X-Message-Number: 20188 Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 17:41:46 -0700 (PDT) From: Dani Kollin <> Subject: Mr. Dee's challenge - I give up what round Mr. Dee, Not to belabor the point but what the heck. You said, If you think that secular movements ALSO contain a specific irrational belief which facilitates atrocities, please describe that specific belief. And further that Eytan s points did not meet your criteria. With regards to Stalin and Hitler, I think Eytan did a pretty good job of describing those despots irrational beliefs. Though you seemed to have dismissed those out of hand. With regards to China it seems pretty obvious. There s a clearly irrational belief in community over individuality to the point of rendering a single individual s life meaningless. And hence a facilitation of atrocities that has resulted in millions of deaths. That those deaths are not a result of physical imperfections but rather simple inconvenience (boys earn more money) is beside the point. Dead is dead and murder is murder. That s an atrocity in my book. It s amazing to me how you manage to ignore that rather salient fact. And then you have the audacity to ask Do you honestly believe that raising a child destined to starve to death is really more moral? Hmmm than murdering her at birth? Uh, yeah. At least she s got a fighting chance if she s breathing (American and European adoption being one of them). And by the way my daughter s adopted. I shudder to think how she would have fared in your dystopic worldview. Re: Washington s views on religion, and speaking of shoddy scholarship, I took the liberty of visiting the site, earlyamerica.com, to which you directed me. Wahsington's farewell address was not a fraud as you claimed but rather a collaboration. A collaboration, I might ad that Washington ultimately had the final approval of. In fact this is what your site had to say about his farewell address: The result, rewritten again by Washington in a final version, and admittedly a collaborative effort, nonetheless embodies the thoughts, ideas and principles of the retiring president. The site then goes on to say that among other ideas, Washington's farewell address stresses the importance of religion and morality giving the following quote from the address: "Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? Re: Socrates' Euthyphro: I found this snippet you might be interested in. http://stripe.colorado.edu/~shields/Blackwell.Socrates.html As for his [Socrates ] other religious beliefs, it appears clear that like most of his contemporaries, he put faith in the oracle of Apollo at Delphi (see Plato, Apology 20e ff.; Xenophon, Apology 14), as well as in a number of other modes of divination (see Plato, Apology 33c; Xenophon, Apology 12; Memorabilia 1.1.9). He is also portrayed as somewhat passively accepting the mythical accounts of nature and natural phenomena. In Plato's Apology, for example, he dismisses Anaxagoras's view that the sun and moon are not gods as "absurd" (26d-e). Even when such accounts struck his intellectual contemporaries as unlikely, Socrates is shown to regard as vain and pointless the attempt to provide naturalistic explanations of the traditional myths - he says that those who do this reveal a "bumpkinish kind of wisdom" (Phaedrus 229e). He did have his doubts about myths portraying the gods as immoral, but even these he could not bring himself to deny outright (Euthyphro 6a-b). Oh and Mr. Dee since you were kind enough to suggest a children s book on secular morality for Eytan, I m taking the liberty of suggesting a children s book on Religious morality for you: So What Does God Have to Do With Who I Am? by Joey O'Connor By all means Mr. Dee, continue to live in your glass house. Eytan and I will cease the throwing of stones made out of inconvenient, or as you would say, non- applicable facts. Dani Kollin __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC & Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20188