You can not blame a religion (or anything else for that matter) for a given persons action. It's exactly the same as blaming quake for the actions of columbine shooters.
Quake is a game. Religion is intended to be serious, and seriously taken, and precisely a guide for persons' actions. When your sacred book, suppossed to be the word of God himself, mandates the killing of witches, homosexuals, adulterers and those who work on Sabbath (to name just a few), the very least that can be said is that your religion is not to be credited if you don't kill such people. So, it is not the same, and you can blame a religion in certain circumstances.
You want to be an artist? Stay an artist and try to produce something worthwhile. You want to be commercial whore? Fine, be that but don't pretend you're an artist. You can't be both.
Since when??? Where says that in the Bible??? Artistic talent and commercial talent are, I think, not at all incompatible. Witness all artists who managed to make a living off their art. Some of them were especially good at marketing and made a very good living indeed, from Pieter Paul Rubens to Salvador Dalí (a.k.a. Avida Dollars, as he himself put it). You can be an artist in more than one field.
Ah, that is a really ludicrous law. It protects the rights of imaginary persons! Perhaps you would like to support a law forbiding a writer to inflict suffering to his underage characters?
AFAIK, KKK members call themselves "Christian" (which no self-respecting, of even self-hating, Nazi would have ever done), and KKK predates Hitler activity by a chunk of decades. Contemporary Ku Klux Klan may have borrowed some items from Nationasocialist ideology (to the extent that it exists), but to call them Nazis would be stretching the word. Not that it is not done...
AFAIK, KKK members call themselves "Christian" (which no self-respecting, of even self-hating, Nazi would have ever done), and KKK predates Hitler activity by a chunk of decades. Contemporary Ku Klux Klan may have borrowed some items from Nationasocialist ideology (to the extent that it exists), but to call them Nazis would be stretching the word. Not that it is not be done...
"Dostoevsky said it best: "If God does not exist, then all things are permissable." But we *know* deep down in our souls and bones, that right and wrong DO exist and all things are not permissable. And that in turn demands the existence of God. And if God exists, then perhaps we should listen to what He has to say about killing. (For those of you that ask, "Which god?", I suggest you search for the one which corresponds to truth - that one will be God, not god.)"
People speaking in the name of God have advocated for and commited what any decent atheist would call heinous crimes. (Yes, your likes, decent Christians, would say they were not "real" Christians, but most Christians in their times didn't agree with this, nor do some nowadays).
Dostoyevsky is magnificently wrong. As is evident in his works, his criminals repent (when they do; Raskolnikov does, Smerdyakov does not) not because God speaks to them, but because they don't feel at ease with themselves. They hadn't counted with their consciences. Dostoievsky being a faithful Christian, he sees in it the voice of God. But you have to believe in God in the first place; it is circular reasoning.
Conscience is a delicate plant. Most people seem to be born with one, but it needs to be cared of. Many warring "primitive" societies educated their children to inflict torture on captured enemies, and to expect such a fate in case of defeat.
What has God to say about killing, indeed? And where has He said it? In our "souls and bones"? They exist indeed, and they can "speak", after a fashion, but this is not proof that there be a God. In the Bible? Please! Being the work of a commitee, you have to read the Bible very selectively, and you are almost certain to find everything you are looking for. You can find God _ordering_ to kill babies, or punishing a king for forgiving the life to war prisoners. If the Judeo-Christian Holy Scriptures are to be followed...
If God does exist, and the Bible is inspired by Him, we are getting very mixed messages from Him; I think we can dismiss them. If God does exist, we don't have more of a clue as to what things are permissable than if He does not exist. The existence of God is _irrelevant_ to ethics.
We don't know whether God exists or not. But we know that we (each "I") exist, and we had better to live at ease with ourselves. If we have the fortune to have a conscience, or even pride, there are things we would not allow to ourselves. Moreover, we know (if we are not solipsists, which is psychologicaly impossible) that other persons exist too, and that they could have an opinion about what we do to them, and enforce it. Hence the Golden Rule. "Do unto others as you would like they to do unto you"... because the next time they can outpower you. An "ethical" ethics can be laid on very practical foundations.
