What's So Great About Ushas

b sharp · 11 Jul 2008, 18:46 · from 2008-July.txt.gz

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From: bsharporflat at hotmail.com (b sharp)
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:46:21 -0400
Subject: (urth) What's So Great About Ushas
Message-ID: <BAY103-W2543B565CE1241FE290423D7900 at phx.gbl>

Paul B I do think you are missing numerous hints that the Hiero-types are (as mentioned in my
previous post) more omniscient and closer to the Increate in purpose than humans (and you 
shouldn't have tried to weaken my position by adding your own thought about power creating 
moral superiority ;-), I mentioned knowledge and foresight only).

In more general terms, it seems to me you are stubbornly clinging to a fallacy:  that you are the
equal in ability to make moral judgements to omniscient beings who can directly observe the future.
You are not their equal.  You and all of us other humans can only guess what the consequence of an
 action will be and make decisions based on judgement of statistical liklihood. I hope you are not trying
to argue that a moral judgement can be made completely independent from the consequences of actions
(making your moral framework very Beavisian in that cool stuff rocks and bogus stuff sucks).

A room full of 4 year olds might get together and decide they should be provided with loaded automatic 
weapons to scare away monsters.  A philosopher child among them might argue that adults are bigger 
but possess no particular features that make them superior moral agents and the right thing to do would
be to provide them with the monster protections they need. Paul, in the presence of God or Tzadkiel you 
are this child. As a human being, you (and I)  just don't know enough to judge the actions of God and 
angels. And I suspect you won't be getting your guns (unless perhaps you share your daycare with baby
Adolph?  j/k  j/k).

You might see the merit of this view in which an absolute certainty about the future is a tool which confers 
moral superiority or perhaps not (but please no more lectures about utilitarianism which is a merely human 
principle based on statistical liklihood of outcome.

But you might argue that you are the equal of any intelligence in making moral judgements about the past 
where outcomes are set. If we pretend that reading history is equivalent to directly observing the past it 
might seem that when we humans observe the past we can see with certainty the full consequences of an 
action.

However this also is false because, unlike Tzadkiel, we cannot see multiple threads and multiple outcomes 
based on many possible choices of action. We can only know what one choice was made, see the outcome
of that choice and only guess whether that outcome would have been better or worse than if other choices
were made.  God can see all possible choices and all possible outcomes making Him the perfect moral agent.
Tzadkiel's ability approaches this making him/her far, far more morally advanced than an adult is to a child.  
Thus our own moral judgement of Tzadkiel's or God's actions is of negligible importance.

-bsharp

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