Oh, ok. I have to stop heckling and take this seriously. DAMN!
First, I yield to no one on this list in my atheism. I have been an atheist longer than most of you have been alive. So there! My FATHER was an atheist, my mother was an agnostic. (For anybody on this list who might have been a child in the 40's, there was genre of jokes that circulated at the time called "Little Moron" jokes. One of my favorites was, "My father was a moron, my mother was a moron, and [placing the left index finger in the left ear and making a circle around the right ear with the right index finger and forefinger] I'm just a little pencil-sharpener-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r!" Now it suddenly occurs to me that most of the people on this list are too young to even know what a pencil is, let alone how a manual pencil sharpener works. So, ask your parents during your next visit to the retirement community. Second, Doug is asserting that religion is a gateway to intolerance (and other forms of evil) in just the same way that pot is said to be a gateway to heroin. It could be, for instance, that the sort of people who smoke pot are likely to be the sort of people who use heroin. Or it could be that almost everybody uses pot, so everybody who has used heroin has previously used pot. Third, Doug is intolerant of religion. I am led, thereby to wonder if software engineering is a gateway to intolerance. Hmmmmmm! I am going to have to think that one over. But I am still heckling. The deep question here is whether any human being can live without the kind of faith that religion represents . whether in fact, ANY human does live without such faith. I have never met a man fuller of unreasoned faith than Richard Dawkins. [He believes, after all, in The Gene.] So, given that we are all condemned to a certain sort of metaphysical craziness, the only interesting point is whether we should be allowed to get together and share our craziness with others. Is organized craziness the problem? So, as long as we are all lonely in our craziness, the world will be safe from intolerance? Certainly, organized craziness is more dangerous than solitary craziness. But on the other hand, organized sanity is more effective than solitary sanity. So perhaps "organization" is orthogonal. I think I have just proved that software engineers should not be allowed to organize. Perhaps I will leave it there. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 10:37 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: America and the Middle East: Murder in Libya | The Economist Well, as much as I respect your opinion, Dave, I could not possibly disagree more with you. Or at least with your opening sentence. While I choose not to state it as absolute fact, I would like to suggest that Religion *is* the problem. Human kind's ongoing attempts to cast one's existence into one or another particular narrow religious world-view where some or another deity is responsible for them, for their well being, for their punishment for failing to follow the tenents of their religion, and for their path to redemption; this is the problem. Again, just my opinion. I would not presume to be a dispenser of absolute truth. --Doug On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 8:20 AM, Prof David West <profw...@fastmail.fm> wrote: The problem is not with the Religion - it is with various interpretations of the religion. And it is a myth that there is a "majority" available to counteract or condemn the "minority" Take the obscene group of "Christians" that like to protest at military funerals claiming "the death is a good thing because it is God's punishment for tolerating gays." Or the group that financed the film at issue the last few days. (Or Mel Gibson's father's church.) .... Following Owen's argument we should see almost every other person who professes to be a Christian denounce this kind of base misinterpretation of their Religion. But it does not happen - because "they" are not "us" and so we do not have to explain, apologize or denounce. Only a few political and religious leaders will react - the Archbishop of Santa Fe, for example, stated that those people are not following the precepts of the Christian religion and should be ignored. Note: no one said they should be expelled, excommunicated, from Christianity or that Christians were in any way responsible - even though the extreme position is grounded in another, more mainstream interpretation of what the Bible may or may not say about homosexuality. Hussein Abbas' eloquent response is a personal example of exactly this kind of phenomenon. There is an exact parallel evident in the middle east today. Yesterday I heard two imams, the president of Egypt, and the president of Yemen state that Islam provided no excuse for the violence - that blasphemy is not an excuse for violence, even to the blasphemer. (Homenei's famous fatwa against Salman Rushdie was denounced by a majority of other imams.) Also heard were promises to seek out and punish the perpetrators (hard there and equally hard here because of the rule of law). In Pakistan, it is the imams that are denouncing the morons that apparently framed and wanted to put to death a young women with mental development issues, for blasphemy. Owen will never see the reaction he seeks - here, there, anywhere - because sectarianism in every religion