A (Useful?) Simplification
From: Joe Dees (joedees@addall.com)
Date: Thu Jan 03 2002 - 01:18:34 MST
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Let's say that there are a hundred people on an island (let's call it Spaceship Earth); the majority, say 85, eat meat and vegetables, but realizing that their numbers are growing and that latrine space is overtaking cattle range and farmland, a few are working on ways to get our eggs out of a tiny basket before we all die of overpopulation-induced pollution and starvation. Let's say that the other fifteen have sworn fealty to a murderous Thugee ideology, and the only people they will not kill are their own. What are the 85 to do?
1) Hunt down and convert, or, failing that, kill the 15 so that all may live their lives unendangered and those working on liberation may continue.
2) Join the 15 to avoid being murdered.
3) Blithely ignore the 15 and hope that one's own number does not come up.
4) Try to understand the killers as members of an alternative yet equally valid lifestyle and attempt constructive and nonjudgemental dialogue with them.
5) Assert that the 85 deserve such a fate because of real or imagined historical wrongs and await their fate with a sense that an incomprehensibele (or maybe comprehensible, but these would most likely convert) divine justice was being meted.
I stand squarely with alternative #1. I see Samantha as embracing alternatives #4 or #5 or perhaps a syncretism of the two.
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: Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:11:20 MST