Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (17870)	7/10/2001 10:15:12 AM
From: average joe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

"They are simply rules that we have invented to govern ourselves. We think that they are the best policies available because we think them most likely to create the sort of society we want to live in. We change these policies regularly, according to our perceptions of their effectiveness. We change them to reflect emerging ideas. Sometimes the emerging ideas don't work, and we change our polices back again. The means by which we choose our policies evolve by the same process. We often disagree. Over many generations we have developed ways to resolve these disagreements peacefully, and to compromise. I'm saying that we don't DISCOVER what is right and what is wrong. We DECIDE what is right and what is wrong." "Of course it's hard to compromise when one guy thinks his idea was revealed by God." And of course it's hard to compromise when one guy thinks his ideas are arrived at by a subjective process that cannot be trusted. #reply-15546197 Your WE is more mythical than any God crackling in the synapses of Greg McRitchie. "At first men were enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. Then he was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of the freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled. But then he gave up all he had won, and fell lower than his savage beginning. What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "WE"."

To: Dayuhan who wrote (17870)	7/10/2001 10:29:15 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

I'd add that what we do 'discover' through experience is what sort of rules might just tend to create a society in which we and our descendants have a decent chance of surviving long enough to reproduce and feel important and party a bit without being offed by a surly neighbor. Just which facilitating rules we want to try out is what we 'decide,' I'd say. If enough people who live proximate to each other, like in neighboring caves or valleys, make the same discoveries and follow them with decisions to implement their insights, voila, a culture. Laws. Civilization of one ilk or another. The capacity for conscience, and guilt, obviously exists in the human animal. It evolved to have that advantageous (to survival) capacity. It seems to me that what those who think they need a God in place of a conscience, or as an enforcer, don't seem to grasp, is that the capacity for conscience is there whether or not there is an external 'divine authority.' It need merely be developed and molded in each human being by family and community according to their culture's, and its subcultures', 'decisions.' (That's not really a 'merely,' clearly, as there are so many sociopaths around-- as many of them in cathedrals and mosques as at meetings of the Secular Humanist Society, i'll wager.) Belief that without an external authority human beings don't have the capacity or will to live humanely does encourage intellectual creativity though, what with the exercise it gives in constructing rationales and institutions that benefit the affiliated believer-groups. That last isn't fair of me, since one of the ironies of human conscience is that it requires of all groups, and individuals, theists and non-theists alike, that they construct 'moral' rationales before taking advantage of others, or perpetrating monstrous atrocities against them. Killing and torturing and raping and stealing their land or possessions and the like. People are diabolically clever in rationale-construction! Aren't you getting a deja-vu sort of feeling, Steven? I am. I shall resist answering the predictable replies, since i've done it so often following my predictable replies to predictable replies.... You are quite wonderful, btw.