[ExI] christmas songs 2

[Seien]

On 11/12/2007, Anna Taylor <femmechakra at yahoo.ca> wrote:
>
> seienchan at gmail.com wrote Tue Dec 11 01:36:14 UTC
> 2007:
>
>
> What's the point of having better philosophies when
> people are starving to death? How can you be positive
> that you know what makes other people
> happy?Philosophies are understood by people that have
> lived and experienced and wish to educate. Some ideas
> are good and some are bad.  The idea is to set memes
> that are beneficial for all, not for the chosen few.



I didn't say they were. And I don't presume to say EXACTLY what will make
other people happy. What's important is an ability to think dynamically, an
understanding of morality - as RATIONALITY, not some other unsatisfactory
mystic description. And the fact that people starve to death has... well,
more or less nothing to do with coming up with better ideas. Better ideas
improve those societies that can benefit from them, and good societies
evolve and improve over time anyway, so we can hopefully presume that at
some point, most people will stop starving to death. Insisting that more
progressive societies suppress their philosophies because other societies
have little food is ridiculous - the two are almost unrelated ideas. And if
the starving societies come up with better philosophies, well, that's FAR
more likely to make them stop starving than anything else. So... uh, making
good philosophy seems great.


Charity is a good thing!  Obviously you have never
> been in any circumstance that required you to yield to
> charity otherwise you would understand that not all
> people that need a helping hand are those that are
> drug addicts or are going to buy cigarettes.


Uhh... sorry, did I not say food and drink first? The amount of money one
would give a beggar would cover things ON THE LEVEL of food, drink or
cigarettes. I mean, it would also cover things like small paperback books
and stationery, but they're more likely to buy things like food/drink/cigs.


The idea
> behind the Scrooge idea was to show how all the money
> in the world doesn't bring you happiness and at most
> brings you closer to solitude because one fears the
> lose of something that appears so relevant.  Once
> Scrooge discovers the idea of giving he no longer
> holds close the idea of possession.


So you want to deprive him of his natural right of property? That sounds
terrible. And if all the money in the world can't bring happiness, then why
give it to poor people if it won't make them happy? The point is, see, that
moral <curi.us/dialogs/show/Morality> decisions make one happy. Money just
facilitates us to have other good things, like computers and food and houses
and entertainment. Having these things makes it easier for us to spend more
time coming up with better ideas that will benefit more people. The story
tells us that money won't make rich people happy but it will poor. I think
it really just comes down to a rather Catholic notion of sin and sacrifice,
rather than actually tells us what can and can't make us happy, and what is
and isn't right.

I still think it's a great story.


I still don't see why. :/


-- 
~Seien
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20071211/c2d36465/attachment.html>