On 1/20/2014 5:44 PM, clipka wrote:

> Note that a person's current belief re a surpreme something will
> typically include that the person itself is entitled to "life, liberty
> and the pursuit of happiness" or some such. Thus, I consider this

>
But, not necessarily that someone else is, if that someone else is 
violating some principle, derived from the idea that a supreme something 
is being violated, somehow.


>

> mathematical systems, but also to moral ones: No matter how complex your
> set of rules, there's always at least one remaining problem with it.
> Therefore I allow my set of moral rules to be incomplete, and its
> application to be subject to case-by-case decision.
>
Would where that true. Unfortunately, most believers in a system that 
would, to use the same example, kill the mother, and possibly the child, 
in the process, on the theory that the "child" is more important than 
the mother, and thus "must be protected", also tend to presume that the 
moral rule is **flawless**, and that its humans that are somehow 
failing, not the rule. In fact, religion often hinges on this assumption 
- if the rules are wrong, or incomplete, then the holy book is wrong, or 
incomplete, and if that is the case, maybe the whole belief system if 
wrong. Since this is impossible, none of it can be wrong, or incomplete.

A round about bit of absurdity, which waved about, when ever defending 
the indefensible, which causes harm to a third party, but which is, 
invariably, ignored, in many, if not all, cases, as soon as the one 
waving it about is the target of the results.

Basically, religion, which is to say "strict religion", which mandates 
that certain things are absolutes, doesn't allow for, "case-by-case 
decisions", especially in the case of third parties. And, even when it 
allows for such things, it often heavily restricts the cases, throws 
barriers up, to prevent making such decisions at all, and may even place 
the decision in the hands of the people most qualified to pontificate 
over the "rules", but least qualified to actually understand the 
problem, and make a decision.

-- 
Commander Vimes: "You take a bunch of people who don't seem any 
different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get 
this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem."

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