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Rat & Swan wrote:
And why should you call me a luddite?
The shoe fits.
I've given no indication I want
to destroy technology, or oppose technology when properly used.
Your little qualification is your shoe. It fits.
So you support technology when improperly used? Anything is
O.K., as long as it involves use of modern machinery and
industrial/technological stuff?
I don't determine proper/improper use. I do distinguish between crimes like murder, but means are irrelevant.
The attack on 9/11 was just dandy because it involved an airplane?
It was wrong for a whole lot of reasons, none of which are technological in nature.
Of course one has to qualify the use of technology -- it is a tool, anything from a flaked handaxe to a modern space shuttle to a bomb. A hammer is a form of technology, but a hammer becomes technology misused when someone uses it to murder someone else by whacking him on the head with it.
Irrelevant comparison. Technology is neutral.
Yes, Usual -- that was exactly what I said, and meant. To oppose the use of technology for inappropriate or negative ends -- such as close-confinement farming -- does not mean one opposes all use of technology, or is a "Luddite". Technology is a hope for the future, a possible means of creating a cleaner, less destructive, world, and a means of coming to understand the world around us better. Technology, such as the study of genetics, has enabled us to see just how close we actually are to other species, for example -- the 90+ per cent of genes we share with chimpanzees, the 50+ per cent we share even with chickens. Technology provides knowledge and power, and knowledge and power can always be used for either good or evil.
Likewise, humans have not changed that much because of technology. The concerns of an Australian aboriginal tribesman or an Ancestral Puebloan or a citizen of ancient Rome were not different in kind from the concerns of a modern person at a computer keyboard. We are still what we have always been -- human beings. So insights from cultures with lower technological levels may still speak to us today, and, as I say, the works of Sophocles may be more valuable to us than Jerry Springer, or the worldview of a Navajo traditionalist more meaningful than the latest effusion from Fox News. The position of women or the poor was not always worse in such cultures either. If we look back, for example, to the position of Mohammed's wife, it was better than the position of women under the Taliban, although the Taliban have much more modern technology (if not as good as American). I would suggest here C.S. Lewis's _Abolition of Man_, if you haven't read it.
I've
just said that a high level of technology in itself does not make a
culture's ideas more or less valuable. Since you hold to a literalist
interpretation of the bible,
Where have I said what I believe?
Where you claimed the bible could not be illuminated by the Holy Spirit or our interpretation of the text change over time.
I think you better go back and read what I actually wrote before you stick words like THOSE in my mouth. I think I only took exception to your statement that the Holy Spirit was behind your church's radical and novel interpretations of Scripture. Your positions (AR, homosexuality) are *not* an evolution of various interpretations, they are *novel* -- and in order to get to your *radical* positions, one must dismiss Scripture altogether (e.g., Hyland's redactions, dismissing all of the Pauline references to homosexuality, Jude 7, etc.).
Ipse Dixit, Usual -- I disagree, and so do many other people with professional theological training. If the Holy Spirit was "behind" Jesus's radical reinterpretation of the tradition in the church of His day, and behind Paul's radical outreach to the Gentiles, I see no reason the Holy Spirit might not be behind the ECUSA's modern outreach to gays and Linzey's outreach to non-human animals. You'll see Jesus saying, "You have heard it said...but I say to you" several times. Concern evolves, reaching outward to the "marginals". It was the "marginals" who were the main focus of Jesus's attention -- and the "marginals" today are often the gays and the animals.
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