Monthly Archives: April 2017

There is a Satan In Opposition To God!

On the Nature of Satan, Philosophical Theology

This post continues the series of reflections on the core Christian teaching that God had to become a human being who suffered died and rose from his grave to a new way of life. God had to do this in order to restore human beings to the regain the capacity to be as they ought to be. The series began Moral Harm and Non-being. It must be emphasized that no originality is claimed for what I propose and no claim that I am proposing teachings of the Catholic Church.

One crucial notion,previously introduced is that moral evil is non-being in so far as it is a condition of an agent differing from what it ought to be. The notion proposed in this posting is that God is in a struggle- a warfare against intelligent forces in opposition to there being what ought to be. The intelligence of these forces is Satan!

Who is Satan?

Assume for this posting, God created an intelligence with a will free to choose as God wills it to act and to be or choose not to act and to be as God wills. Suppose this being is almost equal to God in intelligence and creative power. Suppose further that this being chooses not to act and be as God wills. Such a being could plausibly be described as Satan.

I argued in an earlier posting God cannot destroy Satan when Satan is described as in the previous paragraph.

Subsequent posting will develop the notion of Satan to make it plausible that this Satan opposes God and tries to corrupt the human race. Here I want to close by citing two reasons why I am introducing the notion of Satan in opposition to God. One is that the Christian tradition portrays God as in a struggle against evil forces. C.S. Lewis emphasizes this in his Mere Christianity. Secondly, and of most importance to me is that I want to understand Jesus’ suffering and death as something God had to do is save us from the Satanic forces trying to keep humanity permanently as one of his forces. I want to avoid interpreting Jesus’ suffering and death as punishment He required for humans not acting and being as they ought to be.

I hope eventually to show how Satan exacerbates our sexual temptations. Readers my be interested in my book on sexual morality.

My book Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional Sexual Morality as an Antidote to Nihilism was released by Tate Publishing on March 11, 2014. Email kielkopf.1@osu.edu for a free copy of my book.

.

Are Masturbators Intrinsically Disordered?

Moral philosophy, Sexual morality

The point of this post is to use an analogy that reminds us that to say homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered is not to say that men who are classed as homosexuals are intrinsically disordered.

Let’s say that a masturbator is a male who masturbates at least once a week. There is a lot of masturbators in our society. With the ready availability of internet porn, the class of masturbators is growing because almost all men have inclinations at least to masturbate when sexually aroused. There are far more masturbators than men who engage in homosexual acts on the average of once a week. Let’s call such men homosexuals. If the homosexuals are not wholly included in the masturbators, the class of homosexuals certainly overlaps the class of masturbators.

An act of masturbations is intrinsically disordered. It is wrong regardless of the circumstances and reasons why it is done.

Proving that an act is instrinsically disordered is not easy. There is a long Catholic tradition of making a case, in Thomistic philosopohy, that masturbation and homosexual acts are intrinscially disorder. I have tried to make the same case, in a Kantian way, in my book: Confronting Sexual Nihilism. Here is not the place to make that philosophical case.

Here is the place to remind ourselves that just as we would not classify almost all men as instrinsically disordered because they have strong inclinations to perform intrinsically disordered acts, we should not classify that subset of men who have strong inclinations to perform intrinsically disordered acts of the homosexual style intrinsically disordered.

My book Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional Sexual Morality as an Antidote to Nihilism was released by Tate Publishing on March 11, 2014. See Book Web Page for information about the book. The publisher’s listed price is $26.99. Printed copies can be purchased here by credit card for $3.99, plus $3.71 for shipping and handling.





To purchase the printed book by check, send check of $3.99 plus $3.71 for shipping and handling per copy. Send to:
Charles F. Kielkopf
45 W. Kenworth Rd.
Columbus, Ohio 43214
Include your shipping address.

Moral Harm and Non-being

Core philosophy, Moral Harm and Moral Worth, Moral philosophy

I am beginning a series of posts the goal of which is to get some understanding of the basic Christian framework called the Paschal Mystery. The Paschal Mystery is the teaching that the Incarnation of God as Jesus and Jesus’ subsequent suffering, death and resurrection radically transformed the human condition. These events restored the human condition from a fallen one in which at best human life had no greater destiny than that we typically attribute to bedbugs to an original one in which human beings rise after biological death to live eternally with God. Human beings were in the fallen condition because they had chosen some act which they ought not have chosen and so they were no longer as they ought to be.

The phrases with the moral terms are emphasized because they gave me the clue on how to clarify and modify concepts to become somewhat clearer about the Paschal mystery. Moral concepts will be those under closest analysis and modification. This post focuses on a notion of moral harm.

What is moral harm? Distinguish moral harm from natural harm which here I will treat as medical harm. I use “medical” to have a working definition of natural harm. The medical harm of an act is a physical or psychological condition brought about by an act for which the person has a high probability of being compensated by medical insurance. So if you assault a person and break his arm, that person can very likely win a suit for damages from you. Similarly, if a man seduces a boy into sexual acts medical professionals will almost certainly testify that the boy has suffered psychological harm for which he should be compensated.

Moral harm is not the medical harm which an immoral act causes. Certainly we cannot say that an act is not immoral if it causes no medical harm. Moral harm is the harm a person inflicts on himself when he chooses contrary to a moral law. For instance, there is a moral law that you ought not testify that you saw a man at the scene of a crime when you clearly realize that he was somewhere else. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor!” The moral harm he inflicts upon himself comes from choosing to break the moral law. Moral laws specify how we ought to be. By choosing to break the moral law he chooses to not be the kind of person he ought to be. Moral harm is not being as you ought to be. Harm can be called an evil. So a notion of harm or evil as non-being is being used: non-being as a departure from what ought to be. The non-being which is evil may be an actual state of affairs. But it is a state of non-being, moral non-being, because of its difference from what ought to be.

This notion of moral harm or evil as non-being will be fundamental in posts trying to get clearer about the Paschal mystery. This will include introduction of a notion of Satan!

My book explores the notion of moral evil in conjunction with an examination of male sexual morality.

My book Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional Sexual Morality as an Antidote to Nihilism was released by Tate Publishing on March 11, 2014. See Book Web Page for information about the book. The publisher’s listed price is $26.99. Printed copies can be purchased here by credit card for $3.99, plus $3.71 for shipping and handling.





To purchase the printed book by check, send check of $3.99 plus $3.71 for shipping and handling per copy. Send to:
Charles F. Kielkopf
45 W. Kenworth Rd.
Columbus, Ohio 43214
Include your shipping address.