I'm a witch myself, Raven, and if that's the way you feel, we'll have to agree to disagree. There is little conclusive proof that I am wrong and a great deal of evidence that I am right from observing the behavior of human beings over the last six thousand years.
The reason that I included "Godless" in my descriptor is that the history of the 20th Century indicates that socialistic state power coupled with avowed atheism leads to mass murder. If a state has at least some religious constraints, it has less of a tendency to commit such crimes, especially on innocents.
I mean, seriously, one hundred million dead in the USSR, China, and Cambodia are hard to argue with. As a matter of fact, if humanity managed to eliminate religions, it might be necessary to re-invent them in order to prevent the degree of savagery that our planet saw over the last one hundred years.
In any case, the technology to analyze the genome of unborn children is already going a long way to reducing the number of Downs babies born in the United States. I feel that it is very likely that had the Gimp been conceived now, he would have had a very low liklihood of ever having seen the light of day and we would not now be able, a few decades later, to read his paen to tolerance.
Hell, being *female* is, as we speak, grounds for being aborted in China, India, and several other Asian countries. In some rural areas, the male-to-female ration among teenagers are in the neighborhood of 56-44%. Isn't that a human-rights violation of the lives of *future* women?
Religious statement: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
Granted, stated by a religion you do not follow, but it is the dominant religion in the US at the moment. And I will grant that you follow a relatively peaceful religion, but most aren't so inclined.
Consider: The Crusades, The Burning Times, Radical Islam. Religion doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it's in power, either.
Also consider: For most people, working out a set of ethics is a process of deciding what their ethics should look like, and then looking for evidence to support it, rather than the other way around. So where to they get their underlying assumptions from?
Religious wars amount to about 8% of the total historic wars of humanity. If you exclude ones involving militant Islam, they drop to about 5%.
What is shocking, though, is the difference in the number of deaths involved. The best authorities on the Witch Hunts put the median numbers of dead at between 50,000 and 60,000. Stalin's Soviet Union killed five hundred times that many "internal enemies" during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
All of the Crusades *together* killed about a million and a half people over a period of two centuries--3% of what Mao's Chinese Communists destroyed. Again, no comparison.
If anything, religion, especially Christianity, could be said to put the breaks on mass murder.
Up to the late 18th and early 19th Century, people did not work out a set of ethics and decide what they should look like--they received them from their parents at a young age. It seems to me, from looking at the state of the world, that this experiment in "do-it-yourself ethics" could be considered a dismal failure.
If anything, religion, especially Christianity, could be said to put the breaks on mass murder.
So why aren't you a Christian? You seem to be arguing in its defense. I personally think that the Christian god (Jesus included) is the moral equivalent of a spoiled brat (I just read an excellent, well-argued post on the matter), though I know and respect that I am in a minority there.
Up to the late 18th and early 19th Century, people did not work out a set of ethics and decide what they should look like--they received them from their parents at a young age. It seems to me, from looking at the state of the world, that this experiment in "do-it-yourself ethics" could be considered a dismal failure.
No, the Western world, for the most part, still follows Judeo-Christian ethics. By working out what ethics looks like, I'm including the method of receiving them unquestioned from their parents. The selection of ethics, whether by conscious choice or by receipt from parents, is still being made before any thought of looking at evidence occurs. Note that I have yet to argue what a set of ethics based on objective evidence would look like, just that most people don't do it.
I admire Christianity for the good that it has done for Western Civilization. Hell, just ending slavery over most of the world for 150 years (until it began to creep back as Christianity's influence waned) is good enough for me to send some money to the collection plate every now and then.
The trouble with "thought-out" ethics is that I've never seen any that are original. The ones that are not completely selfish and anti-social are just ones that have been borrowed from established religions and had stuff cut out of them that kept the borrower from having one kind of fun or another.
Tom Trumpinski --Pissing people off so badly they have to re-edit since before the time of Usenet.
The trouble with "thought-out" ethics is that I've never seen any that are original.
I take a fair chunk of my methodology from Rand, though she was more than a bit mistaken on a number of points. I would suspect that on the first bounce, you'll classify her work as "selfish and anti-social" - indeed, her primary work on ethics is called The Virtue Of Selfishness - but once you strip away her mistakes, her basic ideas make sense. After all, they are a documented influence on the Wiccan movement (the Wiccan Rede is essentially the crux of her thought in disguise).
