'The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy'

[Diamond18]

if you believe in a benevolent God who created humans and who desires them to be in accord with His truth, then I think you must also admit that humans must come equipped with some means of discerning truth from falsehood, right from wrong. This must be even more true in Middle-earth, where there is no received law from Eru to guide human behavior. We call this conscience, of course, and in this sense, I think Tolkien would not have looked too sharply on the “listen to your heart” line (cf. Romans 2:14-15).

To clarify: I wasn't discounting a God-given conscience as giving people an innate sense of good and evil, but the "listen to your heart" line is one I've heard thrown out in so many movies as the answer to any dilemma, as if right and wrong originate in the heart (rather than being "written on it"). In most contexts I don't think that "heart" and "conscience" are the same thing, as people often feel impulses to do wrong, based on the desires of a corrupted heart. So, in other words, our conscience ofttimes tells us not to do what our heart desires.

On Plato's philosophy: I admit that my knowledge of Plato's writings is quite slim, so I was mainly basing my comments pertaining to him off of the quote from Esty's post, which didn't include Plato's reasoning why immorality leads to ultimate misery. So I'm not surprised I misunderstood quite what he meant. Ah... well.... [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]