he's wrong." Both are apt to be biased in favor of their own interests. Again in theory courts can be less biased; but we see in practice they often demonstrate this bias or that. That kind of breakdown in the impartiality of the courts also leads to discontent with the result that people often feel they won't find justice in the courts, encouraging them to take justice into their own hands.

Giuliano;
Radically excellent input. Nonetheless, within the first few sentences of my post entitled "Law is Neither Obeyed Disobeyed Nor Broken", I point out that in America we have a mass murder daily, and, our government is helplessly paralyzed in regard thereto and, can essentially do nothing preventative, though I understand some intended mass murders have been obviated...
Duane

 

[Willie T]

Like I said, predominantly peaceful. Compare this Australian inventory with America's; Britian's; both of which would of course be infinitely vast in comparison...
Have you ever seen any early Chaplin movies, where there is a man dressed in a black cape, crouched in the corner of the room, taking everything down in his notepad, you are alike that guy.?! My reason is far from being limited, after all, I am an omnipotent deity...

You are a lot of things, but even though few people here seem to have caught on yet, "Troll", is the predominant disordered personality.

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

Bull. Look at the beautiful dialectical interaction which I have precipitated, and the interlocutors are getting increasingly glib and clearly exhibit higher educational backgrounds. Persist in the troll absurdity and I will place you on Ignore because you, at this instant, are trolling...
You are clearly unable to handle the selfsame ilk of medicine which you have been dishing-out to me for about a week now. When I say your conduct makes me think of the monitor man in the corner in Chaplin films, I am administering the exact same medicine you have been dosing me with all along here!

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

The French revolution I think would be a stark demonstration when people remove the restraints of law. For example, remove the laws governing road safety and speed, what do you think would happen?

Excellent example in the French revolution.

In regard to traffic law; when I was growing up in California, if someone went 80 mph on the freeway, he went directly to jail; now 80 is the norm on CA freeways. I gave up the insanity of driving an auto on public roads many many decades ago, and took up cycling everywhere, even up to hundreds of miles between towns; I still ride because all the earlier riding, and the current riding,has put me in top shape apparently for life.
No matter what the law is drivers will continually do nutty stuff. Like a friend here in Kentucky came by and invited me to go out to a local town with him to buy some cedar sawdust for his horses. He constantly drove around blind curves on the country roads at seventy plus miles per hour; I intend to bring that to his attention the next time I see him. I am a US Air Force safety trained driver; but most people have not had that advantage, and really know not what serious danger is involved in what they mistakenly do on the road.

Common dangerous driving habits provide a perfect example of the fact that law cannot, and does not in fact, have significant effect in regard to human conduct, and, thus, people are driving within a state of affairs wherein there is essentially no law transpiring therein. Drivers are ignoring inefficacious laws; though the laws are absolutely correct as an attempt to obviate stupid and dangerous driving conduct; however, in fact, law does not obviate dangerous driving behavior, and merely punishes the misconduct for profit.

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

I am familiar with the Hegelian dialectic but I refuse to play that game. Two error ridden extremes to gain a contrived result... Order of of chaos. I am not offering you Christian idealism. I offer you truth. Men are sinners... Not because they sin, but because they cannot help themselves. I don't need the Bible to inform me of this stark reality. History is recorded across the pages of time and written in the blood of its victims through the pens of the victors. Moral law is not a construction of society or the result of hit and miss evolutionary development. Add I said in a previous post, the ten commandments that God gave Moses at Sinai were a written transcript of God's righteousness... His character. The laws of nations regarding stealing and murder etc are an imperfect development of those same laws and totally necessary in order to give society some semblance of order. The people found to be in disharmony with those laws are generally people that secular society would shun and prefer to not have anything further to do with... Yet the institution that you repudiate, the church, when practicing that 'idealism' you find offensive, is the one institution offering forgiveness, hope, and a further chance at life. That also us the gospel. Your gospel does not include forgiveness... Your gospel says if someone comes to you with a knife them find a similar sized knife. (eye for eye) and have at it. Great until someone makes up for their lack in knife fighting skills and pulls out their 38 special. Then someone else goes for their 45. Then appears a Remington shotgun... An Uzi... Cannon... Them sometime hires a bigger person with a bigger cannon... Then an army...I think you get the picture.

