I am not the only thinker that has been astounded by the pure grasp of moral truth and accurate psychological insight demonstrated verbally and symbolically by writers, artists and poets and some architects.
Professional philosophers, analytical philosophers, and others, lay out their arguments with rigor, precision and valid, sound argumentation, but they do not capture much truth, or whole truth, because of their anti-metaphysical bias and their metaphysical monism (strict materialists).
Truth and wisdom come from God, the principle of Logos, running through and operating the functioning cosmos; but God is not strictly logical, and God’s omniscience or near omniscience, may not run in linearly constructed lines of argumentation, flawlessly lay out and brimming with certainty at the end.
God’s truth and knowledge may be revealed in flashes, sentiments, and hunches, even by God for God. Logic and mathematics have their place, but irrational sources of knowledge can be quite profound.
How else can I explain How Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, lays out his vision of creatures as basically evil, all without exception sickened and corrupted by excessively centralized power, that to be good is to wield power like Elrond or Galadriel, but not attempt to replace Sauron with themselves as Vicious King or Queen of the world?
Tolkien’s intuitive analysis of how good and evil spiritually and morally are at work in the world of mortal creatures is not validated by formal proofs offered. Formal proofs offered have their place and contribution to make in discovering and communicating what is true, but they are not the last word, as the snobbish professional philosophers-wrong on so many issues, in so many ways—haughtily maintain.
To relax, I enjoy reading Lous Lamour Westerns. I was rereading The Daybreakers, and I came across what he wrote on Page 44, where the Sackett brothers came upon some traveling settlers massacred by a band of Indians: “Seven wagons, burned and charred. We moved in carefully, rifles up and ready; edged over to them, holding to a shallow dip in the prairie until we were close up.
Folks back east have a sight to say about the poor Indian but they have never fought him. He was a fighter by trade, and because he naturally loved it, mercy never entered his head.
Mercy is a taught thing. Nobody comes by it naturally. Indians grew up thinking the tribe was all there was and anybody else was an enemy.
It wasn’t a fault, simply that nobody had ever suggested such a thing to him . . .”
Now Native Americans have been wrong in many ways by whites, America and Western thinking, but Lamour was refuting some of that at least by pointing out that the proud, independent Indians enjoyed their culture of warriors that raided and warred for centuries, and they committed atrocities like all other people.
Lamour writes that mercy is a taught thing, that nobody—whites, blacks, Indians, Asians, Muslims—comes by it naturally.
The presupposition for writing this is that humans are born in sin, and behaving well and treating others with mercy is the result of restraining moral values inculcated into and absorbed by each child of his own free will-or rebuffed by some of these children of each generation of their own free sill--of each successive generation (kids of each generation, each of wicked natural inclination need moral values taught to them, within the historical-Western culture from which they grow up in). And many hypocrites and sinners are still cruel despite being taught their morals.
I have no panacea for this but raising children to be God-centered, Christian-morality trained, plus Objective ethics and self-realization as their telos—then things should improve quite a bit.
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