This is probably the best comment I've ever read on HN. I up voted it because it made simple a VERY HARD to explain concept in Christianity without using the typical rhetorical devices wielded in the church by people who cannot comprehend their own religion let alone explain it.

I agree RE Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; that's what I was taught about it and it makes perfect sense in the context. But I disagree with your last sentence:

> because to make oneself responsible for things one isn't responsible for -- whether it is problems others face or the outright wrong things other people have done -- is beyond rationality and is instead both truly human and divine.

Actuall, covering for other people's sins is perfectly rational if it makes others likely to cover for your sins as well. Cooperation is hard to ensure, but it usually has better payoffs than minding only your own interest. C.f. iterated prisoner's dilemma, etc.

I understand what you're saying. I didn't want to make a long post even longer, but I will try to clarify without hopefully writing stuff that's too obtusely theological. :)

Christ says that one of the greatest expressions of love is to die for a friend. But who is it that dies for one's enemy? Yet this is what Christ does for humanity, forgiving them even while hanging upon the cross, and it is what He calls all Christians to offer to their enemies.

One way I think of this is that there is one mode of living, which I'll call economic, where we do things in order to receive things. That's what you've described in "if it makes others likely to cover for your sins as well". But what the Christian tries to live, what St. Silouan the Athonite would term theanthropic living, is that of humility: of loving even when there is no chance of receiving a reward. One might argue that in this other mode of life, one is awaiting some kind of heavenly reward. But I don't think that is the case because as one approaches God closer, one sees just how _unlike_ God one is; as a saint has said "none of the saints have counted themselves worthy of Heaven."

What I mean is that in approaching God we become aware in the depths of our heart of our fundamental wrongness towards others and toward God, and the great darkness that lies within ourselves. This isn't some kind of masochistic pleasure in self-hatred. It's an awareness that penetrates one's entire being. And _balancing this recognition_ is that God Himself loves us even unto death. Despite this incredible self-awareness, we are indeed not lost. Even more than that, we are empowered to become like God (theosis). The result of this is the joyful sadness of the theanthropic life: one accounts only oneself as deserving of death, while one sees all others as worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven. And really, this is what Christ Himself did in His life, His death, and His descent into Hades. But Hades could not contain God, and St. Silouan says that death also cannot contain any truly theanthropic person, for they become blameless. This is how death becomes the gateway to divine life.

Perhaps there is a rational way to justify suffering and even dying at the hands of one's enemy. I'd honestly be interested in hearing such an argument!

Whoops, one correction, as I misquoted St. Silouan. It's not that the theanthropic person become blameless (as in sinless), but that they become beyond judgment. I've tried to explain some pretty weighty concepts in a very short amount of text. For those interested in St. Silouan's thought I recommend the books "The Enlargement of the Heart" and "The Hidden Man of the Heart," but they require a bit of background that probably isn't appropriate for those unfamiliar with Orthodox theology.

>Perhaps there is a rational way to justify suffering and even dying at the hands of one's enemy. I'd honestly be interested in hearing such an argument!

Yes, it's called "wanting to do so".

I appreciate your comment, but I would also like to draw attention to the inherent difficulty in speaking about these concepts.

In speaking of being "innocent of evil" you also imply being "innocent of good" and so can good truly manifest itself, in the light of self-responsibility, in the face of innocence from it?

Further, you want to speak of "scientific knowledge" as separate from the knowledge of "good and evil", but Saul's identification of six qualities (common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition, memory, and reason) are all in some sense well-springs of knowledge: they guide our action, the way we exercise our agency, and so they way in which we conceive our self-responsibility.

I feel in no way, in bringing up the tree of knowledge, is Saul attacking Judeo-Christianity. He is articulating, instead, the manipulation of scripture, in its narrow interpretation, to the meet the ends of the elite.

In fact, there is something inexorable about eating from the tree, as I argue it is what enables good, but dualities abound, and so with it comes evil, but to only see one side of it is deception.

It is not only "the fall" of man, but also "the ascent."

It's hard to know how good would have been truly manifested without the fall. Some Orthodox Christian theologians have said that had the fall not occurred, Christ would still have taken on flesh for the sake of divinizing humanity (meaning to make them like God; see theosis[1]). What's important to note, though, is that the created world of matter and all the living and nonliving things in it were initially good in and of themselves.

That being said, the initial "job" of Adam and Eve, and the way in which they demonstrated their goodness, was in loving and delighting in God, one another, and all of creation. However, the ramifications of Adam and Eve's actions reverberated throughout the cosmos, and now we all share in the result.

The things described in the six qualities were created and given to us by God in order to help know God, one another, and creation. As such they are indeed good in their essence, but sometimes they are used in a disordered way that fragments creation, that separates us from God and our neighbor. We can use creativity to make music, or we can use it to hatch a plot to hurt someone else.

I didn't mean to imply that Saul is attacking Judeo-Christianity. But in basing his argument upon the wrong name of the tree, I think he ended up mixing these things that have "inherent difficulty" with his main argument, and that might only result in more confusion rather than illumination.

