Quote:
Originally Posted by mark12_30
Whether someone commits atrocities in the name of their religion, to me, is less of a question than whether their actions obey or disobey the tenets of their faith (or absence thereof.) For a Christian to commit atrocities is fundamentally disobedient to their moral and religious duty, and for a Christian that does so this is the proper criticism: not that your moral and religious code is invalidated by your actions; but that you have been shown to be disobedient to that code. If Hitler claimed to be a Christian, then he showed himself disobedient (to put it mildly.) If someone is striving to love his neighbor and defend the innocent, and fails, then he failed. That doesn't invalidate the directive to love the neighbor and defend the innocent.
|
At the risk of inciting further off topic posts, let me compliment
Helen for this classic, logical rebuttal. Free will can lead to terrible choices.
Of course, we don't know what choices would be made had there been no revealed code of virtue.
Quote:
|
In the books, Aragorn, Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, Faramir, Legolas, Gimli, Sam, and even Merry and Pippin adhered pretty well (consistently!) to their own codes of virtue.
|
From where do these characters get their codes of virtue? Gandalf apparently received his directly from a source, although I cannot recall how much of this is specified in LotR. Elrond and Galadriel apparently have the long memories of elven lore but we not know how much memory (and each has a long, long span of memories) has affected that lore (assuming elves do not have perfect memories) over time. Aragorn would have received his code by virtue of his birthright and teachings from his mother and Elrond. Faramir's code comes from his inheritance. They have no practice of revealed religion, but their codes are learned, taught, instilled in them. For the Gondorians particularly, there is a sense of bloodline of the faithful.
But where or how was the hobbit code of virtue developed? As the Prologue makes clear, hobbits have no preserved knowledge of the vanished time of Elder Days; their records begin with the founding of the Shire and they have only legends and tales of an earlier time. So hobbits no longer have (if they once did) a form of revealed path to goodness or virtue.
Do hobbits represent a natural or innate form of spirituality? Do they demonstrate the actions of natural law? In the absence of a character of "absolute goodness" (who traditionally would inform all the other characters) whence comes the moral sense of Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin, to say nothing of Gaffer or Tom Cotton or Farmer Maggot or even Lobelia (granting of course that their actions do not necessarily come from the same source or motivation)?