(March 19, 2016 at 10:04 am)little_monkey Wrote: There is one major difference you have omitted: in the West, those behaviors are outlawed, and those who perpetrate them are brought to justice; in the Islamic states, those behaviors are approved by the law, as those laws follow very closely to Sharia law. So you are comparing apples with oranges.
Hollywood is in the business of making money. The use of violence in those movies is understood that the audience is mature enough to know the difference between reality and fiction. There are exceptions as there are individuals who can't make that distinction, but we are not going to impose laws on movie makers just because a few don't have all of their brain screws properly fixed.
I am prone to errors like any human being, but in your case, you cannot admit that you believe in a crackpot theory, and therefore your mind is closed to any criticism.
There are billions of people who believe in one religion or another. But as I have defined those religions, they are all crackpot theories as they do not have an inbuilt mechanism for self correction. So whether one is converting to Islam, or any other religion, they are just moving from one crackpot theory to another. I just feel sorry for them to live a life of delusion.
You are talking about Sharia Law as if you are a scholar of it. I bet you do not even know the meaning of Sharia.
You are throwing lies of the crooks on purpose and that behaviour by no mean falls under the category of mistake because if literate person behaves like ignorant then that is a clear sign that he has no conscience.
You are talking about “inbuilt mechanism of self-correction” that mechanism is called conscience which is part of every person by nature.
Conscience is an original and natural power of the mind, common to all human beings which provide means of self-governance. It provides us the power to judge our own intentions and deeds critically and in condemnation without, or against, our will or deliberate intention. Through conscience one can judges motives virtuous or vicious. It is conscience that makes man a moral agent. Morals are not a matter of reason or a matter of sentiment.
Our moral capacities create the capacity for self-governance. Reason or conscience gives all individuals the ability to discover objective truths either about duty, or about the good, without external guidance through political authority.
Conscience depends not only on the ability to imagine consequences but on the capacity to mentally "talk to oneself."
However, “A conscience without God is like a court without a judge.”
Alphonse de Lamartine
The only purpose why people reject the existence of God is to consent rationalization of desirable acts by wilfully and systematically ignoring the conscience. Using suspicions and partial knowledge of one’s own faults, followers of their own desires avoid further inquiry by closing the eyes of their mind. This is how one can corrupt his/her own consciences wilfully. Lack of conscience makes people inner hypocrites who culpably pretend themselves to be the better persons than they are in actuality. Dead conscience leads to an inability to distinguish that which is morally good from that which is bad. Repeatedly violating one's conscience will slowly kills it, leaving people unable to tell good from bad.
“There was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That’s not all. He ended by saying that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognised as the inevitable, the most rational, even honourable outcome of his position.’”
Page 45 The Brothers Karamazov
Part 1, Book 2, Chapter 6 ("Why Is Such a Man Alive? ")
Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is how abortion can be defined as "choice," homosexuality must be proclaimed as "normal and healthy," requiring "acceptance," and evolution and global warming described as "established science." The bigger the lie, the greater the self-recrimination if exposed as such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience
However, the craziest intellectual act of all times is the rationalization of the idea that intelligible and predictable universe is the outcome of nothingness and all of its fine-tuned events are happening all by themselves, without any reason, and for nothing.
“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
As that unhappy poet A. E. Housman put it:
For Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will neither care nor know.
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
Page 133
River out of Eden
Richard Dawkins
Cultures without conscience are without morals. Such cultures have seen great miseries and they are vulnerable to more miseries. In such cultures rape and beating of women are everyday norms.
“If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: 'Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
