At 01:25 AM 4/3/00 -0400, Robert M. Owen wrote:
>Why do you suppose any of us worry in the least about
>what anyone else thinks about anything?
(de-lurking)
Your rhetorical question is powerful rhetoric, but it doesn't really make
much sense if taken at face value. If I were "ethnically Jewish" and
living in 1930's Germany, would I worry about whether other people were
thinking I was racially inferior, inherently evil, and barely human? Hell
yes, I would. Thought does have a strange tendency to affect (or effect)
action. I generally agree with you about the two kinds of people --
however, much more than wussy approval-seeking is at stake when we're
talking about religion in society. Some of my intellectual ancestors were
burned at the stake. Others were convicted of "crimes" that were not only
victimless, but physically impossible. In this, religious belief may not
have been sufficient, but to deny that it was a big-ass factor is, IMHO, to
take the libertarian thought/action distinction to a dangerously glib extreme.
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Ellis Wyatt
http://www.foothill.net/~wyattoil
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The Beyond outside us is indeed swept away, and the
great undertaking of the Enlightenment complete;
but the Beyond *inside* us has become a new heaven
and calls us to renewed heaven-storming.
--Max Stirner
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