(June 25, 2020 at 6:46 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: But statues don’t completely represent the values of that individual. No one looks at a statue Martin Luther King, Jr and thinks, ‘He was a great man. I’ll cheat on my wife so I can be just like him’, or at a statue of Michael Collins (the Irish rebel, not the astronaut) and says, ‘Golly, maybe I should emulate him by murdering a few cops.’
Anyone who gets their sense of history from statues is playing a mug’s game.
Boru
Maybe they won't think that because Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't promote infidelity but hid it as a vice, he promoted something else.
When it comes to Michael Collins I don't know much of what he represents, although I did watch that movie about him.
And when it comes to statues being toppled in US they are mostly of those who fought against the US so that they even stand is bizarre because they were the enemy. So one really has to ask themselves what kind of sympathy are they supposed to invoke? Is it that they were enemies of the US or was it because of their stance towards slavery? And people tried living with it but it doesn't work, it's a failed experiment.
When it comes to statues and should they even exist? I really don't care about them. A lot of people likes to grab toes of statues and make a wish.
If they should exist then perhaps they should portray scientists, like Jonas Salk, who were perhaps the real heroes and who don't ever get mentioned in daily lives.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
