zombie84 said:
Tiptup I am aware of all the issue you are bringing up, if you read my original post my point was "if something you do harms no one, nor harms society, then why punish someone for it?", which is really as far as I wished that simplistic "live and let live" sentiment to be taken. You don't need to turn that into anything more than it is.
Tiptup I am aware of all the issue you are bringing up, if you read my original post my point was "if something you do harms no one, nor harms society, then why punish someone for it?", which is really as far as I wished that simplistic "live and let live" sentiment to be taken. You don't need to turn that into anything more than it is.
Well, for starters, I already knew you were starting with the idea of "harm" (even though you certainly didn't express that directly). However the part I had a problem with was near the end and separate from that:
zombie84 said:
Well, as an atheist I have to admit that it is quite infuriating to see the world constantly tearing itself apart in small and big ways over "religion." Even in domestic terms, you have things like a family ostasizing a member because they convert to "the wrong" religion or marry someone outside their faith, and its a real shame. I'm of the live-and-let-live philosophy, but organized religion often goes against this due to its inherant codification.
Well, as an atheist I have to admit that it is quite infuriating to see the world constantly tearing itself apart in small and big ways over "religion." Even in domestic terms, you have things like a family ostasizing a member because they convert to "the wrong" religion or marry someone outside their faith, and its a real shame. I'm of the live-and-let-live philosophy, but organized religion often goes against this due to its inherant codification.
You start by talking about bad things that infuriate you. You then talked about how you're of the live-and-let-live philosophy and thereby implied that you wouldn't do similar things over religion because of it. Lastly, you then finished that sentence by saying that religion supposedly doesn't live-and-let-live because of its "inherent codification." That last bit clearly communicated that inherent codification is basically bad to you because it "often" leads to the things you mentioned, and then simultaneously implied that a live-and-let-live philosophy was basically good because it would fundamentally avoid this.
You did not actually use harm as the reason your philosophy was good (which would not have been simplistic). Instead you appealed to the idea that your philosophy was good because it avoided "codification" (which is simplistic). By that point, even if you try to detail your philosophy with the fundamental idea of harm, you've already described "inherent codification" as fundamentally bad thing apart from that idea and therefore it doesn't apply. That's clearly illogical and too many people think that way in our society and I was just shocked to see you dropping a similar statement. I felt I needed to say something in reply and the second post was merely meant to fight the point further (I don't back down easily).
Apart from that though, I'm glad you've switched to using the idea of "harm" to explain why a "live-and-let-live" philosophy can be a good thing. I knew your mind was operating on that basis before, but now that you're specifically mentioning it, people can argue about what does harm and what does not.
In general, any religion that denies the value of personal freedom and our ability to believe what we want to believe, and argue for what we want to argue, is a false religion. People shouldn't even give it the time of day since, from my point of view (as a theist), disobedience on that level is only to be governed by God. While that can translate into gray areas (like "hurting" emotions in an argument) real harm is never justified.