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Exactly the kind of discussion for an ANSWER the terrorists would like to
see. It would affirm their view that we are godless and dirty, deserving of
whatever they can do to us.
They do not do what they do because they have some religion telling them to
do this. They do it because of what they *are*. They are what they are
because they have been taught unending hatred from the time they were born.
So they celebrate when the "infidels" are attacked. They would *laugh* to
hear us talking about "reason". The only language they know is violence.
If we want them to understand us, we need to speak to them in their language
with the swiftness and power that will cower them.
Talk to the scorpion that killed the turtle after he promised not to do so
and talk to him about reason. If you ask the scorpion why he stung the
turtle he says, "because that is what scorpions do".
----- Original Message -----
From: <the_omega_man@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Don Roos" <rosewood@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2001 8:08 AM
Subject: Re: THE ANSWER
Don wrote:
>Great answer! Meaning: that is no answer at all. As philosophers are bent
>to do, they can only question and not produce any answers.
Philosophy is the source of any answers you know, or think you know. What
you, or anyone else, "knows" may be the product of good philosophy or bad,
but it is the product of your view of reality (your metaphysics), your way
of knowing things (your epistemology), your understanding of good and evil
(ethics), your view of man's relationship to other men (politics), and your
view of beauty and ugliness (aesthetics). In short, all answers to life's
questions are based on philosophy (again, your particular philosophy may be
correct or incorrect). Philosophy not only asks questions, it provides all
the answers (whether you consciously recognize the philosophy upon which
your personal answers are based, or not).
Don also wrote:
>If your *wonderful* philosophical mind can somehow take away someone's
>beliefs, but do not substitute anything else, that is going to disolve all
>need for terrorism? Get real and go think some more. I suspect you will
turn
>into another statue of "the thinker" before you come up with any useable
>answer.
What we witness with "terrorism" is the inevitable dead-end of the road one
travels when one substitutes mysticism for reason as one's way of knowing
things (one's epistemology). When a "higher power" (whether that higher
power is "the people", or "the state", or "God") is substituted for reason
as one's way of knowing things, when "revelation", for example, replaces
reason as a way to know good from evil, then the whims of the "higher power"
become the standard against which all actions are judged.
Thus the "terrorists" find justification, as all terrorists throughout
history have, in the service of their "higher power".
Reason is the right path to discovering things - the way to discern good
from evil. What happens when we follow the path of reason is that we
discover that the free life, man's life qua man, is the ultimate value, the
ultimate good. As long as men follow paths other than reason they will find
things more important than man's free life, and they will sacrifice other
men's lives in pursuit of their "higher" goals.
Philosophy based on reason dissolves "terrorism" by showing that there is no
value higher than man's free life. Once one sees that, committing acts of
terror against other free lives becomes unthinkable. It would be a
violation of one's own highest value.
The Omega Man
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