"I'll let Dostoevsky speak for himself. Numerous other philosophers (even atheists) have reached essentially the same conclusion. There is little difference of opinion between civilized societies about major points such as the wrongness of taking another's life"
Ah, but we now find the same problem: the definition. Murder is defined as unduly killing a person (I understand that in certain states any death resulting from a felony is, o was, a "murder" charged to the felon, even if the death is caused by police fire or accident). So, there is no murder if the dead is not a "person" (an enemy, an underman, a slave, a fetus...) _or_ the killing is legally admitted, be it either judged positively (death penalty, war, self-defence, duelling), frowned upon (killing an adult son for a relatively minor offence, as in Republican Rome), or neutrally considered, as exposing a supernumerary child, which by the way was customary along ALL the history of Rome, not only the "decadent" period. Especially with female babies (as is a constant in pre-modern warring societies); old Romans gave names to their four first sons, but only to their two first daughters. From there on, they used numerals: Quintus, Sextus (Fifth, Sixth)... and Tertia (she the Third). There were no Quartae (female Fourths).
So, you define "civilized society" based on its attitude on "murder". It is as good a method as any other.
"But in the end it's sad to watch these predictions. A space hotel is more important than helping developing countries and getting food for everyone. Also first world people get to live on the moon while tens of thousands of children die of hunger and wars"
This is not even, nor right. In Clarke's article, developing countries help themselves (there are references to India, Singapore and China), and the "food for everyone" issue is covered by the cheap energy devices. No reference is made to war, even indirectly. I you want to blame him, do it on account on the wild foundations of the happy century he, well, extrapolates (commercial cold fusion in 2002 and quantum generators in 2010, indeed!).
And the space hotel project is private. If you deem other things more important, don't invest in it.
You seem to suppose that, once arrived to a certain point (_which_ point exactly?), progress must be stopped until everybody has reached it. And then, perhaps, resume it again.
This is ludicrous. Technological progress cannot be switched off and on at will; it is inextricably woven in the fabric of our civillization. New technologies are at first scarce and expensive luxuries. Some of them will succeed and become more common and cheap, until everyday life will be unconceivable without them; say inhouse plumbing (yes, I am aware that a large part of humankind hasn't got inhouse plumbing, or even outhouse plumbing; that part included the home village of some relatives of mine when I was a child). I can hear you 150 years ago: "Let's stop spending effort and resources in such arcane and useless things as electricity until everybody has a water pump at home".
AFAIK, it was F.A. von Hayek who made the argument (here crudely paraphrased) that the rich are the vanguard of the poor in the progress of society, and that in an equalitarian society an equivalent would have to be established, i.e., a selected group of persons who would test new goods before they could be produced in large quantities.
Slashdot Mirror
As an adjective for flamebait? I think he did mean hypergolic.
If you are a library and don't show one book because of its content, then you are censoring. One book or one thousand, censorship is censorship.
Quake is a game. Religion is intended to be serious, and seriously taken, and precisely a guide for persons' actions. When your sacred book, suppossed to be the word of God himself, mandates the killing of witches, homosexuals, adulterers and those who work on Sabbath (to name just a few), the very least that can be said is that your religion is not to be credited if you don't kill such people. So, it is not the same, and you can blame a religion in certain circumstances.
Since when??? Where says that in the Bible??? Artistic talent and commercial talent are, I think, not at all incompatible. Witness all artists who managed to make a living off their art. Some of them were especially good at marketing and made a very good living indeed, from Pieter Paul Rubens to Salvador Dalí (a.k.a. Avida Dollars, as he himself put it). You can be an artist in more than one field.
Ah, that is a really ludicrous law. It protects the rights of imaginary persons! Perhaps you would like to support a law forbiding a writer to inflict suffering to his underage characters?
AFAIK, KKK members call themselves "Christian" (which no self-respecting, of even self-hating, Nazi would have ever done), and KKK predates Hitler activity by a chunk of decades. Contemporary Ku Klux Klan may have borrowed some items from Nationasocialist ideology (to the extent that it exists), but to call them Nazis would be stretching the word. Not that it is not done...
AFAIK, KKK members call themselves "Christian" (which no self-respecting, of even self-hating, Nazi would have ever done), and KKK predates Hitler activity by a chunk of decades. Contemporary Ku Klux Klan may have borrowed some items from Nationasocialist ideology (to the extent that it exists), but to call them Nazis would be stretching the word. Not that it is not be done...
"Dostoevsky said it best: "If God does not exist, then all things are permissable." But we *know* deep down in our souls and bones, that right and wrong DO exist and all things are not permissable. And that in turn demands the existence of God. And if God exists, then perhaps we should listen to what He has to say about killing. (For those of you that ask, "Which god?", I suggest you search for the one which corresponds to truth - that one will be God, not god.)"
People speaking in the name of God have advocated for and commited what any decent atheist would call heinous crimes. (Yes, your likes, decent Christians, would say they were not "real" Christians, but most Christians in their times didn't agree with this, nor do some nowadays).
