Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Ideas, Creationism, and Minorities: Section 13; Group 4

Hello everybody!

I have been terribly sick for the past four days now.  I am starting to feel well, but I have to go to court on Thursday for a traffic violation.  I am missing all of the great discussion and cannot wait to return next Tuesday.  Below are my thoughts on the readings for Berkeley, Locke, Voltaire, Leibniz, and Hume.

Berkeley believed that anything that was unobserved at any given time did not exist.  As crazy as it sounds, I have actually thought about this many  times.  Is everything around us simply a figment of our imaginations?  Does everything in this world exist only in our heads?  I have thought, at times, that life is just an imagination in our minds and something our souls experience.  Berkeley thought that ideas were the only things that actually existed.  In his thought process, if no mind was there to perceive something, that something simply did not exist.  The point that makes this idea logical is that God maintains ideas in order to keep things in existence, even when civilian observers are absent.
Q: WHO BELIEVED THAT IDEAS WERE THE ONLY THINGS THAT EXISTED?
A: BERKELEY

I really enjoyed reading about Leibniz.  There is such a great peace and lifted weight off of my shoulders in believing that each moment is all part of God's greater plan.  God is all good and perfect and would never allow bad things to occur if they did not serve a greater good.  Does the existence of bad things, such as natural disaster and evil, conclude that there is no God.  What do you think?


Voltaire was inspirational in that he believed everyone should be able to speak their minds.  I absolutely agree with his value in freedom of speech.  This is how the flow of knowledge spreads.  I am not saying that everybody should agree, but each person should be allowed to share their unique ideas and knowledge with the public. Although I agree with his advocacy on free speech, I do not share his pessimism about the world around us.  Faith is trusting God's goodness, no matter what seemingly nightmarish tragedy you may witness.
Q: WHILE LEIBNIZ WAS A(N) ___________, VOLTAIRE WAS A(N) ___________.
          a) optimist; pessimist
          b) pessimist; optimist
A: A) OPTIMIST; PESSIMIST

David Hume claims that God is not proven to be our divine creator.  I disagree.  The things ad beings of this world are far too complex to simply fall into existence one day.  This universe is too magnificent and complex to simply come to being out of thin air.  I did like, however, that Hume did not dispute creationism.  I disputed the lack of evidence in who or what the creator was.

I find it interesting that as Albert Einstein became more educated on science, the more he believed in a higher power.

Warburton asked Kymlicka if immigrants were classified as one group or if they were divided into groups of different cultures.  In a sense, immigrants as a whole, face similar hardships.  To the majority of the people of their new land, they are viewed as different, incompatible, or less important.  Individually, different cultures each face their own set of prejudices.  All of the racism and prejudice is depriving these HUMAN BEINGS of their rights as HUMAN BEINGS.  They deprive these individuals of their dignity and humanity with their unjust words and actions.  We are all inhabitants of this universe.  What are some examples of universal values across the world? If everybody thought of one another in terms of this universal concept, this world would be able to see peace.  Instead, everybody speaks and acts in ways that show carelessness and disgust towards those with cultural, religious, or ethic differences and forgets to embrace this diverse melting pot of a universal community we live in.

I can't wait to hear your thoughts and hear about what GROUP 4 discussed in class. Keep me posted!

Arielle Roides (PHIL 1030-013)

1 comment:

  1. Natalie Ricketts3:32 PM CDT

    Last class we continued discussion on some material that was related to the last few of our topics, minority rights. We thought Kymlicka had good points, although we agreed that it would have made more sense to us for this reading to have come before cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. I found his point about the ties between ‘special rights’ and preferential treatment interesting. That is an angle I never had seen or thought about before. That is a foggy line and I’m not sure what I think.
    Our next topic is tolerance. Brown defines it as not freedom, equality, or justice, but permitting someone to exist within a certain set of conditions/constraints/limits on behavior. She uses the example of the presidential elections and how some of the candidates said they were “not for gay marriage but they were tolerant” which paints sort of a picture of what she defines this as. I think tolerance is an important thing for societies to grasp and utilize to be able to maintain order and respect for one another.
    What are the two things that Brown says is not tolerance? (equality and freedom)
    What is your definition of tolerance? How does it differ from Brown’s?

    --Natalie Ricketts

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