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 | Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 8:25:55 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: C Andrew
E-mail: ca4papen(at)mindspring.com
Hi all,
Was I just inattentive or was there no Objectivst Roundup this week? |
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| Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 8:32:42 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
I've glanced at William Schultz's transcribed discussion with "Humanist," but I don't feel I have enough time at present to read it thoroughly and comment on it, so I've stayed out of that conversation. But Dan G.'s posts on it brought up a topic that I have some thoughts on, and one that I saw in the original exchange: The question of whether it's in one's interest to coerce other people. I run into this in discussions of Objectivism, in two different forms: the claim that if you advocate self-interest you must be in favor of abusing and exploiting other people, because selfishness means disregard for other people's rights and freedom; and the claim that a civilized society must deny people the freedom of choice that Objectivists favor, because it's more to our interest to have government policies that deny individual rights in favor of collective action. It seems odd that both views are widespread! If they proceed from an underlying assumption, it would seem to be that coercion by individuals pursuing individual self-interest is bad and must be forbidden to protect people's rights, but coercion by government is good and must be allowed to overrule individual rights.
In any case, many people seem to get that Rand opposed government or the collective denying individual rights, but think that she must therefore have been in favor of individuals denying individual rights instead. The Objectivist position that it really is not in one's self-interest to violate others' rights . . . which I have become convinced is perfectly true . . . is utterly beyond many people's imagining. This position in fact has an old ancestry in philosophy, as "the harmony of rightly understood interests"; aspects of this idea can be seen in Plato's story of the Ring of Gyges and in Spinoza's assertion that nothing is so useful to a rational being as another rational being, and that therefore it's rational to leave others free to act rationally. But I think most people, if they know of those ideas at all, think they're of only antiquarian interest.
More in a second post. |
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| Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 9:05:29 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
In reading Objectivist literature on the subject, I've encountered what look like three different arguments for the harmony of rightly understood interests.
One is the argument from consistency, which I saw stated in an essay by Nathaniel Branden many years ago: You can only have the moral right to pursue your own interests, meaning the moral right to sustain your own life, if you accept the right to life as a principle, and if you do that, you must accept other people's having the right to life. To violate other people's rights is to reject the belief in rights, and then you cannot consistently claim any rights yourself.
I've never liked that one. It sounds as if it's saying that we need an abstract moral principle, the right to life, to validate the ethical legitimacy of our striving to sustain our own lives, and as if any such moral principle would apply equally to everyone and would require us to recognize other people's right to life as ethically legitimate. But doesn't that have it backward? It's not an ethical principle that justifies our striving to live; rather, our striving to live is the context in which any ethical principle is or is not justified, and does not itself need ethical justification. The choice to live is premoral and is the foundation of morality. Branden's argument sounds disturbingly deontological to me, with its saying we need a principle to justify our striving to live and its universalization of that principle. "I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being."
Now, there is a superficially similar, but different argument: That to have full security in our striving to live we need a legal system, and a government able to maintain it. That legal system must act according to rules, and if we start having it make exceptions to those rules in our own favor, we will see other people asking to have exceptions made in their own favor . . . and before too long we won't have a legal system at all. (A condition that current American politics approaches disturbingly closely!) So if we want the law to protect our rights against other people in the long term, we have to accept its protecting other people's rights against us also. That's sort of a public choice approach to rights. Rand doesn't quite spell this out explicitly that I recall, but it's implicit in several of her analyses of specific issues, and I think it's valid.
But I also think it doesn't go far enough. It sounds as if we were reluctantly setting aside our wish to abuse and exploit other people, which would really be better for us, as insurance against other people abusing and exploiting us. It talks about the purely negative benefits of not risking being the victim. And those benefits are real, but they're not the whole story.
Rather, I think, the other side of the coin is that the relationships we can have with other people when we seek to deal with them through exchange of benefits, to make them better off for dealing with us, are so much richer and more productive that we are much better off pursuing that way of life, even if it sometimes means we don't get the specific thing that we might want. This applies individually, to personal relationships, and it applies on a society-wide scale, to the superior productivity of market economies. "Nothing is as useful to a rational being as another rational being."
