Re: virus: Interesting Excerpt

From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 06:12:19 MDT


[kharin]
Of course, regarding Islamic moderation, I am somewhat biased; since I have long maintained that if I were to be religious at all I would have to be a fundamentalist. I've never quite seen the point of religious moderation; if one is to believe, it seems a somewhat ridiculous exercise to select what you want to believe from a supposedly holy book, accepting some doctrines and not others. At least fundamentalists are consistent.

<snip>

[kharin]
Bear in mind that Islam is also a social system which lacks any state/church division; in other words, social organisation is not supposed to change and evolve, it is supposed to be immutable and fixed.

[rhinoceros]
I realize I digress further, but these parts of your argument show that the way you peceive ideology is different from mine. As I see it, the material terms of a society as an open system interacting with other societies are the underlying cause, while ideology serves as a means of formalizing and coordinating human/social action or impeding it. So, assigning a truth value to an ideology seems to be a social option.

Although the memetic and evolutionary nature of an ideology can lead it towards unexpected directions, and the social realities it creates can make it an agent of either historical momentum or historical inertia, it is the underlying material reality and not logical reasoning that eventually makes an ideology irrelevant. Of course, we care less for the truth value or consistency of something irrelevant.

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This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS.
<http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=26302>


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