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Old 2011-02-20, 05:37   Link #3059
LeoXiao
思想工作
 
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Vereinigte Staaten
Age: 31
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ascaloth View Post
Hoho. It does go to show that charismatic dictators like the aforementioned couple (as well as several others in history) draw the source of their power from the general population's tendency towards blind, unquestioning faith of authority figures; the exact same kind of faith that religious institutions draw their staying power from. History has demonstrated all too many times that the favouring of blind faith over critical thinking tends to lead to bad things.
This is all true. But what I'm saying is that it's practically inevitable for people to follow and yearn for authority, or at least some sense of it.

Spoiler for Long rant on social dynamics:


For those who managed to slog through all that, the moral of the story is that society, people, and the whole world have their own patterns and truths that may or may not be verifiable, and that claiming that the whole truth can only be obtained through empirical analysis (even though, like I said in an earlier post, human beings are imperfect in their perceptions) only leads to a more long-term, underlying blindness and the rise of tragedy.

In my opinion, religion in its ideal form does not claim to know or preach in the same way that science and engineering do, but rather to temper and remind people of what we do not know as tiny beings in the vast existence of the cosmos. Empirical science is but an extension of man's natural physical existence, and we should not be boxed in by its limited scope.

Quote:
In what sense? I'm not disputing their power but I don't quite follow your logic. Surely there were rulers with similar levels of influence in the past?
It's not actually important to my point, but what I'm saying is that despite the new, supposedly improved ideologies surrounding them, those rulers were able to despite this, or perhaps because of this, reach the top and attain such great power. A king of old had to place himself under Heaven, but to those people ruled by Stalin and Mao, Heaven was on earth and ruled through human gods.
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