RE: An age of Medusa: the syndrom of overprotective mother enters politics
Letting people have the right to believe in a very old and possibly outdated moralsystem is not overprotecting, its tolerance.
Not letting me criticize them (and introducing legislation for that purpose) is overprotection.
But not letting them have a say in political and scientific decisions is intelligent.
OK, then where do you derive your morality from? Both science and politics need to have some moral axioms. You just make them up with your brain? It's been tried before and it ended quite badly.
With this new knowledge, how can a twothousand year old book (or any religious book, they are all quite old) tell us how to behave today?
You'd be surprised how adequate those old stories still are.
...about being finally able to formulate humanism instead of religion
It's possible to reconcile those two, humanism is not a replacement for religion. As Dostoevsky and Nietzsche perfectly predicted, the process of loosening up of Europe's christian foundations triggered quite a lot of bad events in the 20th century.
I derive my morality from one simple law: Could the way I act be made into a law for everybody. Or in other words: Don't do what you don't wish others to do. This replaces most of the ten commandments. Not all of them, for sure, but the ones I need for living a socially acceptable and henancing live.
Every religion stemms from a brain. It was a way to explain things humankind couldn't explain at the time. And naturally some of the laws they gave themselves to have a good working society still aply today, for example: don't kill. But others, for example that women are NOT equal to men, have been proven wrong.
I agree, that there can be difficulties during losing your religion, especially if you switch it with another kind of religion. Hitler and Stalin weren't religionless even if they didn't promote christianity. But I have to disagree that humanism can reconcile with religion. Humanism is about the belief in provable facts and the humankind being part of all living things on earth, to name it, we are just an animal like all the others.
And sex is only a social construct. Right.
This is exactly what I would like to criticize about some religious concepts but overprotective mother won't let me to.
I think you understand nothing.
And I think you know nothing about your own European history. It doesn't matter if they were religious or not, what does matter is what caused that people started to gravitate towards such tyrants. It's the vacuum that appeared when christian foundations collapsed in Europe.
I am not an historian, so I won't compete with you there.
I agree with you on one point though, it is important to challenge those beliefs, to criticize their rules and to argue that not everyone has to agree with them.
I just don't think we live in the age of the overprotective mothers, but in a time where times are changing and we have to work on changing it for the better, and we have to do it together.
OK, let us agree that we disagree. Sorry if I've been too harsh to you, I did not mean to.