Christopher,
Thank you
for your thoughtful/careful attempt to guide my understanding of your comment.
I understand
you to hold that at least humans exist in a state of freedom, and I agree with
that. I also agree with your formulations of the relationship between freedom
and love. To give love is to act toward aiding another. To help another is to
stimulate expansion of his/her range of freedom or to provide an extended
opportunity for his/her giving of love.
You state
that to stimulate is to coerce. I am puzzled as to how an ethics without
stimulation could then be developed. In my understanding, God, in stimulating a
person’s heart, is not envisioning or directing a decision for a specified
action, but simply awakening or giving empowerment to the general impulse to
give love. (This meaning of stimulation is found in some dictionaries.) If
there were no God, the force inherent in the creation principle would promote
such reflecting, presumably based upon the principle of dual purposes.
We have been
educated to categorize humans as a species, itself a category of organisms. By
definition, members of a species share certain characteristics/aspects of a
mode of existence. These include not only tendencies or inclinations, but also
limitations on possibility. By 1947, when I was still in high school, I held
the assumption that human beings are altruistic. As a Unificationist, I refined this assumption
In my comment on Dr. Mickler’s post Does
Unificationism Have a Stance on Birth Control? I formulated it as “the fundamental impulse of
a person is to give love as intimately as is possible and effective toward the
greatest possible scope imaginable“. It is further refined in my comment on Dr.
Noda’s post Interpreting the Principle
and still further in my PowerPoint presentation on parenting, the text of the
narration of which I would be glad to send you. I am prepared to fill in the
missing details in my formulations.
To conclude,
I think you misunderstand DP’s freedom in the phrases that you quote. It is the
freedom to will and actualize the desires of the original mind, in other words,
one’s fundamental impulse. True love cannot be given in violation of the creation
principle and what laws may be involved. ‘Responsibility’ here means freely
chosen. Evil forces tempt us to violate the principle by choosing to inordinately
try to realize an individual purpose. To so choose is internal alienation,
which was first discussed by self-described Marxist Christian Dorothea Soelle
in her Sin and Alienation. I cannot find anything in DP indicating the
parent-child relationship as ruler-subject. In its mythic account of creation
and fall, God so respects the dignity of the children as to self-restrain from
preventing the tragedy, even though God will suffer with the children if it
occurs. (A somewhat the demythologized version would have God creating laws
that could not be modified, creating the possibility of the tragedy while
knowing that that would be necessary if the ideal held during creation were
ever to be realized and knowing the scenario in which it surely would
eventually be.) In my PowerPoint parenting workshop, a parent’s respect for the
child’s dignity is a major theme, along with offering increasing responsibility
as a child matures.
No comments:
Post a Comment