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SancheztheWhaler wrote:The answer here is of course no - I'm sure it would be for most people. However, there is a world of difference between trading a painting for a terrorist attack carried out by religous fundamentalists, and believing that the absence of the current crop of religious fundamentalists will ensure that new ones don't crop up.

Stop shifting the burden of proof, asshole. The fundies are causing real harm right now. You need better than "you can't ensure it won't happen" to substantiate your completely groundless claim that they would inevitably be replaced by identically dangerous new fundies in short order.

Talanth wrote:

Spacebeard wrote:Do you really think that the pleasure gained from viewing a painting is comparable to, say, three thousand people dying in a terrorist attack carried out by religious fundamentalists?

I agree. What I meen is that we are trying to balance a "few" thousand dying in a terrorist atack with a "few" million who see one indavidual painting. I interpreted the origional question as asking "which situation would create the greatest sum total of happyness". If interpreted in that way then we must sum up both sides and find which is greatest: A very large number of very small things (happyness by art) or a much smaller number of very large things (missery by fundimentalism).

So since you think that aesthetic pleasure can outweigh the ending of a human life, I take it you would approve of creating a snuff film and distributing it over the Internet? Brief aesthetic pleasure on the part of millions of people would outweigh the death of one person, right?

SancheztheWhaler wrote:Not all terrorism is motivated by religion - plenty of terrorists are nationalistic (the Basques, for example) or have political motivations (animal rights terrorism, environmental terrorism).

Yes, but you haven't shown that there will suddenly be more non-religious terrorists to make up for the absence of religious terrorists. Or that non-religious reasons to suppress contraception will arise, and so on.

Talanth wrote:

Spacebeard wrote:I enjoy Medieval & Renaissance artwork with religious iconography also, but I'm not going to claim that it's more aesthetically pleasing than, say, a portrait by Rembrandt or Hals, an Impressionist landscape, a Japanese ukiyo-e print, or the bust of Philip the Arab, all of which are secular and thus safe from destruction under the OP.

Each to their own as they say. I personly prefer medievil religiose art and almost any art done in the 17th century.

Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Velazquez all worked in the 17th century and their most famous works are secular portraits.

Darth Wong wrote:

Talanth wrote:I agree. What I meen is that we are trying to balance a "few" thousand dying in a terrorist atack with a "few" million who see one indavidual painting.

Objective harm vs subjective benefit. No contest.

Hmm, I see your point. But just out of curiosity would you feel the same if instead of it being religiose based art that was destroyed it was all Sci-fi and all porn?

Talanth wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:

Talanth wrote:I agree. What I meen is that we are trying to balance a "few" thousand dying in a terrorist atack with a "few" million who see one indavidual painting.

Objective harm vs subjective benefit. No contest.

Hmm, I see your point. But just out of curiosity would you feel the same if instead of it being religiose based art that was destroyed it was all Sci-fi and all porn?

Yes. We can always make more sci-fi and porn. We can't replace dead people. Honestly, is this really so hard to comprehend?

Darth Wong wrote:

Talanth wrote:

Darth Wong wrote: Objective harm vs subjective benefit. No contest.

Hmm, I see your point. But just out of curiosity would you feel the same if instead of it being religiose based art that was destroyed it was all Sci-fi and all porn?

Yes. We can always make more sci-fi and porn. We can't replace dead people. Honestly, is this really so hard to comprehend?

Sorry, I meant wipe out for some time to come. After all we've had thousands of years of art, but only decades of Sci-Fi, so we would have to level the playing field by reducing the Sci-Fi and porn by the same amount. As far as I can see this will spill over into the future as this amount of Sci-Fi hasn't been made yet. Also there's this slight disparity that it takes much longer to produce a portrait than an episode of Firefly, yet I'd see the amount of enjoyment to be approximately equal.

Talanth wrote:
Sorry, I meant wipe out for some time to come. After all we've had thousands of years of art, but only decades of Sci-Fi, so we would have to level the playing field by reducing the Sci-Fi and porn by the same amount. As far as I can see this will spill over into the future as this amount of Sci-Fi hasn't been made yet. Also there's this slight disparity that it takes much longer to produce a portrait than an episode of Firefly, yet I'd see the amount of enjoyment to be approximately equal.

Sci-Fi's been around for a long time, ever heard of Jules Verne?

*edit: or HG Wells?*

Cpl Kendall wrote: Sci-Fi's been around for a long time, ever heard of Jules Verne?

*edit: or HG Wells?*

Good point. Well like I said I do see his point and completely agree with it. I was just asking out of curiosity as I got the impresion that I liked religiose art a little more than Darth Wong.

