Fooloso4 wrote: ↑August 12th, 2018, 9:18 amIf people hold hate sacred, why do you want to defend them?
Holding a text sacred does not mean holding hate sacred even if there are parts of the text that may be held to be hateful.
I want the hate eliminated. You say it can't be eliminated because it's in sacred texts - your specific words were "Destroying what others hold sacred". I say the hate isn't sacred and can therefore be removed without destroying anything sacred, but if they do count the hate as sacred (as your words imply), then no one should be defending any such people who hold that hate as sacred. If the people you are defending don't hold that hate as sacred though, then there should be no problem with eliminating it. So why do you have so much difficulty with this? Let's just get rid of all the damned hate.
Let me try one last time to explain this to you. It is not that calling hate is hateful. What would be hateful is the actions taken when trying to eliminate hate. You have not been forthcoming with what you might do in order to eliminate hate.
The actions needed to destroy the hate are simply to eliminate the hate - you go through every copy of every manifesto and holy text obliterating it to remove its ability to do harm (if the owners are determined to keep the documents) or you bury them and replace them with safe versions.
You condemn unnamed religion:
many poisonous religions
And say:
anyone who wants to remain allied to that hate should be removed from society
Those who want to go on spreading poison should be kept apart from everyone else until they desist. Decent people should not have to live amongst people who are openly hostile towards them due to holy or ideological hate. If they secretly harbour such hate, that's a different issue - they may still be dangerous, but at least they aren't spreading it and it will die out with them. You can't stop someone being a Nazi internally if they keep it hidden, but as soon as they start exposing that part of their nature to others in an attempt to propagate their hate or team up with others to act upon it, they can and should be stamped on hard.
One way in which they are so allied is through:
The primary hate in holy texts of religions
You say:
they just need to purge it of all the bad parts
What are we to make this? What does this mean?
It means exactly what it says - get rid of the hate by removing it at source.
How is it to be done?
Marker pen. Paint. Scissors.
What if some (as many good people will) refuse to have texts that are sacred to them defiled by you deciding which parts are and are not acceptable?
The texts are already defiled by the hate that they contain. Obliterating that hate will not defile them if it's done in a way that respects the rest.
Do they remain allied to hate if they tell you to keep your hands off their texts? Do you lock them up?
If they refuse to have the hate that defiles their texts removed, it means they are allied to that hate, and that makes them a threat to humanity. If they want to cling to that hate, they should not be fully free members of society. Bear in mind though, that we're moving into a future world where most criminals won't need to be in prison - they will be able to wear devices that control them and allow them to live relatively normal lives without endangering others. The same tech will be able to control those who run on hate.
What is this systematic thing you propose to do?
Systematic eradication of the hate in holy and ideological texts.
Do you separate the ideology from the religion? Should people be prevented from membership in a religion whose texts contain hate? Are you proposing a systematic reform or religion via censorship?
Religions are often ideologies tied to a God and that needn't be dismantled. What matters is removing the hate so that what's left is a benign religion/ideology. Those who genuinely oppose hate will be happy with the new version of their religion/ideology. Those who want to cling to the hate-containing version are a threat to others because they seek to maintain the hate which generates atrocities.
What if they personally reject every passage you think they should? Is that enough?
Absolutely, and no one has any right to demand that they reject the rest.
Will you require them to speak out even if this means not only ostracism but violence toward them?
I would not expect them to stand up against powerful, armed haters in places where they have insufficient power to beat them militarily, but wherever the conditions make it safe for the transformation to be made, it should be made. Intelligent military devices will make this more practical within a decade even in the most dangerous countries once we can monitor everyone and find out who's still pedalling hate and who's rejected it.
Are there ideologies of one kind or another that are not sources of hate?
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some, but there are often many documents which become part of an extended manifesto and they would all need to be checked to see if they are benign. That's a big task, but it can be done as a collective effort. The opponents of an ideology are usually better placed to identify the hate in it than the followers, but then it needs to be judged by people who are neutral (or by AGI in the future which will do the job impartially).
Your ideology will certainly lead to conflict if you require religious believers to denounce their religion in part or in whole. They will hate you for what you are doing even if you are not driven by hate.
