And that's kindness?
What does religion do for mankind that the statement "Be kind" doesn't do better?
- Thread starter Seattle
- Start date
I guess you should take your grievances up with them, if the topic is do important to you.
You don’t make positive connections to anything solely using philosophy and history, if said examples don’t stand up to a reasonable standard of acceptance, then they must be characterized accordingly. Medical practitioners demonstrably treat and cure patients, religious authorities can’t demonstrate a reasonable connection to a supernatural deity.
I can only reject that which has been presented. Supply an example of what you deem credible and we can discuss the validity of your assertion.
The contradiction is right there in his own assertions:
Souls come from God. That's a pre-existing direct connection, long before the human being has the faculties to practice or be reached by religion.
Then, Musika claims that religion establishes a direct connection to God.
You can't establish something that already exists.
The most that religion can possibly do, according to its own claims, is help someone who has been disconnected from his god, wants to get reconnected and doesn't know how to do it on his own.
Of course, simple, secular kindness could help people who wish to reconnect with their god.
We would have to collect and compare subjects' testimonies from both methods to decide which is better.
Souls come from God. That's a pre-existing direct connection, long before the human being has the faculties to practice or be reached by religion.
Then, Musika claims that religion establishes a direct connection to God.
You can't establish something that already exists.
The most that religion can possibly do, according to its own claims, is help someone who has been disconnected from his god, wants to get reconnected and doesn't know how to do it on his own.
Of course, simple, secular kindness could help people who wish to reconnect with their god.
We would have to collect and compare subjects' testimonies from both methods to decide which is better.
Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
My point was that interpreting it that way would be a way to solve the same problem solved by religious law by "being kind".
If you interpret it in a wider way, I see only arbitrariness. Everything would have to be done by interpretation of what means "being kind". This interpretation becomes the law.
Instead, religious law gives usually a complete law code and a sufficient one. Interpretation is an unavoidable problem, it reintroduces the arbitrariness of law which is the horror of modern democratic law. But this problem is reduced as much as possible.
The non-aggression principle, as interpreted by some libertarians, defines a sufficiently complete and unchangeable law code. The law code of monotheistic religions does this too. Different from the libertarian one, it is far from minimal, but in comparison with modern overregulation, it is also quite minimal. So, both give something against the arbitrariness of modern law, namely something stable in time and much smaller.
"Be kind" is not a complete law code. And as a guiding principle, it is not sufficient. Different people think differently about what is being kind. So, there has to be some parliament which establishes what it means to be kind, and are back to the horrors of modern law.
Yes, because religious tradition defines some law code to start with, "be kind" doesn't.
Applying it means, requires interpreting it.
The first association with this is a memory of some horror story, maybe Edgar Ellen Poe, but not sure, about a very kind inquisitor.
Maybe public torture and finally burning the murderer is the least destructive way, given that it would deter much better from murdering (so that there will be less murder victims destroyed) and the harm to the murderer maybe intense but limited in time?
Whatever, the rule of law means the reaction to murder is, within some boundary, well-defined, and not arbitrary.
The cynical answer is that it is the usual way, in democracies as well.
You have, last but not least, a list of the most horrible examples of religious law, and, moreover, heavily extended it with propaganda. If one does the same thing with democratic law, you can easily get results similar or even worse. Nazi law is quite modern democratic law too.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Well, we didn't have grievances, but it was kind of satisfying to watch them eat their words. Turns out, the existence of leprechauns is all a matter of personal choice after all.
I don't know what this means.
Every guiding principle must be interpreted before it's coded into law.
No, it doesn't. Once the original prophet is gone, subsequent generations interpret according to their circumstances, and their new gurus. And, of course, they all have to be changed - considerably! - once a people has reached enlightenment. You know - figured out that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth, and disease isn't caused by impure thoughts; like that.
What happens when fundamentalists insist on going back to their religious roots? ISIS.
Thing One: what is this arbitrariness of which you keep complaining? People of all nations make laws that they think they need from time to time, and these laws are required to conform to their constitution, which sets out their guiding principles. Constitutions are interpreted by each nation's highest court.
That's not arbitrary. It's not always good, but it's usually rational.
Thing Two: What is this oft-alleged "horror" of democratic law?
How does it compare to the historically documented horrors of religious law?
By whom? By what method? Are there examples?
Do you mean that libertarianism is a religion? Or is this a gratuitous third factor introduced to no purpose?
Are you equating one simple commandment (Thou shalt not initiate aggression) to ten fanciful commandments, the entire text of Leviticus, the Paulist epistles, 300 encyclicals, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Loyola and Billy Graham?
It's okay to be cruel, as long as your legal code is more compact than you imagine a legal code based on the principle of kindness might become.
It's a more instructive beginning than "Thou shalt have no other gods but me."
Actually, it's written someplace that Jesus gave a new one: "Love thy neighbour as thou lovest thyself." Naw - too much arbitrary interpretation!
But they all know the difference between that and being cruel.
here come those unnamed, undocumented horrors again.
Invariably. Either God or Evolution gave us brains to do that.
If you think that's an example of modern democracy, no wonder you're so worried about horrors! but i'm pretty sure it doesn't mention kindness.
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Schmelzer
Valued Senior Member
But religious law is, at least often enough, already quite explicit coded.
But there is a large difference between interpreting quite explicit laws or interpreting a completely vague guiding principle "be kind".
This is possible, but only an exception. Don't forget, this is the quite small Wahabi sect, which becomes so powerful only because of Saudi Arabia behind it and the support of the US behind SA.
