: Sierra: "Caring is a weakness. It gets in the way of the big picture and you never get where you are heading.": Ryan: Caring, if described as investing personal resources of contimplation, voice, time, and money, is weakness. But that is the way things work together in an ecosystem. In nature there is a way in which all things work in harmoney with everything else. But Humans, posessing free will, are able to depart from this, destroying entire ecosystems on the weekend.
You must subscribe to the Hobbesian view of man. Devoid of reason and rational thought man is nothing more than a resus monkie on crack. We only do what is advantageous for our selves. In this view of the world, careing does not exist because it would mean investing your resources in the life of others less fortunate. Definate weekness. It is also a worldview devoid of choice and Love.
Reason, choice, and Love are all things that can not be described or explained by science. But they are about the same thing. Love is that which alows us to decide that we are not any more important than another. This comes from reason and we choice to employ this in our lives.
Society is based on Love and Reason. The fundamental axiom of Law is that every man's rights must be limited so much so that no one else's rights are limited any more. But this is weakness. A Hobbesian would try and keep his rights and would have to have his will broken by an Authoritarian Monarch in order for peace to be maintained. But in Democracy, reason and love alows us to limit our own rights in order that we can all get along peacfully while all members of the Democray maintain their rights to be able to rule them selves.
So which would you prefer, having your will broken by a monarch in a world where you have no choice because you are selfish and irational and incapable of self rule. Or a world where because of reason and love, you are able to put others and the many ahead of your own personal self intrested ways. I would prefer to be weak and capable of self rule than be strong and be dominated by the stronger.
Further more love is not an emotion.
: Kevin: Riigghhht.... perhaps we should just stop trusting our emotions altogether... ...We could, once and for all get it straight with the whole "love" thing. Screw emotions, there's got to be a formula, an equation for this stupid life-partner thing.
: Ryan: Love can not be an emotion. Emotions by definition come and go. How many days on end has any one stayed estaticly happy. No one! well that is surprising. Love as I have demonstrated is based on our capsity to reason and think rationaly. Because of the principal of Love, that which alows us to decide that we are not any more important than another, scociety itself exists. Without it the world would be what Hobbes calles a war of all aginst all. But Locke tells us that because we are rational we are capable of self rule, because we can realize that it is not best to persue our emotions all the time.
C.S. Lewis tells us that there is no one urge or emotion that is correct all the time. Even honor is not good to follow 100% of the time. No urge or emotion is wrong just like no note on a piano is wrong. The note can just be played in the wrong way and the at the wrong time. The sheet music tells us which notes to play and how to play them. In the same way it is reason and love that let us know which urges or emotions are right and which are wrong. Love tells you not to follow through with an urge when it may harm another. Again this is the basis of Law.
So Love is based on our capsity to Reason, it is a Choice not an emotion. A married man does not always Feel married, that quickly wears of with the honeymoon period. But he knows that he is married because he choses. In the same way we all chose to love our fellow man and not kill him just because we want his seat on the subway. We do not feel love at that moment. Another way to think of it is to think of how you FEEL when you are about to do something dangerous in order to save someones's life. You feel like you should run somewhere you can be safe but your rationality and love tell you to go through that danger to save the person. Feelings tell us to run. Rational decisions tell us to attempt to save.
: Kevin: [The emotionless world] A world where EVERYONE made there decisions while keeping their emotions alienated would indeed be a frightening one. We're dangerously close already.
I am not saying emotions are bad but that they should not rule us. Decisions should come first and then emotions should follow. We should decide what will be advantageous for the the society, puting others ahead of our selves, and demonstrating the decision we have made to Love.
I will post on animal rights and the like latter. I think this subject is really over done on these boards. I also think it is weird that I didn't agree with either of you today. You obviously disagree with eachother and expected us to all take sides. Though I admit I didn't take a stand on animal rights at all. So let me just say that useing this worldveiw, where love is a decision to make the choice that is advantageous for the most amount of elements in a society or ecosystem, I would have to say that useing animals for tests is wrong. More on this subject can be seen on a new message I posted today about socialisim and the diffrences between Dualisim and the Complementery view. In this last view there is no hierarchy to say that nature is less important than man. This view, that man can dominate nature, comes from a duelistic worldview postulated around 400 AD by a philosipher very much like Hobbes. It can be seen as follows.
Man
------------
Seperation
------------
Nature
This hierarchy alows us to justify our domination of nature. Is it an acurate way of looking at the world or are we as humans not any more important than nature as the Complementery view states? You decide.
