Real-life situation: twenty years since the Ayatollah's fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
Knowledge issue: on what basis can we know what to do in situations where there may be conflict between free speech and respect for the fundamental beliefs of others?
Or maybe: to what extent should people's beliefs be respected regardless of whether they are true or not?
Anyone got a better formulation? I think the second one is better.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
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6 comments:
I have been staring at the screen for twenty minutes now. I don't think I’m ready to go bald. (You might ask what the connection between screen-staring, and balding is, well, i have also been scratching my head.)
I should have an answer tomorrow.
You've lost me there...
*I believe the world is built on the laws of karma. Inasmuch as other people's beliefs may be radical or just plain stupid they still deserve some respect. You may not agree with them,granted but to show a complete disregard and disrespect for other's beliefs is just plain wrong. 2face puts it best when he says "You no holy pass". You cannot cose your mind to other possibilities and expect yours to be accommodated.* Shoutouts to ma boiz!!!!
Thanks for the interesting contribution.
When we say disregarding and disrespecting others' beliefs in wrong, does this hold across all the areas of knowledge?
For example, if I truly believe and proclaim that the chemical formula of water is H30, do I deserve any "respect" for that? I think not. Whereas many people (but certainly not all) think that religious beliefs do deserve it.
I think it's clear that we can't have everyone running around respecting everything everyone says about everything, so the question is: where does the dividing line lie? Or where is the grey area?
hmmm... that is a shaky one...
Well, I guess there should be respect for beliefs beyond scientific knowledge ie religious belifs etc. basically beacuse you do not know and so you cannot counterclaim.
beliefs that contradict basic scientific knowledge( H3O example)however, i agree, do not deserve respect.
There is a problem though if there is immediate disrespect for certain ideas or beliefs before they can be proven- no matter how absurd they sound. The flat world, spherical world is a classic example of why ideas cannot be disregarded immediately even if they contradict what we believe we know. Many times our knowledge has been falsified by (then) radical beliefs
That's a very good point, in my opinion.
The American historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn spoke about "paradigms" - maybe this has been discussed in class already, it's important for TOK - in which practitioners in science follow an unstated set of beliefs and assumptions in their everyday work, and continue to do so until the anomalies that build up become too obvious to ignore or too difficult to try to reconcile, and then a period of "revolutionary science" eventually results in a new paradigm. Examples would be the earth-centred to the sun-centred model of the solar system in astronomy, or the fixed to drifting continent model in geology.
So in principle, if we were to dismiss (or "disrespect") every new finding indefinitely, it would be difficult to make progress in an area like the sciences. At the same time, we cannot operate in a vacuum - what we know must cohere with other things that we know. There are important judgements to be made here - when should we trust the framework of what we already believe and when should we be receptive to new claims and ideas that don't fit this framework?
With regard to religion, one way forward might be to separate the claims that are factual in nature (creation took six days, the red sea parted, etc.) and subject them to critical scientific scrutiny, and leave the moral content of religious beliefs to each individual to decide. The problem is that, often, when it comes to religion, individuals don't decide what to believe - it is inculcated into them at an early age...
Well, this post is now much longer than I intended, so that's enough. Many things to discuss - I hope other will also feel able to contribute here...
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