I got into a discussion of ethics with a friend a couple of months ago. And when we got down to this issue, I ended up saying that if you looked at the lives of thieves, of slave owners, or of dictators, they were not really leading good lives; they had relationships only with people they couldn't trust, and they knew that most of the people they dealt with hated and resented them. I said that if you really thought about your own interests, you would see that none of those roles actually served your interest. And I don't think this is just an abstract philosophical point; I think it's evident in what we know about actual human lives. If you really want a rich, fulfilling life, being a thief, a slaveowner, or a dictator is not the way to get it . . . and nothing is more "in our interest" than leading fulfilling lives.
So those are the arguments for that position that make sense to me, and that I would make in trying to explain my views to someone else. |
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| Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 12:22:07 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Adam Reed
E-mail: adamreedatalumdotmitdotedu
URL: http://borntoidentify.blogspot.com/
Re Harmony of Interests:
I think that the conclusive argument for the principle of Harmony of Interests is the argument from productivity. Here is how I state this argument (pp 23-24 of my article in Long and Machan, Eds., 2008:)
Is it possible to gain values more effectively by theft, fraud and extortion and in general by violating the rights of others, than by agreeing with them on completely voluntary cooperation and trade? However one endeavors to obtain values, one employs one’s available resources - one’s time, effort, brawn, intelligence, capital, social skills and so on - in this endeavor. Among voluntary trading partners who respect each other’s rights, all of their resources are used for production of values. On the other hand, someone who tries to obtain values by depriving another of his, will face opposition from the prospective victim, who will rationally use some of his resources to try to thwart the aggressor’s designs. Whatever fraction of his resources the aggressor expands on aggressive attempts that the prospective victim manages to thwart, will have been wasted. Thus, other things being equal, when we compare resources that have been used to obtain values rather than wasted on overcoming opposition, we find that those resources, and the sum of values obtained by their use, favor the man who employs his resources for production and trade over the one who attempts to gain values by violating the rights of other men. This is the principle of harmony of interests. On the average, the criminal will be poorer than if he had employed his resources for honest production and trade. It is not impossible for a very resourceful criminal to obtain significant values as a result of a relatively successful life of crime, but even the most “successful” criminal is unavoidably poorer than he would have been, had he used his resources and skills for production and trade - for activities in which none of his energy, capital and skill would have been wasted on overcoming the unavoidable resistance of his victims. |
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| Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 12:43:03 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
Adam,
I certainly agree that that's a part of the case for harmony of interests. But I think there's another part: getting effective productive effort out of other people. If you induce other people to produce things for you by rewarding them when they do, then they will have a motive to seek to produce more and better, so that they can ask you for greater rewards. On the other hand, if you punish them when they don't deliver, their only motive is to avoid being punished, and thus to do the minimum needed to survive; there's no reason for them to strive to do more, because they don't get the benefit from it. If you want enthusiastic, wholehearted effort, make it pay. I think that's the valid insight behind "Thou shalt not bind the mouths of the kine that tread out the grain."
Even slaveowners sometimes understand this. Ancient Roman slaveowners had absolutely control over the "property" of their slaves, but they found it advantageous to give them rewards and let them keep them, when they made an effort; indeed, slaves could save up their tips and buy their freedom. Relying exclusively on punishments was understood not to be an efficient way to get men to work, even if you had the power to do so.
I think this is a separate advantage from saving the effort of aggression. |
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| Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 13:24:44 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Adam Reed
E-mail: adamreedatalumdotmitdotedu
URL: http://borntoidentify.blogspot.com/
William,
True enough, but - unlike the argument from one's own productivity - the argument from the productivity of others is open to the "prudent predator" counter-argument. The case of ancient Roman slave-owners is a case in point; the slave-owner is a "prudent predator" who lets the slave keep just enough of his output to be still motivated to work. It is only the argument from one's own productivity - that even an ancient Roman would have been more productive had he hired free men, instead of wasting some fraction of his resources on keeping those slaves guarded and chained - which is universal. |
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| Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 16:15:26 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Mel McGuire
Re: William Schultz's discussion with "Humanist" as mentioned above.
