Mindchild decided to come and stir up trouble when he read Speechless saying:
gravedancer - you are part of the problem of the world.if we could all just respect everyones personal beliefs, the world would find peace.
religion does not cause war, hatred, etc. - it is people like you who think you 'know it all' and attempt to forcefully broadcast your shallow ideology upon others.
respect my beliefs and I will respect yours.
Hmmm, I'm wondering why so many people hang onto paradigms like this that are not only hard to do in real life but even worse, encourage the development of memes and mind viruses that make the world a much worse place. I have to say for the record I disagree completely with you Speechless.
My reasoning for this isn't so much an issue of "fairness" and the idea of sharing "equality" it is rather that I have a difficult time respecting dangerous and deleterious behavior by others.
If a criminal mobster has the belief that it is good and proper to go out and kill people who look at him the wrong way, our collective cultural values recoil at the thought of respecting this individual's beliefs. Indeed, for reasons of our own collective safety, we lockup and isolate such dangerous preditors from our society. When the radical belief systems behind the destruction caused on 9/11 emerged, they caused worldwide condemnation and for good reason. In reality, we don't always respect other people's beliefs.
I know I used extreme examples here but what about a more moderate approach to respecting the beliefs of others? Should we respect the beliefs of the Witnesses for example? Even here I disagree, even though I have less support in numbers. I think the end result of the Witness belief ideology is human misery, coupled with real deaths of many by suicide or complications from medical beliefs leading to death. Their religion is a killer. These people often break laws when it is in their own "belief" interests and even worse, they spread and propogate their vindictive and life negative beliefs as much as possible. True, they may not have any malicious intent to do so, but they symbolically are like the insane psychotic person who is dangerous to be around.
I think it not only okay to disrespect their belief but also to discredit it as much as possible. I'm not interested in "getting along with them." I want to see what they are doing stopped before they ruin more lives with their negative mind viruses.
Now if someone wants to belive in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, I don't get worked up as much as the side effects of these memes are much less poignant. Yet what a great shame it is to see many people blindly following religions all over the world who don't do much more for them than being a crutch to deal with reality.
Personally I would love to see a BELIEF TAX. You could have your freedom of choice to belive what you want but the more it subtracts from making the world a more liveable and life friendly place, the more you end up paying. If this happened, then the dubs would really end up going broke.
Hope this doesn't make you more speechless.
Skipper
