[ExI] pat condell's latest subtle rant

Emlyn emlynoregan at gmail.com
Tue Dec 8 01:48:43 UTC 2009


2009/12/8 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
>
>
>>On Behalf Of John Clark
> ...
>
>        >Atheists have played the Mr. Nice-guy part for a very long time and
> the end result is that religious morons crash airliners into skyscrapers;
> and the very next day the USA organized a national day of prayer to give
> homage to the very mental cancer that caused the disaster... John K Clark
>
>
> John this approach lumps all religious memes together.  I would
> counter-propose classifying religious thoughtspace into two broad
> categories: those which suggest killing unbelievers and those which do not.
>
> spike

I like this Spike. If we can combine religion and ideology and
philosophy into the same group (maybe the space of meme packages),
then it's a great principle for them all. There are plenty of examples
of non-religious ideologies which have been just as dangerous.

Liberal societies always have this problem of how to do tolerance,
when those they are being tolerant of wont necessarily extend the same
invitation back. I think for inclusive, tolerant societies, where
values are allowed to be divergent, we need some concept of
meta-values; values about values, which all participants are expected
to honor. We might say that the major meta-value is that each person's
interests have equal weight, and derive the various freedoms (such as
speech, liberty, association) from this meta-value, in that if
everyone doesn't respect these, then how is the value to be upheld?

I'm sure someone famous has said this better than I do here. But, I
think it's a good approach; a way of separating the really important
core values that free society requires in order to function, from
everything else, which by definition we want to allow to be divergent.

Back to Spike's topic, any meme package which encourages killing
outgroupers is anathema to the meta value, and deserves to be treated
with some suspicion.

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlyntech.wordpress.com - coding related
http://point7.wordpress.com - ranting
http://emlynoregan.com - main site



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