Just a couple of thoughts....
I think it was John Stuart Mill who said that his freedom ended where the other fellow's nose begins. Well worth remembering. No-one in his/her right mind has tried to tell the devout in the USA that they are not free to practice their religion as they see fit (short perhaps of human sacrifice, genital mutilation and the like). The real debate is over the public space - what some perceive as the insistence by believers on appropriating those spaces to their own purposes, so that the non-believers who venture there do so if you will at the sufferance of those who have appropriated it.
Oddly, none of that bothers me very much. I grew up in a Jewish family living in an isolated NE town and went to a traditional NE school where religious observance (not mine, I can guarantee you) was the party line - Vespers once a week, Sunday morning services, etc., all compulsory. Right out of A Separate Peace. I could daydream through it. Probably gross insensitivity, but water off a duck's back.
In fairness, however, other people care a lot. This is a polyglot society, and its becoming more so. We better learn how to tolerate one another, and make our way day to day without arm-wrestling over whose version of Divine Truth hangs in our courthouses, or we'll wind up in a dark and lonely place.
On terrorism, of two minds (they have a lovely time talking to one another at 3 AM).
- Left brain: "Well, as horrendous as their behavior is, we need to understand what breeds this sort of behavior, besides sheer psychosis."
- Right brain: "Screw you, mushhead, line them up against the wall, let them say their prayers at warp sped, then fire."
Not necessarily inconsistent, unless you believe that all people outside the Judaeo-Christian culture are inherently evil. Zevele accurately points out that the dispossessed have a distressing tendency to breed much faster than those in the First World, and sooner or later, numbers take their toll. That's particularly so when their road to Nirvana is paved with bombs and self-immolation, which is not exactly a shared value for most of us.
Remember relative deprivation? Favorite theory of the early 60s - uneducated Afro day laborer sitting in a bar in Harlem, watching a TV show with a happy middle class white family in a suburban home with comforts he can't imagine. He might not be starving, but he's pissed. If that was a factor with TV in its early primitive stage, its exponential in an age of instant communications and globalized American culture, and doesn't get better when the viewer is starving as well as uneducated.
So all philosophical issues aside, it is in our enlightened self-interest to create a climate in which they can focus on their own well-being instead of killing the infidels. Ultimately, defusing their anger is a whole lot more effective than killing them - at least for the 80%|PLS|/- who are not truly nuts.
The other 20%? Take over, Mr. Right Brain. They're bad dudes. Don't fall into Mme de Stael's trap: "To understand everything is to forgive everything." Yes, its important to understand, because (Zevele again) knowledge is power, and in the long term is probably more effective than guns alone, but old Mr. Right Brain, the hairy ape, has a legitimate claim here too. If we don't finish off the truly whacked out ones who present an immediate threat, we'll deserve what we get. Doing this won't make it any easier to convert the rest of them, but being rational doesn't mean you have to be heedless, and I'm enough of a neo-Marxist to believe that economics eventually will control over just about every other societal driver. That includes for most of us religion, too.
In essence, a two-track process.
HTH
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Topic: A few off-topic thoughts on government (Read 18142 times)