If Only The Romans

[Anomalocaris]

[quote='Pickup_shonuff' pid='829390' dateline='1419653242']
When last I checked we are in the midst of our own struggle to keep those same xtian fuckwits from turning our country into a mindless theocracy. If you are asking me if I resent the Chinese looking to prevent that sort of a cancer from spreading the answer would be 'no.' Religion is about earthly power....not 'beliefs.'

That's very noble and all, but you're simply promoting the installation of a different authoritarian power. And you're not doing so out any deep concern for human liberty, for the "members of a rural Christian congregation in eastern China welded pieces of metal into a cross and hoisted it onto the top of a worship hall," as in, they didn't harm anybody or try to suppress others' rights as you're suggesting theirs should be.

Chinese think a government's ultimate justification is the facilitation of improvement in the practical, demonstrable wellbeing of its citizens in that life which everyone can see as existent, such as economic prosperity, more life choices, freedom of preventable diseases, hungers and anticipatable natural disasters. Christianity Through its promotion of an emphasis on a bogus afterlife rather than effective improvement of this life, undermines the ability of the government to be judged by the criteria any government should be judged by, and is thereby destructive of beneficial central power.

Basically, they don't think the promotion of afterlife at the expense of this one "harms nobody". They think it indirectly but profoundly harms everybody.

You can say in the interest of freedom of conscience, we have been told it is meritorious to act dumb and not dwell on second and third order effects. They think they have seen second and third order effects too often to ignore them.

[Mudhammam]

The Chinese government thinks a government's ultimate justification is the facilitation of improvement in the practical, demonstrable wellbeing of its citizens in that life which everyone can see as existent, such as economic prosperity, more life choices, freedom of preventable diseases, hungers and anticipatable natural disasters. Christianity Through its promotion of an emphasis on a bogus afterlife rather than effective improvement of this life, undermines the ability of the government to be judged by the criteria any government should be judged by, and is thereby destructive of beneficial central power.

Basically, they don't think the promotion of afterlife at the expense of this one "harms nobody". They think it indirectly but profoundly harms everybody.

You can say in the interest of freedom of conscience, we have been told it is meritorious to act dumb and not dwell on second and third order effects. They think they have seen second and third order effects too often to ignore them.

Nothing is more harmful than the oppression of free thought as every atheist ought to know.

[Anomalocaris]

The Chinese government thinks a government's ultimate justification is the facilitation of improvement in the practical, demonstrable wellbeing of its citizens in that life which everyone can see as existent, such as economic prosperity, more life choices, freedom of preventable diseases, hungers and anticipatable natural disasters. Christianity Through its promotion of an emphasis on a bogus afterlife rather than effective improvement of this life, undermines the ability of the government to be judged by the criteria any government should be judged by, and is thereby destructive of beneficial central power.

Basically, they don't think the promotion of afterlife at the expense of this one "harms nobody". They think it indirectly but profoundly harms everybody.

You can say in the interest of freedom of conscience, we have been told it is meritorious to act dumb and not dwell on second and third order effects. They think they have seen second and third order effects too often to ignore them.

Nothing is more harmful than the oppression of free thought as every atheist ought to know.

That is a mantra rather than a univerally empirically demonstrably fact. Atheists should base their views on demonstrability, not theory.

[Mudhammam]

That is a mantra rather than a univerally empirically demonstrably fact. Atheists should base their views on demonstrability, not theory.

I mean, I think it's common sense, with a few lessons from history, that it wouldn't be ideal to live under a government that bans books, loots homes, imprisons, tortures, and forcibly intervenes when the faithful simply wish to gather for the study and practice of their beliefs, beliefs that cannot be demonstrated to necessarily lead to more harm than the ridiculous policies I have just described.

[Minimalist]

That's very noble and all, but you're simply promoting the installation of a different authoritarian power. And obviously you cannot do so with any concern for human liberty. The "members of a rural Christian congregation in eastern China welded pieces of metal into a cross and hoisted it onto the top of a worship hall," as in, they didn't harm anybody or try to suppress others' rights as you're suggesting theirs should be.

You insist upon using your western thought patterns to try to pound the Chinese into the mould you insist they occupy. They do not see it that way and their history warns them of the dangers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion...-East.html

State hostility towards Christianity is particularly rife in China, where more Christians are imprisoned than in any other country in the world, according to the report.

It quotes Ma Hucheng, an advisor to the Chinese government, who claimed in an article last year that the US has backed the growth of the Protestant Church in China as a vehicle for political dissidence.

“Western powers, with America at their head, deliberately export Christianity to China and carry out all kinds of illegal evangelistic activities,” he wrote in the China Social Sciences Press.

“Their basic aim is to use Christianity to change the character of the regime...in China and overturn it,” he added.

In the 19th century the West...mainly the British...were quick to use missionaries to spread western propaganda in China backed up by military power. The Chinese have not forgotten this.

[Anomalocaris]

That is a mantra rather than a univerally empirically demonstrably fact. Atheists should base their views on demonstrability, not theory.

I mean, I think it's common sense, with a few lessons from history, that it wouldn't be ideal to live under a government that bans books, loots homes, imprisons, tortures, and forcibly intervenes when the faithful simply wish to gather for the study and practice of their beliefs, beliefs that cannot be demonstrated to necessarily lead to more harm than the ridiculous policies I have just described.

Common sense is often cultural, and almost always nothing more than a coarse set of heuristic rule s of thumb based on a limited, and biasedly chosen, set of experiences, and reasonably applicable only to a limited set of circumstances, but which intrinsically encourages the less thoughtful to regard them as both universal and fundamental.

