May 29, 2004

Re: Everett, Right on the Money
Danny

Your reply was dead on the money as far as I am concerned on femenism and very close on authority. Your rebuttle of relative morality was perfect. We may have differing views on how truth is given to guide us though. So I may not be one to spur up a controversial debate. I am open to discussion on where our ideas differ though.

I have always beleived that men and women are inherently different in many fundamental ways. This difference should never lend itself to the idea or behavior that one gender is superior to the other. Unfortunately in the past, men have used the differences unfairly and the result is a rebelion against the notion that the genders are not interchangable cogs as you so perfectly put it. It is actually similar in my mind to the way some rebel against religious principle with the idea of relative morality. Extreme femenists tend to want to deny fundamental differences because those differences have not been properly handled in the past. So I agree with you 100% on that issue. To tie this into Tolkien a bit, I don't think he was anti-femenist at all. Especially considering the general opinions of the time when he wrote those books. Eowyn is an amazingly bold character for him to put in at the time of the writing of the book.

I thought your discussion on the misdeeds of religious leaders in the past was very well thought out and well written as well. I don't want to get into any heated religious discussions in this forum for two reasons. First because this isn't the place for it, and second, my experience has shown that heated discussions only offend both parties and leave both even more convinced that they are right than before. I do however enjoy having discussions where ideas are expressed respectfully from two differing views.

You wrote that the collective thinking of generations of leaders is more reliable than an individual. I agree with that, but I do not feel that it is where one should put their trust or their faith for guidance. The problem is that there is a human element in this, which inherently introduces errors. For example purposes, assume you have a straight horizontal line moving from a certain point. Say you also have another line starting from the same point but tilted down even .5 degrees. The further you follow that line, the further appart you are from the original path. The human element introduces error that over time results in greater and greater problems. Consider the collective effect of the human component on doctrine and principles for 2000 years and it is no wonder there are so many differing views and confusions in the religious world today.

The other problem with trusting collective reasoning is that it tends to assimilate potentially wrong ideas in order to accomodate the desires or ideas of a few that are in the collective. By your reasoning, truth is not a democracy so the guiding power behind it shouldn't be a democracy and shouldn't feel the need to accomodate all parties.

The wider the gap between human ideas and truth, the greater the likelihood of attrocities being done by those who are acting under their beleifs. You can see that buying into my train of thought leads to one of two neccesities: reformation or restoration. Reformation would be leaders making an effort to correct the course they have seen to be errant and attempting to correct it. However, reformation still leaves the human element in charge of the direction. Human efforts to fix an errant path are also subject to their own imperfections and errors and therefore not capable of a complete reformation.

Restoration on the other hand implies that a restoration of truth occured through divine means. It means that the truth was restored independent of the human errors of the past 2000 years; new wine in new bottles. It should come as no surprise if a doctrine that claims to be restored has many things in agreement with other religious doctrines, but also has distinct differences on issues where the original truths have been restored. So that is my view on the issue of religious authority. To any who are interested in discussing these ideas RESPECTFULLY I love to do so. If you want to discuss this further, drop an email to danny_staten@hotmail.com. Put "re: tolkien-movies forum" in your subject line so I can distinguish it from the masses of junkmail I get on that address.