Re: Obscenity in ancient texts and the ethics of uploading them

On 2008-05-20, Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaughan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
But #2 is a different matter altogether, and I think *that*
is what many people are disagreeing with Paul about. Paul
thinks (or at least suggests) that lots of activities that
many Christians regard as perfectly normal are commonly,
on balance, inappropriate for Christians because they're
liable to lead to mental pollution. Those who disagree
with him aren't (for the most part) saying "who cares
whether you pollute your mind?", they're saying (or at
least thinking, so far as I can tell) "I don't see that
the danger is great enough relative to the benefits".

You'd hope that our minds were suitably resistant to harm from reading
papers. There may be slight shifts but nothing notable and I'd have
thought no tendency to 'sin'. I don't think reading about binge drinking
is going to make me more likely to do it. Of course the religions would
put us straight on cultivating the right mental attitudes.

Then again, given the typical papers, you'd be spending more time in
compassion reading about all the pain out there than in sympathetic joy
reading about the good things that happen. It's probably a good way of
becoming disconnected - "Oh, another few thousand dead, what a pity"
or feeling more powerless about it. The papers do have a mix of bad
and good news, but we do seem to see the bad from all over the world.

The religious edict (from the Gita but I'm sure Jesus said something
similar) "Most blessed is he who feels others' pain as his own" (or
something like that) would be quite hard if your contact with the world
was through the filtered view of the papers.

- Richard

--
_/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/ Richard dot Corfield at gmail dot com
_/ _/ _/ _/
_/_/ _/ _/ Time is a one way street,
_/ _/ _/_/ _/_/_/ except in the Twilight Zone
.

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