FOLLOW-UP NOTE TO "NOT EVERYTHING'S DEBATABLE"
I have a question for those who believe that everything is relative, that there is no Truth with a capital "T." Are there sane arguments to be made for the merits of genocide, slavery, rape, racism, pedophilia, thievery, littering...? If not, isn't that because there are indeed Truths that are self-evident? And evident to who? Those selves willing to see the Truth, as in "Seek and you shall find" or "There are none so blind as those who will not see."
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I take it this question was for me... lol
For starters, I do hope that Obama turns out to be the Adult Supervision that we need. But realistically speaking I'm not convinced that he'll be more than just a little bit of that Adult Supervision. As you state, (correctly in my opinion), we need a lot. I'm just not convinced that he'll be able to provide all of what we need. There's a lot of Government disfunction that's built into the system and no matter what he does, he's just not going to be able to root it all out. But I'm hopeful that at least some things will improve.
Regarding relativity... again... You said so yourself that for Reaganomics to work, "the private sector would have to be operating from their healthy, enlightened first nature." Hypothetically, what if that were true? Wouldn't Reaganomics be correct then? By your own definition the success of Reaganomics is relative to the enlightened nature of the private sector. If the private sector were in fact enlightened in the manner which you speak, would you then consider Reaganomics to be Truth with a capital "T"?
Clearly, the bulk of the private sector achieving this state of enlightenment is a far fetched prospect at this point. On a more practical level, I believe at one point you mentioned the likes of Bill Gates, who does in fact donate a lot of money to charity. For him, Reaganomics is a completely successful construct for the benefit of all of humanity. Let's cut taxes for Bill Gates, because he actually WILL use that money for good. So relatively speaking Reaganomics is effective... for him...
In the Bill Gates scenario, it's a truth with a lower case "t" because it only applies to him and his likes. For the vast majority of other wealthy private sector people the truth is just the opposite. I believe that you confuse Truth with a capital "T" with an overwhelming majority of one truth versus another truth. In this case let's arbitrarily say it's like 50 million versus one thousand. It's quite a lopsided victory for the truth against Reaganomics versus the truth of Reaganomics. But for Truth to possess a capital "T", (by my definition), it has to possess complete, one hundred percent compliance.
I'm not about to make a similar defense of relativity out of all of the issues you stated, (though I probably could), cause it would just take up too much space, and I'd start to feel my soul deteriorate because my personal opinion sides with the "correct" side of the issues, obviously. But let me tackle one just to prove the point...
Genocide. Clearly, there was at least one person, Hitler, who decided that genocide had a benefit to the greater good of humanity. No matter what we do, we can't change the truth (with a lower case "t") that Hitler felt this way. We can all shout out for eternity that he was wrong... clearly... but for whatever reason it was his truth. Using the same logic that Truth with a capital "T" must possess complete 100 percent compliance we can't mathematically assess that genocide being wrong is a Truth with a capital "T". Despite the fact that it's probably 500 Billion to one in favor of that. It's still relative. It's very lopsided, but it's relative.
I do believe that the truths when stated in the quote, "We hold these truths to be self evident", is much better defined by the degree of lopsidedness in this truth v. truth battle. It will be self evident when one truth dominates another. I don't think the authors of the Declaration of Independence had in mind the truth that slavery was wrong when they wrote it. In fact many, if not all of them, had slaves at the time. Their truth was that slavery was just fine. By proxy of lopsided victory over time against slavery, they turned out to be wrong. But their Truth with a capital "T", if that's what they were espousing, turned out to be anything but definable, extremely fluid, and ultimately, relative.
Thank about it... "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal,..." Really? Except black people apparently. Self evident truth better be fluid and relative for all our sakes.
Relatively yours,
loff56
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