Talanth wrote:Sorry, I meant wipe out for some time to come. After all we've had thousands of years of art, but only decades of Sci-Fi, so we would have to level the playing field by reducing the Sci-Fi and porn by the same amount. As far as I can see this will spill over into the future as this amount of Sci-Fi hasn't been made yet. Also there's this slight disparity that it takes much longer to produce a portrait than an episode of Firefly, yet I'd see the amount of enjoyment to be approximately equal.

You seem to be assuming that Darth Wong, and implicitly anyone else who voted "kill the fundies" in the OP, values religious artwork less than human lives only because he doesn't appreciate it, and that he would be unwilling to do away with that which he does appreciate.

I have no idea what he thinks of religious artwork, but I enjoy Medieval European art, and I would still exchange it for the abolition of fundamentalism. It's because the lives of real people have a greater value than personal appreciation of beauty, no matter how much subjective pleasure you personally take from that beauty.

Darth Wong wrote:

SancheztheWhaler wrote:The answer here is of course no - I'm sure it would be for most people. However, there is a world of difference between trading a painting for a terrorist attack carried out by religous fundamentalists, and believing that the absence of the current crop of religious fundamentalists will ensure that new ones don't crop up.

Stop shifting the burden of proof, asshole. The fundies are causing real harm right now. You need better than "you can't ensure it won't happen" to substantiate your completely groundless claim that they would inevitably be replaced by identically dangerous new fundies in short order.

There are really two answers here:

To the original question - do we murder ten/hundreds of millions of fundamentalist religionists and also eliminate all artwork my answer remains the same - No. If you're saying that wholesale murder on this scale is acceptable, then you have to explain why it's only acceptable for religious fanatics, but not for others who cause harm.

That's not a shifting of the burden - I'm asking you to justify murder on colossal scale, including many people who are considered "fundamentalist" but who have never and would never harm anyone.

To the watered down question - "can we just make fundamentalists stop being religious assholes without murdering them?" - sure, let's go ahead and do that. They'll stop being religious assholes, but if you seriously expect them to stop being assholes altogether you've got a screw loose.

SancheztheWhaler wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:

SancheztheWhaler wrote:The answer here is of course no - I'm sure it would be for most people. However, there is a world of difference between trading a painting for a terrorist attack carried out by religous fundamentalists, and believing that the absence of the current crop of religious fundamentalists will ensure that new ones don't crop up.

Stop shifting the burden of proof, asshole. The fundies are causing real harm right now. You need better than "you can't ensure it won't happen" to substantiate your completely groundless claim that they would inevitably be replaced by identically dangerous new fundies in short order.

There are really two answers here:

To the original question - do we murder ten/hundreds of millions of fundamentalist religionists and also eliminate all artwork my answer remains the same - No. If you're saying that wholesale murder on this scale is acceptable, then you have to explain why it's only acceptable for religious fanatics, but not for others who cause harm.

That's not a shifting of the burden - I'm asking you to justify murder on colossal scale, including many people who are considered "fundamentalist" but who have never and would never harm anyone.

To the watered down question - "can we just make fundamentalists stop being religious assholes without murdering them?" - sure, let's go ahead and do that. They'll stop being religious assholes, but if you seriously expect them to stop being assholes altogether you've got a screw loose.

If you seriously think that Mike or any of the other posters here voted for the ‘kill or fundies’ rather than the ‘convert them to normalcy’ option you are even stupider I than the quality of your recent posting would suggest and that was already pretty damn stupid.

Darth Wong wrote:

drachefly wrote:The purpose was to show that new forms of extremism can be generated ex nihilo, just feeding on ambient weak-minded folk... even when the old-school fundies were soaking almost all of them up.

And these new forms of extremism will be less ridiculous than the old ones, simply by virtue of being invented by people with more background knowledge about the way the universe works.

If you set out to create a new religion today, it would not be anywhere near as absurd as the Old Testament.

Is absurdity the relevant issue?

Here's a cynical but potentially realistic approach:
Consider a Durkadurkastani nationalist. Though he is himself pretty much ambivalent on the whole God idea, he can act the part. He starts a school teaching our present-day forms of Islamic fundamentalism, because it will be useful to his nationalistic goals.

Meanwhile, back in the US of A, some guy is thinking, "What's with this bible thing anyway? If it's even vaguely the word of God, why would God let it be corrupted? It must be totally true!" He gets a bunch of his friends with their poor critical thinking skills together, and there you go.

To wipe out fundamentalism, long-term, you need to eliminate both of these sources, long term, somehow. Universally instilling civics and critical thinking skills would be a start; but it wasn't mentioned in the OP.

