From the notebook.
Item! Faith
Met a person today (note: stop calling people “person,” use man, woman, etc.) who believes current fiscal crisis is caused by God removing blessings from country.
“They call it ‘tolerance,’ but if you look through history, all the Romans and everybody, all those big countries failed when they got totally decadent.”
I feel like I should be able to argue against that better, the realtionship between a permissive and decadent culture and the fall, but I can’t. The guy has a point. Fuck, I hate that.
Notes on blessing:
Assumptions–”blessing” actually exists, it can be counted in human terms, God existed
Can Thermodynamics I be applied to such things?
Of course not, that’s silly. But, assuming you could, how woul that effect the overall understanding of blessing? For instance:
The US has enjoyed a solid two and a half centuries(ish) of pretty impressive wealth. That is not really a disputable fact. Our per capita is still high, as well as our quality of life. America has been a pretty good example of equity and fairness, at least better than anywhere else. Those things, the independent wealth, civil liberties, etc., could be seen as “blessing.” However, most of our wealth and freedom comes at great cost to other people. The Indians lost their land to our farming, the populace of the Middle East has to put up with asshole dictators who are in power because (note: causation is bullshit) of the over representation
of US dollars in the oil market. Or straight up puppet governments. The Cold War years ruined a big chunk of the third world. So, was the pooling of blessing in the US causing draught in other regions?
In other words, was some version of Conservation of Mass/Energy at work?
>I feel like I should be able to argue against that better, the realtionship between a permissive and decadent culture and the fall, but I can’t. The guy has a point. Fuck, I hate that.
No no no! He’s committing at least two logical fallacies: ‘Is’ to ‘Ought’ and A Priori reasoning. In other words, he’s saying ‘Just because it was once like that, it is necessarily always like that. He’s also attributing the fall of the culture to ‘decadence’ (another fallacy not sure which). He has to demonstrate to you that it is decadence which caused the fall, not merely that it is consequent to it. For instance, it’s easy to envisage a scenario where the society’s tolerance was egalitarian, not decadent and allowed for exploitation (in fact, the Druids in Britain spring to mind – a highly religious, tolerant society of pacifists that was comprehensively smashed when they refused to fight the Romans). Also, he’s generalizing – how many cultures are in his sample? Does he include the Sumerians? The great African Nations? The Australian Aborigines? Shit man, you could trounce him with that one alone!
Plus, there’s all kinds of assumptions. What does he consider ‘decadence’? Why does he equate ‘tolerance’ with ‘decadence’ (they are manifestly not the same thing. How does he explain why there are no lasting religious countries of any great power? They all failed too! Everything falls apart eventually! He can’t show you a counter-example where religion worked for Chrissakes!!!
And anyway, he’s wrong. The failure of the Egyptian culture (which lasted some 3500 years or more) was due mostly to war and assimilation. Egypt remained ‘religious’ for all of its Dynasties. It didn’t fail through tolerance or decadence. There are many major cultures where this kind of thing happened. And The British Empire didn’t ‘fail through decadence’. It also was assimilated.
You should smack him over the head. Wrong wrong wrong.
Comment by anaglyph — August 7, 2008 @ 6:52 pm |
Yeah, I guess I didn’t make it very clear (this was taken verbatim from my notebook) that my inability to argue with him was not because he was right.
A goal of mine lately is to work inside the dimensions of someone else’s personal universe to make my points. It’s very hard, and part of the game is to not introduce new text. So basically, you have to argue against his statement inside the head of a reasonably intelligent American Christian. That is not easy. It’s very easy to argue with ideas like his when I have so much experience with differing cultures around the world, and obviously a fairly broad education on the past. To start throwing in Chinese Dynasties would throw him off of the track of reason, since my argument of such foreign facts would sound to him like a magical Jewish man in the sky does to me.
Comment by Casey — August 8, 2008 @ 4:42 pm |
Nevertheless, he opens himself up completely by making generalizations like “…all those big countries failed…” Show him one big country that failed due to religious oppression (there are plenty – they usually lead their people into war ‘In the Name of God’ and get slaughtered) and ask how that squares with his theory. No-one can argue “All the references within the bounds of my own argument show that I’m right”. The most he can do in that case is demonstrate they are right for him and him alone, and there is no other consequence of that. But that’s rationally bankrupt: I can say “There are fairies at the bottom of my garden – I’m the only one who can see them, though” but you would have every right in the world to call me on that. Especially if I tried to make a case for ‘other people not being able to see them’ as the root of all the world’s problems.
If you’re arguing inside the personal universe of a Christian, no matter how intelligent you will always come up against irrationality. Belief in a god or gods is inherently irrational. And anyway, you can use evidence to bolster your argument for Chinese Dynasties, one thing he can never do with his magical Jewish man in the sky.
Comment by anaglyph — August 8, 2008 @ 11:00 pm |