Why not hedonism?

[Mono no aware]

Daniel, I took a long walk on a cold day yesterday and thought about Pascal's Wager, and I would like to retract my posts in favor of it.  Were the editing window still open, I would make them into "lone dot" posts.  Although I still think Pascal saw the problem with exceptional clarity, I can see why you disagree with his proposed resolution.  He took far too much for granted.  I embraced his thinking too rashly, whereas you were already several steps ahead of me in diagnosing its faults.  I can be particularly slow when it comes to numbers, and I sometimes end up having to game "real-life scenarios" in my head in order to make sense of the maths.  This was such a time.  Mea culpa and peace be with you.  I have nothing else to add.

[Non Nobis]

Daniel, I took a long walk on a cold day yesterday and thought about Pascal's Wager, and I would like to retract my posts in favor of it.  Were the editing window still open, I would make them into "lone dot" posts.  Although I still think Pascal saw the problem with exceptional clarity, I can see why you disagree with his proposed resolution...

I think Daniel and now you are right about Pascal's wager.  But is the argument  that praying to God  is wise if you DO believe in Him (and believe that He HEARS you, whatever He does about it; even if He MAY be angry ) a form of Pascal's Wager?  It doesn't say that you should actually believe because it is useful to do so.  It proposes a possible solution and then lets you test it.  It is like calling out to someone for desperately needed help even though you think he may be angry at you for doing so. It is rational.

Or, what do YOU think about Daniel's reasoning here:

I can't pray to God. That's too risky, because for all I know God might be like a human king. And as we know, a random guy off the street does not just barge into the king's chamber and start talking to the king. If he did that, he'd surely offend the king's majesty, and the king would rightly have him beheaded. So if God is like a king, then prayer is not an option. Rather, I would need to find some extremely holy intercessor, whom God favours, who could deliver the message on my behalf. But without assuming any one religion to be right, I know of no such intercessor. So I'm in no position to be praying to God, much less demanding that He reveal Himself to me or do anything else for me.

[Mono no aware]

I think Daniel and now you are right about Pascal's wager.  But is the argument  that praying to God  is wise if you DO believe in Him (and believe that He HEARS you, whatever He does about it; even if He MAY be angry ) a form of Pascal's Wager?  It doesn't say that you should actually believe because it is useful to do so.  It proposes a possible solution and then lets you test it.  It is like calling out to someone for desperately needed help even though you think he may be angry at you for doing so. It is rational.

Or, what do YOU think about Daniel's reasoning here:

I can't pray to God. That's too risky, because for all I know God might be like a human king. And as we know, a random guy off the street does not just barge into the king's chamber and start talking to the king. If he did that, he'd surely offend the king's majesty, and the king would rightly have him beheaded. So if God is like a king, then prayer is not an option. Rather, I would need to find some extremely holy intercessor, whom God favours, who could deliver the message on my behalf. But without assuming any one religion to be right, I know of no such intercessor. So I'm in no position to be praying to God, much less demanding that He reveal Himself to me or do anything else for me.

I am now rather hesitant to criticize Daniel's thinking, because he is like a chess opponent who can map out twice as many future moves as I can.  I will merely offer that his logic appears faulty here, because he is supposing a characteristic of God (God is annoyed by prayer) that I'm not aware has been said of God by any revealed religion.  In that case, it seems a meaningless supposition.  I don't think a person should have any fear of a thus-far unrevealed God, since the possibilities for unrevealed gods are infinite, and in that case one could potentially be offending God by doing anything.  So prayer should not be dismissed by this reasoning, since it is only as likely to offend an unknown god as any other action might offend some other unknown god.  One might just as well be offending God by praying as watching Jeopardy! or clipping one's toenails.

It is strange.  Even though Daniel seems to be more favorably inclined towards Catholicism than I am, his agnosticism stretches deeper than my own.  I am agnostic with a certainty of 1.  Daniel's is a zero—he isn't even sure of consciousness.  I am at a "scoffing character in Dostoevsky" level.  Daniel might be at "yawning black chasm of absolute existential despair."

[Kreuzritter]

But there's a difference between having a generic desire to follow God's rules and actually following God's rules.

The former is easy: granted that you always acknowledge God to be most sovereign, you can never fail to want to follow all of His rules. Just keep your mind always on God's sovereignty in all your actions, and all your actions will be done with the desire to follow all of God's rules.

The latter, however, is oftentimes impossible: it pretty much requires that we have knowledge of God's rules... yet God doesn't give faith to everybody.
And it's impractical (perhaps impossible) to attempt to follow God's rules without knowing what those rules are, since all the religions seem to be contradicting one another, not to mention that it's also possible that none of the religions have knowledge of God's rules.

