Leslie Chase - Romance & Adventure among the Stars

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Leslie Chase - Romance & Adventure among the Stars

Leslie Chase - Romance & Adventure among the Stars

@lchasewrites

USA Today bestselling author of #sciencefictionromance. Geek. Animal Lover. Brit. Trying very hard to figure out what I'm doing!

Katılım Aralık 2015
1.1K Takip Edilen612 Takipçiler
Pretzel Pete
Pretzel Pete@Jpretzlepete·
“Your claim that a husband sparring his wife pain is an example of the kind of love God has for us.” - That is an overly narrow reading that allows you side step the point and pretend to poke holes in my logic. - Love (personal goodness in relationship) is not merely protection from pain. It could be surprising you with your favorite type of flowers, telling you a harsh truth, or an inside joke, or tickling you in that spot you are especially ticklish, or any number of good things that are personally tailored to you. - That being said, who are you to say that God isn’t protecting you every second of everyday. The Goldilocks position of the earth and its magnetic shielding protects you. The fine-tuned laws of physics allow your biochemistry to function unconsciously. And keeping in check any of the trillion things probability could spring on you at any instant, every instant. “Yet you say God protecting me would be living my life for me, so where is his love?” - To be able to see the same from God you must be in relationship with Him, with goodness and its potential for your life for all days, emotional rain or shine. Aka gratitude and humility. - And yes, protecting you from everything would be living your life for you. Your free will is necessary because there is no love behind the praises of puppets. And it is in this fallen world where you have the space to choose God. Like we did in Eden and chose to deviate from His will. That means He stepped back, as to not smother you with His undeniable splendor and rob your of this choice: - Can you see His goodness in this fallen world, its nature, and in its people, and work to spread it? Will you turn towards Him or away, draw closer to Heaven (unity with God) or Hell(separation from God). “You claim good is universal. If that were true, we’d need to agree on what it is, which we don’t.” - Maybe I haven’t explained it plainly enough, so here it is another way: The good things you can observe *by your own definition* must have a common quality *that you can identify* to label them as good. And it is universal, in that this quality either is in things and behaviors or not. Everything can be judged good or not, better or worse, embodying more of this goodness quality or less. - So it stands to reason that there is something that embodies *your definition* for that quality of goodness the most, that is one with it. It could be truth, justice, beauty, adventure, family, people pleasing, safety, order, freedom, food, sex, drugs, money, “feel good now” from moment to moment. Any of these things can take the place of God, but anything short of Jesus Christ occupying this spot will fall short and prove more disastrous and unfulfilling as you go down from virtues to feelings to stuff. - Not having a moral anchor to bind the highest good, or choosing to follow a lower-order good, is insufficient and subpar. It will invite consensus drift as a guiding principle in societies, usually downward to lesser and lesser goods, and eventually producing evil.
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Darwin to Jesus
Darwin to Jesus@darwintojesus·
I hear this objection from atheist philosophers all the time. And yes, I know Josh Rasmussen isn’t an atheist, but he swims in those philosophical waters, and this kind of move is extremely common in high tier atheist philosophical circles. The objection goes like this: if God grounds morality, then whatever grounds God’s authority must itself be grounded, or else you just end up with an ungrounded “first authority.” And if God’s normativity is ungrounded, then the theist is in the same boat as the atheist. So the atheist can say, “Look, nobody actually grounds morality. Not even God. So we can just have objective morality without grounding it.” There are several serious problems with that move. First, this move is basically an admission that atheists can’t ground objective morality. If they could, they wouldn’t try to turn the tables on the theist. They’d just present their grounding. But they can’t. So instead of giving a grounding, they try to argue that even theism fails to ground morality, and therefore no grounding is needed. But like I said, this is a concession. Second, even if theism didn’t ground objective morality (which I don’t grant), it wouldn’t follow that morality doesn’t need grounding. If theism failed to ground normativity, then moral anti-realism would be true. What you don’t get to do is say, “Well, grounding doesn’t exist, therefore objective morality still exists without grounding.” That’s a violation of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. It’s a rejection of rational explanation. If we allow that important features of reality simply have no grounding, then anything can just pop into existence without explanation. And at that point, why do science? Why do philosophy? This whole project collapses. Third, atheists can raise interesting questions about how God grounds morality. Those are fair questions. But they aren’t remotely as difficult as the questions atheists have to answer. On theism, you may have to think carefully about how God’s nature gives rise to moral facts, or how divine authority works. But on atheism, you have to explain how normativity arises in a universe with no mind, no authority, no teleology, and no intrinsic value. That’s not just difficult. It’s absurd. So if we accept that objective morality exists, theism is by far the more plausible grounding. And if one theory offers a plausible grounding, and the other offers none at all, then rationally we should accept the former and reject the latter. Now to directly answer Josh’s question. God’s authority is grounded. It is grounded in God’s ownership. Authority flows from ownership. If I own a house, I have the right to set the rules in that house. You, as a visitor, have a real obligation to follow those rules. That’s intuitive and obvious. We all understand how ownership generates authority. God owns everything because God created everything. God is responsible for the entire domain of contingent reality. Therefore, God has sovereign authority over that domain. This is not some mysterious brute fact. This is simply what it means to be the creator of all contingent existence. Ownership is a binary feature. You either made the thing or you didn’t. You can ask what grounds God’s ownership, but that’s like asking what grounds the squareness of a square. It doesn’t have an external grounding. It is true by nature of what God is. And this brings us to atheism. On atheism, there is no owner of the house. There is no sovereign. There is no one with legitimate authority over reality. So any “rules” we think we discover or create are just that: creations. Projections. Fictions. Made up norms floating inside a house that belongs to no one. As Dostoevsky famously said, “if there is no God, everything is permitted.” Not in the psychological sense. In the metaphysical sense. Without an owner, there are no house rules. You can smoke in the house, you can rip the walls down, you can burn it to the ground. Everything is permitted.
Joshua Rasmussen@worldviewdesign

@darwintojesus @cordwainia How would theism help? Let's say you are right that only something with authority can generate authority. It follows logically that any *first* authority (e.g., God's) is *ungrounded*. So everyone has ungrounded normativity. Why is this a problem for *atheism*?