I don't think this is the proper place to write up a full treatise on ethics, but I'd like to think that what system I've got is reasonably complete and doesn't require that I fear or worship any deity to be able to function in a society.
I have quite a bit of trouble with Rand, but it's more personal than not.
Back when we were inventing "big-L" Libertarianism, there were still quite a few of her personal disciples still hanging around the movement. They were, without exception, consummate pricks, so I always associated her philosophy with prickiness. They talked constantly about their disappointment with her romantic life--which split the Objectivist Movement down the middle.
My head tells me that someone being unpleasant doesn't necessarily mean that their philosophical views are in error, but I'll admit, I just couldn't get beyond it. I was young then and more judgmental.
I have quite a bit of trouble with Rand, but it's more personal than not.
At least you recognize it for what it is.
Yes, Rand's followers tend toward the obnoxious - I remember when I had just read her, and was similarly young, naive, and obnoxious. One of the problems with the Movement was that according to Randian Gospel, since her system was derived from reason, hers was the Only True Way (tm), which should sound awfully familiar. And she really did insist on philosophical purity. The catch is that not all of her viewpoints derive so much from reason as from her own prejudices. For example, Nathaniel Brandon has noted that her understanding of psychology was virtually nil. And by extension, her beliefs concerning relationships was also well below sub-par, which probably explains her relationship foibles (read: really bad polyamory).
As I have noted, while I take something of a cue from Rand, I am neither an Objectivist nor a Libertarian. I spent a good deal of time with both camps and found logical flaws with both schools of thought.
One thing worth noting is that, contrary to a lot of movements (including Objectivism and Libertarianism), I'm not really interested in system-building in the large scale. I'm interested in developing a system of thought and action that is sound for my own reference. And I've found that positing a deity for moral guidance just doesn't work for me. Trust me - I've tried a number of versions of it (including Christianity and neo-paganism).
I posted this before reading Tom's latest comment further down. Please hold off on commentary until Thursday in the "Pimpyerstuff" thread, so I don't have to work with two sets of link-cascades.
The trouble with "thought-out" ethics is that I've never seen any that are original. The ones that are not completely selfish and anti-social are just ones that have been borrowed from established religions and had stuff cut out of them that kept the borrower from having one kind of fun or another.
And the problem with this is what exactly? Taking the Judeo-Christian 10 Commandments as an example, that works pretty well. Toss out the first few that deal with "I'm a better imaginary friend than all the other imaginary friends and you'd better damn well remember it!", you're left with some pretty decent behavioral rules.
I *don't* have any problem with someone doing this, personally. You and everyone else has the freedom to do whatever you want as long as you stay off my lawn and don't screw my dog.
If Reason, however, is so much powerful than faith, you'd think that someone, somewhere, would come up with valid replacement rules that weren't 90% copied from religious teachings and didn't result in mass genocide. It seems like those two sets are mutually exclusive.
Not necessarily. We're all working with the same world; the differences you mention are based on the philosophical underpinnings, two competing worldviews as to why it's kinda hard work to be alive.
In one, we've been created by a greater force, and he wants to see if his creations are good enough to join him on his plane, and so the world itself is a test of and for his creations, and therefore all notions of right and wrong, good and evil, must spring in some way from him. Some people ignore other peoples' efforts in this; others accept the efforts of their fellows as they try to help each other pass the test; still others feel some don't deserve to even be tested, let alone pass.
In the other, we're at the mercy of random forces, and since we're all subject to the same random forces, it makes sense to work together to blunt their negative effects and maintain some sort of Common Good. Some are more competitive than others; some ignore those rules together, figuring Every Man For Themselves, although that becomes problematic when those people find themselves in need of help that individuals cannot provide. The stronger groups of humanity work out, or at least put aside, differences for their own mutual benefit.
I'm sure that, if I'm full of it, the lovely catalana will tell me gently. :)
Very thoughtful, very concise, and well-deserving of a thought-out and thorough answer. I've got one, but I'm afraid that it'll take some time to finalize and will entail more characters than are available on the reply box here.
It'll also be a long read.
There is a third worldview that combines the best of both of the above and explains a lot, including the strong anthropic principle, the reason for evil, and what happens to us when we die.
How about this--let me mull over exactly how I want to put this, write it on my LJ and publish a link to it...probably tomorrow, Wednesday at the latest?
