jimboston wrote:Votanic wrote:Ha! Caught you, Jim.
You just now posted three times in row, only to hide my excellent response/retort to your pandering question, the one you pretended had only two possible answers.
However, incidentally, my actual answer would peace to the Middle East, if actually implemented.
btw, Ataturk, only the most phenomenal statesman ever.
… and how would you accomplish that?
Let’s say you are named “Captain of the Planet” and can make all the decisions related your Fantasy World of “Pal-Rael”.
Do you think either side will accept the “peace” you impose?
Even if I was Captain Planet, I know it wouldn't be easy, especially considering the millennia of 'bad blood' tha has gone down
Who was it who said,"Those who
remember history, are doomed to repeat it"?
I guess the biggest thing I would do differently is call people on all their religious/cultural bullshit.
Instead of 'freedom of religion', start making religion a crime: 'God is Fraud'. Matters of faith would be treated only as cheap hustles and confidence schemes.
If anything fictional is passed off to the public as fact, people would be prosecuted for it.
I mean why... even after all the endless exposure to movies, television, computer games, RPGs, fantasy and science fiction novels, comic books, etc, etc.; why do religious people act like making up a fictional, mythological being with super powers is an exceptional thing to do. Anyone, can imagine a magical being, and then have a set of spells, rules, laws, edicts, wahtever, come out of his/her/its mouth.
I'm reminded of that quote by Michel de Montaigne
“Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm or a flea and yet will create Gods by the dozen!”
The only difference is now, thanks to genetic engineering, we just about can make worms and fleas, but still, you get what he's saying.
I also don't think that "gods by the dozen" part lets monotheism off the hook, but I could see how somebody might play that angle...Maybe, as an exercise, every morning as soon as folks wake up, they could generate a new deity, and then at the end of the day, toss it out (like disposable contact lenses or paper plates).
On the next day, they would just make another one, if they still had a need or desire.
Okay, okay, I do
partly get their motivation. A lot of religious people like the temporal power social control con game of having an imaginary superfriend who likes you best ...
some of them even start really believing in it! A good number probably even particularly like the way it gives them an always-ready excuse to get into a self-rightous huff and start demanding and fighting about everything. Wars, crusades, inquisitions, fatwas, beatings, bombings, exorcisms, witch hunts, book burning (and book writing...). The list goes on and on.
