"HAVGON TO RURAL RE-EDJUKASHUN KAMP."...,
2004-09-19 10:43:51
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An operation would have to be...,
2004-09-19 23:09:37
we are all legionnaires in the army of absolutes:
far too many trains of thought are wasted by these kinds of discussions.
Everybody is a "moral relativist". To the extent the term has any meaning at all Christians, who think they're basing their morality on some external absolute, disagree on any number of moral issues despite drawing on the moral authority of an external source. It should be blatantly obvious that because they do not hold a consistent moral system relative to eachother despite claiming the same external absolute that they are quite obviously moral only relatively, and to the same extent as most others, hence much Bible thumping warmongering, Bible thumping averice, and Bible thumping intolerance all on complex pretexts on which warmongering, averice, and intolerance become moral positions.
Why does the religious right want the Ten Commandments plastered across the state houses and classrooms? It is I think one of the most uselessly inconsistent codes of diabolical, authoritarian law ever written: what to do if my father commands me to steal bread for the family, what to do if a lie would prevent a murder? If they cut to the chase and plastered up something that actually made sense, like say the fulfillment of Biblical law, I would happily tolerate it - and as an athiest who rejects the union of state and religion not because of what it might do to the state but because it destroys the religion. The beatitudes are simple, elegant corallaries to the fundamental, and I consider it to be the moral, absolute taught by evolution: survival of the species. They don't necessarily hold up well under conditions of resource shortages but apply a little relativism and you have some dying for the sake of others and everybody goes to heaven, yet here we are in the land of plenty.
Now if only I could figure out what the hell bug-eyed conservatives mean by "moral equivalence", and, if it means anything, who actually uses it.