BTW, in the specific question, it looks like the value wanted is some kind of joy in killing.
"what's to prevent [Y.B.] from becoming a serial murder if killing is one of his 'standards of happiness'?"
To start with, "standards of happiness" isn't Objectivism. This sounds like some form of hedonism. See the Ayn Rand Online Lexicon for details.
Hedonism: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/hedonism.html
Self-interest: http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/self-interest.html
The Lexicon also has a comceptual index which has "Philosophy: Ethics" as one of its main headings.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/book/conceptual.html
Continuing:
Without the principle of non-coercion, there can't be a right to live according to one's self-interest. If Joe drops non-coercion, then he drops his right of self-interest that he has alleged provides him a sanction for force--a contradiction. Joe can't use coercion on a victim and, at the same time, claim that the victim's right to live according to his self-interest is NOT being rejected. (If Joe advocates reason, then he'd have to allow (morally sanction) the same coercion against himself. If he claims an exemption from reason, then, whatever morality he has, it isn't Objectivist and it's not Objectivist ethics that has the problem.)
I think the issue has been dealt with in theory and it's not necessary (or possible) to refute an endless sequence of examples of the alleged practicality of the use of force. Refutations for individual cases are fine and important but, without the theory, there is no ethical system. |
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| Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 23:33:24 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: rrlv_frsh
I hope no one regards "harmony of interests" as the essence of the Objectivist view that the initiation of physical force against others is evil (an ethical judgment) and ought to be banned on the political level (with government enforcing the ban). The Objectivist view, as I understand it, is far simpler and more direct than some analysis of how best to pursue one's own interests.
Some of the discussion in this thread seems to pose the following scenario:
1. You want something from someone else. How should you attempt to get it?
2. Should you coerce it from the other person by initiating physical force (directly or indirectly) against him?
3. Or should you endeavor to cooperate with him in a voluntary trade?
In response, I ask: But what if the other person doesn't *want* to cooperate with you in a trade? What should you do then? Would you have no choice in that case but to initiate physical force against the other person?
I would like to point out that this whole scenario proceeds from the context of one person wanting something from someone else. But there is another possibility: why can't a person *produce* what he needs by his own direct, productive initiative and effort? That, in fact, has to happen anyway before anyone can have anything to offer in any kind of trade (or anything worth stealing). Trade depends on production; production does not depend on trade, although trade can certainly make productive effort more efficient.
Now, then, continuing this line of thinking a little further: what does productive effort require? What makes it possible? Answer: the mind. Specifically, man's rational faculty. By the nature of man's rational faculty, man has to be left free from physical force from others in order to be able to function productively. The exercise of one's rational faculty, i.e., the exercise of reason, is an individual process and cannot function under physical force. Therefore, for anyone to function productively, he needs freedom of productive action. He needs protection from the initiation of physical force by others. *That* is the fundamental reason why initiation of physical force against others is evil and ought to be banned. Any consideration of whether man's rational interests conflict with others or not is purely a secondary issue. The first issue is each individual's metaphysical relationship to reality, not his relationships with other people. "Harmony of interests" merely helps to answer a possible objection that initiation of force by some against others is an inevitable necessity in human existence. The main answer is the fact that human survival depends on individual productiveness, which depends on reason, which requires freedom from physical force. There is no productive role for initiation of physical force in this basic metaphysical hierarchy of dependence. |
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| Monday, November 16, 2009 at 6:02:11 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: ConversionFromSacrificialVictimToEgoïst
E-mail: Iamoura(at)ymail.com
URL: http://www.youtube.com/user/GaltsGulchPortal
Re: Apparent Conflict In Harmony Of Interests Above
"Did it ever occur to you Miss Taggart," said Galt, in the casual tone of an abstract discussion, but as if he had known her thoughts, "that there is no conflict of interest among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another - if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't. The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer's wealth, the artist who envies a rival's higher talent - they're all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune or an immortal fame - they will merely destroy production, employment and art. A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to destroy - so long as self-destruction and self-sacrifice are preached to them as the practical means of achieving the happiness of the recipients."...
