Yeah, I second this. I survived on about 12 grand a year, covering rent, books, bills, food, transportation (By bus or bicycles bought at the pawn shop which tended to last about a month before falling apart) and tuition. It's lovely that the grandparent is a senator's son, but some of us have actually had to pay our own way.
Honestly, it was just an example. I've never seen such an epic example of people missing the point. If my main point had anything to do with homosexuality, I could see it. Thing is, it's just a means to demonstrate my main point, and within my own philosophy it doesn't matter if it's gay sex or freeing slaves or running planes into buildings. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and if you're trying to stop what you consider evil within yourself, then it doesn't matter what the third party thinks.
I don't have to be afraid of homosexuality to consider it undesirable, nor do I need to fear celibacy to find it undesirable(Indeed, I've been celibate all my life). Regardless, I was using someone elses morality. There is no universal ethic, so the things you value are your own. If you go against the things you value, then you're allowing the things you consider evil to 'win'.
Think of a naive country boy coming to the city for the first time. This person has all sorts of ideas about what's good and evil, but faced with all sorts of new vices he has no experience with dealing with, bad things happen. After being in the city for a while, and hardening himself to the evils there, his virtue is stronger than before he came, because he's had to deal with the evil in the world and in himself. When he next comes to the city, he'll be able to deal with the evils there.
My belief is that there is no universal, objective ethic, that ethics eventually boil down to morality because it's impossible to get any objective first principles upon which to base an ethic, so in the end the things that are important to a person are arbitrary and subjective, so the example holds because they themselves think it's immoral, yet because they have little experience with trying to deal with the issue of sexuality within themselves, they're more likely to have a massive failure to stand by their ethic.
Now I've been accused of being both for and against the slashdot groupthink for the same post. I can rest well tonight, knowing that no matter what happens, I've thought for myself.
I'm happy that at least one person in this thread actually responded to the main thrust of my post, instead of going all knee-jerk about my particular example.
Part of the thing to remember is, without some evils in your life, you never have a chance to deal with it in yourself and in the world. You obviously don't have to run out and do things that are dangerous or hurt people, but without a bit of immunization, things get troublesome quickly.
My favourite example is alcohol. My father let me and my brothers drink from a fairly young age while he was around. His reasoning was that letting the drinking happen in a controlled environment would help us deal with it in a safe environment before we headed out into the world. All my brothers have grown up to drink responsibly, and without most of the dangerous sorts of binge drinking that happen where kids see booze at a party for the first time and go completely haywire. If you simply ignore the problem, then you're setting yourself up for failure.
Another great example is food. You can't stop eating forever. You can't just move to some country where food is banned. You've got to deal with your temptation to eat stuff that'll cause you to be unhealthy on a daily basis if you want to have a healthy weight. If you shop every week, then you have to deal with the temptation then to buy bad food, and after that, you've got to deal with the temptation to just eat so much that you'll have to run out and buy more food before the week ends.
Focusing on my example rather than my message is asinine. Since there's no universal ethic, I was just using a relevant example of a certain group of people with strong beliefs that a certain set of actions constitutes 'evil'. In this case, the ethic holds that sex out of marriage is evil(Actually, sex at all, seeing as they're celibate), that gay sex is evil, that sex with prostitutes is evil, and my point is, by ignoring the evil within themselves, they set themselves up for this eventual fall when something happens. Just like my example of the sewer rats, that person might live a squeaky clean existence, they'll live in a world without evil, but when something comes along that tests their adherence to their principles, they've got no experience dealing with the evil in the world and in themselves.
1. College students as a whole can barely afford books, rent, or food, let alone music. 2. College graduates can afford lots, including lots of music CDs. 3. as a consequence of 1. and 2. it can be said that college students are a tiny market which will become the largest market for premium content, due to their massive disposable income. 4. It seems that because of 3. it is unwise to piss off said demographic. 5. I'm a professional, but I haven't bought a CD (or pirated music -- they don't even deserve mind-share!) in 7 years, because behaviour like this seems unethical to me, and pisses me off. 6. ??? 7. Profit!
I spent the better part of 3 years trying to get the truth. I used newspapers, magazines, television, and history books. The Internet is a wonderful tool, but on a topic where all the major players have something to hide, it's useless. Every time I thought I had the truth, I turned around and there was evidence that the story was more complicated.
