Sven, Ricky, I'm a little late to this discussion but I wanted to say I'm
tending to agree with you guys....

I'm from the USA and I'm very sad to see where I think this country is
going.   One of the things I have the least tolerance for is intolerance.
It baffles me why people care about how other people live their lives, so
much so that they vote for controls and reduce freedoms, or restrict
certain rights to be beneficial only to majority groups and not others.
It's the tyrany of the majority syndrome.

The way I see it, freedom and democracy are two very distinct things.  (A)
In a nation that values "liberty," the idea should be that personal freedom
should extend up to, but not go beyond the point of impinging on others'
rights.   (B) In a nation that values "separation-of-church-and-state", the
government should be absolutely indifferent to religion-based morals. The
government also has no duty to teach religion. (C) And still, in a country
which is supposed to be a democracy, people need to have a say over the law
of the land...   But to what end?  What is the scope?  What protects
minority groups from majority demands?

The emediete question is what should the government do if a majority votes
to impose religion-based morals and teachings? And the question behind this
question is what has precidence, the "will-of-the-people," or "liberty."   I
think this is where countries need to decide that the principle stated in
sentence (A) should apply to the voting population:  you can't vote to
restrict rights without showing that rights conflict with other rights
somehow. (Land use/planning is a good example of how rights can conflict in
a way that I think is vote-able.) Anyhow, majority religion under this
principle, cannot be a reason to change laws etc.


Hmm, are we still talking about raytracing? :)   Oh well, communities get to
talk about other stuff too...

Charles

PS, back to the origin of this thread,   POVMAN  I like your sheep, and on
this one I like the apparent mutual envy of the sheep.  :-)

Post a reply to this message