The end of faith.

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http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speec...s_quote04.html


I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let's review a few cases.

In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth . One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compellng evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent "skeptics" around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.

There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the "pellagra germ." The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called "Goldberger's filth parties." Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.

Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.

And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy…the list of consensus errors goes on and on.

Sam Harris is full of shit. It'd be nice if he could stop jacking himself off to the humanism poster he hangs over his bed long enough to understand that injustices are perpetrated because humans are conditioned to form inclusive, and exclusive communities. That religion excludes based on faith is the leading cause of injustices in history is primarily because we've had tens of thousands of years when man could only explain the world supernaturally, as opposed to the 500 some-odd years of reason and logic.

I guess it's cool to also point out that concepts of justice are subjective, and that one society's conception of what is right may be radically different from others, irregardless of whether or not that justice is based on religion. Communism killed more people than two world wars, and you could hardly call it faith-based.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Wait a second. Isn't it agnostics who simply don't believe, or is it that they just lack faith?

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Mississippi. Mississippi is a long word.

Cat. Cat is a short word.

Cat is not as short as "at."

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Mother Theresa's interests were tied into aiding the Untouchables, who she felt compelled in part by her faith to aid as best as she could.

"Self-interests" are ultimately subjective, and there's no such thing as a "common good." Anybody's vision of a common good is going to end up disadvantaging one group in favor of another, and as hard as ideologues have tried to create unstratified societies, they've never pulled it off.

I'd also say that nobody has the right to dictate what is the "common good," because perceptions of the common good will vary according to culture.

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The mentality that I am describing is not theoretical. It was a mentality that existed until the Enlightenment,

I'm well aware of that, yet the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment was also marked by brutal European imperialism, and the concept of the "common good" was for the sake of common white men.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and I think it wouldn't be unrealistic to find more cases where somebody tried to make the world better, and ended up making it worse than you would with "narrow self-interests."

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The lack of agreement about what the common good is does not demonstrate that there is no such thing as the common good. Nor does it prove that there can never be such agreement. Is the term problematic? Sure it is. Most, if not all, philosophical questions are. The modern idea of 'freedom' is equally as problematic.

Besides, based on the second to last discussion I had with you, you don't seem to think that ethical principles are rationally discernable anyway, so what is the point of debating this with you? According to that philosophy, all we are doing is emoting, anyway.

I think ethical principles are subjective and not universal, and while you can create a body which determines what is and isn't ethical, there will always be someone who disagrees.

The only people capable of determining as a group what qualifies as the common good, are nationals. Aside from the basics of law, being that murder, theft, and in some cases assault are bad, everything else is flavor determined by the dominant forces in society, irregardless of whether or not those forces represent a majority.

In order to "end injustice" and to establish a universal "common good," you would have to create a global authority and culture, and considering basic factors such as religion, ethnicity, locality, history, and other aspects of culture it simply ain't gonna happen, either in this or other lifetimes.

In order for there to be a universally established common good, humanity as a whole does have to accept it on its own. Humanity itself must change its nature, and as I believe you've implied it, if we have to rely on some type of authority to steer humanity in that direction, ultimately the only case of that ever happening, in my opinion, is if we're engaged in inter-special war with aliens, or by altering our very biology. Neither of which is a good option in my opinion.

I was speaking idiomatically.

What a bunch of self-delusional bullshit. You trounce religion yet have the gall to declare that there are absolute moral truths? It is wrong to force our morals on other cultures, because the end result is violent resistance. The end result is a people who feel as if they are no longer their own, and if we want to change foreign cultures, it should be through the demonstration of the superior qualities of our own, not some absolutist moral crusade where we go into some African backwater and make people who still can't get irrigation right understand the concept of ability to consent. We still practice ritual male circumcision in this country, but female circumcision makes so many more heads shake because it's culturally acceptable to us that women possess a clitoris or a clitoral hood, but men can't have foreskins because it's "icky." We can't even establish the right to consent in male infants, and you still insist that we should also deny the ability of an indigenous people to consent to our moral crusades?

No god encouraged the murder of millions through the totalitarianism of communist and fascist regimes.

Claiming that there are absolute moral truths is like putting a dog in a sweater vest. To reject individualism denies that people are at their base simple animals who lucked out in regards to opposable thumbs and a higher ability to reason. Individualism is no more destructive than communism, because both cases produce sociopaths, which are ultimately the greatest cause of destruction in history. Not religion, and not the value of individuality.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

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Sure. And thus European imperialists' actions can be judged to have been too limited in scope in whose good was being served. Notice that the principle I am putting forward of stepping out of oneself and looking after the goods of all over one's own person interests is not being contradicted by the example you are giving. All the imperialists were doing was looking after their own interests. I don't see how that is a valid counterexample.

It's not just that. The fundamental fault of communalism is that by forcing unity, it generally means that those which are incapable of conforming, or don't want to conform end up being shunned. Conformity in European society became racial during and after the Age of Exploration, therefore their perception of the "communal good" was hardly limited in any reasonable scope. That's why I don't like this idea of a common good, because historically it's always been used by a central authority, whether a totalitarian or populist one, to force conformity and persecute the "others."

Is it possible that we'll come to a genuinely just "communal good?" Maybe, but we'd have to come to the conclusion as a race naturally, and consentually, or else forcing the situation only exacerbates the problem.

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And I'd argue that we don't establish moral principles. They exist whether we like them or not.

