[ExI] The mosque at Ground Zero

[Dan]

No, but eating an egg is different from dealing with all the members of a 
religion or all the people living in a large region, don't you think? Perhaps a 
better metaphor would be eating one egg, finding it bad and presuming all eggs 
now and forever are bad. (Side note: a chef once told me that, if you don't like 
a particular dish, you should never say you don't the certain food item -- eggs, 
aubergine, whatever -- that went into it, but that you don't like it prepared 
that way. Even so, I still find it hard to imagine certain foods would ever 
taste good no matter how they're prepared.:)

And, unlike Sabrina, I've met and worked with many Muslims. Few of the ones I've 
met fit the scriptural or doctrinal determinist model. (Scriptural determinism 
is the view that one can know all about a member of a religion merely by looking 
at the scriptures of that religion. Doctrinal determinism is the same view 
applied to doctrines. Typically, such determinisms fail because religious people 
don't slavishly follow the scriptures (or a specific interpretation thereof) or 
doctrines of their respective religions. In fact, many other factors seem to 
impinge -- leaving out free will -- as much as or more than religious scripture 
or doctrine for most believers of any religion. This is exactly the sort of 
thing "fundamentalists" of any religion usually complain about too: most members 
of their religion are weak and water down the beliefs.*)

Regards,

Dan

* Add to this, most members of any religion having more than a few hundred 
members tend to be born into the religion -- their parents raise them up in it 
or it's part of their cultural wallpaper. These people are unlikely to be the 
scriptural literalists or doctrinal purists that make headlines.


From: John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Sent: Wed, August 11, 2010 12:10:53 AM
Subject: Re: [ExI] The mosque at Ground Zero


On Aug 10, 2010, at 12:06 AM, Sabrina Ballard wrote:

I don't know Islam or any Muslims well enough to make a judgement call
>as to the entire religion

Do you have to eat the entire egg to know it is bad?

  John K Clark


      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100811/b9ccd954/attachment.html>