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

To: Lane3 who wrote (78385)	10/27/2003 12:59:59 PM
From: Solon	Respond to of 82486

"You don't get much enlightenment by pissing people off." No. There are probably superior methods for getting enlightenment. But sometimes you do get sundry things like social change. For example: The Founding Fathers pissed off some very powerful people! It takes all kinds, ya know! I don't believe in sacred ideas. Ideas are to be examined and tested and battered and floated on rough seas until they prove worthy or they drown. If people wish to call me infidel either face to face or in a voluminous literature, and to attach a moral and human inferiority to that aspersion, then they must be prepared to be pissed off. I like the practice of proponents holding debates to attack and defend beliefs in a public forum without the use or threat of force. Such a practice has produced some great confrontations down through the ages--and up to the present time. I cannot answer to how pissed off they were, or to how pissed off the reading audience becomes! You are right, though: Simply hating a belief has small practical value, if any. But accepting it without discretion is likewise of dubious merit. The middle road is to debate in a civilized fashion. There are areas where emotions may run high and where people may get pissed off. There are different tolerances in debate for what passes as "civilized", and some ideas or beliefs invite an appropriate contempt. An example would be Hitler preaching his belief in an Aryan Supremacy and of inferior races of people. Another would be someone intimating that you are of so little human value that you will be tortured for all of eternity as a punishment for your moral inferiority. These sorts of ideas are beyond the pale and they have no right to a "civilized" response. Although they may perhaps be debated with constraint...