ON BREW, MISREPRESENTING KEEN

Kudos to Joe for his two posts, and like Will I think it is a good opportunity to clarify where I stand on a few of the issues he has raised, and maybe raise a couple more in the process.

ECONOMY:
Joe: "I can assume that [Eric] allies himself more with the redistribution camp. He thinks we should invest in less non-essential things and spend less money."
Eric: "I think that firstly we should be aware of the fact that money is being redistibuted all the time, more and more towards an affluent elite and less and less to the majority of employed citizens. Fixing this problem requires redistributing funds in a different way, not necessarily through political policy but through providing opportunity for the disadvantaged to compete as well (along Will's line of thought). But more importantly, I think that we should realign our economic aims to the empowerment of local, small-scale economies, that provide incentive not for growth but for a deepening and humanizing of the economic realm. All costs, monetary and environmental, should be accounted for in prices, somehow. International and even global commerce should be maintained at only a minimal, highly regulated level. Globalization of economy, and the international trade of manufactured goods is undeniably a poor idea, in light of current environmental circumstances. "

RELIGION:
Joe: "ERIC does not believe in God and thinks that believing in God is a major problem for the world."
Eric: "A misleading summary. While Will may have deemed religion as irrelevant rather than get angry about it, I think that religious beliefs have an undeniable, significant influence on how we participate in the world. And thus, on cross-cultural communication. Mostly, I think it inhibits it any substantive sense. My experience in predominantly-Islamic Indonesia has really galvanized this for me. Whether or not "religion" is an agent or effect of "culture," or both, it is very relevant to one's cultural vision and any change in cultural infrastructure necessitates change in the religious infrastructure as well. BUT, in agreement with Will, the existence of God and the particularities of belief are irrelevant to me. What concerns me in this world of consequences is the prevailing Religious Method, its counterproductive tendencies and the fact that currently, the irrational respect and authority we grant religious thought disallows discourse or progress entirely.

"To be clear, I think religion has been (part of) the problem, but I also think that within its influence lies the solution. In my eyes, humans are most notably religious beings - desperate for life, scared to death of death, able to die for ideas and create a bond with people, music and the earth in ways that we historically have tried to label as 'transcendent.' I think the current environmental problem is a religious opportunity to re-associate religiosity with relationships and landscapes, and in the necessary solution to it we will find a new religious identity that will be an improvement upon the current one."

HUMANITARIANISM:
See my earlier posts on the dangers of Idealism. Saving people is awesome, but only if it is in accordance with saving ourselves from what appears to be environmental catastrophe. To be more controversial, I think that if we had to prioritize, saving the world comes before saving poor people. Hopefully, in doing the former, the latter will follow suit naturally. Or maybe, by doing the latter the former will follow suit. Hm. I will post soon on cutting food production as a solution to environmental crises.

POLITICS:
Joe: "On a global scale."
Eric: "Hm. Universal human rights is great, as far as I know. But our goal shouldn't be to implement social change of any particular form on global scales. I say that any political movement now should be turned towards the local or regional levels of social order. I think we should decrease the size of governing states to a point that we stop trying to make laws that apply so broadly they might as well be termed "universal." I think that logistically, social order and political justice is only able to be administered on small scales with an attentiveness first and foremost to the contextual quirks of that population and the land on which they live. I think we tend to judge the quality of political systems by a pretty superficial index of standard of living, and that more attention to responsible food production and less attention to stock markets is a necessity for a healthy people with a healthy political system."

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
Joe did not include this in his post, so I will do my best to summarize our various positions:
WILL: "The crisis isn't really that big or that urgent, and its solution will come naturally through the shifting of economic incentives in capitalist systems."
SETH: "The crisis is big and urgent, I don't see Christianity as a source of the problem and I think it can provide a solution. I think about this topic a lot."
JOE: "This certainly is a huge deal and the environmental crisis is flowing over into socioeconomic injustice as well. I'm not sure what to do about it."
ERIC: "The crisis goes beyond global warming. More alarming to me is rates of deforestation, the global food production system and the implosion of oceanic ecosystems. It signals a religious and socioeconomic crisis as well, and the solution must be religious in scale if it is to work.

ON THE UNITY OF THESE ISSUES:
Eirc: "If any effective solution is going to be found in any one of these subjects, it is going to have to include action in all of them. This is both daunting and exciting. "