--- Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 19:32:35 -0700 (PDT), Gautam > Mukunda wrote > > You are > > twisting his statement into an excuse for inaction > - > > we do not know God's will, so we must do nothing. > > Are you willing to stop saying that, since it's not > true?
Well, Nick, when you provide _one single example_ of wanting to do something more meaningful than getting an indictment at the World Court(!), which is what your fabled Council of Churches plan adds up to, I'll stop saying it. Your vague pronouncements that you wanted to do something, while you strenuously attack all the somethings that might actually have _achieved_ anything, are less convincing than that would be. > > > That's exactly wrong. What Lincoln was saying is > > exactly the opposite of that point - he was > saying, we > > cannot know God's will, so we must do the best we > can > > given what we _do_ know. > > So we agree. But we seem to disagree about what is > the best we can do. No. Because "doing something" doesn't mean doing something that we know, before doing it, will have no effect whatsoever. It means doing something that might actually have an impact on the problem we're trying to solve. The other is magical thinking, as Dan has pointed out. > > > Lincoln contained multitudes, > > but none of those multitudes can plausibly be > enlisted > > in an argument that we should sit on our hands in > the > > face of great evil. > > Have you ever considered the fact that if I really > believed this poppycock, I > would speak rather differently about my dead nephew? > > Nick You can love him and still not support the cause for which he gave his life. My parents opposed the war and did everything short of threatening to disown me to stop me from volunteering to go. It didn't mean that they loved me, or, for that matter, freedom, any less. They just didn't want me to be at risk for it, however much I believed in the cause. My parents are not terribly susceptible to feeling that wishing makes things so, so they did recognize the trade-offs, though. I'm going to make one rather more delicate point, I think. Two of my best friends on this list are devout Christians. In Real Life, several of my best friends are devout Evangelicals, Orthodox Catholics, or even Fundamentalists. I have never felt uncomfortable with their way of explaining how their faith informs their beliefs about politics, even when that meant that we very strongly disagreed in our views on government policies. I, as a non-Christian, find President Bush's expressions of faith and how it informs his policies to be remarkably welcoming, in fact. But, to be blunt, the way in which you use faith - stripped, so far as I can tell, from rational analysis of means and ends - makes my skin crawl, which is one of the main reasons I think you often get such an emotional response from me. The conflation of all types of moral analysis with that that of your own particular religious principles is one thing - the second is the consistent failure to acknowledge that just having faith that something will happen is not a policy. God does not, so far as I can tell, intervene to make the government policies I want successful just because I believe in Him. The best I can do is support policies that history and political science and every other type of knowledge and analysis tell me might work and that are as ethical as I can make them, in the hope that, as Lincoln said, this puts me on His side. But arguing that I should - in this case - not go to war because God is opposed to war (maybe he is, but I think and pray that He is opposed to other things far more than He is to war) and therefore I should do other things (like your council of churches plan) that could work only if He directly intervenes on this earth in a way that He certainly didn't in the last fifty years for European Jews, or Guatemalans, or Cambodians, or Russians, or Chinese, or Rwandans, or Kosovars, or Bosnian Muslims - that, it seems to me, is arguing that your faith dictates specific policy in a way that I have never seen (for example) the President do. I can't really see how it's different, in fact, from saying we should do this because God told you that's what to do, and that's not an attitude that's healthy for democracy, or safe for those of us who are religious minorities in the world's most tolerant and diverse democracy. Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Plan great trips with Yahoo! Travel: Now over 17,000 guides! http://travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