Look at the amount of regulation of everything by law. This is completely arbitrary and unnecessary, it goes far beyond what is necessary to protect life and property of the people.
Then, that is law today may not be law tomorrow. Law can be changed at will by some quite arbitrary majority in a parliament. Given that almost everything is regulated, firms have no security that tomorrow, following a new law, they will go bankrupt because of the new legislation. Big firms can afford lobbies (a nice word for bribery) to avoid the most horrible consequences, but small firms have no chance.
The very starting point of modern democracy - the French revolution - was horrible even in comparison with known horrors of religious law. All the modern time genocides have democracy as their base - to have large amounts of people from other nations to decide, via democratic elections, how you have to live, is a quite strong motivation to genocide such minorities away. Say, in Tito time Serbs living in Croatia or Kosovo had no problems. It was Croatian democracy and NATO which genocided them out of Krajina and Kosovo.
The typical method is similar to common law. There is no lawmaker, there is only the religious text, together with its interpretation by particular judges. These interpretations have been also written down, and follow a tradition, thus, judges are not completely free in their interpretations but have to follow the tradition. Note, the tradition of interpretation, not some modern fashion. In case of a serious conflict, religions tend to split.
No. Libertarianism allows solving without any religion a problem of the modern democratic state which other people try to solve by going back to traditional law, and the traditional law is, in many places, religious law.
No. But it has a similar potential to solve the problem with arbitrary democratic law.
This is something you could reasonably claim at the time of Code Napoleon, but not in modern three felonies a day US.
Which is not the starting point. The starting point are, in this case, the 10 commandments.
No. There is a lot of disagreement, with some people naming something kind and others naming the same thing cruel.
Hitler was democratically elected, and a leader of a quite popular mass movement which wanted the power to the (German) people, against the (Jewish) 1%. Quite modern. What I see in the US is a quite popular mass movement which wanted the power to the (non-white) people, against the (white) 1%. Big difference.
Nazi murder as a form of kindness? No problem too. Those who had to be eliminated in the gas chambers thought, up to the last few seconds, that they will simply be transferred to another place, and that they can take a shower after a long transport. Very kind, not? (Those Ukrainian Bandera gangs were much crueler murdering Jews.)
Looks like you are not aware of the Orwellian distortions of language which are typical for totalitarian as well as democratic propaganda that you don't recognize that essentially everything can be easily claimed to be kind.
Here, the particular basic principles matter. The libertarian principles cannot be distorted easily, given that it is quite clear, from the start, that they reject the right of the state to tax people. And without tax income, and without other forms of open aggression, the states are not strong enough to endanger the freedom of the people.
The principle "be kind" has no protection against Orwellian distortion.
I doubt you really want to know.
The point is that if there is a difference, I can show the difference. You claim there is a difference between crystal-rubbing and God-bothering but you refuse to cite the differences.
Yes. It's "do unto others as you would have others do unto you." I would like to be given the protection of the law, so I also want others to have the protection of the law, even murderers.
Yes. Bad law. That's why secular legislatures have to grow out of it and make laws that people can actually live with.
Yes. The first results in at least one war per century; the second can only bring about hostilities in some diseased imagination.
So's all Sharia law, so's the exorcism of demons and child brides
It doesn't explain why so many "exceptional" religious codes exist, since the regular ones are quite mean enough to a sizeable minority of people.
Look at the complexity of modern capitalist societies compared to the tribal herders and desert nomads of the bible.
You keep saying arbitrary as if parliaments and congresses blew on the wind.
Being chosen by some random God, or rejected by him - now, that's arbitrary!
No, it was pretty much the same as every other regime change, religious, secular or conquest. People slaughtering one another, instead of being kind.
So, nothing changed since biblical times. Because people were unkind then, as they are now.
I'm pretty sure that was Commandment #1
Even 'tough love' is better than soft hate.
Except for the burning, intimidation and holding the majority representatives at gun-point... details, details
Diseased imaginations aside, most people know the meaning of simple words.
You've just demonstrated, rather laboriously, that nothing does.
Then, why don't you already? All you had to do was read short sentences.
Musika said some nonsense about religion giving people a direct connection to God.
I replied that, since every soul already has a direct connection God, all clergy can do is get between people and their gods.
Whereupon, he said this: "Its just like saying that people are either categorically healthy or sick and medicinal practices simply places doctors as interlopers between you and your health." which was silly.
As Carpacus pointed out:
"That analogy fails in the sense that a doctor generally posses greater knowledge and skill regarding the practice of medicine than the layman, while the preacher has no more knowledge of an actual god than those they preach to, in this case it’s essentially the blind leading the blind.,"
to which you responded, completely off topic:
"A preacher can be an atheist pretending to know about God. Jim Jones is an obvious and perfect example. It may even be the case that 99% of preachers fall into this category, but it says nothing about the reality of God."
The reality of God was not the issue; the issue was a comparison between the services performed by medical practitioners and clergy.
At which point you seemed to lose the thread altogether, to the extent where, when I responded, you didn't even know what it was about.
All better now?
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The existence of expertise in one's chosen profession.
There is no principle more vulnerable to "misinterpretation" than the non-aggression principle.
And since the libertarian stance so often ascribes aggression to State power alone, rather than capitalist industry or crime, a major misinterpretation is built in.
Meanwhile: two benefits of religion have been posted: codification of the law; a solution to the Tragedy of the Commons.
So if you have two experts, how do you conclude that one is a better, or real expert, compared to the other expert?
Jan.
How did we find two experts, in a field with no expertise?