I am actually thinking of J.P. Sartre's "Search for a Method", wherein he beautifully and correctly describes the movement of human history as dialectical; which is Karl Marx, as in Marx's dialectical materialism...

Of course each of the extremes entail error; which error is putatively transcended via attaining to the next synthetic moment, which moment will contain other error that is subject to further progression away from...and on and on...

 

[mjrhealth]

I just havnt yet figured out what this has to do with salvation through Jesus Christ

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

We may know inherently what is right and wrong, but are incapable of living according to that knowledge, due to a fallen human nature that is wholly corrupt.
How far back do you need to go 'before law' to find a society devoid of violence? Tooth for tooth? Why is the second tooth removed any more righteous than the first?
True righteousness... True love... Is self sscrificial, not self preservation.

Brakelite;
"How far back do you need to go 'before law' to find a society devoid of violence?" No matter how far back we could go, we would not find humans who did not engage in violence. Hunting game is a predatory practice and entails such a high level of violence that the hunter himself can readily be killed. Anthropologists have found evidence of cannibalism inscribed upon the bones of our earliest human ancestors. Human skulls were caved-in and the bones had scratches left by stone butchering implements. Man is a predatory killer even unto his own kind; which, in truth, does not actually involve ascription of a lack of morality to the butchers, they were simply surviving, perhaps starving...

I do not focus on advocating an abandonment of law, because it will not be entirely abandoned. I have limited my ratiocinations to a demonstration of the ontological unintelligibility of all attempts to govern ourselves via language of law, which is a failed/failing project. I have suggested a possible reversion to the eye for an eye practice at the individual interpersonal level; all Christians prescribe Christ and His philosophy of Love as answer; however, a possible consequence of the dialectical interaction we engage in here, could generate an approach to solution to the problem of the inefficacy of law, which none of us has yet recognized, thus the importance of this debating.
Duane

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

I just havnt yet figured out what this has to do with salvation through Jesus Christ

mjrhealth;
My Christian interlocutors on this site have repeatedly proclaimed that salvation via Christ and Christ's injunction to Love, will dissolve the problem of the failure of law as a means of controlling sinful human misconduct; I have proposed that our very own ontological structure is pattern for constituting a civilization based on our fundamental human capacity to kill; based upon our inherent notions of right and wrong. To put my theory in terms of God/Christ, I would proclaim that since we humans are made in the image of God, i.e., made upon the pattern of God, our ontological structural behavioral architecture is the blueprint for achieving a civil human civilization, i.e., if Christ is the pattern/example we ought follow, unto the attainment of a salvation-civilization whereby we would save ourselves from self-destruction per our own misconduct, we need undertake an intense study of Christ's ontological structure as a man who deemed Himself to be saving humanity via His death per being killed...Christ's Salvation is predicated upon His killing...here killing is the central efficacy efficient for achievement of man's salvation...God the Father ordained His Son's killing as the sole means to Salvation in the form of the forgiveness of Sin and Eternal Life for Man. Killing is absolutely key from Jehovah's perspectival view, and, it is only by killing that we men can constitute a civil civilization, no matter how utterly repugnant and unlawful killing human beings may appear to our modern sensibilities.

