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David 
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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^ I think polls in the past have shown 60-70% support for capital punishment here. Not sure if that's changed, but public sentiment in favour of it is obviously still strong.
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"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| pietillidie wrote: | The joys of watching the good-and-evil child's brain cling desperately to the old stories.
People have been warning for decades that the endless violence distant peoples have been submitted to, from colonialism through to Indochina, Latin America and the theft and endless meddling in the Middle East, would snap back at some point.
Cheered on by delusional, flag-waving idiots, country after country is now full of angry victims, from the poor, to the insecure, to the limbless, to the robbed, to the kids thereof and plain old pissed off people looking for an excuse. And now, on a shrinking planet, the angry mob is starting to look like it might want to draw some blood.
If you go back in time, given the attitudes this should hardly come as a surprise. One second, those of the wrong skin tone or tongue or religion or clothing were deemed inherently stupid and savage; the next, willfully lazy and corrupt; the next, incapable of handling self rule; the next, incapable of managing national assets; the next, under the toxic thrall of religion. But never once were there human beings of the same genetic inheritance trying to deal with the same bizarre predicament known as life as best they could.
Let's face it, the West has been lowlife, thieving, violent, filthy scum for a long time now in far too many parts of the world, and has been cheered on by a shockingly high percentage of amoral, cowardly, suburban slime buckets willing to turn a blind eye just in case some of the spoils fell their way.
Well, thanks to such fine enlightened folk, globalisation has brought yesterday's sins right back at us. Just imagine, even in recent times, if the 3T spent on unleashing hell in Iraq and Afghanistan and hastening the GFC was used to help develop the many, many hopeful states that exist, as sane folk have requested all along.
Instead, all the world got was a decade of new victims, new reasons, more insecurity, less hope and more dehumanisation.
It's time for people to move on from defending yesterday, and to accept reality and get back to basics: Religion and ideology are after-the-fact codifications of the human predicament. They don't lead societies anywhere the major socio-economic forces weren't going anyhow. If there was less insecurity and humiliation, and more stability and economic opportunity, there would be less virulent ideology and religion. There's just nothing new to see here; we've always known this.
Turning that plain, very obvious history into some Hollywood clash of civilisations is just another act of dehumanising idiocy to avoid looking in the mirror and dealing with the basic socio-economic physics with honesty.
We already have answers and plenty of opportunity to jolt things in the right direction. Ridding the earth of the vile, corrupt fossil fuels industry pronto is the obvious first step towards normalising the major economies of the many unstable parts of the world, meanwhile dealing with global warming and its raft of associated, instability-causing problems. It might be ugly for a while while things seek a new homeostasis, but such is the bitter pill required now the patient has been left to linger so long without basic care.
Looking in the mirror and apologising for the endless acts of callous interference the world over, and taking responsibility for the amoral violence of transnational companies, would be a second step.
Dropping the obsession with the flaws and shortfalls of other countries, and embracing the diversity of the human condition, i.e., actually practicing the best of Western thought rather than clinging to the worst of nineteenth-century colonialism, would be a third step.
The age of wanking on about being the Enlightened Westmeanwhile engaging in wanton theft and primitive violence overseas as if no one is lookingis over. The world is too small now, and the angry peasants have smartphones and airline tickets. |
Kinda like "war of the worlds" with peasants not computers. I actually agree with a hell of a lot of that. And funnily enough, I read it all! All in all though, it's still just power and riches hungry evil men, doing shit stuff and using religion as an excuse. The disgusting way women are treated in the Muslim culture, that's just an excuse by the men to keep them down.
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| David wrote: | | ^ I think polls in the past have shown 60-70% support for capital punishment here. Not sure if that's changed, but public sentiment in favour of it is obviously still strong. |
Capital punishment not your good old fashion public hung drawn and quartered
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| David wrote: | | For instance, Australian law states that homosexual relationships are inferior to heterosexual ones, yet most Australians nowadays believe that they are not. |
Which law?
The marriage act draws a distinction but doesn't make one or the other superior or inferior, just different, and other legislation provides for every other facet of a gay relationship to be equal to a hetro one, whether married or not in regard to rights and property etc.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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That distinction is hardly arbitrary, though. Marriage is one of the most significant social institutionssociety's primary means of recognising relationshipsand same-sex couples are currently barred from entering it. There is no equivalent institution for them to enter into; indeed, there is no significant way of publicly expressing lifelong commitment at all (we don't even have civil unions, remember).
Even if not all people opposed to same-sex marriage see it this way, most people understand the significance of marriage and what it means: same-sex couples are treated as inferior.
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| Thread's a bit derailed here. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Tannin wrote: | | Mugwump wrote: | Fortunately Christianity gave up its theocratic ambitions progressively through the 17th and 18th centuries, partly because rising merchant classes weren't prone to being bossed about by priests, and partly because of the Reformation's insistence that God was personal, not institutional, but mostly because
(a) for hundreds of years political leaders like (e.g.) Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Fair, James I and Frederick II had had to fight for their very lives against the Church (which wanted to depose them and kill them or simply replace them with obedient papal lackeys) and had, over those hundreds of years, slowly, slowly overcome the vast power of the various churches and their limitless ambition to rule everything; and
(b) because most people simply stopped regarding religion as the most important thing in their lives; little by little, as religion was tamed by the various nations, it became a less central part of everyday life and thought (or, as it became a less central part of everyday life and thought, it was gradually tamed by the various nations - you decide which way riound is correct).
