Dr Taylor Marshall @TaylorRMarshall
Replying to @RealBrysonGray·
One issue is how the Law of Moses relates to the Natural Law. Natural Law being the Law given to Adam and Eve and written on heart of all humans. Almost everyone agrees that 10 Commandments are in Natural Law. But is “Don’t eat shrimp ?” in the natural Law? It’s seems no.
The Natural (scientific) Law (of cooperation) is self-determination by self-determined means by sovereignty in demonstrated interest, and reciprocity in word and deed. ie:property in widest sense.
Of the 10 Commandments, 8 are property rights. The rest command the primacy of these rights (Words, Ideas), and the primacy of the author of those rights (god, nature, the universe) over the worship of ‘idols’ (Beings, Things, Alternatives).
The Greeks wrote the Natural Law in rational philosophy and law, eight hundred years before the Christians wrote it in supernatural law in their scripture. But those laws are just property rights, and as such, they must have evolved, in one sense or another with agrarianism, resulting trade, and the emergence of cities.
And only in the Natural Law (of cooperation), under the anglo common law (empirical discovery) and anglo concurrent legislation (empirical evidence of consent), all three of which are embodied in the American Constitution (if imperfectly), is this Natural Law written down as the product of human reason and evidence. Although the authors attributed it to the law of man, of nature, and of nature’s god.
There are about nine holes in the American Constitution that prevent it from a perfectly scientific form of law and government, under a perfectly scientific natural, common, concurrent law, legislation, and regulation.
However, the Natural Law, as most man-made law, is a via-negativa (what not do). Telling us how to prevent retaliation for our actions, and as a consequence, how to preserve and expand cooperation. With tolerance by Christian Love baiting us to cooperate via-positiva – thus solving the prisoners dilemma of cooperation more completely than any other but the Stoics.
Only Christianity solved the problem of producing a high-trust society across all classes in the absence of genetic and cultural homogeneity and preparing us with the trust necessary for the prosperity of economic modernity. (And democracy, no mattter how severely we fail at it.)
One of those holes is the absence of prohibitions on religions that are hostile to natural law: all of them but Christianity whether supernatural or secular.
And no I’m not biased. I tried to falsify Christianity, because of its fundamentalism. It was onyl at the end of my research that I understood that christianity gave to women, slaves, and the peasantry a religion of commercial cooperation at scale, that had previously been the exclusive domain of men and the upper classes – thereyby uniting the classes and sexes in an aristocratic religion that had never been done before by anyone other than Confucius.
(BTW: I’ve accidentally left this conversation, so include me directly in any replies)