It's not electing to follow God's "rules" because you intellectually acknowledge him as sovereign, which isn't even a logical necessity of that acknowledgment.  Just ask Lucifer. It's loving God and neighbour out of vital necessity by the divinity dwelling within and ones ever-deepening union with it.

You're always thinking in terms of obedience demanded by authority, lists of rules, and the knowledge of the intellect. This is Satanism, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Law that cannot save.

Nevertheless, God damns people who fail to follow His rules.

God "damns" people who don't have goodness in their heart and refuse to act on the work of the law that is written onto it; because that's what damnation is. This is why there's no such thing as "ingorance" of what is moral, "ignorance" of what the good "demands"; because people know the nature of their actions, and they choose those which are after their heart.

Your views of "Christianity" are utterly diabolically-inspired, a dark hole from which there's no escape while you stubbornly cling to them.

[Kreuzritter]

That leaves us with the missionary religions: Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.  Buddhism can be excluded from Pascal's Wager because the penalty for not taking up Buddhism is simply rebirth, but since we don't remember our past lives (or at least I can't), this is a penalty without a sting, as rebirth is no different from birth. Some schools of Buddhism, such as the Tibetan form, do posit hells, but these can be dismissed as syncretisms where the Buddhist message was overmingled with the local paganism.

Nope. They can't be dismissed as syncretisms. The Kathavatthu, which forms part of the Pali Canon, discusses hells, and the concept of a hell in India dates at least to the period of the Upanishads. One could just as well point to the absence in the original Vedas of the notion of reincarnation; one could also point to the argument, in line with samsara and anatta, that upon death and the dissolution of the human into components, all which is "reincarnated" is the karma, not the atman.  Some schools of Buddhism deny the atman, which only makes the phenomenon of "reincarnation" even more irrelevant and the concept of "liberation" something of self-contradiction, but the Buddha only argued that nothing in samsaric existence could be rightly called "I" and that what people in general identify as the self can't be that, not that there is nothing which transcends samsara.

The Buddha was a Hindu, and his preoccupation was liberation.  Samsara alone was enough endless suffering for him.

Hell is just a part of samsara.

You might argue are that there are myriad cult religions to be considered, such as Scientology, Mormonism, Raëlism, &c., but these were all founded recently enough in history that we can see clearly the obvious fabrications by their founders.  Weighing them for probability, they come up far short of the major established monotheisms.

Really? You have African traditional religions, Hermeticism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and Hinduism itself. And Gnostic Christianities. They all have notions of reward and punishment and a heavenly or  afterlife, in one form or another.


Anyway, I won't defend Pascal's Wager. I think it's bullcrap that belongs to the age in which men have lost the ability of immediate experience and entered into an era of blind intellectual speculation. The moment we move from the language of myth and living ritual into that of theology, it's happened. It's the very thing Siddharta encountered in the Brahmanism of his age and against which he formulated his teaching. Heck, you take this from the Vedas and replace "Agni" with "Jesus" and "devas/gods" with "divinity" or "elohim/angels" and it sounds positively Hebrew/Catholic.

1.1.1Mantra 1 – Agni (Author: Madhucchandas Vaisvamitra)

1 I glorify Agni, the divine Priest and the messenger of my oblations to God who is the bestower of prosperity.
2 May Agni, the divine Priest who is glorified by both the past and the present sages, increase and strengthen our bond with the Devas.
3 Praying to God though Agni, the Angel Priest, may we the worshippers obtain valiant offspring, and daily increasing prosperity and glory.
4 Agni, the perfect sacrifice which thou encompassest about
Verily goeth to the Gods.
5 May Agni, sapient-minded Priest, truthful, most gloriously great,The God, come hither with the Gods.
6 Whatever blessing, Agni, thou wilt grant unto thy worshipper,That, Angiras, is indeed thy truth.
7 O Lord, the remover of darkness!  We pray to you morning and eveningwith sincere thoughts of reverence.  Through our prayers we come close to you.
8 Ruler of sacrifices, guard of Law eternal, radiant One,Increasing in thine own abode.
9 God!  Be unto us easy of access, as is a father to his son.Be ever present in our midst, giving us happiness.

[Mono no aware]

Hell is just a part of samsara.

Right.  Some of these hells are temporary and not eternal.  As I said earlier, I would retract those posts and make them into "lone dots" if I could.  I was deliberately using broad strokes because it seemed like Daniel could be gotten to Christianity without troubling overmuch with persuasion, yet I now see that he seems to be starting from a sort of "null hypothesis" of religion—in which case, every last technicality must be considered.  Some Buddhists have hells.  Some Hindus are ecumenical enough to say Christians are unknowingly practicing a form of bhakti yoga.  The Vatican says non-Christians can be saved; traditional Catholics prefer Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. 

