[Vision2020] Crazy Train

[Michael]

Thanks Ted; I don't think this is the end of our developing world history,
but I think you make a very very important point about the stability of a
given society.  This has certainly weakened Ed's generalism at the very
least.

 

Michael 

 

 

Michael, Ed et. al.

 

Social Science, like Political Science, is an oxymoron... but I think that
"morality," and certainly not sexual morality, may have little to do with
the survival or demise of a given society.  Some very brutal and dictatorial
societies (ancient Egypt) survived for millennia, but not because they were
"moral" by the standards of morality you appear to follow.  In fact, I think
a good case could be made that some societies fall in part because they are
"moral," meaning, from my moral perspective, less violent and brutal.  Other
societies survive by doing whatever it takes to survive, "moral" or not. 

 

Success in warfare is one of the most critical variables in maintaining the
survival of many societies throughout history, and the more ruthless and
vicious the warriors and the tactics employed, the more the society has the
means to maintain itself against external threats, or to conquer other
societies.  Thus the willingness to kill "enemies," to wipe out or
assimilate entire other cultures without compunction, may be a very
important variable to maintain the success of a society, but I trust this
does not fit your definition of how a "moral" society functions.  

 

Societies not structured around the willingness and the technology to wage
all out brutal take no prisoners warfare may be at a disadvantage in
competing with more war oriented societies.  Why did the invading European
culture dominate the native cultures in North America, ending in genocide
for many of the native cultures?  One dominate variable: superiority in
warfare.  This may have had more to do with war technology and the numbers
of Europeans invading (small pox blankets were a clever tactic, a form of
biological warfare), than a lack of willingness on the part of the native
cultures to fight and kill.  

 

But I doubt it had anything to do with the European rejection of
homosexuality based on Biblical or Judeo-Christian moral superiority, or any
other moral or religious principle that rendered the European culture
morally superior.  In fact, I think the European culture invading North
America, based on this vaunted Judeo-Christian moral tradition, was morally
despicable, that their treatment of native cultures in North America ranks
among the most horrendous and cruel examples of human inhumanity to other
humans in the history of the human race. And that the Judeo-Christian
tradition was in fact employed as ideological/religious
justification/rationalization for the hideous, cruel, monstrous conduct of
the Europeans against the native cultures. 

 

QED 

 

Ted Moffett

 

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