Time for a bit of contemplation

That last post about the Civil War and such may have given the wrong impression.  I'm not defending slavery.

But the fact remains, the North conquered the South, and took their property.  It wasn't legal.  Those alive at that time said something to the effect that there was a "higher law" than the Constitution.  So, my thesis is sound.  They subverted the Constitution and created something different.  It cannot be argued that this had become a different nation.  It has been changing all the time.

The past is the past.  But the future hasn't been written yet.  You study the past in order to avoid the mistakes of the past, but you cannot change it.  What's done is done.

It is a question of how much freedom can be had.  Total freedom is inconsistent with order.  For example, you are not free to do whatever you want, for it you could, you could do any anti-social thing that popped into your mind.  Clearly, in order to have an orderly society, an individual must give up some autonomy.  A rather extreme example:  you cannot kill somebody just because you want to.  It can thus be seen that the prohibition against killing is a restriction upon freedom.  Random killings would cause a problem with order, no doubt.  People would be more inclined to live in peace with each other if they felt safe around each other.  But how much freedom should there be?  The more prohibitions, the less freedom.  These are not trivial questions.

So, we are left with deciding what kind of world we want.  Do we want a more civilized one, or a less civilized one?  For the more civilized it is, the more likely it is to have restrictions upon freedom of some kind.  There may be arguments about that one.  True, it may be an oversimplification.  But it is sound in the main point.  The point being that you must have restrictions of some kind or chaos will be your lot.

Too much control will remove personal initiative.  For if the government became too restrictive, people would lose all autonomy and cease to strive to better their lot.

I think there is a fear amongst some, or maybe even more than some, that too much progress can be a bad thing.  Referring to myself, I have expressed some apprehension about the progress of mankind if such progress leads to outcomes like self-driving cars and certain "trans-human" technologies.  Perhaps I haven't said it quite this way before, but sometimes I wonder if we are headed towards something like the Borg of Star Trek.  Could resistance indeed be futile?  No, I would prefer to resist that particular outcome, thank you very much.  I would prefer a human existence.  A Borg-like creature could not be free.

I suspect there is also a fear that to leave the Earth and live on other planets could change the basic order.  We are in a comfort zone here on Earth.  But that comfort zone may get quite crowded.  This leads to movements like Limits to Growth and environmentalism.  If humans left Earth, these humans could go off into completely new and strange directions.  There may be a real, justifiable fear of this.  If some don't become Borg, others might.  And so on.

Risk is a fact of life, however.  If the Christians hadn't left the Old World, would they have been conquered by the Muslims?  Quite possibly.  But the Muslims fear leaving the Earth, I suspect.  After all, there was some sort of fatwa against the settlement of Mars.  This confirmed my suspicion that Islam is incompatible with space settlement.  You cannot bow to Mecca if you can't even see the Earth with your naked eye.  But I think Christianity can survive anywhere in the Universe.  It may be well that Christians consider leaving Earth, but that would also be risky.  There was also a fear expressed by someone somewhere who said that we may not find God out there.  Whatever we may find may shake our beliefs to their very foundations.  There is a real fear of this, I suspect.  But staying put also has its risks.  Risks cannot be avoided.  There is no perfect safety.

The world changes.  Humans change.  The Universe changes.  It is folly to think you can escape this.  What do you do about the challenge of change?  Deny it, or embrace it?  I choose to embrace freedom.  I'll risk the changes that may occur that I may not like.  Besides, it is not completely my choice, as it isn't completely up to me to make this decision.  It is completely up to me in my own little world, though.  That is true for anyone, for what you choose to believe is really up to you.  At least for the moment, you can believe whatever you want in this country.