Christian Moral Philosophy.
Mar. 20th, 2006 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
swestrupI just want to start out here by saying I'm not trying to insult or upset anyone or to start a flame war. Its just that a question occurred to me when taking my shower today, and I thought I might seek some enlightenment from my f-list.
I was brought up in a moral system that I suppose I could characterize as liberal and secular. It has many principals but one of them is that people are generally only to be considered culpable for their own actions. You can only be culpable of inaction in certain narrow circumstances where you have accepted responsibility, or there is some sort of implied social responsibility. In no circumstances are you to be held culpable for an inability to act.
You can not, for example, be held accountable for genocide just because you were born German, and Germans participated in the Holocaust. Unless you participated, the fact that you are German has no bearing. In similar ways, my Magyar and Viking roots have no moral taint to them, regardless of what attrocities my ancestors may have gotten up to.
Now, this seems to be a fairly common moral principal, and up till now I had simply assumed that it held in Christian morality as well. Today it occurred to me that this directly flies in the face of the whole concept of Original Sin by which (as I understand it) everyone is assumed to be damned because of what Adam did in the distant past. So, I can think of several possibilies, and I wonder which of the following are true:
I was brought up in a moral system that I suppose I could characterize as liberal and secular. It has many principals but one of them is that people are generally only to be considered culpable for their own actions. You can only be culpable of inaction in certain narrow circumstances where you have accepted responsibility, or there is some sort of implied social responsibility. In no circumstances are you to be held culpable for an inability to act.
You can not, for example, be held accountable for genocide just because you were born German, and Germans participated in the Holocaust. Unless you participated, the fact that you are German has no bearing. In similar ways, my Magyar and Viking roots have no moral taint to them, regardless of what attrocities my ancestors may have gotten up to.
Now, this seems to be a fairly common moral principal, and up till now I had simply assumed that it held in Christian morality as well. Today it occurred to me that this directly flies in the face of the whole concept of Original Sin by which (as I understand it) everyone is assumed to be damned because of what Adam did in the distant past. So, I can think of several possibilies, and I wonder which of the following are true:
- Christain moral philosophy does <b>not</b> accept that you are blameless for the actions of your ancestors. Modern day Germans should all be punished for the Holocaust and most whites should be held accountable for slavery.
- Christians believe as I do. The Original Sin is some sort of metaphor and has nothing to do with systems of moral philosophy.
- God is allowed to act in a fashion that is immoral for people, without it being immoral. Thus God is allowed to declare that a moral taint be visited upon all the descendants of Adam, but no man could be allowed to make such a declaration. Thus God is considered moral only because They are God, and not because of any other particular attributes of behaviour.
- Christians disagree completely on this topic and its a huge moral quagmire.
- Something else that I haven't considered.
