Quote:
Originally Posted by mentor
I'm not sure that ideas are the realm of the eather. Rather, I believe our ideas are part of who we are, and we are part of them. It is essentially similar to the argument of man being separate from nature. I don't believe he is. We are part of it, and we are made of it. Of course the substrate for ideas is minds, and the substrate for minds is brains.
If you break it down to it's atomic form, memes, then perhaps I agree, they are neither good or evil. That would be like calling letters of the alphabet, or words good or evil. But wouldn't you agree that we can build things out of these which qualify as good or evil? Of course it does still require that one special ingredient: belief.
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I think these things can be used to do good or evil but, you can't build something out of nothing. I guess my point is that regardless of Religion's abstractness, you must accredit the deeds to the people. There is no way to police religion, but we can definately police the religious the way we police any other citizen. We have standards that stand apart from dogma that in a consensus we agree are bad (murder, rape, etc) and we should maintain those according to the harm it creates and not because some book says so. Ultimately, religion can only be a guide. Even in a Theocracy, it's still guide for the men that create and enforce the Law.