Friday, January 29, 2016

PHL111B

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EXILE, COMMANDS & DIVINE COUNSEL
Discussion Question #1
"In the third month, when the children of Israel were gone forth out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness of Sinai."  Consider the timing or the context for the giving of God's message, the commandments.  Having been delivered from bondage in Egypt, a tribe of people find themselves in the wilderness of the Sinai desert, yet to establish their community.  The commandments indeed come at a pivotal time.  They provide ethical structure and establish a set of practices that define the spiritual covenant animating the relationship of a people with their divine authority.  Are they sufficient basis for the establishment of a society?

In the beginning God created man in His image so says the book of Genesis. God is perfect, the human is perfect. Humans were given options.

15And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of
Eden to dress it and to keep it. 16And the LORD God commanded
the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 
17But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not
eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Determining what was good and evil was not a given option for humans at this point. The story of the serpent shows that humans reasoned from a premise that was contrary to the given command or law. So was born the idea of sin or going off course. Human history then became a series of actions based on the reasoned determining of good and evil without reference to God. Before long Genesis chapter six records the following:

And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and 
That every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

God selects Abraham and makes an agreement with him. He believes God and so begins a ‘new’ relationship of God with humans. Abrahams son and grandson continue ‘following the covenant’ for several generations until they become enslaved in Egypt. The culture is different, the God of Abraham is not the god of the Egyptians. God selects Moses to establish a written ‘code of ethics’ that would be sufficient to allow the “children of Israel” to re-establish communities that would preserve the Abrahamic covenant with God.

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Radical Freedom," excerpts from 
the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre
Attached Files: File Sartre.pdf (1,008.865 KB)
This edition gives a really nice introduction and, as 
you will see, useful highlights throughout. 

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ETHICS c l a s s n o t e s 1-29-16

DEAD MAN WALKING

LAWLESSNESS
TENTATIVENESS
HYPOCRISY
INSANITY



MLK
SOCRATES
PAUL

THE PROBLEM WITH
ETHICS WE MUST LOOK
IN THE MIRROR

HYPOCRISY - changing without

SCIENCE - tentative

ANARCHY - lawlessness



DEAD MAN WALKING - plot
http://imdb.to/1KghzGp

As death row inmate Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn) nears his execution date, he calls upon Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon) to help him with one last appeal, maintaining that he is innocent of the murders of a young couple.



Poncelet begins to form a bond with Prejean, and she visits both his family and the relatives of the victims, hoping to learn more about the case. As things begin to look bleak for Poncelet, Prejean does all that she can to comfort and console the hardened convict.



Credo Crito
Remember to thine own self be true

Jail

ETHICS
http://bit.ly/1UweimG

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Discussion Questions
2. What resemblances do the injunctions and strictures outlined in these passages bear to our own laws and codes today?


3. Are there fundamental differences in the tone or import between the Old and New Testament?  If there are, what might this mean for the ethic imperatives that are articulated in these two moments?

 resources and further reading

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