Phone Grey
Monday October 3, 2005 - 12:44PM EDT
Why is it that when "we are at war" certain people lose all reasonable thinking in relation to war. Their tagline and excuse for criticising or supporting anything is "we are at war". Take a look, you'll see it. It is the common calling card of Cindy Sheehan opponents. Which I still don't see how exactly to oppose someone like that beyond just ignoring them. War is not valid reasoning in itself. War needs reasoning itself to be "valid". Which is usually not good enough (except in the case of alien invasion and the civil war). It is freaking spooky to hear people use the phrase "we are at war" as reasoning for or against something.
I was just thinking about those who want to criticize war protestors who don't support the war. That is ridiculous to criticize those people. They pay taxes and last time I checked a stealth bomber ran about 2 billion dollars. Everyone supports the war whether they like it or not. The only way you support war is to keep your mouth shut and let it happen. It is bad enough as it is without people championing it.
The study of ethics is always interesting to me. Even more so than philosophy which it is a subset of. Mainly because I think, how can you codify a rarely understood human psyche into hard rules. How can you take something as ephemeral as emmotion and human interaction and create standards by which to live by. That's why I can't stand when people sometimes want to stand by their ethics so steadfastly. As if you can create a set of rules that apply to every situation. But I think that is what these ethicists search for. Some kind of order in chaos. I'm all for order but I feel like I'm just as accepting of chaos.
Religion is the same way. Humans trying to create order from chaos. I guess I'm just accepting of the chaotic base of things. When I say chaos I want to specify that I mean the unknown. The unknown to people. The infinite chaos I am fine with. I search for knowledge and order in things but am not bothered by the fact that I may never know all, the humans may never no all. That there is no definate goal or ending to things. Just because I don't know where the road is going to end doesn't mean I am going to make up where it ends or stop walking along the road.
This is how islam, judaism and christianity works. They define god as the unknowable thing, essentially that same thing I refer to when I talk about the unknown. But the trick is that they believe they know the unknowable and they call it faith. I call it wacko. Then of course there are the endless esoteric practices that abound that have nothing to do with those religions philosophical tennants but are merely tradition. I say, you can follow the core teachings of all three religions and not be considered part of them simply because you do not take part in their traditional practices. Which somehow has become what the religion is all about. Buddhism is kind of a different story. Buddhism originally wasn't really a traditional religion in the sense that we think of it today. It was more of a philosophical take on how to live life. The gods in Buddhism that exist today were not a part of it originally. In fact some may argue that Buddhism originally was athestic or agnostic. I don't know much but tidbits about many other religions so I won't venture into them. One thing that baffled me were the religions that treated women so poorly. It makes their message so weak when they have all these rules restricted half the people that are apart of it. This really only occurred to me when I studied the ancient history of Japan and China. You see that in ancient times women had just about equal standing with men in many aspects of life and that the weird rules regarding women came into effect later in time. Especially with confucianism. They had a target on women for some reason. Of course there is the whole adam and eve story which is ridiculous. And if I recall that story comes from folklore that came before it which didn't have anything to do with women as it implies. But I can't be sure, I could be wrong. This is why I get mad when people want to make the bible the centerpiece of study. Regardless of whether it is taught in a secular manner if you teach just the bible you are ignoring all the stuff that came before it from which it borrowed. Besides the fact that the bible is an imperfect record of history, you have some pretty serious translation issues that change things around through its various languages from its original language (which was ancient greek). You can't use the bible as a base because it is not a base. The base is the history of that area of the world before the bible. Teach that not the bible. Teach where the bible came from and maybe you wouldn't have so many wack jobs taking it word for word. I don't get how a single area of the world came to dominate religion (judaism, christianty and islam). Damn them. They are all part of the same ilk.
What would a more complete teaching of history do for the world? Maybe it's because of my lack of allegiance towards any group of people or ideas(except the eagles, I bleed green) but I don't understand the biased stilted history that we are taught everyday. Can anyone be objective? I guess this goes back to that question of subjective coinsciousness.