Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to You now regret you clicked "post" on that one... ;-)

Not really
Robert — (archived)

You oughta give up on that mind-reading thing, it's just not working out for you.

My use of the word "hate" was to borrow the theme of the entire thread, and it's a bit of hyperbole. You're zeroing in on it and trying to use it as the vehicle to distract from everything else I said. Would you not agree that you're the "quintessential embodiment" of the philosophy you espouse? Don't you live your beliefs? You're not a hypocrite, are you?

You sound oddly like a Rightist's chimera of a Liberal when you wag your finger and declare that one must not hate. But lack of emotion is hardly the measure of a human being. Humans who aren't emotionally crippled experience the full range of emotions, love, fear, anxiety, hate, happiness, sadness, across the whole spectrum. You're not describing an ideal human, you're describing an ideal Vulcan.

What's important is not whether one can avoid emotion, but rather how one handles emotion. An enlightened human is self-aware, recognizes all the various emotions, and then chooses how to act, or not act, upon them. A savage is somebody who is driven by the impulses triggered by emotions, and lacks the consciousness to do otherwise.

All emotions, whether we like them or not, or whether we think it's good or bad to have them, are in fact vitally important to a healthy person. What we call emotions are actually part of the homeostatic regulating mechanisms of all brains, human and nonhuman alike. Emotions evolved to provide the brain with a realtime indicator of the balance of all sensory input at the moment--it's the brain "editorializing", if you will, on the current state of the organism interacting with its environment. When emotions are strong, they act as motivators.

So to say that I "hate" a philosophy isn't to say that I'm in any way inclined to go out and lynch Rightists, nor to lobby the government to pass laws restricting their freedoms, for example to prevent them from marrying; nor to incite violence against them by accusing them of "treason!", to wish that they'd all die in a horrific natural disaster, or to do any sort of harm to Rightists at all. Rather, I'm strongly motivated to participate in political debate, and political action, to defeat the philosophy that I believe is dragging down my country.

Hate per se, like all emotions, is neutral. It's how you harness it that counts.

Hate doesn't kill people, people kill people.

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