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Wednesday, April 24, 13:31:09 [ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1], 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

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Date Posted: Thu, Dec 28 2017, 16:30:38 PST
Author: Ken de Russy (No Gods, No Masters)
Author Host/IP: NoHost / 172.92.243.161
Subject: Re: Merry CHRISTmas to all
In reply to: Hector Ramos 1st VP 's message, "Re: Merry CHRISTmas to all" on Tue, Dec 26 2017, 11:10:38 PST

Thanks for that Hector. In general I feel the same way in that there is often little space for those who are different. A top goal in a healthy world is to let people live as they wish so long as they do not violate the rights of others. To do that of course requires that we must fully comprehend what rights are and where they come from. That is a subject that we all must study to understand and then live.

A small side note on this is to remember that your free exercise of your intellectual freedom in no way insulates you from criticism. You are absolutely free to express your views but you should have no expectation that they will be free from criticism. Religious views are NOT in some special class. Offer a ridiculous view and it will be ridiculed.

The concept of tolerance took on new meaning for me when I read John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty". I recommend reading this passage very slowly to grasp the writer's meaning. The point of this passage is that "toleration" can be misunderstood to mean that rights are ours to grant to someone else. It is true you must not violate the rights of others but no one should require anyone's tolerance or permission to exercise those rights. We are constrained by law to not violate the individual rights of others which I will remind you exist independent of society or government. Our rights are not granted or given. Our government simply guarantees rights we already possess by virtue of being human.

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“Wherever the real power in a government lies, there is the danger of oppression,” Madison wrote. “In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”24

But for Madison and his allies, toleration was not enough. Instead, they insisted on religious liberty. Madison’s friend Thomas Paine denounced the idea of toleration: “Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but is the counterfeit of it,” he wrote. “Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it.”19 George Washington agreed. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of,” he wrote, “as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.” In the United States, “[a]ll possess alike liberty of conscience.”20

The purpose of government is to protect individual freedom, not to empower the majority to do its will.


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