Is dhw Safe??? (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Saturday, August 20, 2011, 19:13 (4844 days ago) @ David Turell

Our site owner lives somewhere in the land of the Britons, where I certainly hope he is far away from danger!
> 
> This problem is in the US as well as Britain. Laura Ingraham wrote a book, "The Pornification of America", commenting about the lack of religiousity, among lots of other issues. Humanists will claim that they are just as moral, and I know that to be true, from my friends among them. But humanists are a small group who do not influence many people. Here is a wonderful commentary by Rabbi Sacks. Britain's chief rabbi.
> 
> 
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903639404576516252066723110.html?KEYWORDS... a Brit might say, "Bullocks!" One thing I spent time studying when an atheist, was the claim that "without a God or a religion, law and order will disappear." Rearward-facing sentimentalists such as Ingraham or Sacks also forget that embedded in their own religious traditions, man has always directly rebelled against "God's morality." As Moses descended from the mount, he came upon the Golden Calf. -The only thing the Judeo-Christian ethic provides is fear. Fear that you will be punished in an afterlife. (There is no eternal hell in Judaism, but there IS Gehenna.) One could say in Jewish terms, they get punished an awful lot while they are alive. -But my point is this: In the United States, 85% of people profess Christianity as their religion. 2% call themselves atheists & agnostics. When you look at the statistics of incarceration rates, 85% of prisoners are Christian, and 0.5% are atheist/agnostic. What this demonstrates, is that religion has absolutely NOTHING to do with morality. The case of Sacks and Ingraham is immediately refuted. -The two central issues are that children need to be instilled with -1. Delayed Gratification
2. Empathy-One of these was directly covered by Sacks. What he's missing however is that it takes someone who is ultimately disciplined to instill those rules in the first place. But in my mind, the only universal truth that exists for man is that we cannot exist without each other. -The problem discussed is one Nietzsche identified: What does society do now that we have killed God? We have no punisher for the afterlife. There are living examples of those who have done perfectly well with nothing other than other people as their focus-->Look to the east.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"