[MD] Dawkins a Materialist (is watching?)

[Case]

[Case]
> What you do find is social democracies whether both are blended.

[Platt]
Well not in North Korea, China, Cuba or Stalinist Russia.

[Case]
None of those are social democracies. The Nicaraguans elected and unelected
Daniel Ortiz and last time I check Chavez was elected in Venezuela. But Marx
has influenced the governments of nearly every country in the western world.

[Platt]
I agree accusation is not enough, although any foreign group who threatens
us and demonstrates a clear and present danger to our way of life doesn't
qualify for due process of our law.

[Case]
Groups are not subject to due process in our system. They are covered by
civil law which has lower standards of proof on one hand but no jail time on
the other.

[Platt]
Agree. I think the influence of Christian ethics was expressed in the
Declaration that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable
rights that belong to us as individuals and cannot be taken away by
government because our Creator outranks government. This idea of individual
rights stemmed I believe from the Protestant reformation which promoted the
concept that individuals could relate directly to God with the necessity of
church intermediaries.

[Case]
I doubt it the founders were unaware of the difficulty in proclaiming God
the author of freedom. It was not the Lord who freed the colonies or the
slaves it was armies. Nor do I think that individual rights are exclusively
revered by Protestants. As Pirsig points out the founders were also heavily
influenced by the example of the Iroquois Nations.

This strikes me as an example of Dawkinseque memetics, where the colonial
populations brought memes from the old world to the new. These became to a
certain extent geographically isolated from the parent group and were
influenced and changed by the memes in the new environment.