means there is no "majority" that can react and that every sect sees themselves as apart from "those idiots over there" and therefore Not Responsible. Nevertheless, Individual leaders, religious and political, do and are currently doing exactly what Owen asks - denouncing, pointing out misinterpretations, apologizing (for faith and for country) for the miscreants, asking for understanding, and promising all possible corrective action/punishment. Is it our own insistence to treat a highly diverse group as a monolithic bloc the real root of the problems? Coupled, of course, with our unwillingness to truly examine and understand our own religion let alone that of someone else. dave west On Thu, Sep 13, 2012, at 09:25 PM, Hussein Abbass wrote: Owen While I am an IT professor, I am very backward in using blogs and almost incapable of expressing myself in emails or otherwise. Your question would be better discussed in a long session with lots of coffees and chocolates J I do not normally put my Moslim hat on; almost never because I see religion as a relationship between me and God that is no one else business. Therefore, my actions are my responsibilities and if I do something good I take the reward personally so why when I do something bad should my religion, or any dimension of my identity be blamed. But your question was interesting. Not just from complexity perspective, from many other dimensions that once more, writing long emails would not send the right message through. Sometimes the good Moslims (whatever this means and in whose eyes) do not respond simply because they do not agree with the premise. The premise of the religion as the centre for conflict. The premise that we should be blamed for our belief. The premise that I should spend my time justifying someone else actions simply because there is a perception that I and them share something in common because it is written in my passport or on a system somewhere. If I believe in doing good, I would like to invest my time in that, and not invest my time to defend bad when bad was not my action in the first place. So call it an ego-centric or whatever, this is I. In Islam, when we do good, we should not talk about it because we are doing it to fulfil a sacred commitment to God. In fact, there is a premise that you should hide the good you are doing to get a better reward from God. This is too complicated to explain in an email! Some of us just do not wish to be bothered to defend or discuss the bad because the time and resources to spend on doing good alone are very limited. The world is full of opportunities to do good, why should we spend the time to discuss the bad! Sometimes also if we wish to explain concepts properly, you would not do it properly in a simple email or a simple discussion. There are things that can take a long time to understand before we can use them to explain! If this sounds a weak argument, we have to dig down to the roots to see what defines weak and strong arguments; and that is a long discussion! If I want to use a complexity lens, the Egyptian reply was a choice they made on a Pareto curve. If someone seriously wishes to understand it, they will need to analyse in details the underlying axes for this Pareto curve, the sources of anti-correlation, and the interaction of the utility functions. Only then, they will see the complex dilemma setting at the roots of this reply as compared to a possibly artificial politically correct reply that some people expect. If the above is a starting point for a discussion, next time you visit Australia, drop by and we can attempt to resolve it all on a nice cup of coffee with nice dark chocolates J Kind regards Hussein From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Friday, 14 September 2012 3:01 AM To: Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Fwd: America and the Middle East: Murder in Libya | The Economist The Economist sent out their weekly email, which included a story on the Libya fiasco: http://goo.gl/0mfCW This reminded me of one of my possibly Politically Incorrect notions: Why don't the civilized muslim world attempt to counter this insanity on the part of their fundamentalists? At least some attempt to apologize for My Religion, The Bad Parts? God knows I do! We had an imam visit the cathedral in Santa Fe to discuss the simplicity and beauty of his religion. Some questions were asked about The Bad Parts, in a very civilized manor. The conversation was sane, polite, and certainly informative. What if the Vatican sent out a hit squad for all the similar anti-Christian movies or other inflammatory media? Or the Buddhists sent ninjas after non-believers? Or the Jews killed Dutch cartoonists? What I'm getting at is this: why *isn't* there a strong community of sane and vocal muslims at least trying to communicate to the rest of us? Please do understand that this is not a rant against religion, but more of a puzzled look at an insane situation. And Yes, I really wish we'd keep our nose out of other's affairs. I'm not trying to be a bigot. But I truly would like to grok this phenomenon. What am I missing? Good complexity question, I bet. -- Owen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- Doug Roberts drobe...@rti.org d...@parrot-farm.net http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell
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