3 ms·

More like calling fouls on a basketball game that happened 100 years ago.

• majormajor 5y ago
  Ah, there's the problem with the metaphor! In real life, the game never really ends. Actions reverberate. 100 years is about the time between the civil war and the civil rights movement, obviously not enough time to wash away all the sins by time alone. If you want to say we should start over and start a new game - maybe reset all the property and wealth in the country - sure, then maybe we would have less reason to talk about the current one.
  • pram 5y ago
    How far back do things need to be for sins to be forgivable? Or if not forgivable, at least judged in context, and not through a very specific contemporary ideological perspective?
    • 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
      At the very least, we need to be talking about past sins, not merely obsolete implementations of continuing ones.
    • majormajor 5y ago
      I think this is the more immediate question: do you agree with the claims that there have been a lot of racist acts in American history, that some of them continue today, and that even many of the past ones still have impacts today? Because there's a big difference between "I find this tiring that people keep talking about it, we already know" - in which case we should be talking about what we can do, instead - and "I disagree with these claims, but instead of trying to disprove them, I'm going to try to discredit them by complaining that I've heard it before." It sounds like the latter - questions like "how far back do things need to be" sounds like a disagreement that the effects continue. In which case: be straightforward! Just come out and disagree directly! Because the answer to a question like that is obviously situational, and depends on how much impact the sin had and continues to have.
      • pram 5y ago
        I can simultaneously believe in present injustice, and the pointlessness of flogging 19th century self-help books. There is no inconsistency, and I am not a reactionary for believing so. Nice strawman though.
    • aaron-santos 5y ago
      What is required for a transgression to be forgiven? Under what theories of justice does the answer to this change?
    • commandlinefan 5y ago
      > How far back do things need to be for sins to be forgivable? I would have hoped "before I was born" to be far enough back, but evidently it isn't.
• kbelder 5y ago
  When the rules were different...