Did you know that Iraq admitted to developing binary sarin warheads? That these warheads were labeled as regular ordinance? That at least one of these was found, and the only reason more people weren't hurt was that IEDs don't have the firepower to properly deploy the chemicals? Suddenly, "They had no WMDs" becomes a fairly subjective statement. We know there was at least one battle-ready, relatively recent warhead, and we know that this warhead was intentionally mislabeled to avoid detection.
Both political parties, and both of their affiliated political ideologies have reasons to show their own side of the story, and either spin or outright lie about inconvenient parts. Since they're our only source of information(Neither newspapers nor people on the street have spy agencies or access to the top secret intelligence other than that which politicians 'graciously' let us have a peek at), they're not a trustworthy source of information. Anything past that untrustworthy primary source is less reliable, accurate, and precise than the original source. It's simple information theory. You can't pass a signal on and expect to get more information than initially exists out of it.
Nihilism isn't self-destruction. Nihilism is an extreme form of skepticism which says there's no meaning, value, or sense in the world. The nature of nihilism means that there's no implicit ethic attached to it, only that simple belief.
My sig is meant almost as a pun, because under nihilism, there's no such thing as objective worth.
If you choose to deal with evil by being evil, then that's your choice. If you choose to deal with alcohol by becoming a drunk, that's your choice. If you choose to deal with vices by destroying yourself, that's your choice. If you're really dedicated to your principles, however, then by looking at evil and being forced to deal with it in yourself and in the world you'll become stronger, more capable of dealing with evil in yourself and in the world.
It's not my ethic or morality which says 'homosexuality is wrong', it's theirs. I used the example I did because I felt like trolling the hypocritical televangelists of the world. I could just as easily have used Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction as an example.
I'm sort of shocked at the number of people who think that you're doomed to be evil unless you close your eyes and ears and heart.
When I was younger, I was all about the strict morality. I was all about shutting out the world. With age, I've come to realize that by seeing evil, and coming to terms with its existence, and by striving to understand yourself in the context of that evil, you can arrive at a much more just way of living than simply not looking at evil.
I never said that you need to remove yourself from a belief in God to want to lead a good life. My point is a belief in God sets up certain first principles. If you believe in God, then you've got a set of morals and a certain philosophy and goal which comes with the belief in God. A nihilistic atheist has nothing. You can't say that your morality has any basis. You can't say that your goals have any meaning. You can't even say with any certainty that the outside world exists.
I got so caught up in my analogy that I missed my point.
Despite this belief of mine, I don't treat theists of any stripe differently, because they're human just like I am, and they believe their truths just as I believe mine.
There are 'religious atheists' out there, people who want to talk all day about how stupid the majority is. I find myself staying away from these people. Life is too short, and we don't have any strong enough standards to definitively say anything. Furthermore, if I could believe in God, I would. It's a wonderful and uplifting belief which removes the need to constantly search for meaning and evaluate what you're doing even if it's the same thing everyone else is doing.
With God, you can say "If I follow these rules, I will have led a good life.", but if you're a nihilistic atheist, you can only say "I know I exist because I think I exist and if I didn't exist I couldn't think I exist because there'd be nothing to think. Beyond that, we live in a meaningless, valueless, senseless world. Any desires I have need to be questioned because they don't necessarily correspond to real needs, any morality I hold has to be questioned because it doesn't necessarily resolve to any solid first ethic, any opinions I hold have to be questioned because they could be illusions of my own understanding. The ways we're told we should live are all subjective views and don't even have to be logically consistent because they too are illusions. With all this, should I live, and if I decide somehow that I should, how should I?"
Not everyone has the desire or the ability to become an atheistic, nihilistic philosopher for life. Some people just want a direction, a way to live, and if that's through God, then I consider them my equals for living as humans, just as I do, with the information available to them, just as I do with the information available to me, with the values they choose to believe in, just as I follow the values I choose to believe in.
Verily. I have no empirical evidence to support the existence of God (Some people think existence proves the existence of God, but the thing is, because we exist, we can't argue that we don't. All the places in the universe that don't have sentient life can't ponder how God must not exist because there's no life there.