The only thing I want them to denounce is the hate, and most of them claim they aren't fond of that hate (if they're prepared to admit that it's hate). What remains of their religion or ideology will be better than it was before because the removed content will all be of negative value.
The reality is that some people read such hate and then act on it by doing what it tells them they should do.
This is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The reality is that you cannot show that they would not have acted violently if they had not read that book or any book or any speech with “primary hate”.
That is simply not the case. ISIS conducted genocide against Yazidis specifically because the instruction in the holy text told them to do so - they would not have done so otherwise. The genocides in Rwanda were driven by hate propaganda on radio stations - there would have been no genocide there otherwise. The cause and effect in these and hosts of other cases are well established. Hate speech kills, and you are denying reality.
At no point have you said how this should be done. By force? Something can be destroyed without total destruction. You will not persuade millions of people to destroy their sacred texts.
Those who are not allied to the hate will gladly have it obliterated in order to enhance their copies of sacred texts. It is not destruction of anything good. Those who oppose the eradication of the hate that's in their possession should be prosecuted just as people who possess illegal weapons are prosecuted.
The term ‘text’ refers not only to the whole but to the parts.
Removing the parts that are hate is not destruction, but enhancement.
Any book containing hate speech should have that hate removed from it.
How are you going to go about doing that? What if you are met with resistance, as you certainly will?
The resistance would only come from those who are allied to the hate. They need to be stamped on. There could be a few scholars who want to continue to have access to it, but they could be given a special licence to do so (which would only be granted to the most peaceful of people), and they would be banned from passing on knowledge of the hate that they are studying.
I should clarify that it's only books which actually encourage the reader to act on the hate, as with holy texts and manifestos. A work of fiction in which two sides use hate speech against each other would not be included, although some vulnerable individuals who might take it as reality would need to be blocked from reading such a book. However, a work of fiction which quotes banned hate would have to have that removed from it if there's any risk that its survival there would lead to it being retained in the religion or ideology that it came from by this back door route.
The three major monotheistic religions do not separate their religion from the holy texts of their religion.
Fine, but they need to separate the hate from the benign. If their God is good, the hate does not belong there and they should be keen to remove it.
You will find that in each of those religions you will meet with strong resistance to your program.
Only if they are emotionally attached to the hate.
Their identification with their texts means that altering their texts is an attack on them and their religion. It does not matter whether you see it that way or not. That is the way they will see it.
If that's the way they see it, then they are dangerous. They propagate the hate that drives atrocities and they cannot be allowed to go on propagating it.
These practices have been rejected. Jews and Christians have condemn them as morally unacceptable. Isn’t that what you wanted?
If they have rejected things which the texts have not clearly labelled as things to be rejected, those things should be removed from the texts. If Nazis say they reject all the hate of their ideology and yet insist on retaining it, they have clearly failed to reject it and cannot be trusted. Nor can later followers of their ideology be trusted even to claim that they reject that hate - it may inspire them to act upon it. The same applies to all other ideologies containing such hate.
Do you really think you can sequester every mention of these practices? To what lengths will your zealotry take you?
Do you think a maniac with a gun collection should be allowed to keep one machine gun? Would you deserve to be called a zealot for wanting to take even that one off him? No. I expect the good followers of all these ideologies to want to remove every single little bit of hate from them. If they don't, they are clearly not genuinely opposed to that hate.
We have no idea what attitudes toward homesexuality would be if were not for the Bible,
Progress towards tolerance has clearly been delayed by this holy bigotry.
but even if what you say was true, it is clear that public attitudes and laws are changing, just as laws and attitudes about stoning have changed. And all this has happened without you editing the texts.
And yet the hate continues to drive the abuse of homosexuals, so why don't we just cut it off at source and pull the rug out from under the feet of the abusive people who get their justification from the texts?
For the majority of history there has been no documents
History began with documents. Before that time we have prehistory.
and with the advent of writing most people still could not read.
There were plenty of bigots who did the reading for them and passed on the hate.
… and from stupidity (where people miscalculate things because they don't think logically).
You are catching on. Now if you could only connect the dots. You are miscalculating the consequences of your unilateral call to censor the sacred texts of religion and censure those for whom the texts are sacrd.
