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Firstly, thanks for your considered reply. "It's very hard to find a way to retort that actually has the potential to change your mind. I will try, though, and

Firstly, thanks for your considered reply. "It's very hard to find a way to retort that actually has the potential to change your mind. I will try, though, and I hope you take this with an open mind." You'd be surprised, I think. I've changed my mind several times on this issue, and I'm still mulling it over. That email represented my current thinking on the matter, quite directly given the speed with which it was written. This is _another_ rushed reply, & I'd like to reply later in more detail if time permits. Some background: I'm an atheist, and I don't (or at least I try not to) distinguish between religious and non-religious philosophies. I happen to think that the greatest religious evil in the world today is perpetrated by Christians against Africa, by way of a prohibition on contraception. Re. freedom of faith, take one example. If your philosophy mandates the execution of apostates, then your philosophy is evil. If you choose to belong to it, to support it, then you yourself are supporting evil even if only by lending it your moral sanction. This is true regardless of whether your philosophy is religious, or not. If your God tells you to murder apostates, then yes, in order to be a decent human being, you need to reject your God - [edited to add]: or, at the very least, find an interpretation of your religion that rejects that mandate. Another example: if you're Catholic, acknowledge the torment and suffering that your religion is inflicting upon the poor in Africa, and change denomination to one that allows contraception. It seems as though you are giving Islam special treatment by virtue of it being a religion.

scrollaway 12y ago
(Disclaimer: I'm an atheist myself. I'll try to make this as coherent as possible, bear with me.) "Everyone has a right to their opinion", as long as it remains an opinion. Right? But let's elaborate a bit on that. Some background first: We, as humans, most likely will never really know the answers to the very existential questions in the universe. If you start asking "Why?" a lot, go all the way outside of the bounds of society, you'll find a lot of very weird questions that you would think you'd get an obvious answer to, but it always tends to come down to "because that's how we defined it". An extreme example: "Why is killing bad?" - An easy question to answer within the bounds of a functional society, but it's not easy to keep answering it if you remove that boundary. Since you're a fan of thought experiments: Many insect species' females eat their mates after copulation. What if our society evolved from such a basis and never quite got past it? You would face the same challenges explaining why not eating your mate would be positive for an established society. (Fun weekend project: Read post-apocalyptic books while keeping such considerations in mind. Authors tend to have a field day with these questions...) Okay, now that that's out of the way: We, humans, do get to define our own ideologies. We get to define what is good and bad, because unlike with mathematics/physics, nature does not dictate rules for philosophy. What I personally believe is that for those potential ideologies to have a chance to prosper, we must never remove their voices. You can choose not to listen to them, but removing the opportunity for them to spread could in fact remove a change for the better. Just like it could prevent a change for the better, but then we go back to the argument earlier: who are we to judge what is good and what is bad? We get to define it, but those that come after us may disagree. At least we have a choice. So no, I'm not giving islam special treatment, I'm just careful of not removing its voice, as much as I can disagree with some of its ideologies (and agree with some others). This is a very tough subject. We don't know where the lines are, different people tend to put them in different places. The law is what we've chosen to draw the lines for us, and we change it all the time. But without differing opinions (christianity, islam, vegetarianism, nazism, kopimism, ...), we can't ever hope to change. And isn't change the reason we are here, exchanging experiences and ideas?

scrollaway 12y ago

(Disclaimer: I'm an atheist myself. I'll try to make this as coherent as possible, bear with me.) "Everyone has a right to their opinion", as long as it remains an opinion. Right? But let's elaborate a bit on that. Some background first: We, as humans, most likely will never really know the answers to the very existential questions in the universe. If you start asking "Why?" a lot, go all the way outside of the bounds of society, you'll find a lot of very weird questions that you would think you'd get an obvious answer to, but it always tends to come down to "because that's how we defined it". An extreme example: "Why is killing bad?" - An easy question to answer within the bounds of a functional society, but it's not easy to keep answering it if you remove that boundary. Since you're a fan of thought experiments: Many insect species' females eat their mates after copulation. What if our society evolved from such a basis and never quite got past it? You would face the same challenges explaining why not eating your mate would be positive for an established society. (Fun weekend project: Read post-apocalyptic books while keeping such considerations in mind. Authors tend to have a field day with these questions...) Okay, now that that's out of the way: We, humans, do get to define our own ideologies. We get to define what is good and bad, because unlike with mathematics/physics, nature does not dictate rules for philosophy. What I personally believe is that for those potential ideologies to have a chance to prosper, we must never remove their voices. You can choose not to listen to them, but removing the opportunity for them to spread could in fact remove a change for the better. Just like it could prevent a change for the better, but then we go back to the argument earlier: who are we to judge what is good and what is bad? We get to define it, but those that come after us may disagree. At least we have a choice. So no, I'm not giving islam special treatment, I'm just careful of not removing its voice, as much as I can disagree with some of its ideologies (and agree with some others). This is a very tough subject. We don't know where the lines are, different people tend to put them in different places. The law is what we've chosen to draw the lines for us, and we change it all the time. But without differing opinions (christianity, islam, vegetarianism, nazism, kopimism, ...), we can't ever hope to change. And isn't change the reason we are here, exchanging experiences and ideas?