[Peace-discuss] Faith and fanaticism

[C. G. Estabrook]

Read history critically.  Even comforting illusions should yield to facts.  The
world is everything that is the case; it does not depend on how we think about
it.  The maxim "One of the tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory 
by a brutal gang of facts," ascribed to various people, perhaps originates with 
La Rochefoucauld.

Human are just those animals who take up the world in language, and all language 
is ironic -- it approaches its object asymptotically.  But the naturalistic 
fallacy is in fact not a fallacy.  The fact/value distinction doesn't work.

So a reference to "Clinton-Bush-Obama war crimes" in SW Asia is as much a matter 
of fact as similar references to "Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war crimes" in SE Asia 
or "Hitler-Goering-Himmler war crimes" in Russia, even though the first -- with 
only a million or so people dead -- has not yet reached the levels of 
destructiveness of the other two. --CGE


LAURIE SOLOMON wrote:
>> A study in displacement: liberals, their principles revealed as a Potemkin
>> village and their heroes unmasked as con-men, are reduced to the 
>> fundamental article of their faith -- how nasty religion is.
> 
> This not just true of liberals but also applies to progressives and other 
> leftists as well as those on the right. In point of fact, it probably applies
> to everyone but you and me.  And frequently, I am not sure about thee.
> Moreover, the article of faith is not always religion; sometimes it is class
> struggle and/or imperialism. None of us can empirically prove the art5icles
> of faith that we assume as the bedrock of our worldviews without engaging in
> a self-fulfilling prophesy in which we have to use the self-same assumptions
> to define what is evidence and what is not, what comprises proof and what
> does not, and when something is proven and when it is not.
> 
>> Meanwhile, in the real world, the Clinton-Bush-Obama war crimes are not a 
>> result of religion but of the long-standing (and rational if vicious) US
>> policy of controlling Mideast energy.  And the resistance to the
>> generation-long assault -- driven into religious institutions after the
>> suppression of its secular forms -- commits crimes of its own in a struggle
>> generally just, for reasons that are primarily political, not religious.
> 
> References to the "Clinton-Bush-Obama war crimes" are general, vague, and 
> ambiguous since you are not referring exclusively to personal war crimes 
> committed by those persons but to those committed by and under their 
> administrations by all those who may be acting on behalf of the 
> administrations or who in performing their duties with respect to those 
> administrations committed personal war crimes in the name of some implied 
> policy but for very personal reasons, which may be religious.  Many 
> individual actors working in and under an administration and the auspices of 
> its policies could very well "kill a Commie for Christ" so to speak without 
> any motivation apart from a personal hatred or belief.
> 
> Moreover, there is nothing to say that religions cannot be secular (they just
> cannot be profane as opposed to sacred) and that the political cannot become
> a religion in its own right. What distinguishes a political ideology from a
> religious one, political policies and practices from religious policies and
> practices, etc.?  You are employing a very narrow and traditional distinction
> between the two; any narrower and political would be restricted to partisan
> party politics as the notion has come to be used in the US as opposed to
> governmental.  Political is a much broader notion than you suggests; we often
> talk of bureaucratic politics, academic politics, family politics, electoral
> politics, legislative politics,  political correctness, etc.
> 
> -----Original Message----- From: peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net 
> [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On Behalf Of C. G. 
> Estabrook Sent: Friday, December 19, 2008 9:58 AM To: David Green Cc: Peace
> Discuss Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Faith and fanaticism
> 
> A study in displacement: liberals, their principles revealed as a Potemkin 
> village and their heroes unmasked as con-men, are reduced to the fundamental 
> article of their faith -- how nasty religion is.
> 
> Meanwhile, in the real world, the Clinton-Bush-Obama war crimes are not a 
> result of religion but of the long-standing (and rational if vicious) US
> policy of controlling Mideast energy.  And the resistance to the
> generation-long assault -- driven into religious institutions after the
> suppression of its secular forms -- commits crimes of its own in a struggle
> generally just, for reasons that are primarily political, not religious.
> --CGE
> 
> 
> David Green wrote:
>> "A serious conversation about faith and how it works, should have become 
>> one of the leading topics of our national conversation."
>> 
>> A serious conversation about not having serious conversations, and why they
>> don't work, should have become one of the leading topics of our national
>> conversation.