Which ontological study of Christ, (Amadeus), I can readily write...
Duane

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

sounds like a whole lot of flowery horse dump to me.

law it simply agreement between two or more living beings able to do so. its contract if you like. even in the case of the law by the hand of Moses, the Lord their God required the children of Israel to agree to it. the garden of Eden was that God put man in the garden and commanded the man. the command was agreed to by the man by default even if not verbally, because Adam didn't seek to leave the garden under those conditions.

the constitution which supersedes all law of the US of A is a agreement between a gov. and its people. when it comes to law if you don't agree you may leave or stay and suffer consequences should you "break" the agreement on your part. because if you stay by default you agree and the gov has the power to enforce or forgive any infraction. the agreement of the household is the law of the household and the same applies.

DPMartin;
That is a confused mess of bogus tyrannical jurisprudential propagandistic nonsense. None of us were there in 1789 to consent to the language of the Constitution, and, to claim that we consent by default is to overthrow our absolute freedom to amend the Constitution, and/or to ultimately realize that Constitutional Law is not the ultimate and most efficient means to constituting our American civilization.
Duane Clinton Meehan

 

[mjrhealth]

mjrhealth;
My Christian interlocutors on this site have repeatedly proclaimed that salvation via Christ and Christ's injunction to Love, will dissolve the problem of the failure of law as a means of controlling sinful human misconduct; I have proposed that our very own ontological structure is pattern for constituting a civilization based on our fundamental human capacity to kill; based upon our inherent notions of right and wrong. To put my theory in terms of God/Christ, I would proclaim that since we humans are made in the image of God, i.e., made upon the pattern of God, our ontological structural behavioral architecture is the blueprint for achieving a civil human civilization, i.e., if Christ is the pattern/example we ought follow, unto the attainment of a salvation-civilization whereby we would save ourselves from self-destruction per our own misconduct, we need undertake an intense study of Christ's ontological structure as a man who deemed Himself to be saving humanity via His death per being killed...Christ's Salvation is predicated upon His killing...here killing is the central efficacy efficient for achievement of man's salvation...God the Father ordained His Son's killing as the sole means to Salvation in the form of the forgiveness of Sin and Eternal Life for Man. Killing is absolutely key from Jehovah's perspectival view, and, it is only by killing that we men can constitute a civil civilization, no matter how utterly repugnant and unlawful killing human beings may appear to our modern sensibilities.

Which ontological study of Christ, (Amadeus), I can readily write...
Duane

Jesus just isnt that complicated.

 

[DNB]

DNB;
Your response is sincerely appreciated. You exhibit some self-inconsistencies which I will describe later; for now you supply us the opportunity to reflect somewhat upon and examine the notion of "sin", which, surely, is a vast consideration. However to me "sin" boils down to being a state of affairs wherein we humans vainly attempt to go against the very way we are structured as living beings, e.g., killing is the most wholly fundamental conduct whereby we maintain and preserve our existence; stealing is an inveterate human characteristic which is ineluctable; reducing other human beings to slavery is a primal human conduct; nonetheless, we absolutely do not have the intestinal fortitude to live face to face with these multiplicity ugly human conducts, which in fact constitute our being as humans, and, we name said characteristics "sin", or "crime", etc., etc., when, in fact these manifold human conducts are absolutely indelible and cannot possibly be dissolved/obviated. Dubbing our apparently unacceptable behavioral traits as '''sin", as those conducts which are shameful and to be boycotted is the epidemy of naivete, and, of impossibility. Our entire religious and jurisprudential endeavor is spent in an irreal attempt not to be precisely what we are.
What I am proposing is that instead of continually attempting to shelve and avoid the ineluctable behavioral traits which constitute our being, we engage and employ our traits precisely for the sake of constituting a civil civilization, for the traits are, so to speak, indespensible God-made/God-given tools which are actually efficacious for man and, for having and maintaining a civil human civilization. Thus the notion of "sin", whereby we hide from ourselves and refuse to come fully face to face with the horror that we in fact are, is standing in the way of our possessing a civil civilization wherein we, at the same time, live precisely and openly what we are as beings. If I can freely kill you on account of misconduct toward me you will not misconduct yourself, you will absolutely maintain civility, thus, killing is indispensable, and, jurisprudence/law posited against killing is an inadvertant dishonest con, whereby one series of humans eats-out /steals the substance of all the others, and, contradictorily, exercises killing in the form of capital punishment...
Sincerely, Duane

