O'Reilly - "Very Secret Plan to Diminish Christianity"

yes he was. btw he favored the OT.

Then why the comment about me passing judgment?

well MA you seem quick to jump having no knowledge of what you are attacking. Nietzsche was a 20th century genius (close to Camus in my mind).

dys,

Like I said, I made that comment based on what was in that quoted article.

So, since you think he was such a genius, do you feel this genius gives him license to belittle and demean anyone for anything?

Or do you just think it's okay to do it because you might agree with him?

Depends on how stupid the thing being belittled is.


Do you argue that we have no right to express a negative opinion strongly?

Like your comment about Islam being a natural place for paedophiles?

I thought that went way over the edge of reasonable ctriticism into bigotry and profound ignorance of historical context,. and was worse than belittling, eg.

dlowan,

Yes, it did go over the edge of reasonable criticism. I apologized for it. I apologized for it because I was totally in the wrong.

Being a victim of sexual abuse as a child I tend to be very emotional about those things. It is not an excuse. I still think that prophet committed rape by having sex with a nine year old child, whether she was married to him or not but I did go too far with the comment.

Well, I disagree with your entire religious philosophy, but you have grace.

I did not see the apology because I stopped reading the thread, since I did not want to react angrily to you.

Actually the notion of moral relativism is fixed. If you are of that mind, it is morality itself that is in the eye of the beholder.

I will not attempt to argue the government's position on torture, because, frankly, I don't know what it is at any given moment, but my own opinion on the subject is not formed by what the government position may or may not be.

I'm sure you think this to be quite wry, but for me it's incoherent.

But then you're Good Ole Dys, holy fool of the West.

Well, we agree on something.

In my opinion Nietzsche was a genius. It is also my opinion that he suffered from time to time from a fevered brain, and even in his most sane of moments tended towards the immoderate.

It is also my opinion that no one requires license to criticize a way of thought. If you reread his quote you will see that he did not belittle or demean any individual.

Just as you do not require license to criticize Nietzche. And you are certainly not required to have read the totality of his written works to criticize him for this one quote you did read.

After all, geniuses are more than capable of uttering idiotic comments. Take Dys for example.

finn

Where did you come by this set of notions you often state here regarding post-modernism and moral relativity? Real question. You have not been in the university environment for a long time (if I have that right) and so your notions won't be accumulated through personal contact. So I conclude you've been reading someone(s). Perhaps Bork, perhaps D'Sousa, perhaps someone else.

Could you tell me who you've received these notions from and why you grant them credence?

since MA hasn't responded, i'll slide in with a follow-up. since the quote characterizes Christianity as depraved, it follows that Christians are either depraved or clueless, does it not? assuming that conclusion is unsound--which i think it is--then the quote demeans all Christians, even if it did not enumerate individual Christians.

According to the same logic, you wouldnt be able to call any ideology, belief or conviction depraved, because there's always individuals who adhere to it and whom you'd then be belittling.

nimh, i disagree. national socialism was depraved, and everyone who supported it was either depraved or clueless, so it was not belittling them to call it depraved.

Is it OK to demean those who are clueless?

Bad ideas can have good followers.

The communism of Lenin and his apigones was a Very Bad Idea, and led to a most depraved state system, time and again; yet even thirty, fourty years after 1917, in ever new countries sincerely idealistic, good-willing people, of sometimes surprising intellect (including some of the greatest writers and intellectuals) got to subscribe to Marxism-Leninism at some point or other.

No-one would want to label all of them simply "depraved or clueless" with one broad brush, but it should still be free to call the ideology, the belief they all followed, depraved or clueless.

Ergo, by defining a belief or conviction for the depraved thing you hold it to be, you don't necessarily have to be demeaning each and every follower of it as deprived.

i don't know, honestly. if someone is truly clueless, chances are he or she may be oblivious to being demeaned. but the point can be resolved if we agree that an ideology can be characterized as either depraved or baseless. of course, we could no longer use a succinct adjective like depraved, unless there's a word that combines the meanings of depraved and baseless.

This thread ostensibly referred to religion, which is the form of human fantastical rumination most given to superstitious speculation, which speculation can and often is eventually asserted to be revealed truth and included in the religious canon.

Ideologies such as communism are attractive to strong intellects who wish to control the society of which they are a part. It is rare indeed that any significant portion of a population enthusiastically adhere to a political or economic ideology in the same numbers and to the same extent that members of a population will adhere to a religious creed. If a true intellectual, such as Ho Chi Mihn, adheres to a particular ideology, it is impossible to escape the very justifiable suspicion that such an individual is motivated by a desire to control the society of which they are a part. In religious establishments, it is the priesthood who aspire to such control--but that does not alter the fervent adherence of the true believer. In ideological establishments, those who aspire to hierarchical success, those with ambition, seem only to seek the power which derives from successful promotion in the ideological hierarchy.

Whether or not such an one were depraved is hardly a matter of any importance in the consideration of motives. Personally, i cannot accept a contention that ideological orthodoxy has anything like the appeal of religious orthodoxy, and i have for most of my adult life been convinced that ideologues are motivated by the "will to power." I once knew members (in particular, one married couple) of the Progressive Labor Party, arguably the most radically "leftist" group in American history. They didn't make the Attorney General's list, but that was an oversight. They had rejected the Communist Party of the United States in the late 1930s as insufficiently, militantly revolutionary, and as having irreparably strayed from pure Marxism. The married couple were from Newark, New Jersey--a rather dirty industrial town (dirty in the sense of the dirt of industry--no moral judgment there). Once the woman explained to me her vision of the freedom she would bring to the oppressed African-Americans of that city. I pointed out that those men and women very likely aspired to the nice cars, the comfortable houses, the good food and the many consumer goods that they saw others enjoying, and that they would in no wise willingly support her revolutionary program. Her response was, condensed, that they didn't know what was good for them, that she did, and it was her unwavering goal to bring the revolution to them, without regard to what they might want.

I don't buy comparisons of politico-economic ideology to religion.

I don't buy comparisons of politico-economic ideology to religion.
Even with double coupons on tuesdays?