To properly game out every last claim by every last religion and alleged oracle of heaven, you would need a supercomputer algorithm and a search engine that could suss out all the world's prophetesses, Messiahs, and cult leaders to the person.  That's the reason why Pascal's Wager fails, not because it's "bullcrap" as you say.  Pascal was incisive and saw the issue clearly, save for a single blinding bias.  But I was mistaken about the wager.  I thought it was something along the lines of what Non Nobis calls "a form of Pascals' Wager": an uncertain Catholic giving 50/50 odds to the Catholic God.  In that case, it makes sense.  Unalloyed, it's the noblest failure.  The odds are lottery-like unless you weight them with subjective preferences such as, "I feel like it's more reasonable that God would incarnate in a celibate first-century Jew rather than give his dispensation to a lustful seventh-century Arabian warlord."  That is fine, but if you start from zero then there is no reason why God couldn't give his message to an Arabian warlord.

You can lament the movement "from the language of myth and living ritual into that of theology" and of course that's your right.   I don't think you'd get much criticism from Pascal, who placed a premium on mystical conversion over proofs.  But that ship has sailed and it's not coming back.  Some years ago, I was right where you are.  I have a shelf of books by Mircea Eliade, Julius Evola, René Guénon, &c..  Myth and ritual and transcendence.  Yap, yap.  I don't put much stock in myths anymore.  I think they're nostalgically overrated.  Modern confusion tends us to hype the ancients.  I think in a lot of cases mythology was, no offense, the ongoing work of a succession of ignorant yahoos and mystical goo-goos who wanted people to "pay, pray, and obey," and now it seems profound because it comes to us so foreign.  I'm not saying there aren't exceptions.  But nowadays if I want "the wisdom of the ancients" I'll mainly stick with Seneca or Epicurus.  Speaks a language I can comprehend.  To each their own, of course.

[Tales]

I've spoken with atheists before about whether or not a personal visitation from Jesus would convince them - unsurprisingly, the answer is usually no.

You believe, or you do not.  This is not to say that both sides do not have reasonable explanations for their stance, but it is to reject the idea of some absolute provable certainty, this magical 100%-its-true-you-cannot-deny-it-here's-the-proof-read-it-and-weep type argument / evidence.  Searching for this is absolutely futile, its kicking against the goads, Jesus never promised it, the Church never promised it, and you cannot even absolutely refute the ridiculous brain-in-vat hypothesis.  We do not require it of anything else we do in our lives, we did not require it when we chose our spouses, picked our careers, decided where to live.  But now we require it of faith?

The faith is all about love (the heart) and many today are so mired in our minds, it is no wonder we struggle so greatly.  Or at least I do.

Maybe I am mistaken but I cannot think of an instance of Jesus exalting the intellect.  And yet I spend far too much time in that arena.  One can be a good friend, and know what a good friend is.  Or one can think and ponder friendship philosophically till the cows come home and probably end up in friendship nihilism.  Jesus did not call us to ponder love, but to love.  He did not call us to intellectualize the faith, but to have faith (believe and obey).  He did not call us to absolutely know with perfect certainty (an impossibility, but I repeat myself), instead He called us to believe (I believe many a thing which I have varying degrees of certainty over, so what?).

Approach the faith from the wrong angle and be not surprised with dissatisfaction.

[Non Nobis]

Kreuzritter,

This is about what you've just said to Daniel, but also other things you've said in the past. 

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but I sometimes get the idea that you don't think much about reasoning about morality and "understanding the rules". Or are you only saying that DANIEL (and others like him) wrongly focus on these things as though they were the most important thing, or even all that mattered?

...
... loving God and neighbour out of vital necessity by the divinity dwelling within and ones ever-deepening union with it.

I absolutely agree that (if this corresponds roughly to what you are saying) goodness comes from love, which can come supernaturally only because of God dwelling within us, united to us by love.  If we love God "with our whole heart, whole soul, whole mind, and whole strength" we will love God and neighbor; more so as our love deepens.

You're always thinking in terms of obedience demanded by authority, lists of rules, and the knowledge of the intellect. This is Satanism, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Law that cannot save.

So you are just saying that thinking EXCLUSIVELY of these things, or leaving out Charity (union of love with God) is Satanic?  (This always makes me think of the  cruel Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, always acting in the name of "justice".  Sorry if you've never heard of him!)

