I'm suggesting, satire isn't always well informed and can add fuel to the fire by not doing the homework.Of course it is.
I'm not even sure where you're going here.
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
I'm suggesting, satire isn't always well informed and can add fuel to the fire by not doing the homework.Of course it is.
I'm not even sure where you're going here.
I'm sure it isn't. So, show where it is wrong. Don't act all offended and say the satire is ill-informed and expect others to care. Provide reasons. Argue against it. Nuke it.I'm suggesting, satire isn't always well informed and can add fuel to the fire by not doing the homework.
As far as Islam goes, there is a stream of reports from Islamic countries about how the courts - not extremists, but actual judges - treat anyone who dares even suggest that rights be extended or atheism is an option:
http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-student-gets-3-jail-term-atheism-152045172.html
That's Egypt where a student has been sentenced to 3 years in jail for saying he is an atheist on Facebook. I mean, you don't have to look for for reasons why Islam needs a massive wakeup call. But not bombs. Not guns. Just pointed criticism and mockery of positions and ideas by showing just how insecure their faith must be if they need to beat and jail those who suggest that their faith is not correct. It's not just the extremists.
but of courseI'm suggesting, satire isn't always well informed and can add fuel to the fire by not doing the homework.
When you make it about how they wish to be treated, how does that work when they want to be treated as more special and fragile than you? When they say, "Hey, because Muhammad was right, we insist you don't so much as draw him as you imagine him, for any reason," do you just capitulate? What of the Scientologists who use lawyers to enforce their rules that nothing bad is said about Scientology? Are we supposed to respect their attempt to impose a similar boundary?The Golden Rule, if applied correctly, compels us to treat others the way they wish to be treated, not the way we wish to be treated. If we are immune to ridicule, and attempt to teach others this immunity by intentionally offending them, despite our knowledge that this will hurt them and the lesson will be fruitless, then we are not applying the Golden Rule. Then we are not practicing Agape.
So, Inanna, how do we deal with people who are easily offended? How do we teach them not to be offended? How do we teach them the simple lesson that the offended is his or her own offender, that the offended has the choice, that the offended chooses to be offended?
By intentionally offending them?
If the offended has the choice whether or not to be offended, then the intentional offender, by the same token, has the choice of whether or not to intentionally offend.
If we ourselves are immune to ridicule, should we ridicule others in order to confer on them the same immunity? Or is ridicule or satire a valid social tool that should be used for the sake of establishing or maintaining social health or social order?
I have no answers for others, but my own love for my fellow beings precludes intentionally offending them. As far as teaching them the lesson that the offended is his or her own offender, that nobody can offend them against their will, I will gladly teach it--if they are open to it.
The Golden Rule, if applied correctly, compels us to treat others the way they wish to be treated, not the way we wish to be treated. If we are immune to ridicule, and attempt to teach others this immunity by intentionally offending them, despite our knowledge that this will hurt them and the lesson will be fruitless, then we are not applying the Golden Rule. Then we are not practicing Agape.
I think there are better ways of social critique and teaching others not to be offended.
Friends, not those tunes! But let us sing a new and better song:
Joy, joy!
Joy, you spark of godly beauty, Daughters of Elysium,
We will enter, drunk with fire, Heavenly, your Heavendom.
-Ode to Joy, music by Beethoven, written by Friedrich Schiller, based on fragments from the Thalia, a Christian prose poem by the Alexandrian Christian teacher Arianus.
"Friends, not those tunes!" was the title of a front page article Hermann Hesse wrote for the Hamburg Daily at the outbreak of the Fist World War. Alas, his appeal proved fruitless! Would satire have done a better job?
Hermann Hess himself was no stranger to satire, but he wrote it for people who were open to it. In his novel Siddartha he depicted Siddartha the Buddha as a greedy merchant who associated with whores and enriched himself at the expense of the poor, but in the end attained enlightenment. The Buddhist world embraced his book! It was translated into all of the twelve languages of India, into most languages of Asia, became the most popular German book ever translated into Asian languages, and Hesse became a household word in Japan because of it.
Unfortunately, Hesse's books were banned and burned in Nazi Germany. Hesse became popular in Germany really only after he had become the darling author of the American Hippie movement.