Seriously, wait till Thursday and link to it in the Pimp Your Stuff thread. Very natural to go there, and it won't get lost in whatever else we talk about between now and then.
Excellent idea, especially since I will be very interested in ways to both prove and disprove the hypothesis in question. I did finish the latest draft just a bit ago, though, so I will have it. :)
In China it has far more to do with the "one child" policy and the tradition of the daughter going to live with and take care of the inlaws, while the son and his wife take care of the parents. If the traditions were such that the daughters took care of their elderly parents rather than the sons, it would have been the boy children who lost out. Frankly the abortion choice is better--and more humane--than leaving the babies somewhere to die of exposure and starvation, which HAS happened both in China and in past societies.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-28 06:31 pm (UTC)Raven
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-28 09:10 pm (UTC)The reason that I included "Godless" in my descriptor is that the history of the 20th Century indicates that socialistic state power coupled with avowed atheism leads to mass murder. If a state has at least some religious constraints, it has less of a tendency to commit such crimes, especially on innocents.
I mean, seriously, one hundred million dead in the USSR, China, and Cambodia are hard to argue with. As a matter of fact, if humanity managed to eliminate religions, it might be necessary to re-invent them in order to prevent the degree of savagery that our planet saw over the last one hundred years.
In any case, the technology to analyze the genome of unborn children is already going a long way to reducing the number of Downs babies born in the United States. I feel that it is very likely that had the Gimp been conceived now, he would have had a very low liklihood of ever having seen the light of day and we would not now be able, a few decades later, to read his paen to tolerance.
Hell, being *female* is, as we speak, grounds for being aborted in China, India, and several other Asian countries. In some rural areas, the male-to-female ration among teenagers are in the neighborhood of 56-44%. Isn't that a human-rights violation of the lives of *future* women?
Tom
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-29 06:49 am (UTC)Granted, stated by a religion you do not follow, but it is the dominant religion in the US at the moment. And I will grant that you follow a relatively peaceful religion, but most aren't so inclined.
Consider: The Crusades, The Burning Times, Radical Islam. Religion doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it's in power, either.
Also consider: For most people, working out a set of ethics is a process of deciding what their ethics should look like, and then looking for evidence to support it, rather than the other way around. So where to they get their underlying assumptions from?
Food for thought...
Raven
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-29 05:34 pm (UTC)What is shocking, though, is the difference in the number of deaths involved. The best authorities on the Witch Hunts put the median numbers of dead at between 50,000 and 60,000. Stalin's Soviet Union killed five hundred times that many "internal enemies" during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
All of the Crusades *together* killed about a million and a half people over a period of two centuries--3% of what Mao's Chinese Communists destroyed. Again, no comparison.
If anything, religion, especially Christianity, could be said to put the breaks on mass murder.
Up to the late 18th and early 19th Century, people did not work out a set of ethics and decide what they should look like--they received them from their parents at a young age. It seems to me, from looking at the state of the world, that this experiment in "do-it-yourself ethics" could be considered a dismal failure.
Tom
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-29 07:00 pm (UTC)So why aren't you a Christian? You seem to be arguing in its defense. I personally think that the Christian god (Jesus included) is the moral equivalent of a spoiled brat (I just read an excellent, well-argued post on the matter), though I know and respect that I am in a minority there.
Up to the late 18th and early 19th Century, people did not work out a set of ethics and decide what they should look like--they received them from their parents at a young age. It seems to me, from looking at the state of the world, that this experiment in "do-it-yourself ethics" could be considered a dismal failure.
No, the Western world, for the most part, still follows Judeo-Christian ethics. By working out what ethics looks like, I'm including the method of receiving them unquestioned from their parents. The selection of ethics, whether by conscious choice or by receipt from parents, is still being made before any thought of looking at evidence occurs. Note that I have yet to argue what a set of ethics based on objective evidence would look like, just that most people don't do it.
Raven
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-29 09:58 pm (UTC)The trouble with "thought-out" ethics is that I've never seen any that are original. The ones that are not completely selfish and anti-social are just ones that have been borrowed from established religions and had stuff cut out of them that kept the borrower from having one kind of fun or another.