Duane, you are missing the trees for the forest? Just the fact that a man recognizes or acknowledges an act as being sinful, denotes the fact that this spiritual dimension is part of our constitution. No other creature on earth has this endowment that enables them to assess their conduct on a moral level. For animals, insects, sea creatures and mammals alike, all sin indiscriminately. The kill, not only for survival, but also when it is not entirely necessary, or when 'negotiations' can preclude the need to kill. Their jealous, covetous, quick to anger, apathetic, gluttonous and cruel. But these intrinsic characteristics are of no concern to such purely one dimensional creatures.
So then, why do humans repulse, cringe and show their indignation when they witness bigotry, arrogance, sadism, selfishness, cruelty, etc...? Is this just a figment of our imaginations, or are we manifesting that innate spirit that is indelibly part of our constitution - the image of God? In other words, we wouldn't be having this conversation if morality and spiritual awareness was not, first of all, conceivable to us, and secondly, integral to our characters and interactions with other humans and our environment.
You are trying to either deny, suppress or re-evaluate this blatant and axiomatic disposition. For, how do you even account for the fact that you are able to define and label such acts as worthy of retaliation, as you suggested? What form of justice in your world, would deal with a racist? Do you attempt to suppress or desist his thoughts, in one manner or another, or does one consider him to be in the right and we start supporting his prejudism and abuse? I.E. who decides whether an act is right or wrong, consequential or neutral?
You're missing the entire point, men are without excuse before God because there is not a single human out there, that does not recognize a moral guideline within him and within others. For again, acknowledging and acting upon such intangibles would be a form of dementia if this abstract and spiritual endowment, and thus, moral soundness and rectitude, wasn't intrinsic within us.
Your proposal is to either ignore, or call it something else. Since when has denial ever solved anyone's issues? But, what's worse, is that you are, whether you realize it or not, calling evil acceptable, or natural to the universe as we know it. You show a very dull understanding of such profound issues. Evil, is darkness, it is not efficacious, constructive or productive, but on the contrary, it is depraved, unsound, insatiable and possessing. Whether one commits it as the instigator, or as the equalizer, both acts show lack of control and character. Were you unaware? Have you ever admired anyone for their promiscuity, filthy talk, abuse, bigotries or deceit? How can you endorse an eye for eye mentality in order to maintain stability in a society? If a man commits adultery on his wife, do you suggest in order to even the score, and regain the equilibrium, that the wife do the same. Or, that the man recognizes his deceit and indecency, repent and make amends to never to do it again. Do you consider the latter as destructive and feigned behaviour, or unnatural?

 

[brakelite]

My Christian interlocutors on this site have repeatedly proclaimed that salvation via Christ and Christ's injunction to Love, will dissolve the problem of the failure of law as a means of controlling sinful human misconduct;

It isn't an untested theory. For 1000s of years individuals have discovered to their joy and eternal benefit, that they, and others in following Christ's example and counsel, can indeed live without recourse to the law. They ate born again and their old sinful natures no longer govern the way they behave... They have feeling within them the Spirit of Christ, and this have unlimited potential for living a righteous life. No longer slaves to sin, no longer unable to resist acting abysmally, they have the power readily available to them to walk as Jesus walked.
This is the reality of genuine Christian living. And the only viable alternative to the propensity of mankind to criminal selfish behaviour. Now sure, there are always some who by exercising self control and discipline they have managed to comport themselves in a manner acceptable to society. They therefore are no bother to the police, nor to their neighbours. However, this outward behaviour may meet with the standards set by secular society, but he still has a heart with a bent toward selfishness... And there shall ever be a time when in crisis, the true heart will manifest itself in a way which violates God's laws... One can never hope to meet God's standards without that change of heart.

