User talk:DontMessWithThis
Moved from user page: A user with no user page? I'm lost.JWSchmidt 15:23, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I guess I got to your new user page before you did.
>"longstanding tradition" is redundant repitition
I am also sensitive to the mindless use of phrases such as "longstanding tradition", but I think that there may have been a good reason for using "longstanding" rather than "some" when introducing those religious traditions that include classical concepts of evil. In my experience there is a significant difference between the way the idea of evil is incorporated into religions founded in the modern era and religions that pre-date the modern era. Unfortunately, I do not know enough about comparative religion to substantiate my hunch. Thanks for stimulating my thoughts on this topic. I wonder what your background is?JWSchmidt 00:59, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)
- I was the victim of religous programers as a child and learned to recognize religiously motivated lies. I reinforced my experience as an adult by training for and participating in cultural warfare.
- Especially in discussing religion, if people don't name which religion they are describing, generalizations of traditions are likely to be ill-informed at best.
- A non-sectarian publisher would likely require an author to cite specific circumstances as evidence of a tradition, and then demonstrate some knowledge that those circumstances were being accurately represented in a proper context. I don't see much evidence of deep knowledge of world cosmologies in that sad personal essay about how everybody in the world sees evil the same way Euro-American Christians do.
- The modern/historic duality might feel comfortable, but Christian beliefs about evil go back 2000 years, which is a long time to be considered modern. Atheism, among others has grown as a world culture since then. It has no concept of good and evil. Atheistic governments killed a lot of people, but there is no evidence the concept of good or evil was a factor, unless one stretches the word good to mean "things I want" and evil to mean "things I don't want". That would be a cheap way out for Western people trying to explain their complex superstitions about cosmic Good and Evil.
- A more likely division would be geographic, with various regional concepts, or lack of concept, regarding good and evil.
DontMessWithThis 01:10, 16 Mar 2004 (UTC)
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