Interview answers...
Aug. 21st, 2005 07:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoAnswers to five questions posed by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pokeypony, original meme can be found here.
1. Would you sacrifice your own life for a complete stranger?
This is a famous "difficult" question, and one that I don't think anyone can answer with certainty. I believe it would depend on the situation for me. While I tend to be generous and altruistic, I'm not terribly brave. Throwing myself into the jaws of a shark or a tiger to distract it from attacking a stranger, for instance, would seem pretty unlikely to me. If I had to do it to save someone I know and love, that might be enough to push me into it.
I do not believe any life is "cheap", but I also don't believe all lives are of equal value. Of course, in the moment of emergency, one has no time for analysis. Instead, we act instinctively or nearly so. Humans do not have a lot of instinct, I believe, but what we do have tends to self-preservation in some form (not always to wisdom, though, in that respect.) We can, and often do, override our instinctive reactions by sheer force of will power. That, however, takes some preparation and forethought in most cases.
In short, I don't have any real answer to this. Without actually having the situation occur, I won't give a hypothetical response, because I can't predict my reactions on this basis.
2. Do you believe in God in any form, and if not why so?
If by God you mean a rational, omniscient, omnipotent, and unique being, the answer is no. There are too many paradoxes and contradictions in that for me to stretch my mind around it. Indeed, if there really is a God who matches the one presented in the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic scriptures and traditions, then I would reject him as cruel, self-centered, pompous, spoiled, childish, greedy, arbitrary, inconsistent, and possessed any number of other character flaws and defects that show him not to be what he claims to be.
This does not mean that I don't think there is any truth that underlies religious faith. I do believe there is an absolute reality, and that we only see bits of it through a sort of fog. Religions try to put together those fragments to construct a coherent whole, with varying degrees of success, but always with some degree of error because the entirety of truth is outside human knowledge and comprehension. I believe that the values and goals taught by Jesus or Gautama or Confucius are sound and have a basis in truth, but that humans often misinterpret them or twist them to the wrong purpose. For example, Jesus said "Judge not" yet today's self-styled Christian leaders seem to spend almost all their time passing judgement on anyone who disagrees with them.
3. What is your opinion of someone like me that is a gay/zoo/christian?
I can't render a judgement, if that's what you mean. I am gay, though the ways in which that finds expression are probably very different from what you mean when you use the word. I may well have zoo tendencies, but again, the actual expression is probably very different. I can only conclude that when you declare yourself to be Christian, it means something different to you than it means to the abrasive evangelical and fundamentalist leaders who are presently so active in condemning everything that doesn't suit them and trying to turn the once free United States into a theocratic tyranny no better and no more free than Afghanistan was under the Taliban.
I simply do not understand how someone can be gay and yet support the Republican party, for example, because that party is clearly dedicated to keeping gays from having any freedom to live at all. The same is true of Christianity as I know it. I have a degree in religious studies, as you probably recall, yet I can't reconcile historic Christianity with people being given the freedom to live their lives and be fulfilled. The Christian church is, and always has been, conflicted by the contradictions between the actual teachings of Jesus and those of Paul. I see these as mutually exclusive in many cases.
As for being zoo, well, the New Testament doesn't seem to address that directly, so we could sidestep the issue of being zoo and Christian if we are strictly literal about it. I have discussed the topic at great length withfavouritewindow only to find that I really am not sure what I think about it. I can understand only up to a point, and beyond that I am lost. My biggest concern about physical expression of zoo tendencies is that those who do so are hurting themselves psychologically. Certainly there is a conflict between Christian belief and most expressions of sexuality, and trying to reconcile this seems to lead to convolutions and distortions that are difficult to justify.
4. If you had the chance to live life as a real horse, but lose all knowledge you had as a human now, would you do it?
At last, an easy question. The answer is no. I am my thoughts, my mind, my experiences. To surrender that is to be dead. If you asked would I agree to live in a horse's body with my own mind and intelligence, I'd have a much harder time deciding. I might say no to that as well unless I could receive the horse's instincts and intelligence alongside my own. Otherwise, I'm sure I wouldn't even be able to walk, much less run. And lacking the survival skills that come naturally to the horse, I'd probably hurt myself or even die quickly. But there would be no point in becoming the physical horse if I no longer knew who I was or could be aware of what I had become.
5. If there were one thing about the world that you could change right now, and I mean *anything* at all, then what would it be?
One thing? Without reducing the level of technical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge humankind has achieved, I would have the actual human population be perhaps one tenth of what it is today. Knowing what we know right now, I believe rational sensibility would keep us from eating our world alive as we are doing. I am not sure it is possible any more for us to stop, our numbers have become too large and our ability to separate sex from reproduction has come too late. Overpopulation produces various kinds of madness that are self-destructive to a civilization, and many of them are already very active in our world.