SancheztheWhaler wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:

SancheztheWhaler wrote:The answer here is of course no - I'm sure it would be for most people. However, there is a world of difference between trading a painting for a terrorist attack carried out by religous fundamentalists, and believing that the absence of the current crop of religious fundamentalists will ensure that new ones don't crop up.

Stop shifting the burden of proof, asshole. The fundies are causing real harm right now. You need better than "you can't ensure it won't happen" to substantiate your completely groundless claim that they would inevitably be replaced by identically dangerous new fundies in short order.

There are really two answers here:

To the original question - do we murder ten/hundreds of millions of fundamentalist religionists and also eliminate all artwork my answer remains the same - No. If you're saying that wholesale murder on this scale is acceptable, then you have to explain why it's only acceptable for religious fanatics, but not for others who cause harm.

That's not a shifting of the burden - I'm asking you to justify murder on colossal scale, including many people who are considered "fundamentalist" but who have never and would never harm anyone.

To the watered down question - "can we just make fundamentalists stop being religious assholes without murdering them?" - sure, let's go ahead and do that. They'll stop being religious assholes, but if you seriously expect them to stop being assholes altogether you've got a screw loose.

In short, when cornered you resort to a massive strawman distortion of my position, by pretending that I must be opting for mass-murder rather than mass-conversion even though I have said no such thing. We have rules against those kinds of tactics, asshole. I suggest you either read them or prepare to get fucked by them.

drachefly wrote:Is absurdity the relevant issue?

It's one of the big ones. It tells you just how far divorced the religion is from reality, and the level of one's separation from reality is pretty strongly correlated to how dangerous one's beliefs are going to be.

Not all religions are equally destructive. Buddhism has never caused crusades.

Sofia wrote:All of Bach's work goes, just because I believe he said that all of his compositions were inspired by the glory of God.

Come on, now! How could every single piece he ever written been inspired by the glory of God? His inventions for the klavier were meant to be technical pieces to develop fingering techniques. Do you really believe out of the thousands of pieces Bach composed every single one was directly created for and influenced by God?

I don't know very much about Liszt, but if he said or believed something similar, all of his goes too.

Well Liszt was actually a priest. However, he wasn't inspired only by his faith in God to become the world's best pianist (and probably the best in all of history) and to compose music. In fact, he was inspired by Niccolo Paganini, who was the best violinist of his time, to become the equivalent piano virtuoso of his own era. It's also speculated that he was very much interested in becoming the greatest pianist to woo women similar to how Paganini did. He spent hours and hours a day just playing scales and his pieces were meant to fully exploit all of the piano's potential to produce rich, beautiful music which would also require a technical master to play proficiently. The man was a priest and he wasn't even inspired by the religion he preached to compose his music.

(I know, it's hard to tell).

Exactly my point. One cannot assume every single piece of music written by a composer was directly inspired by the "glory of God."

Another question I have to offer is this:

Would any performance of a work inspired by religion be wiped out? It can be argued that each performance of a work is by itself a different piece. So what if an atheist string quartet got together and played such a piece in their own interpretation of it? Would that be fair game to destroy or would it remain? Because then I would imagine most of classical music would remain.

Or what about transcriptions? Say, Liszt's piano transcriptions of six of Bach's preludes and fugues for organ. Or Liszt's variations on Bach's "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen"? Assume for this point the pieces by Bach in question were in fact religiously inspired. What then?

Kill the Fundies. Even if the option was something other than art (I personally don't enjoy it that much), and say Sci fi, I would still choose it. We can always make more sci fi, but we can't replace those people who suffer.

The argument that something else would just replace fundamentalism => its pointless is bullshit.

So what if something else replaces fundamentalism. We at least reduce the suffering caused by fundamentalism. This if it doesn't eliminate the suffering 100% therefore its worthless is a false dilemna.

Moreover that argument fails to take into account the time he takes for fundamentalism to arise to power. Using the example of Scientology (since it was bought up), in 50 years Scientology hasn't done anything as deadly as terrorist attacks or crusades. In short it will take a long time for fundamentalist to become a threat (assuming these fundies don't adopt a less aggressive religion like Buddhism for example). So we at least get years of reduced suffering because we eliminate one of the causes.

We don't need people with a fundamentalist mindset; we're talking about people who created a worldview in the midst of barbaric ignorance and have been holding onto it via brainwashing of subsequent generations.

And all these people who are trying to save art as though art and fundamentalism go hand in hand are being moronic; much of fundamentalism movements have tenets specifically rejecting much of art (Just show a hardcore Muslim some of the classic celebrated Christian religious-themed art or expose a Christian fundie to metal), and you'd be hard pressed to find a fundie that was so great an artist that it's perfectly okay to have allowed him to brainwash his kids as long as he made a pretty song. Two accomplishments of opposite social value do not cancel each other out.