Jerry Falwell: RIP
I'm impressed at the predictable giddiness and glee of some folks at the death of Reverand Jerry Falwell. First, he was a human like you and me, and his serial silliness and obnoxiousness shouldn't detract from the obvious fact that his death leaves in its wake grief for some people. That he was hateful and fostered hatefulness is, I think, no excuse to be hateful. Secondly, I think his entire career needs to be weighed fairly. Despite his introduction of political wedge issues as founder of the oxymorically named Moral Majority and his attack of first amendment and civil rights, I think in the hindsight of history he will be regarded as consequential. I don't think he so much as mobilized the evangelical religious right as embody and articulate their frustrations and grievances, giving new voice to millions of Americans living between Washington DC's beltway and Hollywood. I think Falwell was at his best in his stalwart support of Israel, albeit for apocalyptic reasons and in spite for residual anti-semitism, and also for his role in forcing Bakker's PTL Club into bankruptcy. And, although I saw him on the wrong side of issues after issues, I do give him points for the courage of his convictions.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Death, for all its ugliness, gives nobility and poignancy to life and to the departed. The democracy of the dead cannot help but to soften sharp differences, reminding us that for all of us the electrocardiogram's sine will someday flatten.
Some of us feel compelled to express our opinion that the world is a better place without a deluded, hateful bigot like Falwell.
And perhaps you are indeed correct. It may well indeed by that the world would be a better place in the absence of Falwell, bin Laden, Bush, and others. A few minutes ago, I just heard Christopher Hitchens on CNN contending that Falwell exacerbated Middle East tensions, probably resulting in the deaths of unknown numbers of people. Granting all that, I still say that it is unethical to crow over the death of any human-- not because of their evil-- but how it reflects on you-- not as an atheist but as a human. The joyousness I see on this thread is an exact mirror of the joyousness I saw from those very people that you despise when the untimely death of Madelyn O'Hare was revealed. That should tell you something about the strange brotherhood of those two groups of people.
I'm a victim of a religious upbringing myself, but I came to understand that fundamentalism and reality can't mix.
Sure, but have you really dispensed with fundamentalism and embraced reality when you characterize the totality of a man's existence in laundry list is of ad homs? And the irony is that it is the process of demonizing those people that you think haven't seen the light that energizes them. The Falwells and Coulters and other bigots need your hate and bigotry in the same way that fire needs air. And I suspect you also at some level are grateful for their hate and bigotry as well. It's a strange world when we choose to live irrationally.
I think the two scenarios are very different in that we are comparing the rants of delusional people to the rants of rational people.
My objection is two-fold. First, why rant? It seems to me that the best way to defeat intolerance is to consciously eschew emotionalism of any kind, which in itself is a kind of capitulation to the manipulators and no manifestation of rationality. The KKK of today is the merest fraction of the KKK of the '20s, and that was achieved not by confronting hate with hate as the haters on this thread seem to enjoy but with legislation, litigation, agitation, and confrontation within the marketplace of ideas-- not the marketplace of emotions.
Larry Flynt, who had ample reason to hate Falwell, I thought reflected his own values while at least giving a nod to Falwell's humanity-- which is more than most people here are willing to do. The bigger person always wins and it appears that Flynt was the bigger person in this case.
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_135185122.html
My second objection derives from one of the few superstitions I allow myself, perhaps embodied in the categorical imperative, the golden rule, the tao, karma, and other similar constructs. And that is it is both unethical and unwise to regard people living or dead as utterly and hopelesly corrupt and evil. In our culture of death where lives are expendable be it in foreign wars on within the walls of Texas jails, I prefer the presumption that humans as individuals matter and have merit irrespective of what they believe or did.
However, I don't think the teletubbies will miss Falwell.
Why are you so troubled by people continuing to express the disgust they feel for Jerry Falwell, simply because it is so soon after he died?
There is a section in Dante's Inferno where hypocritic ministers are burried ass-naked upside down, because their life was in contradiction to God's will. If there is a hell, I suspect that would be Falwell's fate. I think he caused tremendous damange, although his day had long passed. I cannot understand why McCain even thought it necessary to make nice with the man.
But to get back t your question: this is how I feel both as a pacifist and as a free speech absolutist and also one who like everyone else struggles with questions of ethics. It's a current event that slicely across a number of my fundamental beliefs, such as epistomolgy-- the difficulty in discerning truth from falsehood -- and applied ethics, which I relate absolutely to epistomology, in which perceiving and understanding is more than looking and seeing.
I actually encounted two situations yesterday that relate to the difficulty of figuring out the right course of action. A friend of my son in the middle school was involved in an incident that has caused him tremendous humiliation-- I won't get any more specific than that. I told my boy that this isn't the time to step away from him and that he also has an absolute obligation to contact the school psychologist if there is a continuing downward spiral in behavior and morale. Also, yesterday, after a band concert, we went with some of my boy's friends to In & Out Burger. Outside was a teenager asking for change so he could eat. This was an affluent area, and it seemed more than a bit weird to encounter a begger in that area. So we took off. But a block away, me and my wife had a change of heart, swung the car around, found the kid, went into the restaurant and bought him a meal. An ethical decision? Who knows? The skeptic in me says, no way.
