F. Personal Freedom - it's not just for liberals any more.

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We are told that there was a time when support for the freedom to live one's own life, on one's own terms, was a cornerstone of liberal political thought. But when one can't tell a joke without being expected to precede it with 5 minutes of nervous apologies and disclaimers, or hold a party on a weekend without encountering a line of brainwashed drones self-righteously indignant that one didn't decide to spend one's free time at "Habitats for Humanity" instead, the only freedoms one can honestly see being supported are the freedom to pry and the freedom to preach. Even the "Moral Majority" of the early 1980s was never this repressive. But a great deal of local Pagandom we've encountered is and that's a shame, especially coming from some who pay lip service to a moral principle that ends in the words "do as thou wilt".

We refuse to play along.

The best rule of thumb, here, is that if we don't have a good reason to prohibit you from doing something, we'll let you do it - and the desire to keep somebody from throwing a tantrum, or claiming to be "offended", are not good reasons. The question is not, how offended is somebody, but how offended does she have a reason to be. That assessment is the host's to make, and his alone. How would I make it? Let's put it this way. I like strangeness. I think that "Animal House" should be shown on the first night of Freshman orientation with the hope that the "kids" will get ideas. So, if you complain that somebody's plan to hold a theme party, while left handed albino lesbian abortionists are starving in Haiti, is bourgeois and immature, guess how far that's going to get with me? Nowhere. Life is to be enjoyed. Today. So, let's all lighten up.

(By the way, if it should sound strange that a non-Wiccan Moderate, with some conservative, and some libertarian tendencies would be beating the drum for personal freedom, and anything vaguely resembling the Rede (*), let us note that Gardner did not invent the ideology behind the expression "An ye harm none, do as thou wilt". It's a reasonable statement of one of the values that grew out of the Western rationalist tradition (classical liberalism, as opposed to the contemporary political variety), which has its roots in Greece. What could be more conservative, than to promote the traditional values of one's own civilisation?

However, let us remember the first part of the statement as well as the second. This creed should never be mistaken for "do your own thing, period". The difference, is one of respect for all around one, including oneself).

Question :

What does promoting parties have to do with religion?

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(*) Just resembling the Rede. The problem with the Rede, as a moral principle, is that "harm" is not as simple a concept, as the New Age promoters of the Rede often like to think it is. Applied directly, in practice, it often degenerates into "if you mean well, anything that you do is acceptable". Millenia of experience dealing with the limitations of the understanding of the individual, among other causes, have taught traditional societies the need for moral codes more complex than the demand that one "mean well". How curious that some think that the return to ignorance reflected by the discarding of the lessons learned from these experiences would represent progress!

The Rede is good as a basic principle that a philosophical discussion of Ethics may begin in, so long as one remembers that harm may only be minimized, not eliminated. It is not a practical principle to apply, owing to the complexity of that discussion, which runs so long as to fill entire libraries. The ethical philosophy of this site will not be one of "if you feel good about it, do it", or even the Utilitarianism that a slightly less naive reading of the Rede would suggest. It is more one of Rule Utilitarianism, in which, rather than looking at the expected consequences of a proposed specific action, one considers the effects of adopting a given rule, in an a priori fashion, when deciding whether or not one should do so. What kind of world do we create by adopting it, and is it a world that a sane person would care to live in ?

Example : Let us say that a reasonably healthy person checks into a hospital, and five people are waiting for organ transplants. A utilitarian might accept the notion of that patient being rendered down for his spare organs, because the lives of those five patients may be saved by sacrificing his. A rule utilitarian will embrace the common sensical horror which most of us would feel at such an idea. If, as an apriori decision, we accept the principle underlying such a decision as a valid one, then we would find ourselves living in a world in which, at any moment, we might be the next to be killed. This is no way to live, and so the principle given is invalid.

Let us point out that one can't help but have a position, viewed in a priori terms, even if it is "I'm making my principles up as I go along". So, the non-rule utilitarian's position seems to be, "don't worry about that, and just hope for the best". The "best", so far, seems to include 20th century totalitarianism, including Naziism, an inconvenient historical fact which the Utilitarians and Moral Subjectivists in our midst, alike, seem to like to forget.

That's why we tread lightly around the Rede, instead of enthusiastically embracing it, the way that some will say that we should.