Nevertheless, God damns people who fail to follow His rules.

God "damns" people who don't have goodness in their heart and refuse to act on the work of the law that is written onto it; because that's what damnation is. This is why there's no such thing as "ingorance" of what is moral, "ignorance" of what the good "demands"; because people know the nature of their actions, and they choose those which are after their heart.

God's rules include the 10 commandments (deriving from the two great commandments), and Christ says "If you love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15). Keeping the 10 commandments only materially (without love) can break them, because we are meant to follow the spirit of the law (and must follow the 2 great commandments, love of God and neighbor). Not following God's rules (mortal sin) MEANS that you don't have goodness in your heart.

People are never excused from following the natural law written into their heart; it is never entirely erased.  But it is dirtied, hushed, blurred, ignored.  SIN itself makes it easier to break the natural law in the future.  Original sin brought concupiscence and ignorance to us, so our passions rise up against the natural law and our intellect ignores or is confused about it.

God wrote the natural law on our hearts; but then He ALSO saw fit to give us His laws written on two tablets. I speculate that that would not have been necessary had Adam and Eve not sinned.  Perhaps God would only have needed to give them His "positive" law explicitly e.g. "of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat" (Genesis 2:17).

Given our weakened intellect and the EFFECTS of original sin and past personal sin in us, what ought to be obvious (e.g. that contraception is immoral) is not (even if that is our own fault).  Having the 10 commandments and the Catholic Church (and the study of moral law) explicitly point out and explain what is wrong forces our minds to "pay attention" and recognize and admit the evil it should have already seen. 

The natural law written on our hearts OUGHT TO BE ENOUGH.  But God saw that BY OUR FAULT it would not be.  In His mercy he gave us the 10 Commandments and the Church (and even its theologians and philosophers) to make it more clear. Christ Himself made explicit and explained things even if they were in the natural law already.

And there are positive laws, such as the laws of the Church.  We owe God OBEDIENCE, because He is God, even if a law is not "on our heart". True obedience IS love, not done only out of fear.

The study of moral theology and natural law also focus on the "objective good", which is not explicitly covered by the "divinity dwelling within and ones ever-deepening union with it". God's commands tell US (subjects) to do some objective good.  We could focus only on the subject, and find true union with God and love, what finally matters. But God commands us to do some specific, concrete, good-in-itself thing. Love of God requires us to care about, and so to think about, that objective thing. Natural law and moral theology consider the objective good.  If the objective good is unknown or misunderstood, the subject can still be holy if his intention is holy and his ignorance is blameless.  But the intent of the subject must be to do the objective thing that God had in mind (without that intent there is no love). I think we need to use our intellects to study these things.

Of course a steady diet of considering rules and objective truth is not enough; we need to emphasize love and spiritual things more than we do.

Could you comment?

ETA: Having said all that, I agree with you (and others) that people (e.g. Daniel) can sometimes get hung up on intellectualizing and fail to act as a simple Catholic out of love for God based on what they do know already. I just don't think the study of natural law and moral theology should be pooh poohed in general. It can affect the teachings/explanations of the Church which do matter to every Catholic, and can help fight philosophers whose ideas filter down into society at large, even if not immediately impacting any given individual.  And it is a GOOD THING to understand morality (which is from God) better,  even if it does not impact our current lives.  It is GOOD but if done to excess can tire and confuse our minds, and interfere with our "duties of state" (e.g. caring for our families).

[Xavier]

Although I still think Pascal saw the problem with exceptional clarity, I can see why you disagree with his proposed resolution.  He took far too much for granted.

As you probably know, dear Pon, what is called "Pascal's wager" is in reality only a small part of his Pensees. I think Pascal was a very good scientist, mathematician, philosopher and theologian on the whole, though I don't necessarily agree with each and everything he wrote; here is the part that deals with has been called his Wager, "We know that there is an infinite, but are ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it must therefore be true that there is an infinity in number, but what this is we know not. It can neither be odd nor even, for the addition of an unit can make no change in the nature of number; yet it is a number, and every number is either odd or even, at least this is understood of every finite number. Thus we may well know that there is a God, without knowing what he is ... Since there is an equal chance of gain and loss, if you had only to gain two lives for one, you might still wager. But were there three of them to gain, you would have to play, since needs must that you play, and you would be imprudent, since you must play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where the chances of loss or gain are even. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And that being so, were there an infinity of chances of which one only would be for you, you would still be right to stake one to win two, and you would act foolishly, being obliged to play, did you refuse to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there be one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to win. But there is here an infinity [98] of an infinitely happy life to win, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite; that is decided. Wherever the infinite exists and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no room for hesitation, you must risk the whole." https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/pascal-the-thoughts-of-blaise-pascal

