joanna bujes <jbujes at covad.net> wrote: I have some problems with the below:
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
* * *
I'm a materialist, Joannaj, I assume that the ultimate cause of the wars was class conflict or other material issues. But I'm not a reductionist: those conflicts took a religious form, and we ignore that fact at our peril. It's real progress that in the industrialized west most people don't think religion is something you go to war for or burn people for anymore. I may be oversensitive to the point as a Jew. I am not here referring to the Nazis, but to 2000 years of prior religious persecution.
> 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.
* * *
Same difference, far as I am concerned.
> 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.
* * *
Who said "necessarily"? Not me!
> 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.
* * *
Suggest another. BM's alternative is tyranny -- imposing his values. We'd like his tyranny because we tend to share those values, but I oppose the principle of the thing. Carrol's alrernative is civil war -- he thinks we are headed that way, right Carrol? Charles like the old-style Communist tyrannies. Ravi suggested aome stone-age model, which is not realistic barring catastrophe. So maybe we have not exhausted the alternatives, but what are they? Please describe one in at least very general terms.
jks
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