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xssve -> RE: Benevolent's Taxonomy of Atheism (3/16/2012 8:20:53 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BenevolentM
What xssve wrote in post 78 makes for some interesting background, but I fail to see how it is relevant to the discussion. The argument xssve is making strikes me as dislike as opposed to actual argument. Different religious concepts may have certain properties which may or may not be entirely agreeable, but what does that have to do with the price of rice in China? Must life be perfectly agreeable to you xssve? It would be nice if life were perfectly agreeable. It does not speak to legitimacy or illegitimacy. What you have told me xssve is if it is not utopian, it is not legitimate.
That is perceptive, I am a Utopianist, but like Adam Smith and the authors of the constitution, I'm a realistic one: human beings were not made for utopia, we're inherently self interested - fix everything we complain about and we'll just find new things to complain about.
But, there are Two ways to look at that, depending on your view of human nature: either humans are inherently assholes, and don't deserve to be treated any better - feudalism, or human beings are inherently good and just need to be taught how to act - socialism - trouble is, socialism usually turns out to be feudalism by any other name, because why?
Human beings are inherently self interested! It's the one thing you can't escape, and the only way to deal with a roiling morass of human ambitions and get anything but feudalism out of it, is to pit them against each other, force them to cooperate and advance their mutual self interests in order to satisfy their individual ambitions and self interest: checks and balances, the Three branches of government, the competitive market - anything else, you're just gonna get feudalism, happens every single time - with the possible exception of those backwards people you mentioned who are content to live in balance with nature (hunter-gatherer, or HG generalists).
But over and over again, history has demonstrated that those living in balance with nature and those living out of balance (expanding beyond their immediate needs), often have a difficult time coexisting, mainly because of... human ambition! In most cases, expressed as population expansion and ever increasing demands for development, marked by an ever increasing demand for primitive capital.
Anyway, leaving the HG generalist to their fate for a moment, in terms of expansionists, symbolically, you have mainly pastoral paternalism on one side, agrarian maternalism on the other: if you focus on economics in general - because the truth is, human beings are neither inherently good nor inherently bad, they're inherently adaptive and adapt to whatever situation they find themselves in - it's a curve, with some percentage always wanting to go back, and threatened by competition, get things to stop moving - improve their lot by cementing their advantage, herding, and another percentage on the other end of the curve, wanting to go forward and improve their lot by becoming better adapted, and expanding into new niches, cultivation.
The former have the short term advantage, because they tend to be those with the greatest economic advantages, but at a long term disadvantage because they become increasingly unable to adapt to change.
That's just one aspect of it, but the externalities here are myriad, pastoralism and agrarianism offer the illusion of complete value systems in and of themselves, and they are both in fact, fairly extensive and complex values systems - it's no accident that the conservative-liberal axis is frequently defined as a conflict between meat eaters and vegetarians, value systems are, in many respects, abstract extensions of diet.
The theological fine points you dismiss are expressions of deep fundamental differences in world view, that have profound social and political implications, politics taking place largely in an abstract social landscape, that nevertheless has repercussions in the ecosphere.
These value systems are comprehensive, they just aren't aren't "complete" because competition between them and change around them never stops. HG generalists are right in the middle, the synthesis nobody wants cause it ain't exactly easy street, and is being gradually crowded out by expansionism, which in both population and resources required to support that expanding population itself changes things, often radically - terraforming, which of course alters the ecoscape, even climate patterns.
At this point, we're just talking biology, and biology follows it's own patterns, and by extension, generates it's own value system, and in order for a species to avoid Malthusian corrections, up to and including extinction, it has to adapt to its environment without destroying it - that's the one thing we all have in common, the one thing that's in everybody's long term mutual self interest, but very inconvenient to short term development interests.
Hasn't been much of a problem till this century, we're headed for a saturation point in terms of population w/respect to the resources needed to sustain it, meaning the economics of expansionism are reaching their logical and biological limit.
I'm Utopianist to the extent that those Malthusian corrections are avoidable, we can live, and quite well, within our means indefinitely, but you gotta be able to see the big picture to do it.
And, back to those fine theological points, apocolyptics are gonna say fuck it, the worlds gonna end anyway, so take me Jesus!
Basically comes down to centripetalism and acentrism, for which those theological points are signifiers: the former says wait till Jesus comes and sorts it all out, the latter says Jesus is running late if he's coming at all, and we better figure this thing out ourselves.
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