Pascal uses an argument of the form derived from the mathematical concept of expected value, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value a simple idea. Suppose someone offers $10 in a coin toss for every time you land a head, and you pay nothing if you land a tail. Here, the expected value from the experiment is $5 (=0.5*10+0.5*0). In practice, nobody would offer that, and expected value would be set to zero. E.g. you pay $10 if its heads, you receive 10 if its tails etc. Pascal argues, and this much is agreed by almost everyone (math textbooks would say the same on what rational actors would do), that in such a case, everyone should go forward and toss the coin, because given the stakes, there is a fairly assured probability of return (or, in this case, a certain payoff), and a very unlikely probability (or in this case, nil probability) of loss. He then argues that the promised gain here is infinite, namely eternal life, and is therefore worth risking a lot etc.

Some critics point out that it assumes the likelihood of God and Heaven existing is equal to it not existing etc. Strictly speaking, it does not assume that. Others say it would be useful only if deciding between Christianity and atheism were the only two alternatives. That is a better objection. So personally, I prefer the Thomistic Ways that show us God's Nature and Attributes to that of Blaise Pascal. Some of the other things in the link are quite good, though, particularly the section on prophesies.

I would prefer, Pon, to proceed as St. Thomas and also some of the early Fathers like St. Justin and St. Hilary, converts from paganism both, did in coming to the knowledge of God. (1) Reason establishes clearly that there is One Supreme God, the Eternal Being. (2) But only the God of one religion has consistently and from the beginning taught the whole world that He is One, namely the God Who revealed Himself to the Patriarchs and Prophets, Who even described Himself as HE WHO IS, i.e. as the Sole Being Who has Existence in Himself, upon Whom all other beings depend. (3) So, it is reasonable to believe This God is the One True God. The Church has always professed, Credo in Unum Deum. It was the first Commandment of the God of Israel. Hence, these holy Fathers justly saw that all of pagan polytheism, with its many claimed competing gods, could not be the One True God. An avalanche of conversions from paganism to Christianity during this time was the result, by God's Grace.

Your thoughts, Pon, on why the holy Fathers were mistaken (?) in approaching it in that manner? I think it's a mistake to allow the multiplicity of religions in the world to allow us to become Agnostic, though sometimes that's what comparative religions courses in some modern settings do. The right way is the traditional approach (1) to come from paganism to Monotheism through (especially Thomistic) philosophy; (2) to come from Judaism to Christianity, through the Messianic prophesies etc.

If it is objected that this still leaves Judaism and Islam, as they also profess to worship the God of Abraham, beside Christianity, well you yourself, Pon, said it is quite simple really to decide between Christianity and Islam, on account of the vast difference in the lives of the Founder of Christianity, and the promulgator of Islamism.

Another way imho, also hinted at in Malachi's prophesy of Sacrifices being offered by the Gentiles from dawn to dusk, is that the offering of Sacrifice is always a mark of true religion, as natural law suggests. And neither Jews nor others offer Sacrifice today, as indeed Mal 1:11 says, while the Catholic Church has always offered it. This book by https://www.tanbooks.com/index.php/mass-eucharist/latin-mass-explained-everything-needed-to-understand-and-appreciate-the-traditional-latin-mass.html Msgr. George Moorman quotes Cicero as saying cities without sacrifices were almost unheard of in antiquity. Thus, Sacrifice is an essential part of True Worship.

But more on that in another thread. God bless.

[Kreuzritter]

To properly game out every last claim by every last religion and alleged oracle of heaven, you would need a supercomputer algorithm and a search engine that could suss out all the world's prophetesses, Messiahs, and cult leaders to the person.  That's the reason why Pascal's Wager fails, not because it's "bullcrap" as you say.  Pascal was incisive and saw the issue clearly, save for a single blinding bias.

Well no, it's not. It is bullcrap. It could only be formulated within an understanding of "religion" that is bullcrap.

You can lament the movement "from the language of myth and living ritual into that of theology" and of course that's your right.   I don't think you'd get much criticism from Pascal, who placed a premium on mystical conversion over proofs. 

I don't lament it. It's just indicative of a vital change in man in general, but it's not my problem.

But that ship has sailed and it's not coming back.  Some years ago, I was right where you are. 

