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2/2
"More inclusive" isn't "better" at any specific job, and it does not appear to me that you've shown that Mormons believe that others are "lesser than" them in any meaningful sense. Someone who gets better returns than me on the stock market is not thereby a better type of person than me.
Suppose we are in school together, and we take a test. You ace it, I flunk. You tell me I should have studied harder. some other dude claims that I shouldn't bother studying, because I'm too stupid to learn. Do you see these two statements as functionally identical? That is to say, are you able to recognize the difference between saying someone is making a bad choice and should make a better one, and saying that someone is incapable of making good choices?
If believing that other people are going to go to Hell is incompatible with "inclusiveness", then inclusiveness is not in fact very inclusive. On the other hand, believing that other people are not really people is to exclude them from important considerations in the present, not merely an indeterminate and hypothetical afterlife contingent on their own free decisions.
I see no evidence that this is the case. The Romans made a solid effort to exterminate Christianity as an explicit denial of freedom of conscience, and they exterminated a number of other people as well on a variety of other pretexts. Japan actually did exterminate (local) Christianity in the 1600s. The Greeks killed Socrates over a philosophical dispute, and were not fond of Christians either. My knowledge of Chinese and Indian history is spotty, but the former includes an incident titled "the burning of books and burying of scholars", and I'm comfortably certain that the latter has similar incidents.
Polytheism does not actually offer superior freedom of conscience, because while a polytheist might believe in many gods, they only have the one value-set, and it is disagreements over values that cause fights.
This statement appears to be straightforwardly false. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot killed 20-25% of the total population of the country he ruled, and that during peacetime and entirely through normal state functions. I am pretty sure the Thirty Years War did not kill 20-25% of the population of the numerous countries and territories involved, or even the countries where the war actually took place.
The Nazis were not Christian in any meaningful sense; the closest they got was ruling a Christian nation.
It also gave more than one reason not to kill one's neighbor. The question is whether Christianity made the romans and their successors more warlike than they otherwise were or would have been on net. I see no reason in the historical evidence to believe that it did so. It seems to me that religion was at least as much a part of Classical pagan wars as it was Christian wars; every war Rome and the Greek city-states ever fought was preceded by auguries to determine the disposition of the Gods, and both civilizations appear to have believed that their Gods demanded obesiance and rewarded their worshippers with victory. Do we blame all their wars on their religion too, or is this standard only applied to Christians?
In actual fact, Christian states appear to have engaged in war in much the same way non-Christian states did, and for most of the same reasons: land, wealth, and hubris, often enough. Appeals to the faith as justification for warfighting seem mainly to have served the function that appeals to patriotism do in our own time: a social technique for building consensus by framing the conflict as an extension of core values. On the other hand, appeals to faith also helped establish and maintain peace between Christian states, and to rally those states to common defense against outside aggression, both of which are positive qualities.
I have no problem answering why toleration is good, and neither does Zunger. It's good because war is hell, so you shouldn't fight if compromise is at all possible. Unfortunately, compromise is not always possible, so you need a backup plan. Zunger rejects the possability of retreat or partition, while I think both are really good ideas, and the best fallback to toleration. Zunger claims that coercion is the only real alternative to toleration. I consider coercion the last resort, and maintain that it should be used defensively or at least reactively.
Yes. The problem is that both sides need to do this, or it doesn't work. One side acting like there's a monster means that there now really is a monster for the other side, and the peace fails. Zunger and people like him appear to have self-modified themselves into an unshakable conviction that people like me are monsters who must be destroyed. I do not think they've done this because they're fundamentally evil or hate peace, but rather because they've drifted into a values-set that is mutually incompatible with mine, and are simply following their values. If they continue on their current trajectory and continue acting on their stated beliefs, they will be, from my perspective, monsters, and people like me will have to fight them. I don't think such an outcome is inevitable or unavoidable. I do think it is very likely, given long-term trends in values-drift. I'm not sure why this makes me similar in some fashion to pol pot, or what you think the alternative is supposed to be if the present sequence of escalations continues.
2/2
If I beat you at chess, I’m a better chess player than you. And if I beat you at heaven bingo, I’m a better christian than you. Heavenly rewards are tied to the moral value of the person.
That’s not the point. I’m not inclined to give credit to an ideology for the valuable lesson it taught through the great slaughter it caused.
Of course that includes famine and disease. The Red Horseman who takes peace from the Earth seldom rides alone.
In the “it means what it says it means” sense. Don’t persecute people for what they believe, that’s all. Like the OP was suggesting, like you probably think ‘lesser than’ believers should be persecuted at some point, like zunger thinks those who harbour misogynistic and racist thoughts should be persecuted. I don’t want to delve into the free speech issue, but I obviously oppose hate speech, slander, sedition etc laws. Freedom should go belief > speech > actions, and 99.9% of societal repression should land on the latter category.
Christian actions are not tolerated because of freedom of belief. The reason christians are allowed to act on their current beliefs is because trial and error, as well as secular enlightenment-type thinking and discussions, have sheared off and polished the religious acts that contradicted peaceful and prosperous living.
You and Hlynka are left with a beautiful and shiny religious nub that fits snugly into, and matches, the structure of modern society; and you wonder why you ever needed the structure at all, you were seemingly right all along, look at those outcomes. In reality, without it you’d have nothing but a rusty piece of junk. Christian values gradually converged towards Enlightenment values.
Take the aztec religion (chrisitanity was never as bad, but bear with me). The enlightened version would take an allegorical view of ‘sacrifice hundreds of enemies on the altar every month’, as an altruistic self sacrifice to perform good deeds in the shadow of the Teocalli. The original interpretation can be believed, but it can never be allowed to be performed, that is not covered by freedom of conscience.
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