I'm asking good people to modify their own religions by eliminating the hate. Why should they are they incapable of doing this if they are genuinely opposed to hate?
There is no doubt that many would see this as a hateful act of aggression and the consequences would be horrendous. Whatever your intentions are makes no difference to the way they would react.
You are making the assumption that they will defend the hate with great vigour, and if they do, then they are manifestly not good people. I believe they are better than that, and all it needs is for the plan to be put to them so that they can decide whether they're defenders of hate or opponents of it. Most of them claim to be against it, so they should side with me on this issue.
Animal rights activists would disagree.
If they think that people who eat animals hate the animals that they eat, then they in almost all cases wrong.
Not only the eating of animals but the conditions under which they are raised are seen as a blatant disregard for their welfare. Whether you would use the term hatred is not relevant. They think it is wrong and that only good would come from eliminating such barbaric practices.
Most people want the barbaric practices eliminated, but democracy is poor at offering them the controls needed to do anything about it - all they can do is avoid eating certain products and sign petitions to try to stop others having a hand in the abuse of animals. The only relevance of this to the discussion though is whether there is hate speech in ideologies relating to this. If there is, it needs to be eliminated.
Ideological rules are not set in stone and religious practices can and do change even though the texts are not re-written.
When a prophet dies, his rules are set in stone until another prophet of at least the same status overturns them. The same applies to the creator of an ideology. However, if good people want to follow an ideology which contains hate, they are duty bound to remove that hate from the ideology so as to produce a benign version of it which they can sign up to without endorsing the hate.
I would formulate rules based on reason and allow them to be changed whenever better reasoning creates a need for better rules.
And this is what has been happening continually since the begin of religion. Instead of acknowledging this you call it a hiatus.
Religions can moderate and then turn back to being fundamentalist again - the way to prevent that regression is to eliminate the hate so that it cannot be returned to.
As has been pointed, religion in the West has been dramatically changed by the Enlightenment thinkers. They did not alter texts, not simply because they had respect for what others hold sacred, but because they understood the consequences of doing so.
Dramatic change without any change in the documents is not a mark of stability. They did not understand the consequences of leaving the hate in place, and the hate continues to generate abuses and atrocities.
What they did is change the way people think. If you care to end hatred and violence then don’t do what will provoke it. Change the way they think. If you value reason then use reason to change attitudes.
If you leave the hate speech in religious texts, you will always have people going back to the direct message of the texts in an attempt to do their ideology by the book. If the followers of ideologies and religions are already good people, they don't need to change their attitudes - they just need to make their ideologies/religions benign to get rid of the terrorism that they repeatedly generate.
I am not discussing laws, I am discussing moralists who want to unilaterally forbid what they find to be immoral whatever that might be.
If you say, "Suppose you or your fellow moralist decide that..." (which is how the part I was responding to began), you are discussing the kind of morality that adjusts when it's shown to contain errors rather than being a fixed ideology. If you want to discuss a fixed ideology where the errors are locked in, then don't include me in it.
Well, you can't absolutely prove that smoking causes cancer or that burning fossil fuels causes climate change …
There is more than enough scientific evidence to have established a causal relation.
The evidence that hate speech drives genocide is even stronger.
Saying it over and over again does not establish a causal link.
Denying it over and again doesn't destroy the established causal link.
If someone kills those you love and leave you unprotected in a dangerous, politically unstable world, without food or shelter, and the same happens to everyone in your homeland, then perhaps you would not hate since you are all good, but plenty of others would. As would the following generation. This and not a book is what led many in Islam to hate.
The Yazidis were harming no one - they have been on the receiving end of repeated genocides by people who are acting solely upon the hate speech in holy texts which demonise them and call for their extermination.
If Western imperialists had not destroyed the region, the world would be a different place today. But do not take my word for it. The report from the Washington Institute that I provided (
https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/pol ... cs-on-terr) gives an unbiased synopsis of events. Did you read it? There are many others as well that explain how Western imperialists are complicit.
Of course they're complicit in a lot of the wars - they're acting on their own holy hate.
You are right about the dangerous game of rejecting evidence, but that is exactly what you are doing.
