[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters Hubris

[Robert Robinson]

The discussion about the Jews concerns me. The same identical politics is occurring under our noses today.  substitute the T word. The terrorists are coming! The terrorists are coming! The islamic fundies and the neo cons need to migrate to desert Island and work out their differences leaving the rest of us to work out the serious problems.

  If a few more folks in Washington don't wake up and correct the course of the ship of state. Our nation will land in the same garbage heap of history that the Soviet Union landed in in 1990 sooner than most people would believe.
   
  Maybe this event in MOQ inevitable anyway from an evolutionary point of view. The space program and Ice Cream cones is about all our nation has contributed to humanity recently anyway. On second thought even our space program has not been much to brag about for the last several decades.
   
  What concerns me is the usual floods, fires, droughts and earthquakes. The annual Tornado's and Hurricanes.  A Katrina scale disaster is brewing in my state, California, with the Bay Delta levee system unbeknownst to nearly everyone. Not to mention global warming. 
   
  So all the media talk and government preoccupation with the terrorists is just simple foolishness. Because what mother nation will inflict on our planet and nation in the next 50 years is virtually guaranteed to out weigh by many orders of magnitude anything that the "terrorists" can or will dream up to do to us.
   
  My apologizes for not adequately staying on topic.  These intellectual debates give me a stich in the side. I'm not an intellectual. Just getting old and bewildered. (20 years ago I used to be brilliant.)
   
  Just sick of the media infotainment and hubris. The public hasn't received any real nightly news for atleast 25 years.  So I've chosen to be uninformed, rather than misinformed. I avoid most media outlets, except the Internet as best I can. 
   
  That is why it is so easy for me to parade my ignorance without shame. Now I can fall off my soap box and relax. Sorry for the tirade.
   
  Robbie
  
Ben Golden <theplaidninja at hotmail.com> wrote:
  [Platt]
What do YOU feel is the reason behind the Inquisition, Pol Pot, the Indian 
Wars and the Holocaust? If it is not obedience to social patterns over 
intellectual patterns, what is it? Is it "atheism" and "theism"?

[Ben]
I don't think it's blind obedience and I also don't think it's theism or 
atheism. Mostly I blame bad thinking; in Germany the best minds came 
together and decided the Jews and others were evil and should be killed, 
which was the wrong conclusion. I blame politicians. I blame the 
electorate. I blame German academics and the German media. I blame the 
church for waiting too long and speaking too softly. Ditto for the 
internation community.

True, the holocaust could have been prevented by individuals who did not 
follow orders. But in addition to not following orders, they required good 
thinking; otherwise they suffer the fate of the soldier I mentioned in my 
last post. Furthermore, had Germany's leaders had the ability to think 
well, the tragedy would have been averted regardless of whether people ever 
blindly followed orders, since no immoral orders would have ever been 
issued.

[Platt]
Again, this is about historical patterns. Can you show me any instance, 
historically, where blind obedience to a social structure has never 
degenerated into immoral behavior?

[Ben]
Someone who blindly follows laws that prohibit murder and theft--be they 
American, Polish or Ancient Roman laws--will not degenerate into immoral 
behavior. Mr. T's advice "Don't do drugs, stay in school and drink milk", 
if followed blindly, will not lead to immorality. Blindly following 
professors at Princeton University won't lead to immoral behavior.

[Arlo]
The analogy is flawed. A soldier who would disobey an order "not to rape" 
would rape anyways. And, again, if you prefer an army where soldiers have to 
be ordered "not to rape", to one where they would disobey an order "to 
rape", I'm not sure what more I can say. Good men will disobey orders to 
behave immorally. Bad men will not obey an order to be moral... at least not 
for long.

[Ben]
This is where I see the conflict between social and biological patterns, 
which I mentioned in my first post. Every human has biological instincts 
that are checked by social instincts. The desire to rape is biological and 
not that uncommon. It's overcome by social telling you that if you do it, 
you'll go to jail and sometimes but not always further attacked by 
intellectual patterns telling you it's wrong. Where you talk about Good and 
Bad men, I prefer to think in terms of the relative strength of static 
patterns. A soldier who wants to rape peasant girls but doesn't because 
he's blindly following orders not to is a threat to no one so long as he 
continues to blindly follow that doctrine. This is an instance where 
blindly following a social pattern prevents immorality, rather than causing 
it.

[Arlo]
I think you mean I add that it is IMMORAL to drop an atom bomb or shoot a 
young girl. I'm not sure how far you side with Platt, since you've appeared 
to indicate America HAS given what you consider immoral orders in the past. 
If it does again, would you recommend our soldiers obey them? Platt's 
premise, when you get to it, evidenced by his point-by-point response here 
EVERY American item was "moral" and EVERY non-American item was "immoral" 
belies a belief that WHATEVER America does is moral.

[Ben]
I apologize for the typo in my post. I would not recommed American soldiers 
obey immoral orders, but I don't think Platt would either. It's not 
sufficient to say that Platt has historically supported American action; 
therefore he always will. I'm pretty sure this isn't his stance, though 
I'll let him speak for himself.

[Ben previously]
Consider for instance a young German soldier who does not blindly follow 
orders....

[Arlo]
The example you give is simply a social construction of blind obedience. In 
it, everyone around the person has transferred moral judgement to the state, 
and convince your soldier to do the same. If the soldier felt that his 
orders were immoral, he should have declined them. Tell me, what advice 
would YOU give to the german soldier who is ordered to drop a gas pellet on 
a room full of women, old men and children? Would you advise him to obey or 
disobey. Based on what? How would you explain to him his actions were 
"immoral", even though he was ordered to do it?

[Ben]
It doesn't like blind obedience to me. It looks like bad thinking. Blind 
obedience doesn't call for questioning your commander or your country. It 
doesn't call for reading books or considering empirical evidence. The 
Germans were not all blindly obedient; they were just stupid, unwise and 
wrong. Fixing the thinking fixes the problem. Ending blind obedience 
doesn't, unless you replace it with good thinking.

I don't actually think we're that far apart. You oppose blind obedience 
(zero thinking) by any party in a decision process. My emphasis is on more 
and higher quality thinking as a whole, so blind obedience of well-reasoned 
orders is fine. The only time I'd support blind obedience is in cases where 
I think that additional thinking by a given party leads to a worse overall 
decision, which I think is often the case in the military.

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