I think the censorship arguments can definitely use some maturing… for example, what would you think of the cultural censorship that occurs with Nazi ideology? Probably want to keep that one, huh?
We don’t necessarily want to do away with censorship, I think. But, I think in the most mature world, it would be healthy to.
Why can’t the boy ask his priest about his most serious doubts regarding god, and receive an honest answer back? Why does the priest say the solution is faith, an inward focused quality to be solved at the individual-level?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Why is the priest allowed to just make shit up with nothing more than a bronze aged poorly translated manuscript to back him up? The boy should be able to ask away. It’s the priest that should be censored.
Crazy factoid I learned recently. Children younger than 18 are prohibited from participating in religious activities and receiving religious education, even in schools run by religious organizations within China. If you’re too young to consent, you’re too young to be indoctrinated into a religious tradition.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I mostly agree-ish. But the priest is really a metaphor for us all. See, the priest happened to make a very human mistake: identify yourself with your ideology. The problem there is rather simple: ideology is unstable, and people compensate for that via censorship. The reason people compensate that way is more complex… it has to do with the relationship they’ve created between themselves and the ideology, codependency. If the ideology is attacked, it feels like a personal attack. If the ideology is destroyed, it can feel like philosophical death. People, like the priest, respond like an act of self-preservation.
We do this with all kinds of topics. Sexism, racism, nazism, … the Right would also do this for communism and socialism. If someone came to you with a thought experiment to explore the merits of racism from an objective perspective, how easy would it be to participate? Not so much, reasonably so, I’d imagine.
You run into this problem where now, you’re concerned with what should and shouldn’t be censored. That sounds great and all… but it really isn’t any better. When humanities experience of the world revolved around their connection with god, it made sense to censor the heathens. Common sense to do so, dare I say. That idea doesn’t look so good in retrospect, but what’s changed now is just the context we live in. What hasn’t changed is the problem.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.
Every system has its gray areas and decision points.
That said, I see a lot of anti-censorship absolutists who seem zealously in favor of open debate until… they get swamped by spam posts or drowned out by monied interests or sea-lioned by people who are just being annoying.
Hell, Charlie Kirk died with a debate on his lips. And TPUSA’s love of campus debates appears to have died with him.
How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
That’s a good point, and it’s really what happens at a fundamental level when you decide your ideology is who you are. We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume, and we even joke sometimes like “you know if they’re vegan because they never stop talking about it.” It’s not rational to think the sanctity of an ideology should correspond with our own sanctity, but alas we fall into that trap so often as humans. How it happens can be like the frog in boiling water situation.
300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:
…all the while, they have no problem discussing the right way to punish your children versus a slave.
300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now. We’re doing the same stuff as before under the current cultural context. The only difference now is, we have more awareness of this dynamic while typically considering it just a thing of the past.
We should have conversations with people because that helps them understand. Sometimes when we try to convince them to instead just bury the thoughts because they make you a bad person, all we actually do is inspire more curiosity and secrecy. What we certainly don’t do is figure out where these crazy ideas came from in the first place, which means we aren’t exactly solving the problem with any sense of longevity via the approach of censorship.
My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes. We are always becoming something, never a static identity. If you were born Hitler, then you’d have grown up to be Hitler. The real question is, how do we use this knowledge for the betterment of mankind?