Dechen Norbu wrote:Well, well, I'm under the impression that we're having some parallel topics to undermine a few opinions me and others have been expressing in this thread by our friend mudra.
First you debate me recurring to red herrings like appeal to emotion with that question about your past tainting you and so on and so forth and now you start parallel campaigns instead of directly writing your disagreement here, where this debate is happening? People read those messages, are fooled into accepting your fallacious conclusions and will have a biased reading of this debate, is it?
Do you realize that both actions are classic ways to manipulate opinion and not very wholesome? You are surprising me. I wonder if you realize the problems with your reasoning or you are unaware of them.
Anyway, let's see those new threads you placed in the Dharmic-free-for-all subforum:
The first I will write about is called "don't let yourself be "embedded". In my opinion, if we are to assume this wonderfully woven post is a reaction of sorts to this thread, we should also note that it contains several problems. This means, loosely, that being embedded is a bad thing and if you disagree with the conclusion mudra posits at the end you have let yourself be embedded. However, we will see that this is a faulty conclusion.
mudra wrote:
For as long as we are in a samsaric state, it is always going to be a challenge to think straight. False conceptions
are the stuff of modern life it seems, perhaps more subtly so than in the past. Frankly a lot of people don't even realise that they have bought into subtle or not so subtle media campaigns.
For example, think "embedded". When I was an active photojournalist in what seems another lifetime, admitting to being 'embedded' would have been a cause for shame. Now journalists seem to be proud to 'embedded'. That in itself is damning, let alone sensationalist sound bites that buy and sell the perspective of state sponsored terrorism (eg the Weapons of Mass Distraction spiel, etc).
I have a lot of 'moral' (mainly western to be honest) friends who thought assassinating Osama and dumping him at sea, was totally justified - unlike Mladic who allegedly mass murdered thousands of Muslims (perhaps more individuals than Osama bin Laden was allegedly directly responsible for) but gets to have a trial at the Hague. Mladic too was hunted for years. Is there a fundamental difference? Osama became a much more hated figure than Mladic, yet look at the numbers. Please note the term alleged, because there is in modern jurisprudence the concept that people need to be proven to be guilty, no matter how much evidence there appears to be prior to verification.
The power of the media over the minds of the masses runs quite deep, much deeper than most people who like to think of themselves as educated would like to admit, giving us a kind of unfounded conviction. I worked in media for years, and still do the odd assignment (documentary/editorial). Though war wasn't my "gig" I have covered it a little and a few scenes of mass violence. Most people have just watched this kind of thing on their tv screens. It's different when you see how things actually unfold (and have to try and wash the blood off your shoes after covering the story).
I think as Buddhists we all really need to focus clearly on all aspects of cause and effect when we view samsaric events unfolding around us. It's all to easy to claim this or that group or person is inherently bad, yet we would be letting the Buddha Dharma down by not acknowledging the complexity of these (samsaric) situations
Seems a perfectly well reasoned post, but let's look closer, because if this is a reaction to my opinions, I will make a few comments.
Now, you start this text presenting positions we are all prone to agree with and end with a debatable sentence that doesn't follow from the previous. That's a rhetorical maneuver to induce people who are agreeing with your previous statements to automatically agree with your conclusion while it in fact it doesn't result from them.
Also, it's noteworthy that according to the Buddhist doctrine to the premises that
there isn't anything inherently bad and that
if something can be said to be bad, it also can be said to be complex,
doesn't follow the
conclusion that classifying something as bad is incorrect.
Osama Bin Laden wasn't inherently bad, the reasons why he became a terrorist are very complex and yet we can rightly say that he was a bad person. The same goes for Mladic.
It goes without saying that in this thread nobody says that a certain group or person is inherently bad, so if this post comes as a reaction to this debate, you also have a straw man there. It's a critic to an intellectual standing point that I've seen nobody supporting yet.
Now, the following fallacy is more subtle.
When you present those who felt killing OBL was justified as being doubtfully moral, thus presenting such adjective between apostrophes (
'moral
'), knowing that you are in a Buddhist board and most Buddhists disagree with such POV, and in the end sentence drawn your conclusion, you establish a relation between them and those who, according to you, consider groups or persons bad without taking account for the complexities involved, meaning me or those who in this debate expressed similar opinions. That is called
poisoning the well and is a logical fallacy where adverse information about a target is pre-emptively presented with the intention of discrediting what the target person is about to say, thus trying to make your conclusion unassailable, since those who are likely to disagree with it perhaps share something in common with those who found OBL death justifiable. It may work for those less cautious readers, but not for someone who has some familiarity with rhetorics.
The next topic is called "Abramic religions evolve..."
They do, to protect themselves, just not because of the text you present us.
Well, the fact that many Islamic thinkers claim the divine origin of the Koran because it predicts scientific facts that couldn't be known at the prophet's time is nothing new neither shows some sort of evolution. Saying the theory of evolutions is not problematic for the Islam goes along with this line of claims.
I would call it religious adaptation so that Islam doesn't fall in discredit as science progresses.
We all know who got the wrong end of the stick when the Bible clashed with Darwin's theory of evolution...
OK, that's it.
Best wishes.