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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (82501)	6/21/2000 1:09:00 PM
From: one_less	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

I must be misunderstanding you. It appears that you said, you don't want fringe ideas becoming accepted by the mainstream. Where else have new ideas come from? Or did you just mean the "believer" fringe?

To: epicure who wrote (82501)	6/21/2000 1:43:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Not saying I disagree with you, but your solution requires a belief that government has the right to govern private actions to protect individuals. So you may start with an agreed fact -- ingesting lead can (not necessarily always does, there will always be medical exceptions you can point to, but can or usually does or whatever) -- but what if anything you do about that becomes a matter of what belief system you endorse. But you then go on to say "I think it is valid for society to make a choice to protect children from lead." That requires belief in a world where society has either a right or obligation to protect children. Not necessarily a given. A different belief system would say that the proper role of society would be to make people aware of the danger, and leave it up to the parents to decide what to do about it. In fact, certain belief systems would say that it is flatly wrong for government to interfere in the private relationship between tenant and landlord, or homeowner and contractor, to forbit the use of lead based paint. So in order to pass a law prohibiting me from painting my home with lead-based paint, you have to impose your belief system on me, who may have a totally different belief system.

To: epicure who wrote (82501)	6/21/2000 1:56:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

if the fringe gets control in a democracy (or representative democracy) then the will of the people is the fringe, and then the fringe is really no longer fringe. I don't like that- and I'll always be against it, where the "fringe" ideas seem to be based on belief that has no connection to reality as I understand it. Keeping in mind that democracy itself was once a fringe belief not based on reality (reality was that you needed kings and emperors, that the illiterate mass of the people could never govern themselves). John Locke, on whose writings much of our Constitution is based, was a fringe writer who rejected the reality of his day. The notion that a colony had the right to self-determination, to break off from their country just because they wanted to, in defiance of the divine right of Kings, was an extremely fringe notion with no possible basis in reality, since nobody had ever done it before. And the idea that a government should guarantee freedom of religion instead of imposing a state religion was totally fringe, not to mention that atheists had any rights to exist, let alone be protected. Fringe, no basis in the reality of their times. The notion that Native Americans were people whose rights should respected was a fringe belief totally at odds with the reality of the ignoble savage, the half naked, unChristian creatures who were hardly any more human than the beats. The notion that slavery should be abolished -- totally fringe, violating the clear reality that slavery has been a part of virtually all civilizations for millenia (even the civilized Greek and Roman civilizations, the height of human civilizations, were based on slavery). All of these, fringe belief divorced from the clear reality of their day. But all became mainstream beliefs. Now, if we could only get rid of that fringe notion, which clearly contradicts reality, that women have the capacity to responsibly exercise the franchise or hold public office . . . <ducking!>