It's also why the deceiver focused on Eve first - if she fell, Adam would surly follow.
What is it that she has lost?
It is one thing to know that we like or don't like something. Much harder is understanding why. Usually we give the first acceptable "reason" that comes to mind rather than trying to figure it out. Figuring out why we like or not often takes a number of thought experiments.
Not really, this article is sexist. But alright, this is not reason enough to dismiss it.
The illustration of nihilism show a complete misunderstanding of what nihilism is (the enlightment strawman is pretty intersting too).
Theologians usually do have an education in philosophy and in history, so the man writing this is probably not one. I'm not saying only theologians have the right to reflect on religion, but they are often more thoughtfull than random bloggers.
Although i was educated with classical/continental philosophy, i did read a lot of analytic philosophy, and if the writer is American or from the commonwealth, he was exposed to analytic philosophy (or at least more than i was). And that shows in the development of his article.
But before you craft, you should learn from your master and from your peers, and the writer pretty much ignored all modern analytical works and wrote something that is so behind his time that it becomes interesting to read and to understand.
There’s a lot of pretty messed up sexism packed in there.
It's reflective of the authors values, not sexist. It's not discriminatory towards women.
Even if you don't believe in a deity, the traditions of a successful culture are worth considering given we only have a few years to figure out what a good life looks like before we die.
Even if you extend the search to beyond those three, you're going to end up with the same conclusion.
Highly convenient definition if one wants to slander something. Aka, a straw-man argument.
Actually, freedom means finding a balance between vice and virtue that suits ones personality. With too much virtue one would do serious activity too much, basically overworking oneself. With too much vice one does things that are inadvisable for health and one accomplishes nothing.
This also seems like a strawman of what virtue is (because in the west work is considered virtuous and leisure is not, which is unfortunate ).
1) An average man who is only not a drug addict because he lives in a country where drugs are regulated or shamed in a way to make them hard to obtain.
2) An average man who succumbs to addiction in such a country, and is now in a never-ending cycle in and out of prison and living on the street and at daily risk of death because there's no way to ensure that the drugs he takes aren't 100x as potent as he was expecting because it's easier for the cartels to sneak the product over the border that way?
Drug abuse is mostly a form of escapism. So freedom isn't the problem, issues that drive people to consume drugs are. Although even many healthy people indulge in drug use. We had that argument with alcohol before...
1: i am legally allowed to do X
2: I am legally allowed to do X and you are forbidden to prevent me from doing X
and you can even push to this one:
3: I am legally allowed to do X, you are forbidden to prevent me from doing X, and i am able to do X without discomfort/sacrifice (this can be broken into smaller parts too, but i think this is enough)
Freedom implies moral responsibility of your choices (this can be debated, but i think the modern debate lean to that conclusion): if you are enslaved and are not responsible, you have no freedom at all. So physical addictions remove your freedom. You can do thought experiments about which addictions remove your freedoms and which do not, but i recon most drugs won't really change your freedom.
Boy, freedom does sound pretty bad when you define it that way.
Very few people would earnestly argue a worthwhile life is the sum of arbitrary indulgence, and the author puts zero effort into making a case that's an accurate and whole representation of enlightenment or western values, nor do they put any particular effort into making a case for their slave-to-discipline or slave-to-impulse dichotomy.
In fact, the case is stretched to the point where it seems plausible this piece is as much some sort of attack on enlightenment or western values as it is any kind of philosophical examination of freedom.
Enlightenment/western freedom, as far as I can tell, actually seems to be a balancing act between recognition that individuals are most likely to best be able to determine what self-actualization means, within certain bounds (the right to swing your fist ends at the end of others nose and all that). You have individual freedom out to a point that's collectively negotiated, ideally with majority buy-in and even under reasoned principles, and accountability past that point. There may be individual or collective failures here but they'll be within a bound of acceptable error that will still cause less suffering than, say, letting a privileged minority impose their personal vision of morality on everyone in the name of freedom through moral strength.
That position is certainly not above criticism. Perhaps some day the author will even arrive at something resembling an engaged and thoughtful criticism rather than indulging their own unexamined and unsupported impulse towards strict father vs a degenerate society narratives.
I disagree the goal of normal society is "to lead people away from lasciviousness and impulsive behavior." That is not enough to live a good life. And when we tried it, it ended up with neverending war on drugs.
Society should lead toward something. I think it should be toward a meaning. With the implicit understanding that there is no meaning in impulsive addictive behavior. Catholicism (and christianity generally) should not have a problem with that, as it is incredibly rich with meaning and it's so sad to see it all reduced to rigid morals, orders and prohibitions.
This thing sounds like it was written by a 12 year old
>Even extreme libertarians will probably say (2) is in a better place, but might chalk things up to (1) needing to have more discipline and they'll make up some just-so story as for why unambiguously bad drugs, or pornography, or dangerous things should be allowed anyway.
No, an (informed) extreme libertarian would try to dissolve this as a false dichotomy. They'd perhaps talk about various insurance schemes and contracts, which an individual is free to enter or leave (in the same way that they're free to choose between a countries with more or less harsh drug regulations), but which can still constrain an individual's actions/impulses in the short term for their own benefit.
Similarly, a modern liberal might defend the freedom to choose which country you live in, on similar grounds.
I felt the urge to respond to this just because such arguments are much more interesting than the author's attack on straw-liberals/libertarians
