Albert Cipriani

Dear Miss Piggy,
You say: You sound patronizing to hold up as a standard Europe’s lack of standards. How can I care that where you live people don’t care much about religion? One cannot care about what others don't care about.

And what you guys don’t care about speaks starkly about how uncaring (even on a humanistic non-religious basis) you are. For Europeans as a whole also did not care and still do not care about liberating children from Saddam’s prisons and prisoners from Saddam’s meat hooks and women from thugs who cut their tongues out for waving to American troops. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

poului

Clearly the divinely inspired unquestionably moral and correct American is here to save the universe from the perils of uncertainty......

wade-w

Keep it civil, people.

Miss Piggy

Hmm, maybe I was unclear in my previous posting. I meant that one should not force people into any religion, if they are not interested. Some people want to have a religion, some people don't. I didn't mean that all countries should become as non-religious as many European countries.

I don't think this thread is a suitable place to discuss Iraqi matters.

lpetrich

(Miss Piggy on many Europeans not caring much about religion...)
Albert Cipriani:
You sound patronizing to hold up as a standard Europe?s lack of standards. ...

How is "lack of religion" equivalent to "lack of standards"?

(AC on Europeans not wanting to overthrow Saddam's eeeeeeevil regime...)

Because they don't feel that there is a big enough casus belli -- especially as many other nasty regimes are considered very tolerable by both US and European leaderships.

Like Saudi Arabia's.

That nation is ruled by a corrupt and hypocritical royal family that has allowed the clergy to run a quasi-theocracy. One that was the model for the Taliban.

And as to their treatment of women -- consider the students of some girls' school who were locked inside and burned to death because they were not covered up enough to leave the building.

And women have to be entirely covered up in public, they are to be segregated from men, and they are not allowed to drive cars. That's what's considered "Family Values" there.

The Saudi press is rather jingoistically anti-US and anti-Israel; Saudis also export militant Wahhabism, their very puritan and fundie Muslim sect.

Of course, what good is law without enforcement? The Saudi religious authorities have some nasty "religious police" for enforcing their laws.

Something like 15 of the 19 9/11/2001 kamikaze hijackers had been Saudis; Osama bin Laden is a Saudi -- one wonders what's wrong with those guys.

Religious freedom? In Saudi Arabia, you can practice any religion you want, as long as it is Islam.

Miss Piggy

Good question. In Europe crime rates are generally lower than in the U.S.

And the Netherlands, one of the most secular and liberal countries in the world, has the lowest or almost-lowest rate of abortions.

Radorth

Do move there then, unless you think Conner was murdered along with Laci.

Rad

Albert Cipriani

Dear Miss Piggy,
Standards are either based upon man ("the measurer of all things") or upon God. By "God" I mean any non-man source, i.e. a myth or holy book.

I submit to you that standards based upon man are standards in name only for they will slip and slide as man slips and slides. Such standards are more properly conceived of as reflections, as art is a reflection, of mankind’s current fixations.

Standards, to be worthy of their name, are necessarily based upon some source other than ourselves, for we ought to be the object of standards not their subject. This is as obvious as the fact that a cause cannot be its effect. Since standards are the means of calibrating human behavior, human behavior cannot be the source of those standards.

But in your world, they are. Your "standards" of right and wrong reflect what you yourselves feel is right and wrong. Hence, they are but a projection of your inner selves, a form of self-aggrandizement. Thus, you can never fail to live up to your own standards. Rather, only others who don’t share them can.

Your standards aren’t the north star guiding the course of your life. Rather, your life is a motor boat leaving by its passing a frothy confusion of standards in its wake – a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing. – Sincerely, Albert the Traditional Catholic

emotional

I agree this is positive. My own beliefs are not tied to any particular religion. I don't count any book as "divine revelation".



For deism to be successful as a religion it needs an all-encompassing theory about where we come from, why we are here and where we are going. I haven't found that in the standard deist literature.

I've been to that site. Rather a low-key site, as sites go.

tk

But how do you "know" your "holy book" is indeed written by a non-man source? Ultimately, it's only because a man told you so! But why should you assume that the man was speaking the truth?

The only provably non-man source is Mother Nature, and She is largely silent on the topic of right and wrong.

So are Christian standards any better? The Bible says, "Thou shalt not kill". Not "Thou shalt not kill without justification", or "Thou shalt not kill except in self-defence", or anything of that sort. Yet killing people is exactly what the US soldiers were doing in Iraq -- as if the evils of Saddam somehow `justifies' the killings, even if the prohibition against killing is absolute, unjustifiable. Who is not living up to standards?