Immanuel Can wrote:Greta wrote:...morality's inherent relativity...
In regard to
secular morality, I think your statement is entirely warranted.
Dostoevsky thought so. Nietzsche thought so. And when two brilliant minds with such oppositional views somehow still turn out to agree, that's got to tell you something.
I am not promoting, Immanuel, just observing. Don't you sometimes speak about things you don't endorse simply as observation, without feeling the need to provide the obligatory PC statement of judgement to prove solidarity?
Immanuel Can wrote:Stuff happens, the strong consume or use the weak.
Social Darwinism, then?
Again, I am not endorsing, just observing. It's been rather a pattern, and one that precedes biological life, ie. planets either absorb or banish all the minor planets, asteroids and other material around it as it cleared its orbit during its formation. C'est la vie.
Immanuel Can wrote:Alan Watts once described himself as an intellectual vagabond, and that resonated with me. Still, as you know, I reject religions so whatever goals I set myself would not be their teachings.
Fine. But if you're getting no answers -- just "seeing through" everything...so that everything looks suspicious, inauthentic, unworthy and so forth...then what are you actually seeing? There's nothing left to look at, nothing to hope for, and no point.
Actually, I get answers every day. I see the gaining of knowledge as something that comes piecemeal. Each new knowledge brings me a little closer to reality. I don't have the big answers and I dispute anyone's claims to understand reality, including any that you may make with what I think of as "the black box of God". Maybe in some way, to some extent, aspects of the God idea are real. I'll wait and see. No rush :)
Immanuel Can wrote:I'm not saying be unskeptical or uncritical. I'm just saying that if criticism is being used well, it yields results in terms of definite answers. If it's being used undiscerningly, it just shaves the epistemological field flat.
"Shaves the epistemological field flat" - nice turn of phrase and concept, please forgive me if I borrow it sometime :)
I started with assumptions when I first retired. The last five years have been a process of doing exactly as you say, ditching my old ideas - flattening out bumps in my mental terrain and seeing what rises in their stead as I learn more.
Immanuel Can wrote:Actually, women's equality has appeared elsewhere, most notably in Mao's China, where he wanted each individual to be the best possible tool of the state. Sometimes good can come from bad and vice versa.
Oh, for heaven's sake. Mao's China has killed more females than any other regime in the history of the world. Did you not know? The one-child policy has created rampant infanticide, almost exclusively against women. Go look in China. Count the heads. There should be slightly more women than men, on the world average...where did all the women go? :shock:
You can put away your cries of outrage and emoticons - superfluous. The one child policy happened after Mao. It was a brief period where China was starting to get things right and then, as you say, old biases resurfaced that reflected China's terribly sexist past, inherited from the foot binding imperialist Kuomintang patriarchs that preceded Mao. Of course, once Mao and Mme Mao went with self-deification they became equal opportunity killers.
Actually, I made a cartoon many years ago about foot binding
https://goo.gl/photos/eJZXN27ABpycy1kr7
Again, I'm only observing that equality has occurred outside of the west, not holding China up as a model.
Immanuel Can wrote:Then again, it wasn't so long ago that Muslim women were living like us in the west. Only in our lifetimes has misogyny in Islam been interpreted as lore, and law. Religions go through phases. Not so long ago in history Christianity wasn't much better than Islam is today. For a while each was improving but now Islam is backsliding. So it goes.
None of this is so, I'm afraid. Muslim women have been historically oppressed in the extreme. Christianity has never been anywhere near so bad as Islam...not hijab, no child "brides," no polygamy, no license for wife-beating (read "The Chapter of Women" in the Koran), no revenge rapes and homicides for disobedience...
To be not much better than "the worst of the worst" is still not ideal. Christianity's historical approach to women has been awful although, to be fair, most societies have treated women unfairly. That brings us back to the start of this post - that the strong consume the weak.
Immanuel Can wrote:But I do really wonder at the silence of the Feminist movement on Islam. I wonder if they really care about women after all...or just the rights of white, western ones.
There is no silence. Just that the complaints don't get reported and otherwise fall on deaf ears.
Immanuel Can wrote:Still, "we are made of star stuff" will stay with me for life,
It's a pretty line, I admit. But what does it really say? Nothing. We don't twinkle. We're not heavenly. We're apparently not eternal, celestial or always bright either. He might have equally said "space junk": it's less poetic, but the essential implication is the same. He's saying we're debris derived from a random event in space.
Everything is the debris of the big bang, flying away from the white hole faster than the speed of light. How wonderful that over billions of years that debris would wind itself into so much interesting phenomena.
Sagan's line reminds us that stars and us are one, separated only by time. We are what some parts of a star (or stars) some billions of years ago eventually became. It tells me that life is not just biology, but the entire edifice of our reality is alive in some sense, and we are eloquent manifestations of this life.
Immanuel Can wrote:We will hopefully be links in a chain to something "more" than we are today.
Well, as cosmos admits, "we" won't. Long before the ponderous gears of evolution would ever turn sufficiently to produce any change we would know about, we and billions of our ancestors will be dead.
"We" will never see any of that. That's not a great deal of hope or meaning, is it?
No problemo. Not everything meaningful needs to be in service to us humans - we are part of much larger stories. The dinos personally didn't benefit from their situation as links in the chain leading to us, yet all worked out well - for a while. Now we humans can be a link to whatever may follow us.
It's true that "we" are not going to escape an Earth that is doomed by its star to be obliterated in five billion years' time (with the surface sterilised in less than a billion years' time). Our personal deaths don't matter as we are all going to die long beforehand anyway.
Consider this in terms of eternal life. What is eternal life in context with a universe that in a quadrillion years consist of only black holes and bits of stray energy?
Immanuel Can wrote:Actually, Christianity is highly respectful of right-to-life, both at the beginning and at the end.
But not respectful of right-to-death, and the right to kill appears to be conditional in ways that are irrational, eg. the welfare unwanted and unfeeling blobs of protoplasm that lack even a formed nervous system being of more interest than those of grown people.
"Right to death?" Well, here's a question: to where are you sending people when you "mercy-kill" them? Is it really "mercy"? How would we know?[/quote]
If you are dying and in terrible, horrible agony, struggling to breathe, always nauseous, everything hurts, and you are incapacitated with no hope, and it reaches the point where you plead to be allowed to die, would you want your wishes to be respected? I would.
Immanuel Can wrote:Even supposing that the Sagan account of things were true (let us accept that for the minute, without question) would it ever really be an act of "mercy" to remove a person from the only life they will ever have, and send them into eternal black darkness? Is even a difficult and painful life better than the eternal black hole? I would be tempted to consider the possibility that it might: and that "mercy" might be better spent on alleviating the pain, not on killing the patient. I'm not sure how we can ever be "respectful" of life by simply ending it forever.
Hehehe you are trying to work me out and thinking that maybe Sagan can work as a reference. I neither believe in anyone's idea of an afterlife or lack and nor do I t subscribe to CS or NDGT's ideas as you subscribe to JC's. I sometimes disagree with their suppositions. Do you disagree with any of JC's suppositions?
Immanuel Can wrote:As for infanticide, I suppose we'll just have to disagree that that is ever warranted. But we'll leave that there.
Blobs of protoplasm are not infants - in the first trimester even many fish species are vastly more aware and feeling than foetuses. Certainly, once you have an actual human baby (or any baby), then killing them would seem just a teensy bit inappropriate.