..."No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or destroy."
(:$ JohnGalt:DagnyTaggart@GaltsGulch\AtlasShrugged\AynRand $8D
It's all a matter of applying AynRand's Philosophy in a complete and consistent way; within a compatible millieu - not possible for those that remain on the outside.
Moral Code : Motive Power : Motor Unit
Man and The Universe
It's all Self-Sufficient, Electro-Magnetic and Inductive.
'Harmony of interests' can only be possible when those around you recognize the tool that makes it. You can bruise your brain all you like trying to convince and conquer all of the 'mind-deniers', although its nice to know that Reason communities actually exist, no?
In Atlantis, its harmony, symphony & respect for ability... ergo...Concerto of Deliverance.
Come and witness it for yourself - in June.
And I mean it.
I $ I |
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| Monday, November 16, 2009 at 8:38:06 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
GaltsGulchPortal -- Please stop posting your cryptic advertisements for your supposed Galt's Gulch in the NoodleFood comments. They're only annoying, not even plausible enough to pique my interest. I've deleted a bunch this morning, and I'll delete them all in the future. |
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| Monday, November 16, 2009 at 12:30:03 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: C Andrew
E-mail: ca4papen(at)mindspring.com
Islamist militants stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979, and seized its occupants. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for 444 days.
Carter acknowledged that his failure to bring the hostages home - including a botched rescue mission in which eight U.S. servicemen died - led to his election defeat to President Ronald Reagan in 1980. The hostages were released on Jan. 20, 1981, just minutes after Reagan was sworn in as the new president.
"I don't have any doubt that was the main factor in my defeat," Carter told reporters in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, where he was helping build houses for Habitat for Humanity. "Obviously, if I had rescued the hostages or they had not been taken, I would have been re-elected."
Carter said one proposed option was a military strike on Iran, but he chose to stick with negotiations to prevent bloodshed and bring the hostages home safely.
"My main advisers insisted that I should attack Iran," he said. "I could have destroyed Iran with my weaponry. But I felt in the process it was likely the hostages' lives would be lost, and I didn't want to kill 20,000 Iranians. So I didn't attack."
The former president has commented in the past on how military action had been an option for ending the hostage crisis, but this appears to be the first time he has spoken about how many Iranians could have died in a U.S. attack.
Aside from the obvious altruistic and anti-american concern shown here, I think Carter is forgetting about a tanking economy, a rising regulatory state, rising interest, rising inflation, rising taxes... ad nauseum. I wonder if he really thinks that a "selfless" explanation is going to fix the judgement of history in his favor. Although Obama might just surpass him as the worst president in history...
The rest of the article covers his habit at for humanity.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g6amSbROt_-bARw6k ... |
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| Monday, November 16, 2009 at 15:25:50 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: madmax
I have a question regarding fertility rates of religious people vs secular people. The statistical evidence indicates that religious people have higher fertility rates than non-religious people. There is also evidence that white people have lower fertility rates than non-white people - and even among whites those with the highest fertility rates are Mormons and Anabaptists; ie the very religious. The human bio-diversity crowd along with many religious conservatives that are obsessed with demographics draw the following conclusions:
1) secular liberalized societies are self-extinguishing
2) religion has an evolutionary basis that can not be ignored
3) to the extent that Caucasians embrace liberal, secular, "Darwinian" ideals is the extent that Caucasians are courting extinction.
4) secularism, "liberalism", "Darwinianism" are biological "dead ends"
5) in the end the patriarchal and god-fearing will inherit the earth, one way or another.