And yet, those moral principles exist because of causal reasons. As I've mentioned before, the only absolutes involving morals throughout all cultures is that murder is wrong, theft is wrong, and assault is wrong. Everything else is flavor, and usually many moral, ethical, and legal codes attempt to justify some cases of theft, murder, and assault by establishing a sympathetic circumstance. Dueling, for instance, was considered an honor killing, and practically nobody was sentenced for it in its heydey. In Arab culture, rape is sometimes acceptable. In some African tribes, cannibalism is a natural result of warfare.

All of these codes are subjectively determined based on circumstance and other causal criteria.

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Again, ethical principles are not determined by people, whether they be nationals or otherwise. Any person is capable of discovering something that already exists.

Yet Ethical principles are determined by people. Ethical codes wouldn't even exist if it weren't for controversies surrounding an event, and the end result of those codes is usually caused by a certain amount of debate and consent among a body, whether it be communal, societal, or governmental. Because no two cultures have the exact same ethical principles is enough to establish that they are subjective, and aren't merely "found."

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You are missing my point entirely. This isn't some utopian program. I've said it once, and now I'm going to repeat myself. My point is a lot tamer than the one you are trying to pin on me. Let's perform a thought experiment, not an actual plan of action or a now or future state of affairs, but a world of make believe. Now image that the prevelance of narrow-self interest was reduced to a level where people took only what they needed to survive, and they had so much respect for human life that they would volutarily give what they did not need to those who had not. Why? Because they valued themselves more than they valued themselves What incentive would there be for things such as world wars, etc?

It sounds like a brutal, albeit socially gratifying life of subsistance farming.

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Again, this is not reality, nor do I think that such a reality can ever exist. The point of the thought experiment, and the point that I've been making all along, is that if there were no libido/ will to power for more than what was needed to satisfy, most of the incentive for the most terrible crimes of our century would not exist. Hence, I think I've discovered a cause of a lot of the evil in the world. It's not as if I'm coming up with a new idea. I think most political philosophers and ordinary men of common sense have agreed. Where they disagree is in how essential the promotion of our own self-interests is to our own natures.

And as you've said, it's all based on an if. The reason people want more is because what they have doesn't satisfy them. How much it takes to get to a point of satisfaction is dependent on the individual. Some of them are never satisfied, yet that's also ok depending on the cultural climate. Individualism has nothing to do with the pursuit of "narrow self-interest" because the individual is still a social animal, and helping others whether through charity or the bonds of friendship and family, ultimately ties back into one's own self-interest. "Narrow self-interest," I think, is a buzzword used to attempt to refute the notion of individualism by associating an individualistic term to sociopathy.

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I don't think humans will be able to change their natures. I'm actually quite politically conservative, if you care to know.

Well, I do, and no I don't care.

Claiming that righteousness doesn't serve the ego is a horrifying case of denial. If helping the outcasts didn't make Mother Theresa feel good about herself, she would've never done it. Using terms like "narrow self-interest" itself appeals to the ego, because it entices people to give up behaviors which may not necessarily actually be destructive in order to inflate their own egoes.

I do think people can change their natures, but only through ideologies and the embracing of fundamental truths, such as the needs of the ego. If people truly understood why they do things, and why others commit harm I believe we'd then be on the track to something legitimately resembling a "greater good;" and no, applying buzzwords to social disorders isn't going to get us there.

FELIPE NO

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But the premise is, once you get rid of faith itself, that will remove the religious/historical/local/ethnic barriers blocking us from a common moral ground. We can say with honesty that we all want happiness for ourselves and for each other in general. Only when faith, belief in the irrational, enters that picture will people's views on happiness end up distorted in some hate/bias against others happiness.

Religion is about as important in Europe as good hygiene, yet people still identify themselves based on ethnic backgrounds, and what religion they were born into, irregardless of whether or not they have faith in it, or even go to churches, synagogues, or mosques.

The absence of faith doesn't get rid of cliques, it doesn't get rid of history, location, or skin color. It doesn't get rid of income, social position, or class. It doesn't distribute resources evenly (nothing really can).

Even in the absence of faith, people will find a way to preserve their identities, and it'll be based on the simplest of things.

Hell, it doesn't even get rid of subcultures. Especially not the really weird ones. You know what I mean...

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Are you going to tell me that the middle east tradition of beating women for exposing 3 inches of skin is up to subjective morality? You're saying that it isn't inherently wrong to beat someone for showing a bit of the stomach? What kind bullshit morality does this lead to?

Yeah, if Arabs think beating women is ok within the right context (to us, very silly ones) then morality is subjective. I prefer to think that understanding subjective perspectives of morality would lead people to understand what aspects are truly beneficial to the greatest amount of people possible, and the answer I believe lies in individuality and self-determination. Because it's ok for Arabs to keep beating their women doesn't mean that it's ok for us to do it, because it isn't culturally kosher. If you think that somebody could effectively convince enough guys to beat women (ladder theorists), well, the law and social norms would have something to say about it.

This is not an endorsement of Arab behavior. We think beating women is horrible, and through the virtues of our own society, hopefully they'll end up coming to the same conclusion. Attempting to force our morality on them, however, hasn't come to any good whatsoever. There's a war going on which proves my point.

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Using our views on circumcision as the crux for this argument is laughable. Get a new line. We're talking human rights, not cleaning up genitalia skin.

Is the ability to offer consent to mutilation not a human right? Removing the foreskin is relatively analogous to removing the clitoral hood, so how many of you ladies would be ok without it?

My point is that there are underlying hippocracies in the argument which are based upon our own societal norms. What right do we have to tell other people to stop committing genital mutilation when we continue to perform it ritualistically? Infants can't even offer consent.

