No Compulsion in Religion? November 11, 2005
Posted by Resident Egoist in : Uncategorized , comments closedVia Mid-Day.com:
An alarming trend ? that of Muslims kidnapping Pakistani Hindu girls and forcing them to convert to Islam ? in Pakistan?s Sindh province is forcing the worried resident Hindu community to marry off their daughters as soon as they are of marriageable age or to migrate to India, Canada or other nations.
Recently, at least 19 such abduction cases have occurred in Karachi alone, while several others have been reported in the media.
Well, there’s “the religion of peace” for ya.
What do some people think(?) ideas are anyway? Something to be rammed down the throats of others? Are they so gullible to the point of truly believing that one can’t fake allegiance to an idea? No. The human ability to practice evasion is not infinite.
What the above type of action reveals is merely an interesting fact about ideas that can be transmitted to others only through recourse to the initiation of physical force: that said ideas are glaringly false and those who resort to coercion to spread them know it.
Dialectical Calculus November 11, 2005
Posted by Resident Egoist in : Culture, Philosophy , comments closedRobert Tracinsky has a great article at Capitalism Magazine on the current riots in France and their root cause: the ideology of multiculturalism, i.e., racism. In it he provides an interesting quote by Nazi chief Adolf Hitler, which goes as follows:
“Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles”?”you are nothing, your race is everything.”
Many would be be surprised to learn that they essentially agree with Hitler. Yet all they have to do to see that they do is to replace the word “race” with such words as “society”, or “class”, or “proletariat”, or “ethnic group”. The underlying fact is that in all these cases, the individual is wholly unimportant, while the collective is considered to be everything. Hell, everywhere you turn today you are told to turn away from the illusion of the self, and embrace the undeniable reality of the omni-maximus collective.
But now I come to my question for all the collectivists out there, including the Hitlerites: The collective, whether it be race, or gender, or “proletarians of the world”, or society, or whatnot, is necessarily a collection of individuals. There can be no collective without the individuals that constitute it. To put it another way again: a collective is merely an aggregate finite number of individuals. But now, if the individual is nothing, how can a certain sum of individuals amount to something or anything?! Since when did 0 + 0 + 0 + … start yielding anything other than 0?
So much for the validity of “scientific” socialism.
Technorati Tags: Nazism, Individualism