Eric Newhill
New
Fair point Eric. But they did suggest owning part sins and not merely flicking them off as being in the past, so let's move on. Since you raise the Buddha, let's consider the idea of karma. If you want to post Buddha in defence of a position you can't fairly slice and dice the philosophy - as many Christians do to defend their uncharitable preference for OT idea, despite their faith being named for a much later prophet who repudiated many of the favoured notions.
The OT assertion that the sins of the fathers are visited upon succeeding generations is not too distant from the notion of karma - something now echoed in epigenetics (about which I have but a passing grasp).
While the 'moving finger' may have written and moved on, there is no sense that the consequences of what is written is just as footloose. If we take your seeming position at face value here is an argument against history - unless what we do is comb through what has happened to sift out the nice tings that make us feel good. The past does not matter unless it supports our POV.
I have just finished Henry Reynold's 'Why Weren't We Told'. Henry is a Tasmanian historian who not very popular because he started talking about frontier wars between whites and Aborigines. His research shows, conservatively, up to the 1930s, around 20,000 Aborigines were killed by whites, compared to maybe 2,500 whites killed by Aborigines. Aboriginal history says they were defending their country against an invader. We whites are told told about the conflict. Our myth is 'peaceful' occupation. That's not what our own historical records show.
We have a choice of acknowledging 20,000 deaths in an invasion or admitting to mass murder (or, to be frank, both). In denying either we perpetuate an existential trauma that is now embedded in Aboriginal culture. We owe an acknowledgement of what happened. And yet it is not forthcoming.
Let's consider your apparent position and relate it here. We whites invaded, and we won. Let's move on. But we do not confess to invading. Ee have 'moved on' by denying, by lying about, the truth. That is injurious to the memory of the victors and the defeated. We deny the defeated the opportunity of a dignified defeat Think the US and Vietnam. The US walked away with 'peace with dignity'.
This is my history, to be sure, not yours. But those 20,000 deaths are a 'scoop mark' in history for me. They happened. But how do we write then into our history now, after so long denying they happened. I invite you to read Reynold's book (you can get is an audiobook on Audible) - because it is an examination of how history is managed to conceal a guilt or a responsibility to truth that a culture should own. My family migrated to Australia in the mid 1950s. We are not guilty of the sins going back 150 years. But the sin of lying about it is something we are involved in. As beneficiaries of those alleged sins, we have a moral duty to cherish truth - no matter what the existential cost is to our sense of comfort.
I read in the US that a parent can have their car seized because it has a 'taint of crime' connected to their child being caught with cannabis in it. I see a nation with a very fine moral notion that is designed not on the grounds acceptable to a moral philosopher, but to a politician and a revenue raiser.
What is right - now or in history? What is the real 'statute of limitations' on crimes in a spiritual context? Human law may 'forgive' an alleged offender because 5 years has past. But divine law?
Michael,
I confess to not understanding you at all.
In Christianity sins are wiped clean when one asks Christ for forgiveness. In some schools of Buddhism, karma will get you for past sins. Even if we decide those particular Buddhist schools are correct, we don't need to go around hating ourselves and idealizing others that, being people, are just as bad.
Once again, your entire argument hinges on ancient tribal people as being someone superior - and I find that notion to be a romantic myth.
You and Alice and falling all over each other to justify human sacrifice, head hunting, cannibalism, stoning women, all manner of inter-tribal warfare, magical thinking perpetuating disease and starvation, caste systems, slavery, subsistence living and a host of other spiritual, personal and societal ills just so you can bash on your own culture - to what end I can't even begin to imagine. I suspect it's a psychological issue that I don't suffer from (I have my own issues, as do we all).
Also, as TES says, you don't get to own a continent into perpetuity just because you took over back when no one was around to record the event in a permanent file. On that note, how do you know it wasn't native people's Karma that caused them to be taken over? You are presuming a lot about cosmic justice in your role as a defense lawyer making a case for the primitives/prosecutor of the moderns.