andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> Liberalism started as a way of avoiding religious persecution: a few
> hundred years ago it was perfectly normal for countries to go to war
> over religious differences and to burn heretics at the stake.
It's debatable whether the wars were over "religious differences" or whether they were over who got to control the money/resources/power that were automatically granted organized religion
> Liberalism was a response to that: its original advocates advocated
> tolerance for different religious viewspoints.
There's another perspective to that: it trivialized/falsified religious feeling by reducing it to a "belief" and it asserted that a human society could achieve justice and a common weal independently of any deeper connection to a universal order.
> Over the centuries liberal goals have expanded to include a very
> radical vision of justice, freedom, and equality.
I would disagree that a "radical vision of justice, freedom, and equality" necessarily sprang from liberal roots. Though they might have sprung from questioning liberal assumptions.
> Progress hasn't been as fast as BM and I would like, and liberalism
> has not guaranteed results; a lot of liberal societies have been
> inconsistent in pursuing these goals. But these societies have pursued
> them, unlike fascist tyrannies, fundamentalist theocracies, Communist
> dictaorships, feudal and absolutist monarchies, and the other
> alternatives that history has thrown up for us to consider. So be
> careful before you throw away the political idea that has uniquely
> made what both of us would consider progress possible.
Perhaps we have not exhausted all the alternatives.
Joanna
>
> jks
>
> John Mage <jmage at panix.com> wrote:
>
> Chris Doss wrote:
>
> > --- Brian Charles Dauth wrote:
> >
> > I do not ignore the ubiquity of moral disagreements; I am just
> > seeking a method for arbitrating between them. I find
> > cart-before-the-horse proceduralism to be useless in preventing
> > persecution and injustice. --
> >
> > OK, so what do you do when you come across someone who doesn't agree
> > with you on what injustice is? Shoot them? Send them to a
> reeducation
> > camp?
>
> The liberal proceduralist also faces that problem with someone who
> does
> not agree on the "minima" of the LP's canon; but the proceduralist
> would
> rightly insist on reversing the procedural sequence you suggest.
>
> john mage
>
>
>
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