Graeme Dice wrote:This is all fine and good except that it is used in generalizations. Not by you, but by others with less intelligence and more fanaticism.
Perhaps, but I am not responsible for what other people do. If the point is sound, this is all that matters. The fact that someone can potentially abuse it does not change that fact.
As with life insurance however, the payoff needs to be worth the expense for people to even consider it. The problem arises when people place far too much value on the end result, instead of living their life as a normal person would.
Agreed. This is why the fundamentalists are scary. If you listen to most fundies for any length of time, they will make it clear that they do not consider corporeal death to be important. Those who actually look
forward to "Judgement Day" and the end of human civilization are particularly scary.
It can also be a political motivator; the unspoken reason for America's enormous multi-billion dollar military aid for Israel or its original insistence that the Jews return to that particular piece of territory rather than finding some nicer, less-contested area (there is no rational reason for the US to be involved in that bloody morass) is that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land is prophesied in Revelations as one of the things which must happen before the Second Coming, so they have to make it happen by hook or by crook. Nobody with a brain can possibly believe the ridiculous cover story about how the presence of Israel stabilizes the region; it is a flash point for conflict! It is but one example of how religious zealotry quietly places beliefs over human lives.
It isn't what I claimed, but could be read that way. I claimed that all truly great things are obtained by someone fighting for something "bigger than themselves". This has absolutely nothing to do with religion, and your own examples suport my statement. The Polio vaccine was developed and given away for free because Salk felt "the people say. . . could you patent the sun?" (The quote is paraphrased.) Is that not affecting something larger than yourself? Freeing yourself from tyranny, and stopping would-be dictators are both fighting for causes larger than yourself.
True. But in the context of
this thread, we both know that something "bigger than yourself" was meant as a reference to God and other religious beliefs (as opposed to objectively real phenomena such as scientific research), and I was intending to discuss it in that context (hence my examples of objectively real causes worth fighting for, which you seem to agree with). You are trying to take advantage of the semantics in order to make it appear as if I have contradicted myself. A proper debate should be about ideas, not carefully watching your use of language to make sure no one can interpret their meaning in a manner differently than what you intended.
That is completely correct, there would be no physical casualties. The cost in culture however would be staggering. What you are suggesting is that it doesn't matter that the Crusaders destroyed works of art, as long as they didn't didn't cause casualties in doing so.
The Crusades would have been nowhere near as horrific if they hadn't killed anyone, yes. And sorry to be a splash of cold water, but by any objective standard, the destruction of historical documents and scientific literature was much more devastating to human society than the destruction of art. Art has no use other than pleasing the aesthetic tastes of those who happen to like it. Its contribution to society is
vastly overblown, because the people who speak so eloquently in its praise have a vested interest in doing so.
I would suggest that destroying history and preventing those in the future from experiencing it is as bad as killing the person who created that history.
Do not confuse historical documents (ie- useful information) with art and culture.
Destroying all existing music would also mean that all we would be able to listen to is what is currently being produced, and I hope you don't want Britney to be the sum total of human culture.
No, of course not. But surely you cannot
begin to compare the importance of this loss to the importance of losing any major piece of technology such as refridgeration or running water.
Darth Wong wrote:If you removed all existing science and technology from society, we would instantly regress to caveman status, and there would be billions of deaths in a short timeframe.
I don't believe that the only valid measurement of an accomplishment is it's affect on people's standards of living. "Bolero" by Ravel isn't likely to save lives, but your experiences as a person are poorer if you have not listened to it. (On a decent sound system of course so you can experience the full dynamic range an orchestra is capable of.)
And what if I hate "Bolero?" The vast majority of humanity will live and die without ever hearing "Bolero", and do you know what? Most of them don't give a shit. Perhaps you should try going to an African village with no running water and tell them that they should covet orchestral music rather than modern amenities.
There are other ways of measuring accomplishment, but they pale in importance to the basics: food, shelter, survival. When push comes to shove, nothing matters but the basics. If you're stranded on a desert island, what would you want? Technology, or art? Be honest! If you compare the contributions of science and art directly, the contribution of science is vital. The contribution of art is decorative and frivolous. It has value only in the sense that once you take care of truly important matters, you have the
luxury of considering such frivolous matters important.
Does Dr. Salk deserve recognition for developing a vaccine for Polio? I would define a "great cause" as almost anything that leads to the benefit of society as a whole.
By that definition,
laziness is a great cause, since it has contributed immeasurably to human society (running water, refridgeration, all forms of transportation, great swathes of technology in general, etc). Is laziness what you consider a Great Cause? You can play with the semantics if you like, but we both know that in the context of this thread, "Great Causes" was meant to refer to religious beliefs (remember that I was responding to someone who said that religion is good because it gives you something "bigger than yourself" to believe in and fight for).
