I’d like to espouse not one but two unpopular thoughts. The first is:
If it happens to a person, it is personal.
If my political policies result in the death of two of your children, it is personal to you and ultimately personal to your children, It certainly should be personal to me, although usually it is not.
The belief that something isn’t personal allows us to consider our fellow humans collateral damage. “Collateral damage” is the most hypocritical claim ever made. If you cannot claim others pain, you really shouldn’t be claiming their joy, either. If stabbing somebody can be considered an impersonal act, so can bringing someone a birthday cake. It puts the stabber and the cake-giver on exactly the same moral level.
Any action at a moral remove is morally suspect.
The second unpopular thought, though less meaty, has more moral fiber. I really do not care what whacky ideas you choose to believe in, including some that I believe in. However, if the playing out of your dogma result in harm to a human being, you should defang your dogma. Really, you must really stop believing in that part of your dogma.
If God spoke to Mohammed or to Joseph Smith, as remembered by people a hundred years later, or was translated by looking through some very unusual spectacles, fine by me. If however, apostates are fair killing game for true believers, stop believing in that. Defang that dogma.
For many religions or ethical belief systems, wholeness is all; defang one part and the whole collapses. Fine, let it collapse. There will shortly be a schism, or splinter group, that takes everything else in your dogma and makes it the new dogma. The history of the Latter-Day Saints is instructive to this point, and they keep records. Often disputed records, but still, they keep records.
There are two places someone should look for the truth of the above. There is a museum that has the notes taken and testimony given in the Salem witch trials, by the inquisitors and judges. It is in manuscript form, bits of paper stuck on walls and consequently hard to read. However it is incredibly instructive.
The Salem witch trials are a hissing and a byword for the flowering of the horrific irrational. Depending on which account you read, and there are several, it is mass hysteria, adolescent revenge or ergotism.
The problem is not the logic, the rationality of the judge and inquisitors. Given what they thought and believed was possible, the problem is their belief system, the whacky beliefs cited above. The believers in the rational should make the visit and read the original documents. If you believed that witches were effective, if you believed in a devil who was always at odds with the good people, and that the devil always shows himself in some way…you get the rationality of the witch trials. Given those beliefs, a DA today would consider that there was a case to answer, at least. Fortunately, most DA’s don’t come equipped with those beliefs anymore. That dogma has been definitely defanged.
Rationality is a way of relating things, not the things themselves. Does your dogma end in people being unable to defend themselves? Does your dogma leave a defined way in which an accused could prove he or she was not a witch? In short, what is the outcome of the beliefs Cotton Mather and the other intellectuals leading the Salem witch trials had? It ends in the death of innocent people. Bad dogma, quit believing in that, defang it.
Not all people caught up in several hundred years of witch trials in Europe and the British Isles were complete innocents, anyway. If some could have done the very evil of which they were accused, they would have. Some powerless wannabe’s certainly tried. Witches, in a culture that believes in them, have a very dangerous form of power over others, which stems from the belief of others.
Most accused in witch trials were women who were herbalists, or hypnotists or midwives. Bad dogma, defang that thing. Stop burning midwives and herbalists, at least until you have modern medicine. Midwives, hypnotists and herbalist also need to live,
I had students who believed in rationality of the present. I would ask those students if they would draw a glass of water, spit mucus into it and then drink it. I would then ask them why they chose what they chose to do. It isn’t the alleged rationality of the present or the putative irrationality of the past that counts, it is the outcome.
Everything that happens to persons is personal. Personal outcomes, the joy, pain or even tedium of any person is personal. Beliefs should be judged by their outcomes to persons, not by their assumed probability, by their beautiful language or by their moral cohesion.
If it happens to a person, it is personal.
If my political policies result in the death of two of your children, it is personal to you and ultimately personal to your children, It certainly should be personal to me, although usually it is not.
The belief that something isn’t personal allows us to consider our fellow humans collateral damage. “Collateral damage” is the most hypocritical claim ever made. If you cannot claim others pain, you really shouldn’t be claiming their joy, either. If stabbing somebody can be considered an impersonal act, so can bringing someone a birthday cake. It puts the stabber and the cake-giver on exactly the same moral level.
Any action at a moral remove is morally suspect.
The second unpopular thought, though less meaty, has more moral fiber. I really do not care what whacky ideas you choose to believe in, including some that I believe in. However, if the playing out of your dogma result in harm to a human being, you should defang your dogma. Really, you must really stop believing in that part of your dogma.
If God spoke to Mohammed or to Joseph Smith, as remembered by people a hundred years later, or was translated by looking through some very unusual spectacles, fine by me. If however, apostates are fair killing game for true believers, stop believing in that. Defang that dogma.
For many religions or ethical belief systems, wholeness is all; defang one part and the whole collapses. Fine, let it collapse. There will shortly be a schism, or splinter group, that takes everything else in your dogma and makes it the new dogma. The history of the Latter-Day Saints is instructive to this point, and they keep records. Often disputed records, but still, they keep records.
There are two places someone should look for the truth of the above. There is a museum that has the notes taken and testimony given in the Salem witch trials, by the inquisitors and judges. It is in manuscript form, bits of paper stuck on walls and consequently hard to read. However it is incredibly instructive.
The Salem witch trials are a hissing and a byword for the flowering of the horrific irrational. Depending on which account you read, and there are several, it is mass hysteria, adolescent revenge or ergotism.
The problem is not the logic, the rationality of the judge and inquisitors. Given what they thought and believed was possible, the problem is their belief system, the whacky beliefs cited above. The believers in the rational should make the visit and read the original documents. If you believed that witches were effective, if you believed in a devil who was always at odds with the good people, and that the devil always shows himself in some way…you get the rationality of the witch trials. Given those beliefs, a DA today would consider that there was a case to answer, at least. Fortunately, most DA’s don’t come equipped with those beliefs anymore. That dogma has been definitely defanged.
Rationality is a way of relating things, not the things themselves. Does your dogma end in people being unable to defend themselves? Does your dogma leave a defined way in which an accused could prove he or she was not a witch? In short, what is the outcome of the beliefs Cotton Mather and the other intellectuals leading the Salem witch trials had? It ends in the death of innocent people. Bad dogma, quit believing in that, defang it.
Not all people caught up in several hundred years of witch trials in Europe and the British Isles were complete innocents, anyway. If some could have done the very evil of which they were accused, they would have. Some powerless wannabe’s certainly tried. Witches, in a culture that believes in them, have a very dangerous form of power over others, which stems from the belief of others.
Most accused in witch trials were women who were herbalists, or hypnotists or midwives. Bad dogma, defang that thing. Stop burning midwives and herbalists, at least until you have modern medicine. Midwives, hypnotists and herbalist also need to live,
I had students who believed in rationality of the present. I would ask those students if they would draw a glass of water, spit mucus into it and then drink it. I would then ask them why they chose what they chose to do. It isn’t the alleged rationality of the present or the putative irrationality of the past that counts, it is the outcome.
Everything that happens to persons is personal. Personal outcomes, the joy, pain or even tedium of any person is personal. Beliefs should be judged by their outcomes to persons, not by their assumed probability, by their beautiful language or by their moral cohesion.
