Don’t really have the time right now to get into all of this (maybe later, if you want), but I hope you see that what you just wrote, as a defense of religion, is a very very weak one.
Religion actually is an aggression, it is an aggression against the rational mind of human beings. In the case of children, it is far worse to break their minds than to break their legs.
Beh, I only believe in physical aggression. Lying to children is not a crime, sorry. Kids are not ‘special’.
Yeah, this is the Dawkinsian thesis. I don’t have much to say in response except that you’re clearly equivocating on the definition of the word “aggression.”
Clayton -
I like the old atheists better, anyway.
But while we’re at it, why don’t we make sure to keep tabs on everything parents say to their children, and then BUST them in the face when they don’t pass the standards of our free speech board.
Or not.
I don’t understand how you could call religion “aggression” and not ny other custom, ethic, habit. If anything you can just speculate it will fad away when it becomes increasingly more untenable/ costly/ ignored all of which may very well go hand in hand with a “realized” market mentality. Either way discussions/ speculations like these are semi-worthless to comical.
Suppose someone would mentally torture their child into a deep depression to the point of suicide, but they wouldn’t ever strike them. Crime or not crime*?
* this requires that I know how you believe crimes ought to be dealt with.
Suppose someone would mentally torture their child into a deep depression to the point of suicide, but they wouldn’t ever strike them. Crime or not crime*?
Not a crime. A-hole thing to do, but oh well.
You guys are going down the wrong rabbit whole. You have to ask yourself how criminality is defined. What legal agencies are subscribed to at the tim of the incident?
You guys are going down the wrong rabbit whole. You have to ask yourself how criminality is defined. What legal agencies are subscribed to at the tim of the incident?
People under contract can be confined by various statuates, I am talking about in a natural circumstance where you haven’t made any specific agreements about what norms you will abide by; which is really all that libertarian legal theory is concerned with since any arbitrary and crazy ‘laws’ can theoretically be agreed to by contracted right.
Even more to the point, what would other (extended) family members do about it? Note that the idea of parents torturing their children is about 99.9% myth since we are not the descendants of those who tortured their children (unless you want to make the case that torture somehow increases a child’s chances of surviving and reproducing), so this is all castles-in-the-air bullshit to begin with. But given that we are dealing with sociopathic parents who have no empathy for their children, the first line of defense provided by Nature is the extended family, not the State, not Richard Dawkins, not even PDAs or anarcho-capitalist courts.
Clayton -
not Richard Dawkins
lol.
So because you survive and have sex it’s wasn’t mental torture?
Re: 99.9% myth.
In North America, for example, approximately 15% to 25% of women and 5% to 15% of men were sexually abused when they were children.[11][12][13] Most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often brothers, fathers, uncles or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances such as ‘friends’ of the family, babysitters, or neighbors; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases.[11] Most child sexual abuse is committed by men; studies show that women commit 14% to 40% of offenses reported against boys and 6% of offenses reported against girls.[11][12][14]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sexual_abuse
This really doesn’t bother me. Saving the world = boring.
Nielsio,
If there are people who need religion as a coping mechanism to have a “near perfectly rational” mind, would you have these people destroyed in order to eliminate religion?
I went through an athiest phase and almost went insane when I realized that in that context right and wrong was just a matter of opinion. I don’t understand why athiests don’t become nihilistic hedonists. It’s just not rational to care when there is no ultimate cause for anything.
Huh? I’ve advocated nothing of the sort. The way to deal with religion is through science.
Wrong is that set of actions which are discretely anti-society. We have a society (division of production and property rights) because it benefits us. Discretely anti-societal actions are theft, murder, rape, etc. They hurt society.
So it’s very rational to care about wrongs. If nobody would care about wrongs, we’d all be dead very soon.
The only real cause are your own values. Worshipping some being (imaginary or not) is not a life worth living.
What is beautiful is the world around you. Open your eyes.
You’re not comprehending what I wrote. Go back and read it again, carefully. Are you familiar with evolutionary arguments?
I would like to see how much of that 30% are one of the biological parents. I’ll quote Kanazawa and Miller from their book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters on the related subject of parents killing their children:
"At first sight, it appears that killing children makes no sense from the evolutionary psychological perspective, which emphasizes reproductive success. Why would parents kill their own children? [Martin] Daly and [Margo] Wilson have two answers to this question. The first answer is that they don’t. Daly and Wilson discovered that what often passes as parents killing their children in police statistics is actually stepfathers killing their stepchildren, who do not carry their genes. It looks as though biological parents are killing their genetic children in the statistics because the police, uninformed by Darwinian logic, make no distinction between biological parents and stepparents in their record keeping. Biological parents very seldom kill their genetic children.
Their second answer to the question is that sometimes parents have to make tough choices. All parents, even wealthy ones, have limited resources to invest in their children. Every dollar, every minute, every effort that they invest in one child is another dollar, another minute, another effort that they cannot invest in other children. Their evolved psychological mechanisms therefore compel them to invest most efficiently, which usually means that they invest more in children who have the greatest prospect for reproductive success, at the cost of other children whose reproductive prospect is gloomier." [Emphasis added]
I suspect that a diligent search of the records in the case of sex abuse would turn up similar results since having sex with your Dad is not a very good strategy for a woman’s reproductive success. The argument that “she’s a minor, she can’t fight back” doesn’t really matter since nature will have worked around the problem in other ways (for example, mama-bear protection of daughters or whatever).
Yes, I’ve watched this video. I will repeat, saying that Jesus Camp is aggression against children is equivocating on the meaning of the word aggression.
Clayton -
So what if it’s wrong? I’ll do it and get away with it. In this framework, I really don’t see why I should serve society if I can be better off by not serving it. What’s the point of spending hours and hours of one’s life to promote some idea that might make society better if the likelihood of it happening as a result of their efforts is zero? Isn’t their time better spent serving themselves and not society? What about brilliant people who are able to get away with criminal activity? Why should they “co-operate” with society if it benefits them more not to?
Selfishness causes people to be immoral. Does this even matter to the nihilist?
I suppose with no dogma, people have no point from which to make sense of the world.
So what if it’s wrong? I’ll do it and get away with it. In this framework, I really don’t see why I should serve society if I can be better off by not serving it.
You’d be an idiot if you didn’t. Technically, it is impossible. You can’t act contrary to your subjective self-interest.
Selfishness causes people to be immoral. Does this even matter to the nihilist?
Actually, that doesn’t even make sense to the nihilist/egoist. Everyone is always selfish (they just lie to themselves or believe nonsense) and nothing is ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’.
I suppose with no dogma, people have no point from which to make sense of the world.
Nonsense. You don’t need to believe in magical floating values to do what you want. Everything you do is ultimately up to you. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ a priori. Oh well, deal with it.
I pretty much agree with what you’ve said, Ricky. I’m just confused by militant anti-theism by some libertarians. Isn’t it a bit un-libertarian to be against something that’s largely a cultural thing/coping mechanism that people could choose to not be a part of? I just don’t see where the NAP or contracts are violated because some people in some other community have faith in a religion.
Well, the militant anti-theism comes from the Secular Humanist Left which dominates modern Euro-American culture. Ironically, the main reason they hate more mainline Christians is that they are basically another sect of Christianity and are having doctrinal squabbles as per usual. Their Millinarian dogmatism and obsession with heresy hunting (everyone is a racist/theocrat/fascist/sexist) puts the Baptists to shame.
I think theism is incredibly stupid and not a position worthy of any philosophical consideration (in fact, I consider it a non-position); but if people want to believe in crazy nonsense that is their problem.