I'm really glad you replied to this, Curtis. And so well. I simply couldn't believe that someone could suggest that ideas shouldn't be challenged unless someone takes the idea and does something wrong with it.
If that were true, someone could defend Sarah Palin's belief that she can see Russia from her house and her absolute right to hold such a belief until she starts throwing grenades into Russian territory. :-) --- In [email protected], "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltabl...@...> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: > > > I don't think it makes any sense to object to ideas > > *unless* they are the cause of bad actions. The thing > > is, certain ideas can lead to good actions as well as > > bad ones, depending on the interpretation and > > inclinations of the actor. > > I must be missing something here. It would be wrong to challenge a person's view that the world is flat if the person doesn't do bad things? That reduces the whole field of intellectual discourse to a pretty low level doesn't it? > > This view is used to protect the Muslim's right to believe in a holy book with absolute authority whose prophet condones the killing of infidels. The argument is that only a small number of Muslims take him at his word and go out and kill infidels. > > But in the case of the karmic thoery and its social manifestation in the caste system the numbers are reversed. We have millions of people who believe in this thoery outside India who may not be using it for repression. But we have close to a billion people in India whose lives are oppressed by this belief. > > If a person lived in England during our legal slavery era didn't own slaves but believed in the divinely sanctioned right to own them, would his idea be any less wrong? > > I am proposing that karmic thoery is not just the basis for cruelty in the vast majority of its believer's lives. I am saying further that it is a belief with poor evidence. And that it deserves to be subjected to the same analysis we give any other bad idea. Every area of our intellectual discourse is governed by laws of reason and evidence based criteria for evaluating the worthiness of the idea. > > Shielding spiritual beliefs from this process itself is a bad idea. Because the source of the idea comes from a system of authority, the argument that is often used by religious moderates that they don't take it all literally doesn't solve the problem of people who do. Your example of a Biblical saying being used in a good an bad way is an excellent illustration. > > > The biblical story of Sodom, for example, leads some > > people to condemn homosexuality; it leads others to > > practice hospitality and charity. > > The reason it is wrong to persecute gay people has nothing to do with the scripture. The reason people practice hospitality and charity has nothing to do with the scripture. These are values we hold as a society or at least try to impose laws to disallow the worst violations. Linking these behaviors good or bad to the authority of scripture rather than the process of reasonable discourse about what kind of world we want to live in is the problem in my view. Because there is nothing intrinsic in the system of authority that guides one person to use it for good and another to use it for evil. > > So I say let all human ideas stand on their own merit and don't shield spiritual claims with claims of bigotry just because someone challenges the idea as a bad one, held for bad reasons. You would be right to tell a holocaust denier that his idea was wrong by the evidence even if he didn't use it to do bad things to Jews today. And a person who challenges them to provide evidence to support their outrageous belief is not a bigot for asking them to prove it. > > People will always believe things that are false. Myself included. The issue for me is how we discuss ideas, with freedom of the right to challenge bad evidence, or in a protected class of beliefs that are considered too special to be subjected to the same process that we use for every other idea in our society. No one would claim that a person is being a bigot for telling a member of the the other political party that their ideas have no merit. And no one would get away with a bad idea with the excuse that they haven't hurt anyone with it yet. The freedom to challenge ideas is a very good thing.
