by donkey 40 Replies latest jw friends
A couple of questions:
If you could travel back in time and ended up in Germany where Hitler was a 5 year old child and you had the opportunity to strangle him to death with your bare hands....would you do it?
If an animal species could be saved from extinction by killing one human - would you do it?
My answers: yes to both
Donkey
no and no
NO.
NO.
bebu
Hypothetical question Donkey. Even if we could go back and kill Hitler, maybe we would set off a chain of events that would even be worse. We may change history that we know it, to a point that we don't even exists!! Which leads us to another paradoxical dilemma.
Will
To me Hitler would not have been a problem if nobody have followed him !!!
So I don't think I should have kill every German who did - cause in this case I would have been responsible of a genocide ...
I ask these questions based upon an essay named "Gaps in the Mind" by Rihard Dawkins.
I the essay he challenges, IMO rightfully so, something called the "discontinuous mind", which most humans seem to have. For instance, he starts with a letter as follows:
Sir,
You appeal for money to save the gorillas. Very laudable, no doubt. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that there are thousands of human children suffering on the very same continent of Africa. There'll be time enough to worry about gorillas when we've taken care of every last one of the kiddies. Let's get our priorities right, please!
Dawkins says he is:
...only trying to point the finger at the automatic, unthinking nature of the speciesist double standard. To many people it is simply self-evident, without any discussion, that humans are entitled to special treatment
He then uses a second letter to make his point:
To see this, consider the following variant on the same letter:
Sir,
You appeal for money to save the gorillas. Very laudable, no doubt. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to you that there are thousands of aardvarks suffering on the very same continent of Africa. There'll be time enough to worry about gorillas when we've saved every last one of the aardvarks. Let's get our priorities right, please!
And he then asks the all important question:
This second letter could not fail to provoke the question: What's so special about aardvarks? A good question, and one to which we should require a satisfactory answer before we took the letter seriously. Yet the first letter, I suggest, would not for most people provoke the equivalent question--What's so special about humans? As I said, I don't deny that this question, unlike the aardvark question, very probably has a powerful answer. All that I am criticising is an unthinking failure to realise in the case of humans that the question even arises
For anyone interested the essay can be found at http://articles.animalconcerns.org/ar-voices/archive/mind_gap.html
As someone who has been deceived by religion into believing in an imaginary friend known as "Jehovah" or "God", I realized that I had to learn the truth about not only my feelings and what I believed but I wanted to learn the real truth about the world around us because I could not understand why people who had never been ensnared by the Witnesses could believe so many things in common with the Witnesses. (The only real differences I could see is that the Witnesses are less hypocrticial and they actually try to follow and live in accordance with their beliefs.)
Now I am no JW apologist - so please don't misunderstand me. In short one of the key factors that made me start to examine evolution was the advancement in DNA mapping due to the events in 2000 with a scientist known as Craig Venter and his achievements in mapping the human genomic code (I have subsequently grown to have a whole lot less respect for Mr. Venter BTW). To cut the story even shorter once we appreciate that all living things share the same DNA we then start to cross over into the "moral" issues such as those posed by Dawkins in the start of this post.
My own views did full 180 degree swing on abortion thanks to DNA arguments and the essay by Carl Sagan, as I have witten previously.
So can you accept the fact that humans and animals all share the same DNA? It is a proven fact. If so what is so special aboiut humans?
Donkey - who knows asses and humans have so much in common.
no and no
must be something wrong with me...
Hitler would not have been a problem if nobody have followed him !!!Agreed...maybe go back and convince the German people how much of a loony he was...but then again you never now what that would have led to. As for the extinction of any one animal...civilization to a certain extent is responsible as a whole, not just any one person IMHO. With the growing planet population and animals getting pushed out of their natural habitats, it is something that was inevitable to happen. Unfortunately, I think that when I'm older and have grandkids someday, I know that animals that are still alive today won't be around when they are growing up. Sad to think about.
No and no.
must be something wrong with me...
The thought occurred to me. It's possible to over-study a matter, to philosophize ad infinitum, to get so deep that we miss the simple crux of an issue. Is human DNA identical to aardvark DNA? I don't know and don't think I'll ever care. What I *do* know is that humans and aardvarks are vastly different kinds of beings, their "identical" DNA notwithstanding. Given the choice of pushing either a human or an aardvark off a cliff, the decision would be made in an instant without a second's refection