The Christian religion wasn't replaced by some other belief all in one go, it was gradually overcome and made less important by a range of other interests in everday life, including the enjoyment of the material goods which were at this time becoming more widely available and affordable, and a great interest in science and knowledge and general education, which reached its peak around the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. . Perhaps it helps that the founder was no politician, and had little to say about government. The separation has made Christianity a fairly benign force for hundreds of years, wherever it's been effected. |
Cheers mate. Fixed ^ that one for you. |
Time consuming way to elaborate agreement, but thanks. You coild add perhaps ten other factors if you've got the afternoon free. You missed perhaps the most signal event, the French revolution's anti-clericalism and anti-monarchism and its inspiration of the American constitutional theorists.
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Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Sun Jan 18, 2015 8:34 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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| Wokko wrote: | | Thread's a bit derailed here. |
Heading that way, but it's still in service of my original point: that it is wrong to extrapolate mainstream Muslim values from the actions of violent extremists. I guess from there we got to the difference between law and culture and whether Australia's legal status quo matches its cultural norms.
Anyway, sorry. I'll try to reel it back in. 
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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So do you consider "living together" inferior too?
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Yes, I think living inferior too. |
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Morrigu 
Joined: 11 Aug 2001
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| David wrote: | | it is wrong to extrapolate mainstream Muslim values from the actions of violent extremists. |
True but it is also wrong to ignore many of the mainstream Muslim values that result in what we would see as abhorrent practices and lack of basic human rights in some of the countries that are predominantly Muslim and suggest that these things only result from the beliefs and actions of violent extremists for that is totally incorrect.
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“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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| think positive wrote: | | So do you consider "living together" inferior too? |
No, I don't think it's inferior at all. I don't believe that you have to be married to have a happy, fulfilling and lifelong relationship. But for a certain class of relationship to be excluded from the institution of marriage is for that type of relationship to be marked down as inferior, I believe.
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| David wrote: |
By the way, the claim above that Christianity "gave up" its theocratic ambitions is laughable. For one thing, as memtioned above, there are still countries in the world in which Christianity's theocratic ambitions remain as strong as ever. Secondly, there was no meek handover in Europe; power had to be dragged away from the church every step of the way. Thirdly, even this very day, right here in Australia, the Australian Christian Lobby's campaign against same-sex marriage shows that Christianity still hasn't given up on influencing public gay", look at any Western country less than 50 years ago. Most of the posters in this thread were alive when the last man in Australia was jailed for sodomy. So, let's not pretend that we have some mortgage on righteousness here and that there are fundamental differences between Christianity and Islam that make one benign and the other barbaric. To mount such an argument requires a profound ignorance of history and pretty much everything else. |
If changing "gave up" to "relinquished", "surrendered" or "capitulated" makes it less laughable for you, then I have no objection. It won't change the substantive meaning. Secondly, arguments with a democratic process to have your views -religious or otherwise - codified in law is not theocracy, David. Thirdly, I probably agree that there is no fundamental difference between religions such that one is benign and another barbaric, though that's very debatable - you have to look at the core texts that animate believers to decide that. What i stated was that religion sits within social history and history matters in how benign a religion may be, now, in practice. Finally, when a law has been in place for fifty years and there is no serious movement to overturn it, I think that's rather a long time ; even if only measured by the number of lives that have not been wrecked since its passing.
I think all religions are false, an expression of human fears and the finitude of an animal that developed a distressing consciousness of time. I believe none of them ; though what Christ said in the gospels seems pretty timeless, and rather remarkable for a desert prophet 2000 years ago. Maybe that's just my culture talking, though.
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Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Sun Jan 18, 2015 8:32 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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David
to wish impossible things
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: the edge of the deep green sea
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| Mugwump wrote: | | Secondly, arguments with a democratic process to have your views -religious or otherwise - codified in law is not theocracy, David. |
I quite agree, though on the other hand I'm not sure you can necessarily call even a country like Iran a theocracy, either (the way I understand it, even though its laws are heavily influenced by Islamic teachings and the Ayatollah is kind of the equivalent of a British monarch, the elected government is hardly making policy based on Sharia Law alone). And that's Iranwhen it comes to Algeria or Jordan or Pakistan or Malaysia, the Muslim influence on lawmaking is probably roughly on par with the Christian influence on Western European law until relatively recently. I'm not sure that you could say that Putin's Russia, for instance, is less of a "religious" state than many Muslim countries.
_________________
"Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence." – Julian Assange |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| David wrote: | | think positive wrote: | | So do you consider "living together" inferior too? |
No, I don't think it's inferior at all. I don't believe that you have to be married to have a happy, fulfilling and lifelong relationship. But for a certain class of relationship to be excluded from the institution of marriage is for that type of relationship to be marked down as inferior, I believe. |
What really important though, do they have the same rights as a de facto relationship does? De facto wasn't accepted for a long time too
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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