Moral 'Absoloutism'....just my $0.02....

[dave123williams]

If you were an Incan priest living 1500 years ago, you probably felt that it was a moral obligation, and certainly a religious duty to cut the living human heart out of a sacrifice and chuck it down a flight of stairs.

In our society, that only happens to Republicans who cross Tom Delay.

My point is, things we find morally objectionable are framed by our point of view. The unwillingness to examine what other people believe, and contrast that examination against our own beliefs is how we learn not to kill people with whom we have little common ground.

It's kind of like...an alternative to warmongering, jingoism, and demagoguery. Understanding that different people have different moral standards might lead to crazy things like diplomacy.

It's no surprise to me, then, that our domestic moral absolutists have no problem killing people they don't understand, or more accurately, that they don't want to understand. They've just got everything all worked out, now don't they; right/wrong, good/evil - they just kind of know what's what, with the kind of bliss that can only be found in ignorance, and a faith that needs to be blind to the consequences of it's actions.

You'd never have guessed that this kind of crushing debt, a world-wide foreign-policy cluster fuck, keeping everything they can out of the realm of public accountability, and price-gouging at the pump could have been engineered by our nation's moral standard bearers...the Enron crowd.

</rant>

[fasttense]

1. Oh, never mind, I though your post said moral absolution.

I thought perhaps the new Pope was gong back to selling indulgences and I wanted to buy a get out of hell free card.

[rkc3]

2. Do you mind if I print 10,000 copies of this rant and drop them on my

on-laws? Between their rants on gay marriage, the homosexual agenda, and those god-damned furriners, I think they could use this to shake them up a bit.

[dave123williams]

5. Be my guest...that's what it's for....

[meg]

3. Great post

Well said.

[Warpy]

4. You've confused Incas with Aztecs.

The Incas thought it was a moral absolute to pour chicha into the most beautiful maiden in the village and toss her over a cliff after she passed out, an appeasement to the mountain gods who had been angry and causing earthquakes.

But you're absolutely right in that those moral absolutes and ours today are purely subjective. Good and evil have always been perceptually bound. After all, one component in Robert Blake's acquittal was an unspoken "She needed killing."

There have been millions of gods in human history, each one with omnipotence and his own set of moral absolutes in his own time. Just as those gods have faded away, so will these, along with their codes of moral conduct.

Absolutists always think they can kill an idea by killing the people who espouse it. They can't. It always comes back. Even their ideas always come back, as we're witnessing now in the fascist White HOuse.

(Jesus saves, Buddha recycles)