You're the one rejecting evidence. I blame all the causes of the conflicts, but you want to protect some of them because they're "sacred" hate.
Look at the events and circumstances. Hitler did not rise to power on ideological grounds, but because he found a scapegoat, someone to blame for the economic crisis and thus a solution, eliminate those they blame.
And in doing so, he set up an ideology whose hate led to millions of people being murdered.
Whenever you see lots of people engaging in the same vile activities, it is hatred not hate speech that drives them.
Without the hate speech, there is no transmission of the hate and no amplification from people whipping each other up to to point where coordinated violence emerges.
One must look deeper in order to see why they hate, and what you will find is a sense of economic and political powerlessness and fear that things will get worse not better.
Lovely, but you then have to ask how that translates into hatred of people who are not to blame. The hate under discussion here is hate of blameless individuals, and that requires serious errors of thinking in the people who are doing the hating. For a whole lot of people to make the same big error, that has to be spread by hate speech. Few would think of abusing homosexuals if they weren't guided to do so by transmitted hate - the natural reaction is to be amused at the idea of homosexuality rather than to become full of hate. It takes effort to demonise and dehumanise people.
It is not a failure of philosophers, it is a simple fact that people do not agree as to what is and is not good.
That failure to agree on what is correct is a failure. There is a correct answer to all moral questions, regardless of how hard it can be to calculate what it is. For people to be set on different answers and to reject each others answers necessarily depends on some of them being in error.
You have criteria by which you judge people good or not. That criteria forms your definition, that is, what is in and out of the bounds of goodness.
I have identified a method which can be followed to determine right and wrong as closely as they can be determined, but it will take AGI to apply it - human minds are simply not up to the task of crunching the numbers correctly.
Since we may define them as good people according to very different criteria, the members of the set will be different. One set of good people will contain members who are members of the set of bad people according to different criteria. The same person would be both good and bad.
Incorrect. Some of those sets would simply be mislabelled.
My judgement of some people may be wrong …
That is right. And so, if you mistakenly put these people in the set of all good people, they do not become something they are not because you put them in the wrong set.
The set of good people is not a set that I can guarantee putting all the right people into - it is not me that would have to make the selection for it, but such a set exists nevertheless.
so it's fairly easy to judge most people to be overwhelmingly good.
It is fairly easy to be fooled as well, not only by others but by yourself.
Indeed - it may be wrong to think that most people are overwhelmingly good, so I may be overly positive in my judgement. But I can continue to make that judgement without making the mistake of relying on it being true. I am not naive though - I can still guard against the possibility that most people who say they're opposed to hate are actually allied to hate , so I do not put my trust in hope alone. I can also put them on the spot by asking them to demonstrate that they are opposed to hate by getting rid of all the hate that they currently propagate. If they refuse to do so, then I will make a new judgement about whether they're really so good.
I know exactly what morality is …
Yes, I am not at all surprised you think you do.
If anyone can show a situation where my system for calculating morality doesn't fit, they would be more than welcome to do so, but all the ones working in the field of machine ethics who have tried to do so have failed miserably. I'm still looking for more "experts" to give this a go, but all I'm finding are irrational people who go directly against mathematics when they're pushed any distance at all. They are an absolute shambles.
The moralist has since ancient times been a comic character, wildly overestimating his abilities, stumbling and bumbling, convinced of the correctness of his actions because they are his actions. This evokes laughter, but comedy can turn to tragedy when his ineffectual schemes and plans do not simply backfire, as inevitably they must, but provoke others to act in violent and destructive ways.
Morality comes out of reason and mathematics and is all about harm management. The kinds of moralist you speak of are not good thinkers, but simpletons who tie themselves to ill-thought rules which approximate to something deeper which they are incapable of digging deep enough to see.
Socrates benefitted those he spoke with by allowing them to see that they do not know what they think they know, thus keeping them from making comic and tragic mistakes. But I am no Socrates and even Socrates could not get some to see themselves as they truly are. I have nothing more to say.
Well, at the moment you're attacking something you haven't seen, so you're prejudging something on the basis that you've only ever seen white swans and that there are therefore no black ones.