We openly and commonly acknowledge only the most rudimentary exceptions to our rule of thumb - shouting fire in a crowded theater, probably because we have so little diversity of common experience. But in practice we often strongly discourage many forms of expression or conscience. But by culturally based habit we overlook our own inconsistency. The Germans based on experience of 1933-1945 deemed untrammeled freedom to advocate nazism, as well as some cults like Scientology, to menifestlygood not be a good idea. So they are open about more exceptions than we are, but politically we find it inexpedient to challenge them. The Chinese probably have more diverse range of well remembered collective continuous cultural and sociological experience than anyone else in the world today. They deem it not adviseable to tolerate any significant evangelizing apocalyptic cults. But we feel the fact they have their act disturbingly together threatening, and find it politically expedient to highlight the fact that they do not conform to how we would like to represent our own principles.

Mind you they have neither now, nor through most of their history, been hostile to all what we might call cults. But they clearly have had a distinct set of very painful experiences with evangelizing apaclyptic cults which drew their special attention. The last such apocalyptic cult that advocated a heavenly kingdom whose putative rules trumped those of the actual Civil authority attempting to run a real country on earth and which the central government failed to promptly suppresse ended up costing 40 million dead in China less than 160 years ago. Nor was that by any means a singular experience. They associate the failure to suppress similar such cults throughout history with subsequent failure of central authority, deadly civil war, failure of nationally run public works such as flood control and irrigation, and widespread famine and misery since about 280 AD.

I would not challenge their judgement based only on some contemporary political philosophical theory, especially when their judgement have appearently enabled them to, in defiance of our political philosophical theories, chalk up the single largest and fastest movement humanity out of poverty into modernity through all history.

[Mudhammam]

Common sense is often cultural, and almost always nothing more than a coarse set of heuristic rule s of thumb based on a limited, and biasedly chosen, set of experiences, and reasonably applicable only to a limited set of circumstances, but which intrinsically encourages the less thoughtful to regard them as both universal and fundamental.

What's that? A justification for any ethically and culturally inferior system of rule? Yeah, that's a nice abstraction about diverging traditions and contrasting forms of civilization, but I rather care to think about the well-being of actual people in the actual world.

We openly and commonly acknowledge only the most rudimentary exceptions to our rule of thumb - shouting fire in a crowded theater, probably because we have so little diversity of common experience. But in practice we often strongly discourage many forms of expression or conscience. But by culturally based habit we overlook our own inconsistency. The Germans based on experience of 1933-1945 deemed untrammeled freedom to advocate nazism, as well as some cults like Scientology, to menifestlygood not be a good idea. So they are open about more exceptions than we are, but politically we find it inexpedient to challenge them. The Chinese probably have more diverse range of well remembered collective continuous cultural and sociological experience than anyone else in the world today. They deem it not adviseable to tolerate any significant evangelizing apocalyptic cults. But we feel the fact they have their act disturbingly together threatening, and find it politically expedient to highlight the fact that they do not conform to how we would like to represent our own principles.

Mind you they have neither now, nor through most of their history, been hostile to all what we might call cults. But they clearly have had a distinct set of very painful experiences with evangelizing apaclyptic cults which drew their special attention. The last such apocalyptic cult that advocated a heavenly kingdom whose putative rules trumped those of the actual Civil authority attempting to run a real country on earth and which the central government failed to promptly suppresse ended up costing 40 million dead in China less than 160 years ago. Nor was that by any means a singular experience. They associate the failure to suppress similar such cults throughout history with subsequent failure of central authority, deadly civil war, failure of nationally run public works such as flood control and irrigation, and widespread famine and misery since about 280 AD.

I would not challenge their judgement based only on some contemporary political philosophical theory, especially when their judgement have appearently enabled them to, in defiance of our political philosophical theories, chalk up the single largest and fastest movement humanity out of poverty into modernity through all history.

So, if a government can ensure that everybody is employed, then it should also be able to discriminate what beliefs people are allowed to practice, even when those beliefs don't necessarily interfere with anyone else's well-being. This is a silly argument. I don't even know why I'm wasting time talking to someone that would have federal agents barge into people's private gatherings if their decorative ornaments do not adhere to official regulation, perhaps hauling a few to jail and confiscating their reading material. Someone has to be a quite dense to argue that such a scenario is conducive to human flourishing.

[ManMachine]

I mean minus being an authoritarian one-party state, and their record on human rights, China is ideal.

Do we consider China to have less of a moral compass because they are more open about their human rights abuses?

I would always trust a Chinese government to do what they say they will do, at least I know exactly how I'm being oppressed.

They may be Orwellian but I'd take that over Huxlian any day.

MM

[Thumpalumpacus]

I mean minus being an authoritarian one-party state, and their record on human rights, China is ideal.

Do we consider China to have less of a moral compass because they are more open about their human rights abuses?

I would always trust a Chinese government to do what they say they will do, at least I know exactly how I'm being oppressed.

They may be Orwellian but I'd take that over Huxlian any day.

MM

And you know this how? In order to judge, you'd need to know everything they've done vs everything they've admitted, and then make a direct comparison with us using the same data fields.

[Mudhammam]

And you know this how? In order to judge, you'd need to know everything they've done vs everything they've admitted, and then make a direct comparison with us using the same data fields.

The debate isn't who's better: us or them? It's what is a better ideal to strive for.