Been a while...
Very tired and a bit desolate tonight. Missing John, as usual, and so tired I could cry. Just exhausted and trying to get this art project done.
Gah. Tired and cranky. Need to sleep.
That, and I'm SO TIRED of listening to people bitch about how dumb this country is. How awful and horrible and how we're all just eeebil and stupid and every bad name in the book because we're conservatives.
In the past two days, I've seen rants that basically say any monotheistic religion is a monstronsity and that no matter what anyone says, they're pretty much evil.
I'm so tired of it. So tired of it all.
I guess it's only tolerance when you get to tolerate what you like?
posted by Soldier Grrrl @ 8:31 PM
3 Comments:
Yeah, I think it's great that you can be tolerant and give such good replies to people over at LJ who don't agree with you, but I am sure it gets tiresome after awhile. Maybe take a break from it for a bit? I hope your project goes well. God bless you!
What does conservative mean, anyway?
In engineering (which I try to do for a living), conservative means that you design something (with which you want to accomplish an objective) in such a way that you build in some margin if things don't quite work as expected, i.e., you design in reserves in case you run into bad surprises, so you don't have to take (unnecessarily) heroic desperate measures that push the materials and resources used beyond their design limits and make expenses and schedules explode and completely unpredictable. You also think about possible consequences before you act.
If there's anything that I would identify as cultural stupidity of this country (at least its leadership), it is the failure to be conservative. American business leaders want to be action heroes, no matter whether the action makes sense or not. (It does make some sense, because any conservative plans get disrupted immediately, and thus any alternatives to blind actionism get eliminated, and the only ones left to handle the situations are the crisis managers - of a crisis they created, or perpetuated, themselves.)
I'll withhold my judgment as to whether the country as a whole is stupid until I've seen conclusive evidence whether or not the leadership gets away with its blind actionism.
The true monsters, IMHO, don't rant.
Truly evil people are sweet talkers that convince you that something that is harmful for you but good for them is actually good for you, so you should do it even though it doesn't seem to make sense. Some form of religious authority helps (because you can counter suspicions like "but this doesn't make sense" with "your faith is not strong enough"), but it is not religion itself that is evil, only its use by evil, manipulative people.
If you try to avoid falling prey to such manipulative people, I think it helps to be particularly alert if someone starts talking about Gods and Generals, because military and religious chains of command are such useful devices for manipulators. Again, these forms of authority are not inherently evil, but extremely susceptible to use for evil (=manipulative) purposes.
In any case, monotheism can't be the property that determines evil.
The most evil monsters are those who incite others to do suicide attacks, and the two most prominent examples that come to my mind are Islamic extremists (monotheistic all right) and Velupillai Prabakharan ("religion is not a factor in his philosophy or ideology").
It's certainly a pity that polytheistic religions were/are generally much more bloody-minded than monotheistic ones.
Remind me: which are the monotheistic religions (aside from Stalinism, Nazisim and other forms of Socialism) that practice(d) human sacrifice?
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