No, I don't think you were. I'm not a hoarder of books and armchair pontificator. I've done. I've found. I've beheld. I've had experience after experience that destroyed the conventional understanding of eality I'd been implcitly and explicitly force-fed by the institutions of society and state and shattered my world and my self. Asking me if God, Jesus, spirit, angels, demons, heavens, hells, spheres, aeons, magic, the cosmic powers of myth and my transcendent self are real is like asking me if the morning sunlight streaming through my windows is real. You can call it make-believe, delusion and illusion, but I don't think you or anyone else possesses a criterion of "reality" that would make your position meaningful as anything more than a blind and tendentious clinging to the value of one small corner of existence.

I have a shelf of books by Mircea Eliade, Julius Evola, René Guénon, &c..  Myth and ritual and transcendence.  Yap, yap.  I don't put much stock in myths anymore.  I think they're nostalgically overrated.  Modern confusion tends us to hype the ancients.  I think in a lot of cases mythology was, no offense, the ongoing work of a succession of ignorant yahoos and mystical goo-goos who wanted people to "pay, pray, and obey," and now it seems profound because it comes to us so foreign.  I'm not saying there aren't exceptions.  But nowadays if I want "the wisdom of the ancients" I'll mainly stick with Seneca or Epicurus.  Speaks a language I can comprehend.  To each their own, of course.

To some. I understand and I believe because I've practised and seen. But, again, not my problem if your own inaction or failures lead you to chalk it up mystical goo-goos playing huckster.

[Kreuzritter]

Kreuzritter,

This is about what you've just said to Daniel, but also other things you've said in the past. 

Perhaps I misunderstand you, but I sometimes get the idea that you don't think much about reasoning about morality and "understanding the rules". Or are you only saying that DANIEL (and others like him) wrongly focus on these things as though they were the most important thing, or even all that mattered?

I believe I've said it elsewhere. Reason, as regards morality, is a tool for awareness of what one is doing and understanding what its consequences will likely be. I mean that in the sense that a good person will act out of love, but, to give an example, though this disposition would not lead him to harm another person, he may yet harm another person if he doesn't understand that is what he's doing (this is not meant in the sense that one can be "ignorant", e.g., that what murder is is wrong, but that one might not understand that one one is doing is this). But I unequivocally reject, and reject as pagan, the fundamental idea of Western ethics and the proposition that value and "right action" are discoverable through reason in any other sense than the one I just gave.

So you are just saying that thinking EXCLUSIVELY of these things, or leaving out Charity (union of love with God) is Satanic?  (This always makes me think of the  cruel Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, always acting in the name of "justice".  Sorry if you've never heard of him!)

Somewhat. Moreso, it's a warped Western view that sees God, morality, Heaven and salvation in these terms.

God's rules include the 10 commandments (deriving from the two great commandments), and Christ says "If you love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15). Keeping the 10 commandments only materially (without love) can break them, because we are meant to follow the spirit of the law (and must follow the 2 great commandments, love of God and neighbor). Not following God's rules (mortal sin) MEANS that you don't have goodness in your heart.

Sure. The good implies certain right ways of acting which can be forumulated as imperatives. But Moses was founding a state, and a state needs to formulate explicit rules to keep order and enact justice in the face of evil people. The point is, this is not the essence of morality: following the rules of a supreme authority. The essence of the good and moral action is love; loving God with all ones being and loving ones neighbour as oneself.

People are never excused from following the natural law written into their heart; it is never entirely erased.  But it is dirtied, hushed, blurred, ignored.  SIN itself makes it easier to break the natural law in the future.  Original sin brought concupiscence and ignorance to us, so our passions rise up against the natural law and our intellect ignores or is confused about it.

The work of the law is written on the heart, but the scriptures never mention "natural law", which is through-and-through a Greek and Stoic idea. I've responded to this before.

God wrote the natural law on our hearts; but then He ALSO saw fit to give us His laws written on two tablets. I speculate that that would not have been necessary had Adam and Eve not sinned.  Perhaps God would only have needed to give them His "positive" law explicitly e.g. "of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat" (Genesis 2:17).

Was it a positive law, verbally announced, as we understand it? I don't know. The text of these chapters of Genesis is not strictly literal. But remember why Eve took it, apparently: the desire to be like God.

Given our weakened intellect and the EFFECTS of original sin and past personal sin in us, what ought to be obvious (e.g. that contraception is immoral) is not (even if that is our own fault).  Having the 10 commandments and the Catholic Church (and the study of moral law) explicitly point out and explain what is wrong forces our minds to "pay attention" and recognize and admit the evil it should have already seen. 

Sure. Theosis is a long process. Rules are like a ladder.

And there are positive laws, such as the laws of the Church.  We owe God OBEDIENCE, because He is God, even if a law is not "on our heart". True obedience IS love, not done only out of fear.