Dostoyevsky is magnificently wrong. As is evident in his works, his criminals repent (when they do; Raskolnikov does, Smerdyakov does not) not because God speaks to them, but because they don't feel at ease with themselves. They hadn't counted with their consciences. Dostoievsky being a faithful Christian, he sees in it the voice of God. But you have to believe in God in the first place; it is circular reasoning.
Conscience is a delicate plant. Most people seem to be born with one, but it needs to be cared of. Many warring "primitive" societies educated their children to inflict torture on captured enemies, and to expect such a fate in case of defeat.
What has God to say about killing, indeed? And where has He said it? In our "souls and bones"? They exist indeed, and they can "speak", after a fashion, but this is not proof that there be a God. In the Bible? Please! Being the work of a commitee, you have to read the Bible very selectively, and you are almost certain to find everything you are looking for. You can find God _ordering_ to kill babies, or punishing a king for forgiving the life to war prisoners. If the Judeo-Christian Holy Scriptures are to be followed...
If God does exist, and the Bible is inspired by Him, we are getting very mixed messages from Him; I think we can dismiss them. If God does exist, we don't have more of a clue as to what things are permissable than if He does not exist. The existence of God is _irrelevant_ to ethics.
We don't know whether God exists or not. But we know that we (each "I") exist, and we had better to live at ease with ourselves. If we have the fortune to have a conscience, or even pride, there are things we would not allow to ourselves. Moreover, we know (if we are not solipsists, which is psychologicaly impossible) that other persons exist too, and that they could have an opinion about what we do to them, and enforce it. Hence the Golden Rule. "Do unto others as you would like they to do unto you"... because the next time they can outpower you. An "ethical" ethics can be laid on very practical foundations.
"I'll let Dostoevsky speak for himself. Numerous other philosophers (even atheists) have reached essentially the same conclusion. There is little difference of opinion between civilized societies about major points such as the wrongness of taking another's life"
Ah, but we now find the same problem: the definition. Murder is defined as unduly killing a person (I understand that in certain states any death resulting from a felony is, o was, a "murder" charged to the felon, even if the death is caused by police fire or accident). So, there is no murder if the dead is not a "person" (an enemy, an underman, a slave, a fetus...) _or_ the killing is legally admitted, be it either judged positively (death penalty, war, self-defence, duelling), frowned upon (killing an adult son for a relatively minor offence, as in Republican Rome), or neutrally considered, as exposing a supernumerary child, which by the way was customary along ALL the history of Rome, not only the "decadent" period. Especially with female babies (as is a constant in pre-modern warring societies); old Romans gave names to their four first sons, but only to their two first daughters. From there on, they used numerals: Quintus, Sextus (Fifth, Sixth)... and Tertia (she the Third). There were no Quartae (female Fourths).
So, you define "civilized society" based on its attitude on "murder". It is as good a method as any other.
Marzo (marzo@encomix.es)
"But in the end it's sad to watch these predictions. A space hotel is more important than helping developing countries and getting food for everyone. Also first world people get to live on the moon while tens of thousands of children die of hunger and wars"
This is not even, nor right. In Clarke's article, developing countries help themselves (there are references to India, Singapore and China), and the "food for everyone" issue is covered by the cheap energy devices. No reference is made to war, even indirectly. I you want to blame him, do it on account on the wild foundations of the happy century he, well, extrapolates (commercial cold fusion in 2002 and quantum generators in 2010, indeed!).
And the space hotel project is private. If you deem other things more important, don't invest in it.
You seem to suppose that, once arrived to a certain point (_which_ point exactly?), progress must be stopped until everybody has reached it. And then, perhaps, resume it again.
This is ludicrous. Technological progress cannot be switched off and on at will; it is inextricably woven in the fabric of our civillization. New technologies are at first scarce and expensive luxuries. Some of them will succeed and become more common and cheap, until everyday life will be unconceivable without them; say inhouse plumbing (yes, I am aware that a large part of humankind hasn't got inhouse plumbing, or even outhouse plumbing; that part included the home village of some relatives of mine when I was a child). I can hear you 150 years ago: "Let's stop spending effort and resources in such arcane and useless things as electricity until everybody has a water pump at home".
AFAIK, it was F.A. von Hayek who made the argument (here crudely paraphrased) that the rich are the vanguard of the poor in the progress of society, and that in an equalitarian society an equivalent would have to be established, i.e., a selected group of persons who would test new goods before they could be produced in large quantities.
And he wasn't being cynical.