Tom Trumpinski
--Pissing people off so badly they have to re-edit since before the time of Usenet.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-29 10:38 pm (UTC)I take a fair chunk of my methodology from Rand, though she was more than a bit mistaken on a number of points. I would suspect that on the first bounce, you'll classify her work as "selfish and anti-social" - indeed, her primary work on ethics is called The Virtue Of Selfishness - but once you strip away her mistakes, her basic ideas make sense. After all, they are a documented influence on the Wiccan movement (the Wiccan Rede is essentially the crux of her thought in disguise).
I don't think this is the proper place to write up a full treatise on ethics, but I'd like to think that what system I've got is reasonably complete and doesn't require that I fear or worship any deity to be able to function in a society.
Raven
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-30 12:51 am (UTC)Back when we were inventing "big-L" Libertarianism, there were still quite a few of her personal disciples still hanging around the movement. They were, without exception, consummate pricks, so I always associated her philosophy with prickiness. They talked constantly about their disappointment with her romantic life--which split the Objectivist Movement down the middle.
My head tells me that someone being unpleasant doesn't necessarily mean that their philosophical views are in error, but I'll admit, I just couldn't get beyond it. I was young then and more judgmental.
Tom
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-30 08:01 am (UTC)At least you recognize it for what it is.
Yes, Rand's followers tend toward the obnoxious - I remember when I had just read her, and was similarly young, naive, and obnoxious. One of the problems with the Movement was that according to Randian Gospel, since her system was derived from reason, hers was the Only True Way (tm), which should sound awfully familiar. And she really did insist on philosophical purity. The catch is that not all of her viewpoints derive so much from reason as from her own prejudices. For example, Nathaniel Brandon has noted that her understanding of psychology was virtually nil. And by extension, her beliefs concerning relationships was also well below sub-par, which probably explains her relationship foibles (read: really bad polyamory).
As I have noted, while I take something of a cue from Rand, I am neither an Objectivist nor a Libertarian. I spent a good deal of time with both camps and found logical flaws with both schools of thought.
One thing worth noting is that, contrary to a lot of movements (including Objectivism and Libertarianism), I'm not really interested in system-building in the large scale. I'm interested in developing a system of thought and action that is sound for my own reference. And I've found that positing a deity for moral guidance just doesn't work for me. Trust me - I've tried a number of versions of it (including Christianity and neo-paganism).
Raven
Link
Date: 2010-03-30 10:41 pm (UTC)http://tcgtrf.livejournal.com/11742.html
Re: Link
Date: 2010-03-30 10:44 pm (UTC)Tom
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-29 11:00 pm (UTC)The trouble with "thought-out" ethics is that I've never seen any that are original. The ones that are not completely selfish and anti-social are just ones that have been borrowed from established religions and had stuff cut out of them that kept the borrower from having one kind of fun or another.
And the problem with this is what exactly? Taking the Judeo-Christian 10 Commandments as an example, that works pretty well. Toss out the first few that deal with "I'm a better imaginary friend than all the other imaginary friends and you'd better damn well remember it!", you're left with some pretty decent behavioral rules.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-30 12:58 am (UTC)If Reason, however, is so much powerful than faith, you'd think that someone, somewhere, would come up with valid replacement rules that weren't 90% copied from religious teachings and didn't result in mass genocide. It seems like those two sets are mutually exclusive.
Tom
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-30 01:28 am (UTC)In one, we've been created by a greater force, and he wants to see if his creations are good enough to join him on his plane, and so the world itself is a test of and for his creations, and therefore all notions of right and wrong, good and evil, must spring in some way from him. Some people ignore other peoples' efforts in this; others accept the efforts of their fellows as they try to help each other pass the test; still others feel some don't deserve to even be tested, let alone pass.
In the other, we're at the mercy of random forces, and since we're all subject to the same random forces, it makes sense to work together to blunt their negative effects and maintain some sort of Common Good. Some are more competitive than others; some ignore those rules together, figuring Every Man For Themselves, although that becomes problematic when those people find themselves in need of help that individuals cannot provide. The stronger groups of humanity work out, or at least put aside, differences for their own mutual benefit.
I'm sure that, if I'm full of it, the lovely
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-30 03:34 am (UTC)It'll also be a long read.
There is a third worldview that combines the best of both of the above and explains a lot, including the strong anthropic principle, the reason for evil, and what happens to us when we die.
How about this--let me mull over exactly how I want to put this, write it on my LJ and publish a link to it...probably tomorrow, Wednesday at the latest?
Tom T.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-30 04:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-30 10:42 pm (UTC)Tom
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-29 02:04 pm (UTC)