Sure, but those law don't need to be. Where they serve the purpose of the Gospel, great; where they become Pharisaic, and people treat them as such, the object is lost. Look at Daniel's reasoning on why the Church "doesn't allow" him to get married. It's horrific.

The study of moral theology and natural law also focus on the "objective good", which is not explicitly covered by the "divinity dwelling within and ones ever-deepening union with it". God's commands tell US (subjects) to do some objective good.  We could focus only on the subject, and find true union with God and love, what finally matters. But God commands us to do some specific, concrete, good-in-itself thing. Love of God requires us to care about, and so to think about, that objective thing. Natural law and moral theology consider the objective good.  If the objective good is unknown or misunderstood, the subject can still be holy if his intention is holy and his ignorance is blameless.  But the intent of the subject must be to do the objective thing that God had in mind (without that intent there is no love). I think we need to use our intellects to study these things.

If that's meant as I previously spoke, I agree but doubt its expedience when it comes to ethics as an intellectual exercise; if it's meant that man, in absence of God, can through his intellect and applied reason discover "moral truth", I dismiss it.

ETA: Having said all that, I agree with you (and others) that people (e.g. Daniel) can sometimes get hung up on intellectualizing and fail to act as a simple Catholic out of love for God based on what they do know already. I just don't think the study of natural law and moral theology should be pooh poohed in general. It can affect the teachings/explanations of the Church which do matter to every Catholic, and can help fight philosophers whose ideas filter down into society at large, even if not immediately impacting any given individual.  And it is a GOOD THING to understand morality (which is from God) better,  even if it does not impact our current lives.  It is GOOD but if done to excess can tire and confuse our minds, and interfere with our "duties of state" (e.g. caring for our families).

It's not just that, it's that his vision of God and morality and salvation is diabolical. When I read him I'm struck with the image of a man in a fevered delirium running frantically in circles through a subterranean maze. It's positively neurotic.

[Mono no aware]

As you probably know, dear Pon, what is called "Pascal's wager" is in reality only a small part of his Pensees. I think Pascal was a very good scientist, mathematician, philosopher and theologian on the whole, though I don't necessarily agree with each and everything he wrote; here is the part that deals with has been called his Wager, "We know that there is an infinite, but are ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be false that numbers are finite, it must therefore be true that there is an infinity in number, but what this is we know not. It can neither be odd nor even, for the addition of an unit can make no change in the nature of number; yet it is a number, and every number is either odd or even, at least this is understood of every finite number. Thus we may well know that there is a God, without knowing what he is ... Since there is an equal chance of gain and loss, if you had only to gain two lives for one, you might still wager. But were there three of them to gain, you would have to play, since needs must that you play, and you would be imprudent, since you must play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where the chances of loss or gain are even. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And that being so, were there an infinity of chances of which one only would be for you, you would still be right to stake one to win two, and you would act foolishly, being obliged to play, did you refuse to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there be one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to win. But there is here an infinity [98] of an infinitely happy life to win, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite; that is decided. Wherever the infinite exists and there is not an infinity of chances of loss against that of gain, there is no room for hesitation, you must risk the whole." https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/pascal-the-thoughts-of-blaise-pascal

Pascal uses an argument of the form derived from the mathematical concept of expected value, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value a simple idea. Suppose someone offers $10 in a coin toss for every time you land a head, and you pay nothing if you land a tail. Here, the expected value from the experiment is $5 (=0.5*10+0.5*0). In practice, nobody would offer that, and expected value would be set to zero. E.g. you pay $10 if its heads, you receive 10 if its tails etc. Pascal argues, and this much is agreed by almost everyone (math textbooks would say the same on what rational actors would do), that in such a case, everyone should go forward and toss the coin, because given the stakes, there is a fairly assured probability of return (or, in this case, a certain payoff), and a very unlikely probability (or in this case, nil probability) of loss. He then argues that the promised gain here is infinite, namely eternal life, and is therefore worth risking a lot etc.

Some critics point out that it assumes the likelihood of God and Heaven existing is equal to it not existing etc. Strictly speaking, it does not assume that. Others say it would be useful only if deciding between Christianity and atheism were the only two alternatives. That is a better objection. So personally, I prefer the Thomistic Ways that show us God's Nature and Attributes to that of Blaise Pascal. Some of the other things in the link are quite good, though, particularly the section on prophesies.

Gracias, Xavier.  Thank you for the elucidation on Pascal's Wager.  We agree: the best objection to it is that "it would be useful only if deciding between Christianity and atheism were the only two alternatives."  That was originally how I understood Daniel's dilemma, and that's why I (mistakenly) argued for the wager earlier.  I'm just surprised that Pascal didn't see the flaw there.  Even though in the Pensées Pascal does argue, as you often do, that things like Scripture and miracles ought to be persuasive, in the portion concerning the wager he seems to be putting that aside and starting from zero, so to speak: God exists or does not. 

