> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-virus@lucifer.com
> [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com]On Behalf
> Of David McFadzean
> Sent: Monday, March 15, 1999 1:55 PM
> To: virus@lucifer.com
> Subject: RE: virus: Re: virus-digest V3 #70
>
>
> At 01:26 PM 3/15/99 -0500, Sodom wrote:
>
> >Nice thought - but wrong - Fear driven by faith.
> Necessitated by that faith.
> >Reason cant make that claim. Reason cannot drive fear and
> does not fead fear
> >or bloodlust or the others. Faith calls for death and destruction
> >explicitly. That is the difference.
>
> I'd like to take this opportunity to side with Reed for a change. Any
> belief can theoretically be justified by reason, you just have to
> pick the right premises. Don't you think any good racist can come up
> with a plethora of reasons for hating a given ethnic group? The real
> power of reason is that it provides an avenue for challenging the
> veracity of the assumptions. As long as they claim to be reasonable
> and play by the rules of rationality, you have a chance to convince
> them of the error in their ways (and, importantly, vice versa).
Yes, A racist can come up with all sorts of reasons - revenge alone is a reason, but so far this propaganda so reasonably justified for so long uses the Bible as the source. You will be hard pressed to find a modern racist, or any racist who does not use religion to justify his racism. When "Faith" is the premise from which reasoning follows, then your results are not reasonable as the source is invariabley flawed.
If you are going to say "Reasonable - considering" all the time, then the box for reason has nothing to do with accurate. I could be making an assumption here, but I felt that our use of the word "reason" implied that the information those doing the "reasoning" with was verifiably accurate.
Your last line is a good point - and so far I have yet to hear a divine interpretation of faith that can be argued rationally. If the person can hang into the argument long enough to reach the fundamentals assertions, you will find "faith" clinging to it's skyhooks every time, with fear as it's guardian to protect it falling.
Bill Roh