Dogmatic, proselytizing atheists want to focus on the negatives of religion, because why would you think about the positive aspects of something you’ve rejected? Their task, as they see it, is not a balanced assessment, but destruction.
Any group of people that will abuse language for the sake of power, or will suffer violence to language and truth, are capable of actual violence. This is the significance of the AGW phenomena, in that it is not just a perversion of science, but of principle, and once you’ve lost your compass, anything is possible. If you will lie once, you will lie twice. If you will accept power you have not earned once, you will do it twice.
All perception should be understood as a sort of momentary art, that has to be destroyed almost immediately. I like the analogy of the Tibetan’s use of butter and sand for art that is created, displayed, and then ceremonially destroyed. No static formulation of Truth can ever reach, in the abstract, the full demands of practical necessity. Logically, this rule itself would admit of exceptions, but in so doing validate itself. Think that three times fast.
It is interesting to note that Social Darwinism was apparently a key component in later British Imperialism, although it was cloaked in the outwardly benign doctrine of the paternalistic “White Man’s Burden”. We forget, now, but Britain as a matter of historical record once presided over the largest empire ever created in human history. They had Canada, Australia, much of Africa, India (now, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh), possessions in the Caribbean, and de facto control of much of China. That list is no doubt less than complete.
One part of that imperialism whose history I found particularly interesting was that, having conquered Bengal in eastern India, they used that land to grow opium, which they then sold to the Chinese. When the Chinese banned opium sales, and started confiscating their crops, the British invaded China, and quickly forced her to terms. This invasion was by regular British Army and Navy forces, who were acting for the explicit benefit of official drug dealers. History is an interesting thing.
I’m reading a book which makes the following arguments. I have not fully validated them, but the premises are interesting. According to the author (whose name I forget), the primary reason that the Civil War moved forward was that Lincoln, first, ordered Virginia and North Carolina to invade South Carolina, and secondly refused to adopt the Crittendon Compromise, which would have allowed slavery in New Mexico, but otherwise prohibited it anywhere it didn’t already exist.
In considering slavery, it needs to be noted that for most Southerners slavery wasn’t profitable, and would likely have passed away due to economic factors alone. It is cold-hearted to put it this bluntly, but you can’t lay off slaves when economic conditions decline. All moral issues aside, most plantations–despite the fact that they “owned” their laborers–did not do well financially. Jefferson, a tobacco farmer, never seems to have had a profitable year in his entire life.
Arguably, the Civil War set back the process of racial equality, in that the sheer destruction of the war hardened existing prejudices into the active hatreds we saw in the formation of the KKK. Lincoln was a master orator and man of principle, but the question can be asked: did he, in the end, accomplish the greatest good with the resources he had? He did preserve the Union, but there may well have been other methods that would have done the same. You have to be judged by what you actually did, not what you were trying to do. The question is not saying whether Lincoln was good or not, but to understand what happened, so we can learn and make better decisions now.
I looked it up (I actually made these notes a month or so ago). The book was “How America got it right”, by Bevin Alexander. He proposed we would have been much more intelligent had we recognized the market forces pointing to an end of slavery, and simply used U.S. Treasury funds to buy the freedom of the slaves at a suitable point. Since they were defined as property, and property rights were protected under the Constitution, that would been simultaneosly the most prudential and most Constitutional remedy. This could have been done very early in our history.
He makes this interesting point: “In 1860 just 10 percent of white southerners owned any slaves, and only 4% owned ten or more.” In effect, the main opposition to the emancipation of the slaves arose from a small group of aristocrats. The rest of the South fought, in the end, because their homes had been invaded.
He also said this: “In 1830. . .a Southern planter had to invest $750 to produce the same revenue that a factory owner gained by investing a dollar. This disparity became all the greater with the extension of the railroads in the 1840’s. If slavery had been voted out, plantation owners would have diverted their resources from agriculture to industry, the South would have industrialized at the same pace as the North, and the Southern aristocracy would have disappeared in short order.”
There is a point between war and appeasement where principled self assertive patience pays dividends. The roots of the “War between the States” went back at least to the Revolutionary War. I do not feel the end outcome warranted the deaths of 650,000 men, and the destruction of American cities and countrysides, and the generalized poverty and associated crime that follow all wars. This will always remain a complex topic, and it is of course never possible to state with certainty what the outcome would in the end have been, had other paths been chosen.