iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

Well, I am like them. I have it very difficult to respect compromise. Principles must never be compromised.

Well, that's fine for you, but what would one possibly do as a politician with that policy? I understand perfectly well that this is why people don't like politicians, but no one of them, on his own, can avoid compromise and remain in a position of power without luck and compromise by others.

So you are a professional politician? My condolences. Sincerely.

When you are some faction leader or such, it's hard to avoid compromises indeed, because that's precisely the job of negotiating compromises, but if you are not, it should be somewhat possible to keep a clean voting record in matters of principle.

iwpoe wrote:

I have a principal. I agree to put the execution of principals in the public sphere up to vote. The majority votes against my principal. I acquiesce to the will of the majority.

It doesn't end there. If you are principled, you step down and refuse to administer the policy.

iwpoe wrote:

seigneur wrote:

If natural law is not merely an ideal, but also a fact and truth, there's no need to "execute" it. It will effect itself in due time, like a broken leg will bleed and then hopefully heal in some manner.

Then what's the point of having political arguments at all?

Masses never rule themselves spontaneously. There will always be active leaders of some sort or another, and to be a leader, you have to make yourself heard as such. In a democracy, the political arguments between politicians are supposed to reflect the needs of the population, so you have to take demographic trends into account, which is a sign of a pragmatic politician in any case. Statistics tend to indicate that marriage in natural law sense is extinct. What's the purpose of trying to keep an extinct concept alive? What practical utility does marriage serve for the state or for the people? If there are other concepts that

iwpoe has been going on about some policies that could work to bring gays "dignity" or such. In my view, dignity is only appropriate when external appreciation is in accord with internal dignity and these both are in accord with natural law. In the context of marriage, gays can have absolutely no dignity at all by the very definition of marriage. Sorry, but this is how it is, if natural law is to be respected.

Of course, legislators are free to ignore natural law, and they are doing it as we speak. What are the political options for traditionalists under such circumstances? As I said, in my opinion the case was lost half a century ago when statistics indicated the implosion of the institution of marriage. It's a consistent demographic trend and no policy can turn this around. The only active thing for traditionalists to do is to acknowledge this fact for what it is - a symptom of a serious internal failure of civilisation - while trying to continue to live with (proper) dignity in married life themselves.

"A symptom of a serious internal failure of civilisation" may sound like a doomsday message. This is what it in fact is. Wilful ignorance of natural law is fatal, or should be, if natural law is a fact and truth.

Such a message has hardly any chance of getting through in self-satisfied consumerist countries like US, UK, Canada, and all major Western European nations. It has a much better chance of resonating with the bulk of population in Eastern European countries, who see themselves as a rare endangered species, but the leadership in those countries is easy to pressure into concession by EU authorities. Russia's regime has already pre-empted the problem. It's sad how this issue has become a marker between totalitarianism and the "free world". This is another reason why this issue is politically irreversibly lost in the West.

Correct observation, AmandoAlvarez. The problem of evil is really the problem of suffering. The answer to the problem of suffering, the way I construe it, takes us closer to the esoteric topics, such as death and afterlife, than mere evil.

AmandoAlvarez wrote:

My own non-philosophical guess is that either 1.  God values the non-determinedness of all his creation. The Newtonian clock-like universe is not our universe.

The more appropriate word is perhaps dynamics, instead of non-determinedness. There's enough intelligibility in the world (my subjective impression of course), but the actualised instances are in constant change. In a sense, there's just one moment actualised, while the rest of the universe (including its history and future) is in potentiality in the Aristotelian sense. The potentiality vastly overpowers the actuality, hence the dynamics that can take us anywhere.

We talk about, for example, causality. Has anybody seen a cause, ever? Not really. We only see effects. Causes are always somewhere in the past or somehow hidden behind the effects, they are never in plain sight. Yet we can't help it and keep talking about causality.

Like every cause, the cause of suffering is hidden from plain sight. The mechanics of the universe is such that there's a certain portion of suffering and a certain portion of happiness actualised, while their causes are hidden from sight, probably in the past, and the full ripening of these causes, the ultimate justice, is tentatively somewhere in the future.

The amount and nature of suffering depends on the perspective that we adopt when talking about it. As a starting point, the perspective may be the history of smallpox, the Holocaust or Ethiopian famines, and we may call these events "wanton suffering", but it would be honest to admit that we know neither the root causes behind these events nor their ultimate purpose. Inasmuch as we don't know these things, is it really correct to call it "wanton suffering", "o