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

Duane, you are missing the trees for the forest? Just the fact that a man recognizes or acknowledges an act as being sinful, denotes the fact that this spiritual dimension is part of our constitution. No other creature on earth has this endowment that enables them to assess their conduct on a moral level. For animals, insects, sea creatures and mammals alike, all sin indiscriminately. The kill, not only for survival, but also when it is not entirely necessary, or when 'negotiations' can preclude the need to kill. Their jealous, covetous, quick to anger, apathetic, gluttonous and cruel. But these intrinsic characteristics are of no concern to such purely one dimensional creatures.
So then, why do humans repulse, cringe and show their indignation when they witness bigotry, arrogance, sadism, selfishness, cruelty, etc...? Is this just a figment of our imaginations, or are we manifesting that innate spirit that is indelibly part of our constitution - the image of God? In other words, we wouldn't be having this conversation if morality and spiritual awareness was not, first of all, conceivable to us, and secondly, integral to our characters and interactions with other humans and our environment.
You are trying to either deny, suppress or re-evaluate this blatant and axiomatic disposition. For, how do you even account for the fact that you are able to define and label such acts as worthy of retaliation, as you suggested? What form of justice in your world, would deal with a racist? Do you attempt to suppress or desist his thoughts, in one manner or another, or does one consider him to be in the right and we start supporting his prejudism and abuse? I.E. who decides whether an act is right or wrong, consequential or neutral?
You're missing the entire point, men are without excuse before God because there is not a single human out there, that does not recognize a moral guideline within him and within others. For again, acknowledging and acting upon such intangibles would be a form of dementia if this abstract and spiritual endowment, and thus, moral soundness and rectitude, wasn't intrinsic within us.
Your proposal is to either ignore, or call it something else. Since when has denial ever solved anyone's issues? But, what's worse, is that you are, whether you realize it or not, calling evil acceptable, or natural to the universe as we know it. You show a very dull understanding of such profound issues. Evil, is darkness, it is not efficacious, constructive or productive, but on the contrary, it is depraved, unsound, insatiable and possessing. Whether one commits it as the instigator, or as the equalizer, both acts show lack of control and character. Were you unaware? Have you ever admired anyone for their promiscuity, filthy talk, abuse, bigotries or deceit? How can you endorse an eye for eye mentality in order to maintain stability in a society? If a man commits adultery on his wife, do you suggest in order to even the score, and regain the equilibrium, that the wife do the same. Or, that the man recognizes his deceit and indecency, repent and make amends to never to do it again. Do you consider the latter as destructive and feigned behaviour, or unnatural?

DNB;
You inundate me with many questions which I will have to reflect upon, though, I can immediately say that although we are agreed that we all possess a sense of right conduct, there is, for sure, no one absolute, final, set of moral standards via which to conduct one's self. There is no final word within the sphere of ethics.

Given that there is no one final and indubitable moral code whereby one can conduct one's self, it cannot in fact ultimately be claimed that Christ is indeed, as He openly claimed: "The Way." When a crucifix was shown to some Amazon Indians they proclaimed that he must have been very stupid indeed to permit himself to be killed in that horrid manner; they possessed an entirely other perspectival view whereby they immediately saw Christ as a fool indeed not to be followed!

It boils down to a question of efficiency in attaining one's goals, which is the Buddhist view, i.e., that all of our various approaches to securing our objective, whatever the objective may be, are temporary scaffoldings along the route to approximating our projected end(s); Buddhism, seeing human existence as an ongoing series of approaches to attaining one's overall objective or personal global project, makes perfect sense to me; i.e., there is no one final efficient and efficacious approach to dissolving our difficulties; hence, Christ's prescription to proceed via Love is one of a series of scaffoldings employable while structuring the means to Nirvana.
Duane

