[MD] Dawkins a Materialist (is watching?)

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting Case <Case at iSpots.com>:

> [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.

That was my point. You said examples of pure communism were rare and that
today we find social democracies. I noted the exceptions.

> [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.

I wish you would tell that to those who want to give the group of terrorists
at Guantanamo the due process of our system. 

> [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.

I doubt about "heavily influenced." Old Ben Franklin may have said something
about the Iroquois, but I how much it influenced the others is highly debatable.

> 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. 

Well, since I never saw a meme and wouldn't know how to measure one if I did
I find them highly unscientific and thus, by your standards, probably nonexistent.

 




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