Did Ed Snowden do the right thing?
dcrookston at gmail.com
Mon Jun 10 16:42:21 MDT 2013
On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 6:33 PM, Sasha Pachev <sasha at asksasha.com> wrote:
> Because he lived in a society that as a whole has rejected the idea of God-
> given moral compass and tried to invent its own.
It is disingenuous to assert that everyone who struggles with
questions of ethics in the absence of a divine command will come to
the same conclusions that the Soviet Union did.
> If you reject God, how do you know that what you believe is right is really
You can't. Then again, you can't know that if you accept the divine
command theory, either.
> If there is no good or evil, then no matter what happens - pain, hunger,
> addiction, or loss of life - is just another thing, neither good nor bad.
Well, if you want to be a nihilist, then I suppose you might come to
that conclusion. But if you're proposing that there are only two
options - religion and nihilism - then you're either missing out on
several centuries of philosophical thought or you're deliberately
creating a false dichotomy.
> You may think this train of thought is crazy, but I am speaking from the
> perspective of someone who actually has lived in a society that has suffered
> severe mass deception and who has had to question every value he's been
> taught from birth to figure out what was wrong and what was right.
I had the same experience. I was raised Mormon.
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