[Peace-discuss] Wesley etc.

[Bob Illyes]

That is not exactly what I am saying, Phil. I almost always get
in trouble when I exercise poetic licence and speak or write tersely.

I know that fascism and bigotry are not the same. I know that
war and racism are not the the same. But there are deeply disturbing
connections between the causes of all of these things, so I sometimes
say that I have a lot of trouble telling the difference (and sometimes
I do).

Two millennia ago, when Jesus walked this earth, his core message
was that if we forgive each other, God would forgive us. Jesus
talked about good and evil all of the time, but he also said
"let him who is without sin cast the first stone".

This is a hard thing to internalize, that we should judge good and
evil but not judge each other. There is an inherent contradiction.
If we believe strongly in tolerance, for example, we will condemn
intolerance. But this too is a form of intolerance. So what are
we to do?

Bertand Russel wrote that when he was a young man, he found Aristotle's
idea of the golden mean in ethics to be boring. Later, he wrote, he
realized that the truth is not always interesting. Aristotle believed
that in most ethical matters it was the extremes that we should fear.

I'm working my way through a book on human rights at the moment (sorry,
but I can't think of the author's name). He points out that statements
of human rights or of ethics, such as the Bill of Rights or the Ten
Commandments, are inherently contradictory. He brings up as an example
the question of what should one do if honoring ones parents requires
that one should kill. There are no easy answers, no cookbook that one
can follow and be sure that one is right. I don't know what the right
answer is when dealing with folks who think there is an easy answer.

Bertrand Russel also wrote that any given proposition is either, true,
false or nonsense. I submit that it is the nonsense that is the biggest
problem. We can refute falsehood, but what to do with nonsense? It's
out there big time. It's almost all we hear from the government and
much of what we hear from the church. For evidence, our behavior is
Iraq is good enough.

Bob