RE: How many of you would punish religious people for being religious?
April 18, 2022 at 10:36 am
(This post was last modified: April 18, 2022 at 10:38 am by Angrboda.)
What in this case counts as punishing someone? Does withholding a like from their twitter post constitute punishing them? Does criticizing their ideas count as punishing them? Does calling them names constitute punishing them? Or is it only punishment by an authority that you're concerned with, i.e. taking away someone's rights? And does it matter whether or not they deserve said punishment?
It seems that there's a vast gray area here where some things are ethical, some things may not be ethical, and some things have no ethical significance at all. Someone called Bel a self-righteous tool. Bel complained that it was a contentless insult and therefore a form of punishment (ignoring the fact that it isn't contentless because Bel is in fact a self-righteous tool). That seems to be one of the gray areas. For some questions, that amount of opprobrium is not morally significant and so is an ethically defensible response to religion. If I were to deny religious people their freedom or right to own property, then that wouldn't necessarily be ethically defensible.
So unless and until Ahriman defines what he means by punishment, a lot of the significance of various answers will be unclear. This becomes fertile ground for equivocation.
It seems that there's a vast gray area here where some things are ethical, some things may not be ethical, and some things have no ethical significance at all. Someone called Bel a self-righteous tool. Bel complained that it was a contentless insult and therefore a form of punishment (ignoring the fact that it isn't contentless because Bel is in fact a self-righteous tool). That seems to be one of the gray areas. For some questions, that amount of opprobrium is not morally significant and so is an ethically defensible response to religion. If I were to deny religious people their freedom or right to own property, then that wouldn't necessarily be ethically defensible.
So unless and until Ahriman defines what he means by punishment, a lot of the significance of various answers will be unclear. This becomes fertile ground for equivocation.