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No, but undeniable FAITH did. I think this topic is getting too religious in general. Harris' argument is against FAITH. Hitler called for faith from his followers, as do all great leaders. They call for their masses to follow their hearts, not their head - this is faith in the most absolute sense, following your heart. And when it comes to human justice and injustice, faith should never be a factor.

Granted. Consequently, the very reason Hitler came to power was by playing off of the fears of Germans for Jews and Communists, and by making false promisses to industrialists and workers. People "had faith" that Hitler would lead Germany into great nation status, which he did. The side effect, of course, was a world war and the systematic murder of millions.

It's essentially not much of a leap from voting for any politician in a democracy. You cast a vote for the representative or party that you believe will act in your best interests.

The end result I'm getting from this argument is that the inevitable solution to the politics problem is no politics, and social or market anarchies.

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Conformity, no doubt, to faith based principles such as: jews are evil, russians are evil, God is evil, Islam is evil, Christianity is evil, blah blah etc. Persecution of others always has it's roots in faith: the population who persecutes has faith in their doctrine or their leader that some group is evil, regardless of rationality.

... Capitalists are evil, the nobility is evil, the white man is evil. The persecution of others does not require faith, because it can be as simple as the extraction of resources.

It didn't require faith when Colombus committed genocide against the Arawaks, although it did help him sleep at night. Cognitive dissonance has as much to do with, or may even function independantly of faith.

"It's ok to kill Jews, they destroyed Germany."

"These niggers deserve slavery, they can't even carry the hoes in."

Cognitive dissonance, of course, is highly irrational, yet it has no real basis on faith.

European Imperialism subjugated millions, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands (millions when you count plagues in the Americas), yet it wasn't based on faith, but real political interests, such as the spice trade and gold production.

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Are you saying rape is sometimes acceptable? Are you saying cannibalism, in this day an age, is acceptable? They probably thought they'd gain magical powers from eating each other.

Acceptable? I never claimed we should embrace rape or cannibalism, but at the same point we have to be willing to tolerate it within cultural and societal bounds. If we don't allow people to determine for themselves what is right and wrong, then we deny them the very self-determination that we supposedly value, as well as end up with bloody messes.

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Honor, back in it's heyday, was almost as grand a concept as faith, aka bullshit. No rational basis. Honor is an imaginary concept, and if it produces unwarranted unnecessary death, what's the use of it? None, which is why it faded into the past in light of secular rationality.

Honor has its use in posturing. By establishing that one possesses honor, one makes oneself more marketable to those that are interested in egaging with or doing business with one. The concept of honor hasn't gone away, dueling has, because it was perceived that fights to the death were counterproductive.

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Your argument that there's no universal morals beyond murder theft and assault is true, but that doesn't make it right. Letting cultures beat and rape women just because they're a "different culture" is unjust. Just because a culture is different doesn't mean they're equally rational or justified in their systems of justice. Why hell, why don't we just send all our rapists and abusers into these cultures??? That way they can do whatever the fuck they want and not get in trouble for it! That's justice, right? God forbid we step on Allah's toes and tell them to respect women as equal individuals.

Yeah, I'm sure they'll listen.

I never said it was right, and you're coming up with an end which I never implied. Obviously shipping off rapists to the middle east doesn't fit with our concept of justice, because we prefer punitive sentences to exile.

You're applying the misconception that subjective perspective is equal perspective. What I'm saying is that forcing people to come to the "right conclusion" creates more problems than it solves. If that conclusion is self-evident, let them figure it out.

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The bottom line is that the more faith-centered a culture is, the more irrational and unjust it tends to be. This includes Hitler. This includes most of Christianity's past and some of it's present. This includes almost all of Islam's past and present, with the exception of those Muslims now adopted to modern day secular culture. Secular rationality will lead to universal moral standards, but unfortunately there is too much faith clouding the world for this to happen anytime soon.

Don't you mean the entirety of human history, written and uknown? Secular rationality may lead to universal moral standards, but I don't buy that it'd make the world a better place. No matter what, the ability to use force always exists, and it's not that hard to get enough people to support you by appealing to their greed.

If you're going to tell me that no faith will eliminate greed, then get the fuck out of here.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

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Many of those things you listed are intertwined to such a degree that there's basically two subjects. One is ethnic/historical background, and while the end of faith will not erase these, it will cause the irrational prejudice caused by these systems to cease. You can no longer hate someone for being black because he's dumber than white people. You have to hate him simply for being black. As you can see, racism of this kind would be based simply on hatred, not faith-based hatred that your race is better.

As for SES, it's true it will remain in faithless societies as well as possible injustices caused by them, but the playing field will be greatly leveled when equality is truly reached through non-discrimination of the previous category.

I don't really think there can ever be a true equality. People are always able to find ways to stratisfy their societies, and while the frequency of "injustice" may be lowered, it'll never be eliminated. It's also possible to hate blacks because of "black culture."

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Well, in my opinion I don't care what society you come from or what culture you come from. If you beat other human beings for irrational religions reasons, you are immoral. That simply a matter of fact in a rational world.

No it isn't. Reason itself is subjective. The only form of thought that is objective is logic, yet logical conclusions may still not be right.

What you're creating here is a cultural conflict, in which one culture, presumably ours, cannot accept the existance of another culture, Arab ones, on the same planet. This creates problems because it implies to Arabs that we consider them an enemy, meaning that we are their enemy. You may not feel that way, but carried to its extreme through interventionist relations (essentially what is happening now) you end up with a clash of civilizations, if not at the least terrorism.

