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 Review #4818913 |
 | Sin Pain Poverty or False Perspective  [ASR] My take on the given prompt  |
| (3.0)| Hello sindbad . Thank you for entering this month's contest.
As the official Judge of this contest, I have the following comments to offer for "Sin Pain Poverty or False Perspective"  Did you answer the question?You answered the question by saying that all the suggestions were valid problems, and all of their connected solutions were valuable. Each of these problems and solutions was interconnected, and you picked all of them, not one. Sin was defined in terms of whatever moral code one followed, rather than in absolute terms with reference to God or by a universally accepted set of values. Use of quotes, proof-texting or AI - could I hear your voice?The tone of your writing was secular, psychological, and philosophical. You defined terms here and there with no effort to prioritize into some kind of hierarchy. This was the kind of non-committal, relativistic answer I would expect from an AI. It is easy to find quotes to support each position in the bible but an AI lacks the wisdom to differentiate the plausible from the improbable. For example, no major religion outside socialistic versions of humanism would cite poverty or alienation from the means of production as the essential human problem. Indeed ascetics in many religions have embraced poverty as an essential pillar of true religion. But you did not seem to express any recognition of this in your piece. How consistent was your argument?You consistently accepted all of the ways of looking at the problem of the human condition without discrimination. There was no attempt to assess the relative weight of the problems in terms of discomfort, life or death, or the issue of eternal destiny. Interestingly, no major religion regards poverty as the core problem of humanity but you weighted it at the same level as sin. Discomfort in this life is therefore weighted more highly than one's eternal destiny in heaven or hell. You accepted without questioning the assumption that you were qualified to weigh and define the problems and map them to the solutions and did not seek a higher religious authority to adjudicate between the competing perspectives. My thoughts on the substance of what you saidSt Anthony was one of the more famous desert fathers in the Christian tradition. These guys would go into the desert, endure extreme hardship and deprivation, living in absolute poverty to purge their sins. Neither pain nor poverty were regarded as the primary problem by these guys. Traditionally also Christians have regarded false perspectives as a symptom of sin. It is our failure to obey God that generates the need to rationalize defenses of sinful positions, to conceal our guilt, and to build edifices of stone or mind that revolve around ourselves. We separate ourselves from God with our sins and then call our darkness wisdom. So weighting the temporary experience of pain on the same level as that of eternal salvation would need justifying. An atheist might do this in terms of dismissing a Judgment Day or an afterlife for example. But you seemed to embrace a broader and more spiritual outlook and so would need to justify why pain for the short season of human life would be in any way comparable to an eternity in hell in punishment for our sins. If there is an afterlife, heaven, and hell then sin must be the weightier problem, and the forgiveness of sins the necessary guarantee of a hopeful outcome. Similarly, the ability of a person to fully articulate reality and the human condition as it is and even to prescribe methods and values that could have beneficial practical outcomes is not necessarily going to save a person from the wrath of God for the sins in their life. We can say and think all the right things and still go to hell if we are not right with God. We can repent, change our ways, and receive the gift of salvation, It is this that ensures our long-term well-being rather than an ability to articulate all the mysteries of creation great and small. Such a capability will always be beyond our capacity anyway, in isolation, compared to God because we are merely finite creatures, mortal, and in our current state imperfect. Mechanical issuesYour style was a little repetitive and you could have been more fluent and precise in the way you phrased things Thanks again for entering. LightinMind
 My review has been submitted for consideration in "Good Deeds Get CASH!" .
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