[Buddha-l] it's not about belief

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 09:25 -0500, curt wrote:

> >On this we agree. Indeed, I believe what started this whole discussion
> >was my observing just that. Where we disagree is on the point of whether
> >Christianity has a monopoly on intolerance. 
> >
> I don't know why you keep on bringing up Monopoly. A much better game 
> analogy is basketball. You see, basketball is a rough game, and its not 
> uncommon for a player to throw an elbow when he or she thinks no one is 
> watching. But if there are suddenly multiple players lying dead and 
> dying on the floor in pools of their own blood, then it is only natural 
> to assume that the player standing there for everyone to see with a 
> submachine screaming "kill 'em all!" is probably the guilty party.

As soon as I see we are living in a world in which the only people left
are Christians standing around with machine guns saying "Kill 'em all!"
then I'll accept your point. But as long as we have Sikhs blowing up
airplanes, Hindus killing Muslims to get Ayodhya back, Buddhists
persecuting Muslims in Burma, Buddhists persecuting Tamils in Sri Lanka,
Jews claiming that Sharon had a stroke because God is punishing him for
kicking Jews out of land given to them by God, and other Jews
complaining that the department of health in New York City is trampling
on their freedom to practice religion when it does not all a particular
kind of circumcision practice to be carried out in public hospitals,
then I think we are a long way from the scenario you describe.

While I appreciate your recent essay on romanticism and the absurdity
involved in saying that anything that sounds Romantic must be Nazi, I
think you are torching a straw man. The particular feature of your
approach that strikes me as Romanticism is your idealization of certain
marginalized cultures on the basis of very carefully selected data. And
the particular feature of your approach that reminds me of Nazism (and I
could just as well have chosen any number of other totalitarian
examples) is your apparent willingness to single out one subset of the
entire human population as bearing the responsibility for fostering
violence and impeding human progress toward Utopia. Your apparent
willingness to single out Christians alarms me.

I guess the way we differ is that you come across as (dare I say)
rabidly anti-Christian, whereas I come across as (in no one's eyes but
my own) charmingly misanthropic. 

-- 
Richard