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As for your view on how to convert their society, their faith blinds them to virtues of our society. Their faith says men are in control of all aspects of life and women are not. That's how it's always been, and it's worked for thousands of years, why change now? Giving women equal rights doesn't necessarily improve a society's wealth, a society's military, or most importantly a society's faith, so what virtues could possibly be found in it?

Uh, why did Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers have to become secular rationalists? Use what God gave you. :P

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blah blah rape bad yaddy-yadda unnacceptable

I really don't think you're getting any of my points. Granted, doing this like a quote-war probably isn't helping your concentration, but these things are like Pringles. Pay some fucking attention.

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And that's exactly my point. It's a faith-based ideology. If this practice is to remain in our society it should be wholly based on rational scientific data showing pros and cons. If there are neither pros nor cons, it can be left up to the individual since it becomes purely a visual decision, if you know what I mean. This foreskin argument, however, has no impact on non-faith-based ideologies such as individual freedoms, which I feel need to be spread to all cultures.

Genital mutilation isn't practiced based on faith in this country. If anything, it's practiced because of a doctor's recommendation, or as a fashion statement. One case is illogical, the other unreasonable. Which one is based on faith?

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Oh but I think it does. If a communist tells you all capitalists are money grubbing whores, does he give you a fact sheet listing corporations that have done such things? That you can corroborate on your own? Getting unbiased sources, making an informed decision? I think not. All hate such as this is dependent on faith in your information source. And when it comes to things like hating groups of people, we should never take someone else's word for it. We can see how it is indeed faith that leads us to make uninformed hateful conclusions.

Communism only provided a theory and alternative for what people already felt, that they were being screwed over by industrialists, and that an exhorbitant amount of wealth was being distributed to them and away from the working class. Ultimately, communism is about forced equality and socialistic brotherhood. That brotherhood just comes at the price of everything looking like a government housing project and a post office, and in the case of the actual attempt at communism, almost always ends up being headed by sociopaths, because they tend to be drawn to movements of violent revolution.

Faith is also a matter of trust. You can't trust anybody without placing a reasonable amount of faith in them. The Germans trusted Hitler, the Cubans trusted Che Guevera, etc., etc., yet if we denied ourselves the ability to trust, how would we ever develop meaningful interpersonal relationships?

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We can sit here and list the legitimate reasons he did it, but that's not the point. What did he tell his fellow officers when he tried to convince them to help him kill all these people? Did he say "well, they really bother me and I think we should kill them"? I think not. It was most likely an impassioned speech about the godless natives who want to destroy their holy christian doctrine of Jesus, and their holy country etc etc. You can't just rally people up to kill a bunch of other people unjustly without a faith-based justification.

None of the Conquistadores bought that. Everybody in Columbus's first voyage new that the Arawaks were technologically primitive militarily, and could never pose any kind of threat to Christian Europe. What was simple, however, was convincing them that there were gold and women there for the taking. Religion was a factor, of course, but it was mostly to ease their consciences and justify their actions while establishing the means to convert the primitives. In the absence of religion and faith, I doubt faith would have been a factor, and they still would've gone ahead with it.

Cognitive Dissonance, in case you didn't know, is the behavior associated with demonizing a demographic in order to justify your intent to persecute them. On his first voyage, Columbus had a lot of praise for the Arawak people in his journal, yet when he returned with Spain's military might he described them as stupid and warlike whereas before he considered them beautiful and inquisitive. Would he have made these claims if he didn't think the Arawaks had gold? I doubt it.

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But to get the backing of your fellow officers and population who do the actually killing, you can't say "we need more spice so the King can get more money, so you're going to have to kill these people." Humans HAVE to label others in order to separate themselves from that person, and faith-based labels are always at the forefront. Faith in your race being better, faith in your country being better, faith in anything without rational unbiased evidence. Your arguments would be better supported if you could show me actual lectures or speeches that were given at the time to rally people up.

Jingoism itself is a real political ideology which justifies the actions of one's nation, because one's nation should be at the forefront of the world stage. If one is a national, why shouldn't one want his nation to be the best? While Imperialism may have been justified by racism and ethnocentricity (you know a lot about that don't you?) ultimately it could never exist without the desire to consume and to live in a great nation. The appeal was to the ego and didn't require faith. Jingoism died as an ideology, because the effects of constant warfare took their toll, and encouraged people to seek alternatives in regard to foreign diplomacy.

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But in these societies people aren't allowed to determine for themselves what is right and wrong in the first place, because they don't have that individual freedom to do so! The middle east has been the same situation religiously for the past how many thousands of years? Yet now they're really rich because of oil, with big weapons and lots of followers. See how the situation has changed for the worse? How do you expect them to dig themselves out of a hole when we keep on pilling dirt into it by accepting their lifestyle?

They've only been dominated by Islam since the 8th century, so it's only been slightly more than a thousand. Arab tribal culture, however, goes back a considerably farther timeframe, and in many respects is based on the same nomadic cultures which birthed Abraham and the Jews, and as legend has it due to Ishmael, the Arabs themselves.

The Western World has been Christian dominated since the Edict of Milan in 313. It took us 500 years after a dark age and subsequent enlightenments before we've even started to toy with the idea of faithless societies. The Arab world is currently in their own dark age, and they have to come out of it naturally, otherwise we end up with collapsed towers and dead soldiers, in addition to all of the other innocent Arabs who end up being killed, all so that we can impose our own values on their society and still fail, because they can't accept a system of government which doesn't adhere to Sharia law.