I have often wondered why the birth rates are so low for secular people. Is it because of the nihilism of today's scepticism-drenched secularism or is it the case that secular people are perhaps less willing to engage in child rearing because of other rational reasons. Also, religious apologists (and many secularists also) argue that religion conveyed evolutionary advantages. Could it be that since religion is a primitive form of philosophy that does attempt at a cohesive worldview (Mis-Integration as Dr. Peikoff would put it) that this is true? Is the Dis-Integration of today's secularism what's really the problem?
What are some opinions on this (and I know the racial stuff is always potentially controversial)? Dr. Peikoff predicts that a religious M2 movement is under way and could swallow the West. Well it seems that demographics may be contributing to this as well as terrible epistemology. It looks like the case that if Ayn Rand's philosophy does not spread quickly then secular skepticism will pave the way for some version (or multiple versions) of religious societies. In addition, there may be a drastic change in racial demographics in the world with Caucasians numbers greatly reduced. This wouldn't matter in a laissez fairre world but in a race conscious and collectivist one? There is perhaps significant cause for concern. |
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| Monday, November 16, 2009 at 18:35:31 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Andrew Dalton
E-mail: andrew.s.dalton(at)gmail.com
URL: http://witchdoctorrepellent.blogspot.com
Madmax -
I think that you worry too much about the propaganda from these neanderthals.
Think about what a huge concession these tactics are. For millennia, religion has had two huge selling points: truth and morality. It offered answers to the ultimate origins and nature of existence, and also to the principles that should guide people's actions. These aspects of religion are immensely powerful, because those questions *are* vitally important to human life. And before the time of secular philosophy and science, only religion was offering any answers.
And now what do we get from these crypto-materialist "bio-conservatives"? "Facts be damned, logic be damned, values be damned; you'd better believe in our Bronze Age Sky-Wizard, or else the dark-skinned heathens are going to outbreed you."
The fire of Christianity was always the belief that it was *true*, and that it was *right.* Now these conservative propagandists are insisting that religion is merely *inevitable*, right or not, and that everyone should climb on the bandwagon in a desperate struggle for nationalistic and racial survival. It's the theory of the Noble Lie reborn, but this time with more fear and venom behind it.
How desperate they are, and how far they have fallen! If this sort of argument becomes mainstream among Western religionists, then Yahweh will soon be on the express train to wherever Perkunos and Huitzilopochtli are now.
(But defeating religion won't be so easy. Most religionists are true believers, not crypto-materialists or Machiavellian cynics.)
As for the factual debate over declining birth rates and their cause, morality likely plays a role. (We can't ignore socialistic government policies, either.) But morality is not equivalent to religion; that claim is the fallacy of the frozen abstraction.
And finally, there are so many things horribly wrong with the philosophy and direction of the modern Western world that the conservatives' faddish obsession with birth rates (including some of the more intellectual conservatives who ought to know better) is, in my view, an insulting distraction. |
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| Monday, November 16, 2009 at 20:17:38 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
madmax: The thing about those arguments from differential reproductive rate is that they aren't even sound biologically. Maximizing reproductive rate (r) is *a* strategy for evolutionary success; but it's not the only strategy. Another strategy is maximizing stable adult biomass (K). Think of grass versus trees, or mice versus elephants. Maximizing K goes with large adult body size, small number of offspring (in the extreme, one at a time), and in mammals, high parental effort at caring for offspring; and it works well in stable environments. Human beings are fairly far toward the K end of the spectrum already: we have (usually) one offspring at a time, we're large for mammals, we spend many years in child care, and we take a long time to develop our full capabilities. These "outbreed the heathen" enthusiasts are advocating that we follow a breeding strategy that's better suited to rodents.