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

It isn't an untested theory. For 1000s of years individuals have discovered to their joy and eternal benefit, that they, and others in following Christ's example and counsel, can indeed live without recourse to the law. They ate born again and their old sinful natures no longer govern the way they behave... They have feeling within them the Spirit of Christ, and this have unlimited potential for living a righteous life. No longer slaves to sin, no longer unable to resist acting abysmally, they have the power readily available to them to walk as Jesus walked.
This is the reality of genuine Christian living. And the only viable alternative to the propensity of mankind to criminal selfish behaviour. Now sure, there are always some who by exercising self control and discipline they have managed to comport themselves in a manner acceptable to society. They therefore are no bother to the police, nor to their neighbours. However, this outward behaviour may meet with the standards set by secular society, but he still has a heart with a bent toward selfishness... And there shall ever be a time when in crisis, the true heart will manifest itself in a way which violates God's laws... One can never hope to meet God's standards without that change of heart.

brakelite;
One very significant reality which I submit for your consideration, is that a human being, per what existentialist thinkers of the twentieth century have discovered to be the Absolute, i.e., absolute human ontological freedom, has no "nature", for a our absolute freedom cannot possibly concretize as a final structure; thus, no human person possesses a nature.

We have ontological characteristics which are metastable structures, like: anger; love; killer; enslaver; deity worshipper...and on and on, without absolute finality, wherein other and new behavioral characteristics can upsurge as part of our evolving absolutely free being. Human beings, as absolutely free beings, cannot be limited, even by a Jesus Christ...
The central reason why American Constitutional civilization is such a great phenomenon, is that our Bill of Rights is essentially an ontologically-oriented document, which attempts to protect and secure our several original human ontological freedoms of speech and worship and choice and so on...
Duane

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

Jesus just isnt that complicated.

What really blows my mind is that Christians gloss over the fact that their very Salvation is grounded upon a killing, and, while Jehovah employs His Son's killing as means to human salvation, He simultaneously self-inconsistently outlawed killing; thus, the entire contradictory scenario is indeed "...that complicated..", and Jehovah's thinking exhibits itself as radically self-contradictory via the fact that He both employs and prohibits killing. He killed nearly everyone on earth in the flood; He killed His only begotten Son; He instructed Abraham to kill his son, and, Abraham amazingly undertook to comply. The entire state of affairs is frightfully immoral in tone, nonetheless, believers deem their mode of salvation via killing to be the sine qua non of praiseworthy righteousness!

 

[mjrhealth]

What really blows my mind is that Christians gloss over the fact that their very Salvation is grounded upon a killing, and, while Jehovah employs His Son's killing as means to human salvation, He simultaneously self-inconsistently outlawed killing; thus, the entire contradictory scenario in indeed "...that complicated..", and Jehovah's thinking exhibits itself as radically self-contradictory via the fact that He both employs and prohibits killing.

No its not complicated, men just like to impress.

 

[Duane Clinton Meehan]

No its not complicated, men just like to impress.

Its complicatedly confused.

 

[brakelite]

What really blows my mind is that Christians gloss over the fact that their very Salvation is grounded upon a killing, and, while Jehovah employs His Son's killing as means to human salvation, He simultaneously self-inconsistently outlawed killing; thus, the entire contradictory scenario is indeed "...that complicated..", and Jehovah's thinking exhibits itself as radically self-contradictory via the fact that He both employs and prohibits killing. He killed nearly everyone on earth in the flood; He killed His only begotten Son; He instructed Abraham to kill his son, and, Abraham amazingly undertook to comply. The entire state of affairs is frightfully immoral in tone, nonetheless, believers deem their mode of salvation via killing to be the sine qua non of praiseworthy righteousness!

This simply reveals your limited understanding of soteriology. And repeat an argument that has been offered, and rebutted, for centuries only you have managed to state it in a manner that almost sounds intellectual. I say almost, because despite the advanced grammar and words used, us premised on a total misunderstanding of who God is and a misconstruction of motive. I suggest you do some more study in that area.