You still think this is just?

The Soviets understood that Chinese communism was different from Vietnamese communism, was different from Soviet communism, yet right now we've made a mistake in regards to considering how Democracy would work in the Middle East. As one blogger put it, it's as if we all thought that Arabs were just "Americans in funny outfits."

In our own society, men had to be convinced to give up their power in order to foment equality for women and minorities. We still have a lot of problems regarding race relations in this country, and you think that we should be imposing our values on a foreign culture?

Not dictating what is right and wrong to Arabs is no more an acceptance of wife beating than prosecuting "curb stompers" is an acceptance of homosexuality. Stop being an idiot.

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It may survive in very remedial ways, but it's power has lessened tremendously. Now we have rational terms like dependability, efficiency, friendliness, customer support, etc. Honor, as an idea and a word, died a long time ago.

So you've just entrapped a concept in business-friendly buzzwords in order to try and somehow establish that the concept of honor is dead, as if anybody who doesn't have their head up their ass would believe you.

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I never said we need to force them to our way of life. However, accepting that they can beat women as long as the women don't complain is a vicious circle. The women don't complain because then they'll be beaten. They don't run away because they'll be hunted down and killed, and what of the children? Do you really think us sitting here being accepting of their way of life is going to encourage them to change??

We possess the greatest technology and have the most powerful economy in the world. We live in a society which produces so much wealth that obesity is an epidemic. This alone is the primary catalyst for reformers in the Arab world, and it's what Wahhabists fear the most. No moral posturing will get us anywhere that observable phenomenon can't.

I never said that we should accept cultures which don't appeal to us, only that we should tolerate them within their boundaries. Otherwise, if we attempt to impose our values on them as you suggest, either through force or posturing, we enable the forces of regression in the region to capitalize on our oppression or hypocracy.

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Hahah, no it won't eliminate violence in the name of greed. But if greed would become the new major sin of the world instead of faith, I'd be fine with that. At least the people who were committing crimes would all KNOW they were doing wrong, instead of thinking they're fighting some glorious battle.

And what if they're nihilists? What if they don't believe in right and wrong and are moral relativists? The very fact that they believe so makes it so, and that's basically the essence of "the will to power."

This also, of course, denies that some people may be legitimately justified for violating a societal norm.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by JackyBoy

Is it purely coincidental that male circumcision is viewed as acceptable to western cultures and at the same time shows up in scripture? I can only wonder, if God asked for the removal of the labia how many millions of women in North America would undergo the procedure without consent in the same manner as their male counterpart. I am willing to bet quite a few. Although male circumcision is accepted it is still widely debated simply because the child has no say in the matter.

Coincidence? No. Then again, circumcision wasn't popularized in Christian Europe, and it wasn't in America for hundreds of years. It got its start as a medical fad.

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Brady, I want to be clear on your position so correct me if I have misunderstood. You're saying that because certain societies are less fortunate, moral truths ought not to apply to them and more, do not exist at all? This is the equivalent of suggesting that 2 + 2 only equals 4 in certain societies with higher education. Moral truths are no different than logical truths. Also, in calling it the moral crusade, you seem concerned that moral truths are nothing more than an iron curtain. This isn't the case. Moral truths are not forced onto people. It is not like the ten commandments. The rational person only has to think about murder to know it's wrong. There is no need to look it up in the criminal code or scripture.

I'm saying that because all societies develop independent of each other, based on seperate criteria, that their views of morality are going to be very different. It's because this view of morality is subjective that there can never be an absolute moral truth, especially when you consider nihilists, who simply don't believe in morality. The application of reason has developed vastly different methods of philosophy, and none of them have the same take on morals or moral development. The belief in a moral truth is itself a vast leap of faith that has no real basis in history or reason.

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It's interesting that you reject moral truths because the study of ethics is to do just that. Ethics is the attempt to derive our values from facts. You are free to believe that we are forever hopeless in ever finding moral truths but I just happen to think of them as quite real and obtainable.

And yet, every ethical issue is a controversy, in which certain people are going to disagree with what ends up as the widely accepted norm. How can you declare an absolute truth over a controversy?

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Last thing, I want to clarify the contradiction you believe I have made. My view on morality and religion are very much separate. Moral truths are discoverable through reason. These are not rules codified by the elite and forced onto others. All humans have the ability to discover the same moral truth. In the same manner that all humans have the ability to understand that 2 objects when added to another 2 objects equals 4 total objects. And so I have not contradicted myself because while religion is an iron curtain, moral truths are not.

Tell yourself what you want. No amount of reasoning will get around the fact that you have to take the view of absolute morality with a bit of faith.

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That is very misleading. You can only have a false logical conclusion assuming the premises you start with are not true themselves.

No shit?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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If you can rationalize this into some kind of theory of relative cultures, go right ahead, but it's sad to think there are people like you who succumb to that liberal propaganda of non-action. You're the kind who will sit on their asses while Germany kills jews and say "well, they're from a different culture, we should hope they see the virtues of our society to change because war is bad."

Leave it to a Neo-Conservative to use strawmen and debating ad-Hitlerum when he feels cornered.

Nevermind that the Nazis kidnapped Jews from other countries and gassed them, or their sporadic slaughter of Russians and Ukranians, and denied the rights of self-determination to other countries, cultures, and especially individuals. Nevermind that the Jews themselves were a seperate culture unto themselves, and that the Nazis had no right to subjugate those outside of their cultural boundaries, or that the very practice of genocide didn't even conform to German norms.

