Re: [Pan-users] Re: OT: freedomware vs... Was: Building Panon Windows?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 8 Mar 2010 12:47:05 pm Duncan wrote:
> Travis posted on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:29:58 -0800 as excerpted:
> > I listen to all those that post here Duncan included even though it
> > sometimes reminds me of
> > what I might hear at a rightwing "Fundamentalist" revival.
>
> FWIW, something that sometimes gets lost on both Christian (I
> honestly don't know if it applies in Islam, etc, or not) and
> Linux/FLOSS fundamentalists, but which I'm acutely aware of, due to
> my background, is that it *MUST* be a personal choice.

Historically, freedom of choice in religion was vanishingly rare. It 
*still* is vanishingly rare in many parts of the world, particularly 
the Islamic world, where proselytising other religions is a crime, and 
converting away from Islam is often treated as a capital offense.

As Richard Dawkins points out, it would be the strangest thing if people 
referred to small children or even new-born babies as "Republican" 
or "Democrat", but all over the world people think nothing of talking 
about "Jewish babies" and "Catholic babies" or "Hindu babies". It is 
ridiculous and wicked.

Even when freedom of religion is permitted by law, there is very little 
actual freedom of religion (to say nothing about freedom *from* 
religion) in practice. Duncan, you were raised as a particular  
Christian denomination. I feel confident to make a prediction:

90% chance you are still with the same denomination.

9.99% chance you are with a very similar denomination.

0.01% chance that you have converted to significantly different branch 
of Christianity (say, Greek Orthodox) or an offshoot like Mormonism or 
Unitarianism.

And a vanishingly small chance that you converted to a non-Christian 
religion. Even if you have done so, I can virtually guarantee it isn't 
Druze, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Chinese Traditional Religion, or 
medieval Norse religion. To mention just a few out of thousands.

Do you really think that you have freedom to choose any religion? Can 
you really tell us that you could have equally chosen to convert to 
Samaritanism, Ghost Dance, or Bambuti native religion as some variety 
of Protestantism? (In fact, I'm predicting that even Catholicism would 
have been a huge and difficult step.)


> For Christians (at least most Christians, and here's why I'm not sure
> it applies to Islam, etc), it's called "salvation by faith".  If it's
> the law, it's not faith.

On the contrary, according to most Christians throughout history, it's 
the law that you have faith, or else. (Not just any old faith, of 
course, it has to be the right one.)



-- 
Steven D'Aprano