Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Beyond Good and Evil

I stupidly started an argument on teh interwebs. Rather than continue in this pointless endeavour, I will write here - equally pointless probably but I'll feel better about it.

Once again I have been annoyed by the unwillingness of people who think they're doing the right thing to be willing to examine their premise for even a second. Not all people, many people are fabulous. Quietly going about their lives being decent and kind without needing to nail anyone to a 't' shaped object to make a point.

Faith is a wonderful thing. I wish I had more of it. I continue to have faith that humanity is not entirely made up of douchebags and asshats for example. No matter how hard the douchebags and asshats try to convince me otherwise. 

Blind Faith, and Misguided Faith are other things altogether. It's a lovely thing that you believe all the things you believe, I applaud you for trying to live your life by a set of rules that you have assigned to yourself. Would you, for the love of whatever Deity or Higher Power you hold to, LET ME LIVE BY MINE. You see different people believe different things and have a different set of priorities for those beliefs. I'm willing to bet that you can even walk into a single place of worship grab any two people and find that they have differences of opinion in their common belief set. Different religions sometimes form BECAUSE people have differences of opinion over how their belief set is being lived. And that's cool too, because how else do we grow as a species? Differences.

So if there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands even millions and billions of different belief sets out their - whose gets to be the winner? If you want me to live by your rules, and so does 'he' (whomever 'he' may be) and your rules are totally different from his, what? Are you going to fight to the death for the right to rule me? Because I also have a different belief set, and while I don't expect anyone else to live by  mine and I'm really not willing to do more than say, wrestle in lime jelly over it - I'll die before I'll let you make me follow a rule that makes me a bad person. 

Because most peoples decisions come down to that. Most peoples arguments against or for this belief or that belief come down to whether or not they feel they are doing the right thing. Which is great, until they start telling me that I have to do their 'right thing' with absolute disregard for what my 'right thing' is. 

And this is where I start screaming about Religion staying out of Government, and Government staying out of Religion. They should be mutually exclusive, if for no better reason than none of us can fully agree on either, certainly not BOTH. Civil rights should be at the heart of Civil decisions, obviously there are massive differences in Civil rights from country to country but it is for each individual Government to decide on both what their Civil rights are, and how they apply to their law making. It's an argument for another day that some sets of Civil rights are a bit crap. Even in countries where 'one religion' applies (and it's never 100%) Governments should be very careful to apply this. Even more so really since it is in these countries that the most vicious hate crimes tend to occur. 

Wanting to do the right thing is wonderful, truly wonderful. But when you do it to the point of ignoring other peoples right to a full life then I think you need to examine what the 'right thing' you're trying to do is actually about. Cherish your right to your faith, cherish your right to believe in whatever 'crazy' things you want to believe, don't try to take that right away from other people.

Me, I'm going to continue to believe that humans can be better than the dross that keeps surfacing. Do you hear me? I have faith in you humanity. 

Peace. Out.

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