Nevermind, either that Roosevelt maneuvered America into fighting a war it wanted no part of (and really didn't need us) and as a result established global American hegemony and eradicated the classical liberal qualities valued by Americans due to the paranoia propagated over a threat that didn't exist (Communism).

Our legacy of interventionism has fucked over several countries in the Americas and Asia, yet here you are proposing a Jacobinist rational utopia which can never be implemented because people don't appreciate being forced into conformity. How can you be this stupid?

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Why did they become that way? Because there was huge amount of evidence that overwhelmed and contradicted previously held notions and people found virtue in rationality. Can we say the same will happen to the Arab community? Possibly. But how long are you willing to wait while they have nuclear bombs in their lockers? 10 years? 100? 1000 years for a revolution in their culture? You think somebody isn't going to get nuked before then?

No, I don't think anybody is going to get nuked before then, because nuclear weapons are weapons which are ultimately extensions of national pride. The actual use of nuclear weapons is inconceivable, even to men like Ahmadinejad, because the result of their use is always mutual annihilation. Yet you want to go start wars and create more enemies for America instead of playing nuclear hardball and ending these programs through hard diplomacy. Iran and North Korea are nations with big talk and no power, yet you want to depose their regimes by force and consequently force our own values upon a people who is conditioned to be resistant to them because of the very fact that they're being forced upon them. You're satisfied with the notion that we should encourage freedom in Iraq through oppression and socialist oligarchy.

Nigga please. Your ideology is so idiotic and old-hat that if you actually shared it with other secular rationalists they would laugh you out of the county.

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It's no longer practiced out of faith based reasons, no, but it's a relic of our religious past. It's where it originated from. Why do doctors still recommend it? Probably mostly due to medical reasons, since it's easier to catch diseases with the foreskin on. If you'd like to disagree and say that doctor's don't know what they're talking about, go right ahead, but your war on foreskin cutting is the most ridiculous way to argue for moral relativity so I'm going to stop responding to posts about it. It's wasted space.

Then wallow in your ignorance and hypocracy.

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Incorrect. Is this some kind of magical bullshit theory you pulled out of your ass? I'm not going to respond to this point until you make some kind of legitimate claim that the concept of faith, as I've defined it, is interlinked with trust. I've defined faith as belief in the irrational how many times now, yet you're still trying to wiggle out other definitions to prove I'm "wrong". How about you start paying attention? I already addressed confidence in others with Sass. The faith I'm speaking of is faith in the irrational - which is what these societies had when following their respective leaders.

It's irrational to presume that you can trust people, even with relative histories of reliability and good faith. Kids have turned in their own parents for drug charges, and you think that trusting people isn't irrational?

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You think they would have gone ahead with it even if they had no justification for their actions?

They were a technologically inferior people who may have possessed vast amounts of wealth. That's essentially all the justification they needed.

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If they wouldn't be able to degrade the natives through use of faith-based labels it would have been terribly more difficult.If they wouldn't be able to degrade the natives through use of faith-based labels it would have been terribly more difficult.

"Stupid" and "warlike" are not faith-based labels.

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They sugar-coated their actions in faith. This sugar-coating is what makes these actions acceptable in their consciousness. There was also faith that their culture and government was superior to the natives as well. If you remove all these faith based principles and justifications and leave them simply with "we want money and women, so we're going to go rape and pillage these humans who are equally intelligent and legitimate as we are" it would've been nearly impossible.

Which is wrong, because the Spaniards knew that what they were doing was inhuman. The application of faith gave them Casus Belli to do as they pleased in relation to other Spaniards and Europeans, yet there was no denying at the individual level that raping and murdering people was wrong. The greatest critic of Spanish imperialism, Bartolomé de Las Casas, was himself a man of God and understood first-hand the immorality (faith-based even) of slavery, first for Native Americans, then for Africans.

Consider this excerpt from Columbus's journal: "They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned. . . they do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance . . .. Their spears are made of cane . . . they would make fine servants . . .. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

Did this require faith in order to convince Spain that conquest was to be had?

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You can HARDLY convince people to attack others without lowering the other group to sub-human standards. I'd make the case you never can, not counting individual sociopaths. I'm talking group theory. You're saying you can just convince a group of people to go out to steal and murder without needing to make them impassioned for an irrational cause, and I say you're full of shit.

It's not a matter of lowering them to sub-human standards, but of presenting them as a competitive "other" which seeks to gain prosperity at their own expense. The British and French did not consider each other inhuman, yet that still didn't discourage both peoples from continually attempting to subjugate the other. The Mongols had no illusions concerning the humanity of their enemies, they merely played ball harder than anybody else. The Turks essentially did the same thing, until Vlad Dracula.

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All these examples you give of atrocities have non-faith based roots. Power, money, political gain. But all of them use FAITH to justify their actions. Once faith is removed from the picture, there are no more excuses to make you seem good and righteous, and people will see you for what you truly are; a thief, a murderer, etc.

Fascist and Communist atrocities weren't performed using faith in order to justify their actions, because they didn't need to justify their actions. The Boss starved millions of Ukrainians to death because he ruled the USSR through fear. What they did have to justify and attempt to reason for, was their rise to power, but after that point it didn't matter what people thought of their actions.

