At de Lange's discourse below is a quite brilliant example of genres of
communication now under attack as unsuitable for a learning organization:
it is a lecture, a sermon, a totalizing vision of the world and why it is
what it is.
And then it ends with an invitation to dialog: to discuss the fabric of
language which the writer has created, the world of language which he has
created and within which he lives.
I would like to accept the invitation to dialog, and hope At will talk
with me, since I am one who finds the world he describes below not the
world I live in, or want to live in.
I begin by acknowledging that I am more convinced than ever that it is
best to keep "believing" and "thinking" as separate ways of being in the
world, and that one of the functions of "systems thinking," perhaps its
most critical function, is to subject belief systems such as At's to the
pressures of dialectics that might help him to review his certainties and
taken for granteds. His a complete and confident world, with no evidence
of uncertainty, or tentativeness, or groping: the function of system
thinking is, I believe, to help him to open his beliefs to the pressure of
countervailing views.
As an initial step in trying to open a dialog which may never come about,
I would like to ask At why the evil that Christians and other "believers"
have inflicted on the world he attributes not to their "beliefs" but to
something he chooses to call "judgment." That is, the Grand Inquisitor and
the Crusaders did not torture and kill millions because of their Christian
"beliefs" but because something that At inserts into the conversation: bad
"judgment".
The question then must be raised: why are "believers" so prone to this
kind of murderous bad "judgment"?
For example, in our time Christians continue to kill and main in the US to
show their disagreement with those of our citizens who support the right
of women to have abortions. Strangely, the often nonbelievers and atheists
who support abortion do not kill the Christians: it's the devout
Christians who are the violent ones.
Is this merely bad judgment? Or is violence endemic to "belief"? Is there
a road that leads from passionate belief to Holocaust?
I may, of course, merely be one of those cold academics running with an
empty spiritual fuel tank. It does increasingly seem to me that the cool
ones with a half empty tank are less likely to hurt others than the true
believers, convinced that they hold the truth, and with tanks and holster
full go speeding ahead.
It comes down to this for me:
There is a always a need for prophets, for those with a burning vision of
the sins of this world and a plan for its redemption. Those believers are
always in a state of declared war with the coldeyed thinkers who want to
slow them down and talk a bit before launching the next crusade.
I do not think it is wise for us at this time to try to merge the hot
vision of the true believers with cooler perspectives of the system
thinkers.
And I am hoping that Rick will not decide that this message of mine is too
passionate for this list.
Steve
[Host's Note: Steve, passion is OK. However, I prefer that we not have a
debate here about pro life and pro choice. With that caveat, I'm delighted
to see this thread. ...Rick]
[Quote of At's long msg deleted by your host...]
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