[1] http://orthodoxwiki.org/Theosis

I disagree with the specific point that taking the blame of others is at all moral or good or proper. It isn't even remotely the same thing as forgiveness. Either Christ was a scapegoat, an immoral transference of sin onto another to be ritualistically slaughtered; or Christ, as God (i.e. the trinity) who blamed himself for the mistake of creating man in the first place, is taking responsibility for this mistake and leaves his punishment up to the free will of humans who prove their miserableness with murder.

So no matter how you look at this it doesn't make humans look particularly good let alone divine. And the very idea of original sin, which makes Christ's existence and death necessary, is immoral. The actions of others has absolutely zero rational transference to children. It's an allegory for why all humans are so wicked. It's a nasty story.

One of the difficulties in engaging in theological discussions is that we all come to the table with different interpretations of particular terms and ideas. I know that I began this discussion by criticizing one interpretation, but that is because the author's interpretation of the tree as containing scientific knowledge seemed to directly contradict the very name of the tree. What I present here is what the Orthodox Church has taught, rooted in ideas from St. Ignatius, a bishop in the first century. I say this not as some kind of appeal to authority, but only to make clear that what I express has been upheld and refined for nearly 2000 years.

In the Orthodox Church, "original sin" isn't some sort of inherited guilt. Adam and Eve bear the guilt for their actions; the _ramification_ of their actions resulted in the disordering of all the cosmos, which is what all of humanity has sadly inherited. The Catholic (or perhaps more specifically Augustinian) idea that all share in the guilt of Adam is what leads to ideas like Christ needing to be a propitiatory sacrifice to appease an angry God. This idea is inconceivable in the Orthodox church. Nor does Christ exist only to reconcile original sin; He has always existed, and Orthodox theologians have said that if the fall had not occurred He still would have taken on flesh for the sake of uniting Himself with humanity.

It is this union in the Incarnation that makes humans "divine": Christ is fully God and fully man; as St. Ignatius said, "God became man so that man might become like God." If the intent was only to "get people to heaven," meaning to put them in some specific place after death, then there were certainly easier ways to accomplish this. But God has in His eyes the beautification of His beloved.

Christ's life is a perfect illustration not only of God's love but of the way in which all who follow Christ are empowered to walk. What we see in the Incarnation, Transfiguration, and Resurrection is what humanity is truly capable of: a love so powerful that it can annihilate death.

>And if we use only our rational minds we might not ever arrive at this point, because to make oneself responsible for things one isn't responsible for -- whether it is problems others face or the outright wrong things other people have done -- is beyond rationality and is instead both truly human and divine.

Rational != selfless, and also, rational != emotionless.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawVulcan

I understand what you're saying, and I was worried that my comment might accidentally come across like this. Please see my response to TeMPOraL.

Well apparently you don't understand what I'm saying. It doesn't help that I accidentally typed "selfless" instead of "selfish", so my meaning of "rationality is not selfishness, selfishess is not rational" did not come across.

"Rationality", as in the rational way of making decisions and taking actions, is only defined up to a specific set of values, goals, or preferences (however you want to phrase things) -- those goals are a free parameter.

Hence you completely misunderstood, again, continuously making the assumption that "rationality" entails acting something like a banker, seeking some sort of personal profit in everything and caring for nothing else. Again, this just isn't true. If we take the Christ-character in the New Testament as speaking sincerely, for instance, he was acting rationally for his goals.

So again, the issue is not that one has to discard rational thought in order to take a "leap of divinity", but instead that you are assigning "more divinity" to certain goals, and therefore certain actions, than to others -- this all being contingent on your belief in the Scripture.

I think you're being a bit overly pedantic about the use of the word rational. Yes, everything you're saying is true, rationality is framed by the individual's goals. That said, I think it's fair to assume that values, goals and preferences such as "not being poor" and "staying alive" are parameters that are on average not that free. By your definition this is "rationality" and I don't think it's controversial to say your average human is "rational" in this sense.

I don't think he's being overly pedantic -- these kinds of things are difficult to talk about because we bring different definitions to the table. I tried to use "rational" in the context of the original article, which perhaps I failed to do so. The interviewer notes the contemporary critique of Enlightenment rationality, which Saul seems to share. So when I critique this kind of rationality, I mean a type of faculty that is in a different category from emotions and faith, that is separated from Saul's description of the other faculties of humanity.

I think Eli and I are caught in what Wittgenstein might call a "language game." We seem to be using the same word but we're really meaning two different things. It'd be like if I thought basketball was a game involving kicking a ball into a net (soccer) and Eli thought it was a game involving throwing a ball into a net (basketball). While in that case we do have one objective definition of basketball, we don't necessarily have one universally accepted definition for "rationality."

I'm kind of reaching my limit here in terms of knowledge of philosophy; I've perhaps confused things by framing my descriptions using two contradictory definitions of rationality: that of the Enlightenment idea of rational (which I critique) vs St. Maximos the Confessor's idea of rational (which I advocate). I think that Eli is arguing from a Kantian sense, in terms of actions being rational up to a subjective idea of an ultimate good. Luckily for us, I've found a paper that discusses these three topics and will hopefully clear up the miscommunication we've had: http://www.academia.edu/10973797/A_Byzantine_Critique_of_Enl...

Edit: I initially said that Eli and I are perhaps in agreement, but assuming he's arguing from the Kantian sense then we aren't.