But that also is life, where we are faced each day with a myriad of ethical dilemmas with ambiguous outcomes, where we in effect are our our own judge and jury acting on behalf of all of humanity. To me, ethics starts from the premise of autonomous choice-- that as we decide, so we are. To make the leap between principle and application, I rely fundamentally on my experience and common sense firstly, but also on writings that have influenced me deeply, such as parts of the Sermon on the Mount, Emerson's essay on Compensation, Kant's Categorical Imperative, and the xtian existentialists. To boil it all down, my core belief is that all truth starts from a place of doubt, that reason and faith is integral to ethics, but that there are limits to reason just as there are limits to faith.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls. Death, for all its ugliness, gives nobility and poignancy to life and to the departed. The democracy of the dead cannot help but to soften sharp differences, reminding us that for all of us the electrocardiogram's sine will someday flatten.
Some of us feel compelled to express our opinion that the world is a better place without a deluded, hateful bigot like Falwell.
And perhaps you are indeed correct. It may well indeed by that the world would be a better place in the absence of Falwell, bin Laden, Bush, and others. A few minutes ago, I just heard Christopher Hitchens on CNN contending that Falwell exacerbated Middle East tensions, probably resulting in the deaths of unknown numbers of people. Granting all that, I still say that it is unethical to crow over the death of any human-- not because of their evil-- but how it reflects on you-- not as an atheist but as a human. The joyousness I see on this thread is an exact mirror of the joyousness I saw from those very people that you despise when the untimely death of Madelyn O'Hare was revealed. That should tell you something about the strange brotherhood of those two groups of people.
I'm a victim of a religious upbringing myself, but I came to understand that fundamentalism and reality can't mix.
Sure, but have you really dispensed with fundamentalism and embraced reality when you characterize the totality of a man's existence in laundry list is of ad homs? And the irony is that it is the process of demonizing those people that you think haven't seen the light that energizes them. The Falwells and Coulters and other bigots need your hate and bigotry in the same way that fire needs air. And I suspect you also at some level are grateful for their hate and bigotry as well. It's a strange world when we choose to live irrationally.
I think the two scenarios are very different in that we are comparing the rants of delusional people to the rants of rational people.
My objection is two-fold. First, why rant? It seems to me that the best way to defeat intolerance is to consciously eschew emotionalism of any kind, which in itself is a kind of capitulation to the manipulators and no manifestation of rationality. The KKK of today is the merest fraction of the KKK of the '20s, and that was achieved not by confronting hate with hate as the haters on this thread seem to enjoy but with legislation, litigation, agitation, and confrontation within the marketplace of ideas-- not the marketplace of emotions.
Larry Flynt, who had ample reason to hate Falwell, I thought reflected his own values while at least giving a nod to Falwell's humanity-- which is more than most people here are willing to do. The bigger person always wins and it appears that Flynt was the bigger person in this case.
http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_135185122.html
My second objection derives from one of the few superstitions I allow myself, perhaps embodied in the categorical imperative, the golden rule, the tao, karma, and other similar constructs. And that is it is both unethical and unwise to regard people living or dead as utterly and hopelesly corrupt and evil. In our culture of death where lives are expendable be it in foreign wars on within the walls of Texas jails, I prefer the presumption that humans as individuals matter and have merit irrespective of what they believe or did.
However, I don't think the teletubbies will miss Falwell.
Why are you so troubled by people continuing to express the disgust they feel for Jerry Falwell, simply because it is so soon after he died?
There is a section in Dante's Inferno where hypocritic ministers are burried ass-naked upside down, because their life was in contradiction to God's will. If there is a hell, I suspect that would be Falwell's fate. I think he caused tremendous damange, although his day had long passed. I cannot understand why McCain even thought it necessary to make nice with the man.
But to get back t your question: this is how I feel both as a pacifist and as a free speech absolutist and also one who like everyone else struggles with questions of ethics. It's a current event that slicely across a number of my fundamental beliefs, such as epistomolgy-- the difficulty in discerning truth from falsehood -- and applied ethics, which I relate absolutely to epistomology, in which perceiving and understanding is more than looking and seeing.
I actually encounted two situations yesterday that relate to the difficulty of figuring out the right course of action. A friend of my son in the middle school was involved in an incident that has caused him tremendous humiliation-- I won't get any more specific than that. I told my boy that this isn't the time to step away from him and that he also has an absolute obligation to contact the school psychologist if there is a continuing downward spiral in behavior and morale. Also, yesterday, after a band concert, we went with some of my boy's friends to In & Out Burger. Outside was a teenager asking for change so he could eat. This was an affluent area, and it seemed more than a bit weird to encounter a begger in that area. So we took off. But a block away, me and my wife had a change of heart, swung the car around, found the kid, went into the restaurant and bought him a meal. An ethical decision? Who knows? The skeptic in me says, no way.
But that also is life, where we are faced each day with a myriad of ethical dilemmas with ambiguous outcomes, where we in effect are our our own judge and jury acting on behalf of all of humanity. To me, ethics starts from the premise of autonomous choice-- that as we decide, so we are. To make the leap between principle and application, I rely fundamentally on my experience and common sense firstly, but also on writings that have influenced me deeply, such as parts of the Sermon on the Mount, Emerson's essay on Compensation, Kant's Categorical Imperative, and the xtian existentialists. To boil it all down, my core belief is that all truth starts from a place of doubt, that reason and faith is integral to ethics, but that there are limits to reason just as there are limits to faith.
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