The K strategy works because, if you want to maximize your representation in future generations, it's not necessarily optimal to have a huge number of offspring, and have them do the same, with most of the offspring in each generation dying. Another strategy is to have relatively few offspring, but to invest as much as possible in getting each of them ideally fit to function competitively, so that they can outcompete the rapidly bred offspring of your rivals. It's like having one child whom you send to Cal Tech rather than having ten children who are lucky to get into the community college down the street.
And if you think about it, capitalism is a strategy that favors fewer but higher quality children. When you eliminate violence as a means of competing, you lower the risk of sudden death. When you establish stable property rights, you make possible continuing command of resources. When you protect investments, you make possible long-term planning and the accumulation of resources over time . . . and investment in offspring with good health, good education, good nutrition, and so on. Consider, too, that the states with the lowest divorce rates and the lowest rates of illegitimacy are Massachusetts and Connecticut . . . the states that the "family values" crowd think are horrifyingly decadent; whereas most of the states that are big on family values have shorter term marriages and lots of single-parent families.
In any case, all this stuff about breeding would make more sense if religion were genetically transmitted. Ideas are contagious. Look at changing attitudes toward same-sex marriage, for example. No one can count on their children sharing their faith . . . especially so long as we maintain freedom of expression, so that children of religious parents can't be insulated from scientific and secularist ideas. Or, for that matter, Objectivist ideas. How many of the Objectivists you know learned their Objectivism from their parents? |
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| Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 17:37:14 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: madmax
Andrew & William,
Excellent responses. Thank you greatly.
William,
BTW, Phillipe Rusthon is famous for his research on the child rearing pattern exhibited by the different races. It seems that Asians are the most K-type people while African blacks are the least. Whites are in between. Bio-cons (like Steve Salier) endlessly point to this to say that Blacks will out-breed whites and overwhelm Western nations. This is but one of many reasons that many bio-cons argue for a white only Euro-American world.
Unlike leftists who use evolutionary theory to argue for an internationalist egalitarianism in the human genome. the bio-cons see evolution as mandating "race-consciousness" and traditionalist sexual morality because of the innate promiscuity and hypergamy of women. But that is a whole other discussion. It seems that materialists can't end up but being collectivists of one type or another; international one-worlders or ethnic nationalists. |
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| Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 13:54:42 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: madmax
"In any case, all this stuff about breeding would make more sense if religion were genetically transmitted."
I should add that many of these demographic enthusiasts (especially the more secular ones) believe that religion is genetically transmitted - by memes. I think memes are pure nonsense; a strange form of Platonic idealism mixed with materialism. But humans as "memeplexes" theory is very popular now sadly. Thank Richard Dawkins for that - the so-called great defender of reason and secularism. |
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| Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 16:09:39 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: William H Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
madmax: But memes are not the same thing as genes.
In terms of the way memetic theory is formulated, the following is a meme: "I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." Now, you acquired that meme, most likely, the same way I did, by reading a book by Ayn Rand. That is, she passed it on to thousands (if not millions) of people who were genetically unrelated to her; and those people, in turn, can pass it on further, either directly, by repeating the phrase, or indirectly, by telling people, "There's this great book called 'Atlas Shrugged'. . . ." None of that is comparable to the way genes are passed from parents to children; if it's like anything biological, it's more like passing a virus through contagion.
Which means that where genes are optimized for encouraging (a) individual survival, (b) individual reproduction, (c) individual investment in producing fit offspring, and (d) individual concern for close kin and their offspring . . . memes, if they exist, are going to be optimized for encouraging individual survival, individual motivation to communicate memes, and efficiency of memes in infecting new hosts. If you really believe in memes, and in Christianity as a meme, you want not to be focused on getting current Christians to breed, but on getting people who currently aren't Christian to become Christians, regardless of what race or nationality they are. Which is, in fact, what Christianity advocates: Preaching the gospel to the whole world, in every language.
In other words, the people you are talking about aren't being logical or consistent even on their own premises. Which I guess is not to be wondered at. |
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| Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 21:48:23 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: madmax
William,
Extremely interesting as always. I'm going to raise the subject of memes in the next open thread. |
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