> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Charlie Bell > Sent: Monday, August 04, 2008 5:42 PM > To: Killer Bs (David Brin et al) Discussion > Subject: Re: Religion kills > > When beliefs get > in the way of reason. And in that sense, Stalinist Russia, Nazi > Germany, Spain under the Inquistion, Maoist China, and the Balkan > conflicts are all the same thing. It's ideology.
Stalin and Mao, especially Mao, were about ideology. I've heard, and give some credence to the idea that Stalin used ideology as a tool, and that his USSR was steered more by his desire for power than by Marxist ideology. My reading and listening to folks who lived under Mao leads me to be believe that he was a Marxist ideology. I think that the Nazis were a cross between tribalism and ideology, since the ideology was nationalism and a nation was "one's people" and other people were enemies by their very blood. This broadens the concept of "people" from the narrow family based tribalism, but I think that there is still much akin. > "Atheism" is not an ideology, it's just a position of non-belief in > gods. Agreed. Just as theism is a position of belief in God or gods. >The one problem is that a large proportion of humanity seem to > be wired for religion, so if one decides they don't believe in God, > there's some room for other dangerous nonsense to fill the gap. In > Russia, that was Marx-Leninism and Lysenkoism, and very similar in > China. I think that, while I have quibbles with your first statement, Agreed with your second (while adding a parallel), we have our strongest differences here. I like reason; it allows me to connect the dots and is a tool to see where I contradict myself. But, reason, by itself, only allows one to do things like prove theorems from axioms. It can show that a set of axioms contain contradiction (e.g. when you can both prove A and ~A from a set of axioms). There are thousands of theories of physics out there, produced by hard working professional theoretical physicists. Most, I would say, are reasonable. They have internal consistency, and argue logically from A to B to C, etc. But, only one of many candidate can model observations: > As you were. I'm about to hop on my bike and ride to work. > > Charlie. > _______________________________________________ > http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
