Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2018 3:50 pmGreta wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2018 5:30 amNick_A wrote: ↑Wed Jan 31, 2018 4:32 pmYou are caught up with women’s rights. The idea of sacrificing some for the sake of the greater good or sustaining a free society is insulting to you as it is for the secular progressive philosophy which has the demand for rights as its primary objective.
Not at all. I simply see no reason why stopping abortions would improve society. Rather, studies tend to show that abortion reduces crime in the next generation.
I note you are blaming and scapegoating again.
Do you realise that you routinely do what you accuse others of doing?
How can you be so unaware of the disconnect between your words and behaviour?
Further, what of some of those bizarre interpretations you make of others' posts? It's as if you are replying to something in your own head and pretending that mental script was theirs. If a "secularist" told you that "Mary had a little lamb" you would probably accuse them of vicarious paedo-bestiality.
A question: Do you think that most people are essentially well-meaning?
You are unaware that you do not recognize the question. You immediately devolve the question of a women's objective obligations into abortion rights.
You scapegoat because you cast blame. Recognizing the human condition isn't casting blame. Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses. He cast blame. Simone Weil retorted that revolution is the opiate of the masses. She is not casting blame but acknowledging that revolution will eventually produce the same results that led to revolution. The problem is the human condition which isn't a scapegoat. Can you see the difference?
People are well meaning on Monday. Then conditions change on Tuesday. They may end up in a traffic jam and exhibit road rage. They are no longer well meaning. it is human nature.
I speak about abortion because it's your pet peeve, so I respond. For me, it's a matter of MYOB.
The human condition you complain about is the animal condition. Over the millennia humanity has been trying to escape the brutality and suffering inherent in nature, both without and within. So far, given the mere millennia with which humans have had so far to make sense of these unprecedented and complex social conditions, human beings have done
incredibly well!
There have been many mistakes - murder, cannibalism, rape, infanticide, extreme torture methods, superstitious beliefs, wars, the Plague, the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, violent colonisation and failure to learn from indigenous people, overuse of fossil fuels and nuclear arms, sustainability, oppression, slavery, the list goes on. Humanity has had to deal with and learn from these traps and mistakes, resulting in uneven, but definite, progress on all fronts - moral, intellectual, political, economic, social, technological. Given that there was no manual telling humans how to handle their powers, how can the species be blameworthy?
Consider the climate change situation, with major fossil fuel companies fighting to maximise profits from superseded infrastructure, plus a phalanx of social media deniers, usually influenced by the fossil fuel-invested Murdoch media. This means some influential nations are lagging in this area, weighed down by the inertia of influential companies and the effects of their counter-information offensives, largely sponsored by a fossil fuel-invested conservative media, Murdoch and others.
This is not evidence of inherent human badness, and certainly not of a "fall". It is evidence of the unevenness of progress. Almost nobody talks about this, rather they tend to point to dysfunctional aspects of a few societies and extrapolate that to all of humanity.
However, progress continues, and it continues to be as uneven and potted as it ever was. In the path towards growth many backward steps are inevitably taken. These "backwards steps" on societal scale can last longer than human lifetimes (eg. the Dark Ages) so it's understandable for those involved to see humanity as going backwards. However, this is a personal or limited short-term perspective with more to do with solipsism than clear-eyed consideration of the whole.
It is possible that the human project per se will fail. The end has been predicted for millennia because there is always a tendency to treat catastrophic setbacks as Doomsday. Catastrophe looks like doomsday for those most affected, and for many of our ancestors their personal doomsday did come to pass as they had feared. However, rebuilding and renewed and accelerated progress by survivors has always been the aftermath of major destructive events in both the wild and human culture.
Sadly, "spaceship Earth" cannot carry so many humans for long. This is ultimately the sources of your fears. Not secularism. Or progressivism. Or atheism. Or women. Or liberals. It's the (correct intuitive) sense that
all this is not sustainable and bad things will happen.
So yes, all this that we have today will one day be lost. All beautiful things go extinct, as beautiful things have always disappeared and will continue to disappear, only to be replaced by different things with a different beauty. We can complain that it's not the same - that something beautiful will be lost that is irreplaceable. That's true. Yet the new has qualities greater than that which it replaced, and those qualities too will one day be lost and probably mourned by those of a certain generation who see them as irreplaceable.
Given all these "irreplaceable" things being lost and mourned by older generations while the young happily replace them, maybe we need to consider what is truly "irreplaceable"? I remember being "irreplaceable" a few years before retirement, and a year later my job was replaced by AI. The machine, of course, would lack my flexibility (and charm haha) but it would be ultimately more solid and reliable, much cheaper, no holidays, sick days, workspace, payroll tax, etc.
As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, so it goes.