Yet in assuming that God's existence necessitates an eternal reward, he takes too great a leap.  Starting from zero, it seems it ought to be framed as: either God does not exist or any god might exist.  From there the discussion could proceed to apologetics in order to establish which god one ought to believe in, but in that case it was pointless to start from zero.  Properly considered, the wager supports agnosticism.  It isn't 50/50 with a high expected gain.  It's one in the number of religions proposing afterlives (or even an infinite number of religions that haven't been revealed yet—dawn has not yet come and we're all primitives living in spiritual darkness).  In which case hedonism in this life is the surer bet against a lottery of afterlife happiness.  To be fair, this is my objection to Pascal and not Daniel's.  Interestingly, Daniel disagrees with Pascal for prizing happiness over truth.  Daniel would sooner suffer for truth than wager on happiness.

[Mono no aware]

But that ship has sailed and it's not coming back.  Some years ago, I was right where you are. 

No, I don't think you were. I'm not a hoarder of books and armchair pontificator. I've done. I've found. I've beheld. I've had experience after experience that destroyed the conventional understanding of eality I'd been implcitly and explicitly force-fed by the institutions of society and state and shattered my world and my self. Asking me if God, Jesus, spirit, angels, demons, heavens, hells, spheres, aeons, magic, the cosmic powers of myth and my transcendent self are real is like asking me if the morning sunlight streaming through my windows is real. You can call it make-believe, delusion and illusion, but I don't think you or anyone else possesses a criterion of "reality" that would make your position meaningful as anything more than a blind and tendentious clinging to the value of one small corner of existence.

Apologies, Kreuzritter.  I didn't mean to imply that you were bookish like I am.  I only meant that we shared an interest in the primacy of myth, ritual, and transcendence.  I haven't "done, found, and beheld" though.  I did have mystical experiences myself, however, when I was young.  But they contained no theological content.  If pressed, I would say they came closest in description to something like satori.  In terms of whether a particular god exists, they told me zilch.  Maybe the irreducible divinity at the bottom of all space and time wanted to say something to me and I wasn't fit to receive the message, but something sure came through.  Or maybe mystery was the message.  Or maybe the chemicals in my brain provided me with an experience of profundity.  I do not know. 

I'll disagree with you that Pascal had an understanding of religion which was bullcrap.  He was a Jansenist.  "GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob—not of the philosophers and of the learned."  The piety and commitment of the Jansenists was lived, not declared, and my criteria is "by their fruits you will know them," so I rate them highly.  Anyone can declare, from the unkempt preacher on the street corner with his placards and microphone to the clean-cut Mormon boys on the doorstep.  They all claim certainty.  I'd rather be shown than declared to.  "Come and see." 

Which is nothing against declared certainty, mind you.  If you are as certain of the cosmic powers of myth and your transcendent self as you are the morning sunlight streaming through your windows, then I respect that.  A faith that one could not be certain of would be a faith with a potential for falsehood, and what kind of god would impart a faith that is potentially false?  A trickster, perhaps.  But the teaching is "ye shall know the truth," not "you can be reasonably certain you know the truth, but there's a chance you may not."  No.  Certainty seems required.

[Tales]

But the teaching is "ye shall know the truth," not "you can be reasonably certain you know the truth, but there's a chance you may not."  No.  Certainty seems required.

Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free."

If you do X, then Y (and then Z).

Love God with all your heart, and then you will know the truth.  Of course if one never comes to know the truth then its a bit true-scotsman, but such is life.  Restating what I noted before, be a good friend and then know what a good friend is.

I note that you state you had mystical experiences but then introduce some doubt as offering the possibility that it was merely chemicals in your brain.  Even things happening to us personally can be doubted, if we want to doubt them.

Does this verse exclude the interpretation that the truth is known (with this certainty you all demand) only in the beatific vision?

[St. Columba]

We do not require it of anything else we do in our lives, we did not require it when we chose our spouses, picked our careers, decided where to live.  But now we require it of faith?

Hi Davis Blank...it is a pleasure to interact with you friend...

I am curious how you would answer the following question: if your Catholic faith is not absolutely certain, then why is it a sin to doubt it?

...anticipating one possible answer, "well, because God has revealed it and therefore to doubt is sinful" is begging the question, of course.

I am not asking in order to be contentious...I would just like a satisfactory answer, since I am more or less stumped on it myself...