QUOTE(Moulton @ Thu 6th May 2010, 7:46am)
QUOTE(Herschelkrustofsky @ Thu 6th May 2010, 9:46am)
You obviously have not acquainted yourself with scholars such as
Nicholas of Kues.
Indeed I am not. But could you say more about his role in promoting diligent epistemology of arbitrary beliefs systems (including scientific beliefs, religious beliefs, secular political beliefs, and popular cultural beliefs)?
The Wikipedia article is typically inadequate. An example of Cusa's epistemological rigor is his contribution to the debate on the
Quadrature of the Circle. Some scholars insisted that by increasing the number of sides of a polygon, you make it eventually indistisguishable from a circle. Cusa pointed out that in fact, the more sides (and vertices) you add, the
less like a circle it becomes, because each vertex is a singularity, an interruption of continuity, as opposed to a circle which has no singularities. Beyond that, as a colleague of mine wrote some time ago,
QUOTE
This just underscores the fact that Cusanus was not the first to discover the incommensurability of a circular and a straight line. Cusanus’s discovery was to realize the implications of the incommensurability, i.e., that the circle is not incommensurable to the polygon in the same way that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side. The circle is transcendental, and therefore ontologically superior, to the polygon, something which Llull did not realize.
QUOTE(Ottava @ Thu 6th May 2010, 9:51am)
QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Thu 6th May 2010, 4:23pm)
QUOTE(Kwork @ Thu 6th May 2010, 11:09am)
Of course hate speech is forbiden, but otherwise mild humor and criticism is protected freedom of speech.
As is saying
"Your being a dick to Muslims for no good reason."There is a very good reason. They kill people over it in order to try and dominate and spread fear. This is to show that they cannot intimidate us.
Can you name one religion whose adherents have not done that at one time or another? You sound like Bernard Lewis.
QUOTE(A Horse With No Name @ Thu 6th May 2010, 11:47am)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Thu 6th May 2010, 2:14pm)
And its attitude toward women is some of the worst to be found in a modern religion.
Curious, but four predominantly Muslim countries -- Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Kyrgyzstan -- found themselves with women as heads of state.
Milton is no dummy, but his Achilles heel seems to be his willingness to be an echo chamber for whatever the latest propaganda line may be.
QUOTE(dtobias @ Thu 6th May 2010, 2:58pm)
Of course, to our resident nincompoop GlassBeadGame, the cartoonists are the evil offenders and the censors/death-threateners are the victims.
IMHO,
these guys are the evil offenders and everyone else becomes the victim.
Back to the question of Nicholas of Cusa -- despite being a Catholic Cardinal a long, long time ago, he was a progressive thinker in that he wrote
De Pace Fidei, "
On the Peace of Faith," which is a dialog between representatives of different religious persuasions, including Islam, seeking common ground.