Let's say you find a car, abandoned, in a place that's dark and rotten and forgotten, and it's obvious that the car has been abandoned for years, and the previous owner is long dead with no next of kin, and for some reason by law that entitles you to take it, and it starts up and runs and is perfectly ready to drive for 100,000 miles. You can't argue that you must have bought the car because it's unlikely that you found a car like that. You've got a car, and there's no proof that you bought it (no reciept, no cash gone from your bank account, no loans to pay back), but there's a piece of paper saying it's yours and you drive it everywhere. Because the evidence points to something, you can't argue that either you bought a car or you don't own one, because you do own one, no matter how unlikely it is.
It would also, ironically, get rid of the future generations who will be expected to pay off the 9 trillion. That's why someone has to think of the children -- because someone has to pay for all this shit!
Unfortunately, folks like this don't realize that you need to face evil to become hardened to it. If you never have to look upon the things that can corrupt you, you'll be completely defenceless when you get a good look at them. Just think about all those ministers and televangelists into the gay sex. Most of us, we've got some measure of sexual stuff in our life somehow, so when this gay sex thing comes along, it's like "Yeah, I'm not all about doing that". When the guy who hasn't looked at a naked girl since 1972 sees the gay sex though, it's like "Wow! This is the best thing ever! I've got to do this all the time!"
Sewer rats were found to have more powerful immune systems than regular lab rats, and were on the whole much healthier despite their living conditions. So to it is with humans and morality.
In other words, you've decided on the facts you like, you don't have any objective standard to tell if it's true or untrue, so as a result you're ignoring any evidence to the contrary or rationalizing it away, and the truth gets torn asunder?
Slashdot Mirror
True North Strong and Free!
Of course, our police are competent, which sort of ruins the point of draconian new laws and using the military as police.
o ---point .O .^ -you /.\
\|/
Yeah, I second this. I survived on about 12 grand a year, covering rent, books, bills, food, transportation (By bus or bicycles bought at the pawn shop which tended to last about a month before falling apart) and tuition. It's lovely that the grandparent is a senator's son, but some of us have actually had to pay our own way.
Sheep don't think homosexuality is evil. The minister does.
Honestly, it was just an example. I've never seen such an epic example of people missing the point. If my main point had anything to do with homosexuality, I could see it. Thing is, it's just a means to demonstrate my main point, and within my own philosophy it doesn't matter if it's gay sex or freeing slaves or running planes into buildings. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and if you're trying to stop what you consider evil within yourself, then it doesn't matter what the third party thinks.
I don't have to be afraid of homosexuality to consider it undesirable, nor do I need to fear celibacy to find it undesirable(Indeed, I've been celibate all my life). Regardless, I was using someone elses morality. There is no universal ethic, so the things you value are your own. If you go against the things you value, then you're allowing the things you consider evil to 'win'.
Think of a naive country boy coming to the city for the first time. This person has all sorts of ideas about what's good and evil, but faced with all sorts of new vices he has no experience with dealing with, bad things happen. After being in the city for a while, and hardening himself to the evils there, his virtue is stronger than before he came, because he's had to deal with the evil in the world and in himself. When he next comes to the city, he'll be able to deal with the evils there.
My belief is that there is no universal, objective ethic, that ethics eventually boil down to morality because it's impossible to get any objective first principles upon which to base an ethic, so in the end the things that are important to a person are arbitrary and subjective, so the example holds because they themselves think it's immoral, yet because they have little experience with trying to deal with the issue of sexuality within themselves, they're more likely to have a massive failure to stand by their ethic.
Now I've been accused of being both for and against the slashdot groupthink for the same post. I can rest well tonight, knowing that no matter what happens, I've thought for myself.
I'm happy that at least one person in this thread actually responded to the main thrust of my post, instead of going all knee-jerk about my particular example.
Part of the thing to remember is, without some evils in your life, you never have a chance to deal with it in yourself and in the world. You obviously don't have to run out and do things that are dangerous or hurt people, but without a bit of immunization, things get troublesome quickly.
