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Originally posted by 1kiki:
. . . so we have a god, created by wandering herders and a lack of imagination.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:
Now here's a happy Easter thread.

Those who dreamed up Genesis or the rest of the bible may very well have been bored, but they didn't lack in imagination.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I think in the USA, my vote is with "capitalism" doing a pretty good job of displacing The Almighty, followed by anti-Communism and ant-Islam. After all, look at RAPPY. If there are a few things he's religious about (ie belief without evidence) it's that his version of capitalism is best (for whom?) and that Islam and Communism are direct, immediate threats to his existence.

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But it's the US-backed (Nazi) Yatsenyuk government that's starving people while the communist Russian government is providing aid and refuge. And it's radicals who are threatening lives (though not so many as the US through its proxies), not the entirety of Islam. So you've failed to demonstrate evil where you think it belongs.

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I see you're not getting the idea of facts and logic* as elements of an honest, reasonable discussion.

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Because all of Islam is responsible for the acts of a hell of a lot of radicals, across Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Got it.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
address the facts

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
you've got a lot to correct in this thread alone if you want to have a discussion

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

I'd argue that in the realm of how people think about society the replacement is the bastardization of the understanding of evolution: social Darwinism. Things are the way they are because that's just how nature works.

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I'd argue that in the realm of how people think about society the replacement is the bastardization of the understanding of evolution: social Darwinism. Things are the way they are because that's just how nature works.-KIKI

That made me think of Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul:
It is one of the most cherished modern myths - and the subject of pretty much all the modernist works of art you can think of - that the Western world is decadent and on the slide, that we spend our lives spinning in the hither-and-thither breeze of the mass media and faceless bureaucratic corporations, and that we have wantonly sacrificed any theological authority for our moral life. You would not have thought it necessary, these days, to write a 500-page book arguing that the world has gone wrong. But John Ralston Saul, the historian and thriller writer, has come up with a fervent attack on the rational technocracy that governs modern culture.

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We have relied too blindly on reason as the chief hope for the betterment of mankind. Worse, somewhere along the way we have settled for the illusion of reason rather than the thing itself. It takes confidence - some might say cheek - to see the world as deluded and mechanical while exempting oneself from the charge. Still, the book hums with a sharp sense of the absurd ironies in modern life. 'Our societies turn upon democratic principles,' Saul writes, 'yet the quasi totality of our citizens refuse to take part in that process and, instead, leave the exercise of political power to those for whom they have contempt. Our business leaders hector us in the name of capitalism, when most of them are no more than corporate employees, isolated from personal risk. We condemn arms dealers as immoral and sleazy figures, while ignoring the fact that our own senior civil servants and senior corporate leadership together are responsible for more than 90 per cent of the arms traded.'

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It is curiously vexing to agree so warmly with so much of what someone says, yet still to resent the way he keeps haranguing you about it. You read this book thinking, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, hah, exactly! yup, yup . . . wait a minute . . . yup, yup . . . listen, I agree, okay? . . . sure, yup . . . look, just shut up for a minute, would you? It's unreasonable, I know. But there it is.

You could read the whole book here:

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Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul
Chapter 1. In Which the Narrator Positions Himself

In moments of great passion, the mind tends to be flooded with a warm vision of the person in our arms. We are unlikely, at that point, to be analyzing their flaws, real or hypothetical. Even less likely if lying in darkness. As for the possible product of our intercourse, only the most peculiar lover would be fretting, while in the act, over whether such a child might or might not be an appropriate and worthy creation.

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Voltaire and the other thinkers of the eighteenth century could be criticized, with the facility of hindsight, for the passion with which they embraced reason.

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But they lived in societies still ruled by the demeaning vagaries of court life. All of them had been thrown in jail or risked it simply for expressing their opinions. In most countries justice still used torture as an official method of interrogation and the condemned faced a variety of brutal punishments; being broken on the wheel, for example. This and other tools of arbitrary power constituted a social form of darkness. The philosophers of Europe, England and America threw themselves into the arms of reason, convinced that birth would be given to new rational elites capable of building a new civilization. This love affair was fertile to the point of being miraculous and society was subsequently reformed for the better beyond what any of these thinkers had imagined.

And yet the exercise of power, without the moderating influence of any ethical structure, rapidly became the religion of these new elites. And their reforms included an unparalleled and permanent institutionalization of state violence. This was accompanied by a growing struggle between democratic and rational methods, with the rational increasingly at an advantage.

Were Voltaire to reappear today, he would be outraged by the new structures, which somehow deformed the changes for which he struggled. As for his descendants -- our ruling elites -- he would deny all legal responsibility and set about fighting them, as he once fought the courtiers and priests of eighteenth-century Europe.

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

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Because all of Islam is responsible for the acts of a hell of a lot of radicals, across Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Got it.

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Good. Glad it finally sunk in.
Fathom the hypocrisy of a government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured... but not everyone must prove they are a citizen

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Originally posted by second:
www.nytimes.com/1992/09/27/books/l-voltaire-s-bastards-006192.html
The central theme of the book follows the parallel progression of reason and humanism in the West. It argues that the rational elites, aggressive and without direction, claimed credit for many of the accomplishments of the humanists while blaming the humanists for the disasters they themselves brought on. The effect of this parallel development on military strategy, science, politics and business makes up the body of "Voltaire's Bastards." The rise of secrecy has been one of the results, as has the change in the nature of individualism and in the role of both the image and the word as facilitators or controllers of communication.

The standard methodology among ideologues is distracting personal abuse. What's more, the ideologue's weapon against thought and consideration is to insist on quick answers. When faced by the failure of their public policies, their answer is always: What next? The Chinese strategist Sun-tzu laid out a far more sensible approach 2,500 years ago. When you are losing, withdraw to safe ground and work out why.

Perhaps this is a good time not to cede to the hysteria of ideologues and to their worship of absolute answers, of power for its own sake, of false individualism, courtesanage and corporatism. Perhaps it is the moment for a more careful, considered approach to ideas and to public affairs.

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