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No, they don't have to come out of it naturally. You seem to think the only options are killing and converting, or doing nothing at all. That's ridiculous. There could be many methods to turning the Arab culture into a moderate secular society by way of religious doctrine. Start with the more moderate countries to begin with, and start up religious campaigns for moderate Islam and try to work it into the core of their beliefs. Yes, this is basically hijacking their religion to turn it into a secular, rational based one, but that's fine with me. If we can twist their fairy tales into ones that don't justify murder so easily, just as we've twisted our own, all for the better.

So because an ideology is foreign-backed, you don't think that Wahabiists wouldn't capitalize on that? Any movement towards secularization has to be purely Arab, otherwise it'll be easily delegitimized. The only realistic alternative is a forced change.

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Yes, considering we won't KILL you for being another religion and they WILL. Again you love to blame America for shit but refuse to admit that we are a more rational and thus more just system. You, for some reason, refuse to make that connection. You say that systems of irrational justice may be equally legitimate as rational ones. This is a terribly liberal argument. Beating a human causes pain. Pain is not happiness to the one being beaten. Therefore, we can draw the rational conclusion that we shouldn't BEAT people. But the Arabs do, and why? Because they sugar-coat it in their faith to make it seem like they're doing the right thing. Do you really think Arabs would continue to beat their women if they no longer held faith-based, irrational principles like inferiority of women and religious rules?

I'm not going to say that the American system isn't the superior one, yet the quality of one system doesn't delegitimize another, especially when the issue of quality is itself subjective. Would Arab societies no longer continue beating women if all elements didn't believe in it? It's a self-resolving question, though in Islam there is quite a bit of controversy on the part of scholars claiming that wife beating has no real Qu'ranic basis, and that Muhammad himself condemned the act of wife beating, even though he made exceptions in cases of "disobedience" to use non-harmful striking as a last resort of disciplinary action.

It's not as if women aren't capable of consenting to a culture which marginalises their roles in favor of men, either. The greatest opponents of Women's Suffrage were women. It's possible to make rational judgements concerning marginalised societies in which men and women accept their gender-roles instead of encouraging social equality. In that sense, it's possible to make a reasonable claim, that it's ok to hit somebody if they deserve it. What is deserving of hitting or beating is determined by culture, and while some justifications aren't acceptable to us, that does not make them illegitimate within the bounds of that culture.

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And what is homosexual intolerance? A FAITH-based principle for Christ sake. Are you not fucking pay attention to what I'm saying?? I'm saying our SECULAR.RATIONAL.BELIEFS should be spread, for like the third time now. For fuck's sake, Brady. And your argument makes no sense. "Curb stompers" I assume are people who beat homosexuals? If we prosecute them, we're saying they're doing wrong. If we don't prosecute them, we're saying they're doing right. We prosecute them. Just as Arabs should prosecute wife beating, but don't, because their irrational faith-based system makes it OK.

One does not require a faith-based conclusion to understand that homosexuality is genetically unproductive, and therefore should be squelched. Arabs are actually supposed to prosecute wife beating, the problem is that the male-dominant cultural traits they inherited from conquered peoples has encouraged the adoption of clothing that hides the bruises which are forbidden according to Sharia. When you couple that with battered wife syndrome, there's very little room within the culture for the act to be contested by women. They can make arguments based on faith which eliminate the practice entirely, yet are presently incapable of having much effect because of the massive ignorance of the Islamic populace concerning their own religion. The wearing of body-covering articles is itself oddly perceived as a liberating tool by women, because they feel it protects them from the leering gaze of men who are incapable of controlling their own desires, even though Muhammad encourages them to do precisely the opposite. It's even gotten to the point where they've lobbied for female-only facilities so that they can expose themselves to the sun without being visually violated by the leering gaze of evil men. It's something which has even been oddly adopted by some radical European feminists who feel that it allows them to isolate themselves from the corrupting influence of men.

I think it's dumb as shit, but you can't end stupid.

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Buzzwords? WTF. Dependability means they deliver a product consistently. Efficiency means they can get the job done in a short amount of time while producing a quality product. Friendliness means the welcoming of pleasant conversation, etc. Oh, and what does your magical word Honor mean in context of business? Absolute bullshit. Hmmm, I wonder why we don't see marketing campaigns based around which companies are most honorable to buy from? I suppose it's because the word is bullshit.

I suppose the concept of "friendly business practice" is also foreign to you, and how the practice of businesses according to lobbying to reduce competition (Wal-Mart) makes those businesses less desirable to people who value free markets and fair play.

Of course, you're also applying what is fundamentally an individual value to groups which lack political or family ties. Honor is very much still alive in society, it's just a term that possesses little use. Shit-talking behind somebody's back, for instance, is often perceived as a cowardly trait, and since cowardice cannot exist as a concept in the absence of honor, it sort of means that the concept of it is alive and well, even if it isn't applied as much semantically or given as much social import.

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Then they're ignoring the possibilities of a rational world, and the possibilities of a rational morality. They gave up and decide to believe in nothing.

Yet, believing in nothing also lets them operate outside the bounds of morality. If morality cannot apply universally, then there can never be such a thing as "universal morality."

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Incorrect. You're neglecting the possibilities of a rational world. Moral subjectivity exists today due to development alongside faith. Punishment of wrong doing may always be subjective, but the degree to which any given action is wrong or right is not. Remove the faith and stick in rationality, and everyone will come to the same basic conclusions. And don't bullshit me with saying moral truth requires faith. I'm talking about rational moral truth based on individual freedom. If you think individual freedom is under the category "subjective truth", I call it complete bullshit. You're denying others the right to individual freedoms because of an illusory world. That should be a crime in and of itself.