My favourite example is alcohol. My father let me and my brothers drink from a fairly young age while he was around. His reasoning was that letting the drinking happen in a controlled environment would help us deal with it in a safe environment before we headed out into the world. All my brothers have grown up to drink responsibly, and without most of the dangerous sorts of binge drinking that happen where kids see booze at a party for the first time and go completely haywire. If you simply ignore the problem, then you're setting yourself up for failure.
Another great example is food. You can't stop eating forever. You can't just move to some country where food is banned. You've got to deal with your temptation to eat stuff that'll cause you to be unhealthy on a daily basis if you want to have a healthy weight. If you shop every week, then you have to deal with the temptation then to buy bad food, and after that, you've got to deal with the temptation to just eat so much that you'll have to run out and buy more food before the week ends.
* -- point
o
\|/
| -- you
/ \
Focusing on my example rather than my message is asinine. Since there's no universal ethic, I was just using a relevant example of a certain group of people with strong beliefs that a certain set of actions constitutes 'evil'. In this case, the ethic holds that sex out of marriage is evil(Actually, sex at all, seeing as they're celibate), that gay sex is evil, that sex with prostitutes is evil, and my point is, by ignoring the evil within themselves, they set themselves up for this eventual fall when something happens. Just like my example of the sewer rats, that person might live a squeaky clean existence, they'll live in a world without evil, but when something comes along that tests their adherence to their principles, they've got no experience dealing with the evil in the world and in themselves.
Nice troll. I like how you make no distinction between my point and my examples. It just becomes a blur of information without context.
I look at it this way:
1. College students as a whole can barely afford books, rent, or food, let alone music.
2. College graduates can afford lots, including lots of music CDs.
3. as a consequence of 1. and 2. it can be said that college students are a tiny market which will become the largest market for premium content, due to their massive disposable income.
4. It seems that because of 3. it is unwise to piss off said demographic.
5. I'm a professional, but I haven't bought a CD (or pirated music -- they don't even deserve mind-share!) in 7 years, because behaviour like this seems unethical to me, and pisses me off.
6. ???
7. Profit!
Erm...Yes, that was my point.
I spent the better part of 3 years trying to get the truth. I used newspapers, magazines, television, and history books. The Internet is a wonderful tool, but on a topic where all the major players have something to hide, it's useless. Every time I thought I had the truth, I turned around and there was evidence that the story was more complicated.
Did you know that Iraq admitted to developing binary sarin warheads? That these warheads were labeled as regular ordinance? That at least one of these was found, and the only reason more people weren't hurt was that IEDs don't have the firepower to properly deploy the chemicals? Suddenly, "They had no WMDs" becomes a fairly subjective statement. We know there was at least one battle-ready, relatively recent warhead, and we know that this warhead was intentionally mislabeled to avoid detection.
Both political parties, and both of their affiliated political ideologies have reasons to show their own side of the story, and either spin or outright lie about inconvenient parts. Since they're our only source of information(Neither newspapers nor people on the street have spy agencies or access to the top secret intelligence other than that which politicians 'graciously' let us have a peek at), they're not a trustworthy source of information. Anything past that untrustworthy primary source is less reliable, accurate, and precise than the original source. It's simple information theory. You can't pass a signal on and expect to get more information than initially exists out of it.
Nihilism isn't self-destruction. Nihilism is an extreme form of skepticism which says there's no meaning, value, or sense in the world. The nature of nihilism means that there's no implicit ethic attached to it, only that simple belief.
My sig is meant almost as a pun, because under nihilism, there's no such thing as objective worth.
If you choose to deal with evil by being evil, then that's your choice. If you choose to deal with alcohol by becoming a drunk, that's your choice. If you choose to deal with vices by destroying yourself, that's your choice. If you're really dedicated to your principles, however, then by looking at evil and being forced to deal with it in yourself and in the world you'll become stronger, more capable of dealing with evil in yourself and in the world.
It's not my ethic or morality which says 'homosexuality is wrong', it's theirs.
I used the example I did because I felt like trolling the hypocritical televangelists of the world. I could just as easily have used Rush Limbaugh's drug addiction as an example.
I'm sort of shocked at the number of people who think that you're doomed to be evil unless you close your eyes and ears and heart.
When I was younger, I was all about the strict morality. I was all about shutting out the world. With age, I've come to realize that by seeing evil, and coming to terms with its existence, and by striving to understand yourself in the context of that evil, you can arrive at a much more just way of living than simply not looking at evil.
