Dear visionaries,
Just got back in town after a week out, and had a fun time catching up.
I agree with William (!) about one post a day. What a good deal that would be. Although I am a little concerned that a liberal wants to work out this kind of a solution without the intervention of a regulatory agency, I am still willing to support it, and after my comments below that’s the last you will hear from me today.
If our constitution, laws, and ordinances are all evolving, and there is no over-arching ethical standard, then we have no basis for folks in one part of the evolutionary process showing indignation at the inhabitants of another portion of the process, regardless of what they are doing at that other time. And if that is the case then we need to ditch all our faux-indignation about Chinese folks having to live outside of town, women not voting, segregation of races, and women having to keep their shirts on. Who cares?
If you are not relativists, then tell us what the standard is. Such a standard would have to be better than your living elastic gumby constitution, because a standard that can evolve into any other standard isn’t a standard at all. A constitution which could incrementally evolve to the point where lynching blacks would be a civic responsibility and duty is personally offensive to me, and I cannot believe that you all persist in defending this. Why do you defend this?
But if you have a fixed standard, then please tell us what it is, and why it is binding on the rest of us. If you are open relativists, then open wide and swallow the reductio. After all, it is your cooking, not ours.
And this ties in to my one comment on the misrepresentations of my writing in Credenda. What I am represented as advocating, I actually repudiate. But those who accuse me of this form of abusive sexism have no basis for being indignant over any form of sexism. So, suppose me guilty of maintaining that a wife should just lie back and take it. So? Suppose that I do advocate spouse rape. Don’t you?
“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community, whose names I have changed. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.