Difficult questions, I hope my answers make sense. Ask me if you need clarification on anything. :)
pokeypony, original meme can be found here.1. Would you sacrifice your own life for a complete stranger?
This is a famous "difficult" question, and one that I don't think anyone can answer with certainty. I believe it would depend on the situation for me. While I tend to be generous and altruistic, I'm not terribly brave. Throwing myself into the jaws of a shark or a tiger to distract it from attacking a stranger, for instance, would seem pretty unlikely to me. If I had to do it to save someone I know and love, that might be enough to push me into it.
I do not believe any life is "cheap", but I also don't believe all lives are of equal value. Of course, in the moment of emergency, one has no time for analysis. Instead, we act instinctively or nearly so. Humans do not have a lot of instinct, I believe, but what we do have tends to self-preservation in some form (not always to wisdom, though, in that respect.) We can, and often do, override our instinctive reactions by sheer force of will power. That, however, takes some preparation and forethought in most cases.
In short, I don't have any real answer to this. Without actually having the situation occur, I won't give a hypothetical response, because I can't predict my reactions on this basis.
2. Do you believe in God in any form, and if not why so?
If by God you mean a rational, omniscient, omnipotent, and unique being, the answer is no. There are too many paradoxes and contradictions in that for me to stretch my mind around it. Indeed, if there really is a God who matches the one presented in the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic scriptures and traditions, then I would reject him as cruel, self-centered, pompous, spoiled, childish, greedy, arbitrary, inconsistent, and possessed any number of other character flaws and defects that show him not to be what he claims to be.
This does not mean that I don't think there is any truth that underlies religious faith. I do believe there is an absolute reality, and that we only see bits of it through a sort of fog. Religions try to put together those fragments to construct a coherent whole, with varying degrees of success, but always with some degree of error because the entirety of truth is outside human knowledge and comprehension. I believe that the values and goals taught by Jesus or Gautama or Confucius are sound and have a basis in truth, but that humans often misinterpret them or twist them to the wrong purpose. For example, Jesus said "Judge not" yet today's self-styled Christian leaders seem to spend almost all their time passing judgement on anyone who disagrees with them.
3. What is your opinion of someone like me that is a gay/zoo/christian?
I can't render a judgement, if that's what you mean. I am gay, though the ways in which that finds expression are probably very different from what you mean when you use the word. I may well have zoo tendencies, but again, the actual expression is probably very different. I can only conclude that when you declare yourself to be Christian, it means something different to you than it means to the abrasive evangelical and fundamentalist leaders who are presently so active in condemning everything that doesn't suit them and trying to turn the once free United States into a theocratic tyranny no better and no more free than Afghanistan was under the Taliban.
I simply do not understand how someone can be gay and yet support the Republican party, for example, because that party is clearly dedicated to keeping gays from having any freedom to live at all. The same is true of Christianity as I know it. I have a degree in religious studies, as you probably recall, yet I can't reconcile historic Christianity with people being given the freedom to live their lives and be fulfilled. The Christian church is, and always has been, conflicted by the contradictions between the actual teachings of Jesus and those of Paul. I see these as mutually exclusive in many cases.
As for being zoo, well, the New Testament doesn't seem to address that directly, so we could sidestep the issue of being zoo and Christian if we are strictly literal about it. I have discussed the topic at great length with
favouritewindow only to find that I really am not sure what I think about it. I can understand only up to a point, and beyond that I am lost. My biggest concern about physical expression of zoo tendencies is that those who do so are hurting themselves psychologically. Certainly there is a conflict between Christian belief and most expressions of sexuality, and trying to reconcile this seems to lead to convolutions and distortions that are difficult to justify.4. If you had the chance to live life as a real horse, but lose all knowledge you had as a human now, would you do it?
At last, an easy question. The answer is no. I am my thoughts, my mind, my experiences. To surrender that is to be dead. If you asked would I agree to live in a horse's body with my own mind and intelligence, I'd have a much harder time deciding. I might say no to that as well unless I could receive the horse's instincts and intelligence alongside my own. Otherwise, I'm sure I wouldn't even be able to walk, much less run. And lacking the survival skills that come naturally to the horse, I'd probably hurt myself or even die quickly. But there would be no point in becoming the physical horse if I no longer knew who I was or could be aware of what I had become.
5. If there were one thing about the world that you could change right now, and I mean *anything* at all, then what would it be?
One thing? Without reducing the level of technical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge humankind has achieved, I would have the actual human population be perhaps one tenth of what it is today. Knowing what we know right now, I believe rational sensibility would keep us from eating our world alive as we are doing. I am not sure it is possible any more for us to stop, our numbers have become too large and our ability to separate sex from reproduction has come too late. Overpopulation produces various kinds of madness that are self-destructive to a civilization, and many of them are already very active in our world.
Difficult questions, I hope my answers make sense. Ask me if you need clarification on anything. :)
