Showing posts with label natural law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label natural law. Show all posts

Thursday, June 27, 2024

The film The Ten Commandments starring Charleton Heston called this The Light of Eternal Mind



 
Did he speak as a man? He is not flesh, but spirit, the light of Eternal Mind. And I know that his light is in every man.

 

John M. Grondelski, here from "Why so much ado about the Ten Commandments?":

Paul is undeterred, arguing that what Israel received in divine revelation, everyman receives in “the law written on men’s hearts” (Rom 2:15). It is a law every man is aware he has at one time violated. He is aware because every man has the experience of obligation (“I ought to do X,” “I ought not to do Y”) yet he also experiences his betrayal of obligation (“I did what I ought not to have done,” “I did not do what I should have”). As these experiences are the lot of everyman (i.e., every man experiences guilt), one can only explain it as man is accountable to a law of which he is not the author. As the young Karol Wojtyła argued in his analysis of the human experience of obligation, man is not the author of that law because, if he was, he could dispense himself. He could waive the duty. But he finds he cannot. The persistence of that sense of guilt indicates that what he violated was more than just his own, self-imposed expectations.

That law “written on the heart” is natural law, the universal human awareness that “I ought to do good and avoid evil.” But that awareness is not limited to just that very abstract principle. It does not take a refined moral genius to conclude that “evil” acts include things like killing, lying, being unfaithful (or wanting to if I could get away with it), and stealing (or wanting to, if I could pull it off). The natural awareness of the status, role, and work of parents leads without too much mental strain to the conclusion that mothers and fathers should be honored. You’ve basically got the second tablet of the Ten Commandments—Commandments IV-X—right there.

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Modernity is a war of religious ideas, not a war on them

Very ably argued here, by Dominic Erdozain, from which this snippet on Voltaire:

Rousseau's "heart," Voltaire complained, could justify him in anything. Guided by the "inner voice" of conscience, a man could do as he pleased. From the murderous and adulterous David, in the Old Testament, to any number of latter-day tyrants, Voltaire lamented, history was strewn with icy campaigners who had learned to manage the accusing conscience to expert degree. "There is a natural law," he declared rather plaintively in his Philosophical Dictionary, "but it is still more natural to many people to forget it."
The sin of religious "fanaticism" was to subordinate conscience to the "passions" - under the dangerous delusion that my desire represents God's will. The problem with religion - even in its more acceptable formulations - is that it too often flattered, rather than stirred, the slumbering conscience. The moralizing philosopher defined his task in self-consciously homiletic terms: "it is judicious to endeavor to awaken conscience both in mantua-makers and in monarchs." Indeed, "it is necessary to preach better than modern preachers usually do, who seldom talk effectively to either." Enlightenment was again strangely evangelical.