I never said that you need to remove yourself from a belief in God to want to lead a good life. My point is a belief in God sets up certain first principles. If you believe in God, then you've got a set of morals and a certain philosophy and goal which comes with the belief in God. A nihilistic atheist has nothing. You can't say that your morality has any basis. You can't say that your goals have any meaning. You can't even say with any certainty that the outside world exists.
I got so caught up in my analogy that I missed my point.
Despite this belief of mine, I don't treat theists of any stripe differently, because they're human just like I am, and they believe their truths just as I believe mine.
There are 'religious atheists' out there, people who want to talk all day about how stupid the majority is. I find myself staying away from these people. Life is too short, and we don't have any strong enough standards to definitively say anything. Furthermore, if I could believe in God, I would. It's a wonderful and uplifting belief which removes the need to constantly search for meaning and evaluate what you're doing even if it's the same thing everyone else is doing.
With God, you can say "If I follow these rules, I will have led a good life.", but if you're a nihilistic atheist, you can only say "I know I exist because I think I exist and if I didn't exist I couldn't think I exist because there'd be nothing to think. Beyond that, we live in a meaningless, valueless, senseless world. Any desires I have need to be questioned because they don't necessarily correspond to real needs, any morality I hold has to be questioned because it doesn't necessarily resolve to any solid first ethic, any opinions I hold have to be questioned because they could be illusions of my own understanding. The ways we're told we should live are all subjective views and don't even have to be logically consistent because they too are illusions. With all this, should I live, and if I decide somehow that I should, how should I?"
Not everyone has the desire or the ability to become an atheistic, nihilistic philosopher for life. Some people just want a direction, a way to live, and if that's through God, then I consider them my equals for living as humans, just as I do, with the information available to them, just as I do with the information available to me, with the values they choose to believe in, just as I follow the values I choose to believe in.
Verily. I have no empirical evidence to support the existence of God (Some people think existence proves the existence of God, but the thing is, because we exist, we can't argue that we don't. All the places in the universe that don't have sentient life can't ponder how God must not exist because there's no life there.
Let's say you find a car, abandoned, in a place that's dark and rotten and forgotten, and it's obvious that the car has been abandoned for years, and the previous owner is long dead with no next of kin, and for some reason by law that entitles you to take it, and it starts up and runs and is perfectly ready to drive for 100,000 miles. You can't argue that you must have bought the car because it's unlikely that you found a car like that. You've got a car, and there's no proof that you bought it (no reciept, no cash gone from your bank account, no loans to pay back), but there's a piece of paper saying it's yours and you drive it everywhere. Because the evidence points to something, you can't argue that either you bought a car or you don't own one, because you do own one, no matter how unlikely it is.
I think it would be VERY simple to put parental controls on it:
Here's your Wii. Here's your access point.
Don't set your kids Wii up with the code for your access point.
Wow. That was tough. I mean, it took all of no time at all to do.
Of course, I'm probably not going to have to convince YOU.
It would also, ironically, get rid of the future generations who will be expected to pay off the 9 trillion. That's why someone has to think of the children -- because someone has to pay for all this shit!
Unfortunately, folks like this don't realize that you need to face evil to become hardened to it. If you never have to look upon the things that can corrupt you, you'll be completely defenceless when you get a good look at them. Just think about all those ministers and televangelists into the gay sex. Most of us, we've got some measure of sexual stuff in our life somehow, so when this gay sex thing comes along, it's like "Yeah, I'm not all about doing that". When the guy who hasn't looked at a naked girl since 1972 sees the gay sex though, it's like "Wow! This is the best thing ever! I've got to do this all the time!"
Sewer rats were found to have more powerful immune systems than regular lab rats, and were on the whole much healthier despite their living conditions. So to it is with humans and morality.
There's a porno portal in my pants. It's all gay porn though, so I don't pay any attention to it. Don't swing that way, you know?
In other words, you've decided on the facts you like, you don't have any objective standard to tell if it's true or untrue, so as a result you're ignoring any evidence to the contrary or rationalizing it away, and the truth gets torn asunder?
Your post only proves my point. Congratulations.