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Pretzel Pete
Pretzel Pete@Jpretzlepete·
I’ve observed this pattern. And extrapolated the logic in a couple different ways for you. And you just say “No”. FYI not engaging with the argument is not as convincing as you think it is. The “circular reasoning” you accuse me of only exists in a fantasy built by your own cynicism of my intentions and not the reality of my words. And no, God won’t live your life for you, even in this fallen world. But if you open your closed mind and heart in good faith reasoning and exploration you will find Him. I hope that you do.
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Pretzel Pete
Pretzel Pete@Jpretzlepete·
“Why should we believe that the ultimately good thing created the universe?” - Goodness creates. Good actions and character produce marriages, families, and societies, and sustains them through generations. - Evil destroys and corrupts what has been created. Lies fall apart. Stealing destroys trust. Murder destroys community. - So creation must come from a pre-creation good, enabling all other lower-order goods. The ultimate act of creation produced from the ultimate good. That’s God’s handiwork. “Has consciousness?” - We can know God has a conscious subjective experience for the same reason He’s personal and relational: we can observe His goodness in our lives. - The example in my previous post was “wife is clumsy, so husband watches and puts hand over the sharp corner of the table when wife reaches down for dropped fork.” This being an example of personal goodness, personal because it’s tailored to that specific woman and his relationship with her. - Take this dynamic and apply it to humans’ relationship with goodness itself, the divine, God. He is not some cold and indifferent equation, not merely a universal principle like the laws of physics. “Cares about humans more than ants?” - Are ants moral actors? Do they have a relationship with goodness? - No, instinct drives their actions. And instinct doesn’t leave the material world. The human experience enters the conceptual and spiritual.
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Pretzel Pete
Pretzel Pete@Jpretzlepete·
The “greatest thing” deserves the spot as our God. What better use of your time and efforts is there except for serving/working towards the “greatest thing”? And all good things must have a common quality that we identify as good in varying degrees. So the most-good thing should be undeniably the best thing when observed/understood/experienced. And it’s not a physical thing, more like: good physical stuff —> virtues —> good-est thing.
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Pretzel Pete
Pretzel Pete@Jpretzlepete·
A. God is goodness. “Oh, but you’re just saying that.” You like good things, yes? And good-er things are better than just meh-good things, yes? Then there must be some ultimate good-est thing, yes? That thing deserves the title of God and it should orient our lives and deserves our reverence and trust, even if it goes against us in the short-medium term. That’s the calculus for saying “God is goodness”. The Christian twist is the claim that God is all that, but also personal. And it makes sense conceptually when you think of the good things in your life: they are specific to you. Goodness could be generic like “cool breeze on summer day”, but also encompass “wife is clumsy, so husband watches and puts hand over the sharp corner of the table when wife reaches down for dropped fork”. That is the earthly example for heavenly mysteries, the creation pointing towards the creator. So God is one and the same with goodness, He is not some human given arbitrary power over us. He set the moral order and not like a decree from a king, but emerging out from His nature. There is no goodness that exists independent from God.
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Leslie Chase - Romance & Adventure among the Stars
Leslie Chase - Romance & Adventure among the Stars@lchasewrites·
@PlottrApp This sounds like a good deal, but I'm not clear what's actually included? Plottr lifetime is clear, is the Idea Threads app also a lifetime license? Is that weekly coaching sessions for life? The 10 Story Snap credits feels almost more like a trial than a deal, tbh.
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Leslie Chase - Romance & Adventure among the Stars retweetledi
Clarissa Lake
Clarissa Lake@clarissalake1·
When a cyborg steps out of a snowstorm to save them both, Taryn, a single mother, finds herself facing something she thought she’d lost forever—hope. In Jorek’s arms, she learns that love can be rebuilt, even after the end of the world. amazon.com/dp/B0FWBMCVN7
Clarissa Lake tweet media
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Leslie Chase - Romance & Adventure among the Stars
Leslie Chase - Romance & Adventure among the Stars@lchasewrites·
@Partisangirl That's wrong - A: Russia was a member of the Partnership for Peace, so should be as blue as Belarus. (Both have been suspended because of the war on Ukraine, ofc.) B: 'Germany' didn't exist for most of it, and East Germany wasn't a member of NATO. I'm sure there are more.
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Syrian Girl
Syrian Girl@Partisangirl·
This is why you should side with Russia in Ukraine. Ukraine was about to join a terrorist organisation called NATO which has destroyed several countries. Then it started burning Russian speakers alive. Can you blame her?
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Keşfet

@oliviacarter321 @AppleBooks @kobo @Jpretzlepete @neumann_gunnar @Stan17736 @AllDefinitely @darwintojesus