Tuesday, June 22, 2010

How does God judge?

In the comments, BobinCT writes:
But why did I make the first bad choice? That's the major question as I see it, and the 2nd major question is does that determine my destiny? Two very separate yet connected questions with no universal answer.
This was in response to a discussion about how our character gets formed. The question BobinCt asks, and it's a very good question,  might be paraphrased as follows: if both things that are under our control and things that are not under our control contribute to forming our character how do we judge character?

I have a number of answers to that but I want to hang around the question for a while first. Because BobinCt is in very good company. In the very last years of his life, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote the following:
Look at human beings: one is poison to the other. A mother to her son, and vice versa, etc. But the mother is blind and so is her son. Perhaps they have guilty consciences, but what good does that do them? The child is wicked, but nobody teaches it to be any different and its parents spoil it with their stupid affection; and how are they supposed to understand this and how is their child supposed to understand it? It's as though they were all wicked and all innocent.
More to come ...

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