From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Thu May 13 2004 - 01:26:02 BST
Hi Wim:
Good to hear from you again. You wrote:
> Dear all (especially Americans),
>
> Back from holiday (and catching up with what you wrote in my absence) I was
> quite shocked to read in my newspaper (de Volkskrant) today that 59% of the
> Americans (cf. 2,5% of the Dutch) believe that the bible book of
> Revelations is literally true (i.e. reliably predicts the -literal- 'being
> taken up into Heaven' of faithful Christians preceded and followed by all
> kinds of disasters associated with Israel, 'Babylon', a 'resurrected Roman
> empire' etc.)... The article didn't state a source for this statistic. Is
> it true in your experience? That it is 'dangerous to let one's life be
> motivated by non-rational belief systems' (ascribed 3 May 2004 20:46:49
> -0700 by Mark H. to Noam Chomsky) then gets a whole new meaning for me when
> it is endorsed by Americans (supposedly from the other 41%)... If such
> ideas (implying the welcoming of those disasters) have considerable
> influence on the foreign policy of the USA (as the article stated), to what
> extent can it be a force for Good in the world then???
A USA Gallup Poll in January 2002 found that 50 percent of Americans call
themselves religious, 33 percent said they were spiritual but not
religious, and 10 percent said they were neither. So the statistic you
quoted is wrong. But, I didn't need a poll to confirm what from my
experience I already knew.
Be that as it may, my question is, "What does this have to do with the
MOQ?" Are you trying to establish that SOM intellect should control
society when Pirsig takes such pains to point out that such control would
be a disaster?
"When they (subject-object intellectual patterns ) are put in the position
of controlling society, of setting moral standards and declaring values
when they then declare that there are no values and no morals, the result
isn't progress. The result is social catastrophe." (Lila, 24)
I know it's standard operating procedure for Europeans to bash the U.S.,
but don't you think we should at least bring Pirsig into the discussion on
a site supposedly devoted to his metaphysics?
Best regards,
Platt
P.S. Not that I'm pure. I plead guilty to ignoring the MOQ in some of my
posts, too.
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