From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Mar 29 2003 - 00:13:10 MST
At 09:19 PM 3/28/03 -0800, Spike wrote:
>Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son to god
>is praised early and often in the old and new
>testaments of the christian scriptures. This make
>anyone with a modicum of a sense of ethics want to
>barf.
I hate to be the god's advocate, but this only makes sense as a moral
position if earthly life is All There Is, which by biblical hypothesis is
exactly *not* the case. If there were some kind of extra-physical `soul' or
`essence' that can be preserved, enhanced and fulfilled within the bosom of
a god after one's death, dying as a sacred sacrifice might well be a
consummation devoutly to be wished.
Oddly enough, Abraham wasn't *entirely* convinced of this point of view,
although he was prepared to go along with it. And oddly enough, the god in
question apparently thought well enough of continued physical existence
that it allowed the kid to survive once the test of obedience was concluded
to its satisfaction.
The asserted wickedness of this bizarre parable takes on a creepy >H
salience when we transpose the matter to uploads, xoxes and all that jazz.
Many extropians are only too happy to terminate a xox, or get rid of a
`meat' body, once the magic dust has been ported into a computer.
Theodicies actually work better when there's a theos in the equation. (Of
course, very few of us here accept that there *is*, or even that it makes
much sense that there should be one, unless it's a superintelligence from
the last arms race and we're its wetware dream.)
Damien Broderick
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