The possibility of a rational world is itself flawed, because reasoning is a subjective behavior. There are no objective conclusions which may be reached through the application of reason, there may only be consensus or majorities. Reason itself, may also be fundamentally flawed if it is based on criteria which prove to be false, in the same way that logicical conclusions may also be false. It is impossible to disprove the existence of a god, for instance, because most of the legitimate religions of the world are based on traditions which pre-date written history. Hell, even concerning our own immediate history it's impossible to establish what is and isn't fact. In order to establish that the concept of a god is the pure product of imagination, you would need a time machine with which to observe the genesis of the concept. This isn't like Scientology where it's obvious that people are just making this shit up.

The "Rational World" is not a complete world, because it can only ever be based on the capabilities of human perception. It's impossible to understand beyond what the mind can perceive, and it is that uncertainty which establishes the subjective nature of "truth." The existance or non-existance of a god, or more specifically The God, can only ever be a truth and not a fact.

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It's a controversy because of irrationality. Because of belief in God, belief in Allah, belief that group A should have more rights than group B. All irrational.

Right. So come up with a rational conclusion concerning abortion. Even in classical liberal circles, people are divided on the issue. If there are issues which don't have a position determined by objective rationality, then such a thing cannot exist.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Well, technically oppression also requires power. =/

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

All of this quote war shit has reached critical mass, so instead of arguing history and subjectivity, I'd like to address two points:

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Thus, your claims both on cultural infringement and subjectivity are paradoxical in that they cling to universal truths as their foundation.

My views on cultural infringement are based on a value of self-determination, and the subjective nature of reality is not necessarily a universal truth. That's the rub, essentially, that we don't really know if there can be a universal reality, and that we'll ever know anything without any uncertainty.

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Hardly true. If an extremist sneaks into a country with a nuclear bomb and detonates it, and no extreme Muslim sect willingly takes credit for it, who can we blame? Nobody, because everything will be blown the fuck up leaving no witnesses. Nuclear weapons to nations are extensions of national pride, but to rogue operatives fighting for a religious cause it's much different.

Yet there are only so many people we can blame. The former Soviets, for instance, have supposedly had unsecured nuclear material for ages, yet there has yet to be any city that's been engulfed in nuclear fire. At the present, the only country which could possibly supply anybody with nuclear weapons would be Iran, in the future. There are very few choices in the matter, and hard diplomacy is the easiest way to get Iran to abandon their nuclear ambitions. There's already a moderate element in Iranian politics who feel that Ahmadinejad is pushing us too far, and if we just started pushing back a little we might be able to reach an agreement before we really give them a reason to nuke us.

I was speaking idiomatically.

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The subjective nature of realty becomes a universal truth when you apply it to all humans being unable to reach beyond it, which is your argument. You're limiting human cognitive function in a realistic, universal way by claiming to know and describe the limitations of human cognition. You can never know anything without uncertainty, thus you can never know that we are unable to produce universal truths. Your theory self-destructs because of this contradiction, you can't just ignore it.

No, what I'm saying is that subjective reality is the present truth, but may not be the truth at some point in the future. Besides, I never really argued that it was impossible for there to be a universal truth, but a universal morality. I suppose to clarify, it would be practically impossible to establish a universal morality without going to measures which I find distasteful.

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Only so many people, yes. I'm sure we would have a list of possible countries and/or factions that could've done it, but in the end we'd have no evidence to point a finger. Soviets haven't engulfed a city with fire because they don't think they're fighting a religious war. They've come to the rationality that they need other nations for support. Fundamental Muslim sects want to destroy not for rational reasons, but for religious ones, and to think that reason will prevail over faith naturally in that area is a mistake. Why do you think there's a never ending supply of young extremists?

I don't think you understand the concept of "unsecured nuclear material." Former Soviet Republics have no reason to nuke anybody, yet the nuclear materials they possessed aren't all accounted for. This has been the leading cause of fears concerning nuclear terrorism prior to North Korea's atomic bomb. Supposedly, if this material was unsecured it would be on a market somewhere, and whether it was sold as cheap fuel, or to potential terrorists we really wouldn't know, yet there hasn't been a single incidence of nuclear terrorism since the fall of the Soviet Union, and I think that's long enough to declare the former Soviets an unlikely source of nuclear material.

It doesn't really matter if we have concrete proof of somebody's involvement or not, because we're going to nuke somebody anyways. The bloodlust initiated by an act of nuclear terrorism would be insatiable, and the most likely targets at this point would be Iran and North Korea. North Korea's program, of course, is purely for reasons of national pride, so it's unlikely they'd ever consider selling their biggest insurance against Amero-Asian interference.

So, essentially your argument is that Iran would have to use its own nuclear weapons on somebody becuase Ahmadinejad is just that crazy. The problem with this assumtion, though, is that Iran would need enough weapons to ensure the destruction of their target, otherwise they would be completely annihilated. As Styphon pointed out, Muslims aren't stupid, even the radical ones, and their ultimate goal is the global hegemony of Islam, not its destruction in thermonuclear fire. If there were nuclear weapons or materials circulating on the black market, that's the most probable cause for their reluctance to use them, because it would spark a war which no Islamic country could possibly win.

At the present, the United States has a dominating nuclear weapons gap with every nation on the planet with the exception of Russia. The concept of any country attempting to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons is laughable, because all it takes is for American leadership to establish a willingness to use our weapons in order to eradicate any nuclear upstarts. Even Israel could do essentially the same thing if they admitted to their weapons stockpile, and they have a much greater willingness to act tough when it comes to nuclear diplomacy.

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