What right do you have?

Originally Posted by BigJohn

Not too long ago I would watch a 'preacher' preach from on top of a wooden box. I would go and listen to him on a regular basis. It wasn't his message that I was interested in, nor was it he would talk till he could talk no more and another 'preacher' would replace him on top of the wooden box.

What amazed me was he preaching in a 100% Muslim community.......


By the way, I was the only one in the 'crowd'.

You weren't the one(s) on the box as well were you....cause that would be something to see.
Although people do practice their speeches in front of a mirror.

Anyway, let's say he was preaching something you really disagreed with and found offensive, but you are the guy who owns a fruit stand a coupletwothreetens of meters away and just could't stand to listen to it anymore. You can't move the stand as your license is for that spot and all the other ones are taken. How would your right to pursue a livelihood without being subject to what you consider hateful rhetoric play into that scene?

[BigJohn]

Originally Posted by ketzer

You weren't the one(s) on the box as well were you....cause that would be something to see.
Although people do practice their speeches in front of a mirror.

Anyway, let's say he was preaching something you really disagreed with and found offensive, but you are the guy who owns a fruit stand a coupletwothreetens of meters away and just could't stand to listen to it anymore. You can't move the stand as your license is for that spot and all the other ones are taken. How would your right to pursue a livelihood without being subject to what you consider hateful rhetoric play into that scene?

I had a situation happen that was similar to what you portrayed. The situation got totally out of control when the woman moved inside the business and claimed to customers and then to the police that I had kidnapped her and other terrible things. I finally put on the door a sign claiming we were closed and turned the lights off. The woman still would not stop what she was doing and the customers still came into the store.

Finally the police arrived. One officer spoke to her and another spoke to me. It looked like I was going to get arrested. To my surprise, they arrested her. A couple days later, I looked up the charges. She was arrested on a whole lot of serious charges. It turned out, she was on probation for other serious crimes she had committed. I felt sorry for her because she was a young mother in her 20's.

Originally Posted by BigJohn

I had a situation happen that was similar to what you portrayed. The situation got totally out of control when the woman moved inside the business and claimed to customers and then to the police that I had kidnapped her and other terrible things. I finally put on the door a sign claiming we were closed and turned the lights off. The woman still would not stop what she was doing and the customers still came into the store.

Finally the police arrived. One officer spoke to her and another spoke to me. It looked like I was going to get arrested. To my surprise, they arrested her. A couple days later, I looked up the charges. She was arrested on a whole lot of serious charges. It turned out, she was on probation for other serious crimes she had committed. I felt sorry for her because she was a young mother in her 20's.

Sounds like she may have been mentally ill, but I hear being kidnapped can do that to a person, lets hope she gets/got whatever help she needs.

You didn't address my hypothetical, but I will forgive you as your reply brings yet another complication for you or any of the other dogs out there to chew on.

What about those apparently crazy people?
What rights to espouse their own beliefs do they have, even when they are not harming anyone else at the moment?

Many would listen to another's religious beliefs and say "That person is nuts!" and "What they are preaching is dangerous!". And sometimes, their ideas are clearly contagious and start spreading among the wider population. How wide should we let that person spread their deranged ideas? What if once enough minds become infected, we fear they will try to force their beliefs on the rest of us and it will be too late to stop them, as they will have become too many in number, and too many of us are too afraid, or just too disconnected or apathetic to try? Do we have the right to expect that these people with their crazy contagious beliefs should be quarantined to avoid spreading them to the majority of our society and perhaps bringing the whole thing to it's knees? Maybe we need to nip it in the bud before it is too late?

Maybe they are advocating that the US go ahead and use its nuclear weapons because God will not let it's enemies destroy America by retaliating with their own nuclear weapons??? One street corner cook is not so much of a threat, but what if the idea starts catching on? Do we have the right to blow out the candle before it becomes a fire that burns everything down? Where is that cut off line when we have the right to act? When are we allowed to take the threat seriously and act in our own defense.... before it is too late to stop it?

One of the things people regret about history is that nobody tried hard enough to stop Hitler before it was too late. The question that gets posed about going back in time to kill Hitler supposes that the time traveler knows the future, but in real life we never do (well most of us anyway ). We keep thinking the fire will blow out until we realize that it won't. We underestimated the amount of dry fuel and its ability to spread, and now it is going to burn until it burns itself out, and that could turn into a real holocaust. So, without that time travelers hindsight turned into foresight advantage, how does one know when the time has come to extinguish the flames themselves, and that they have the right to do so? Hard questions.

[inavalan]

Originally Posted by ketzer

... Hard questions.

Maybe those questions seem hard to answer when the root assumptions are inadequate.

Especially when unhappy with something in our present lives, we look back, find a turning point, and believe that if we did something in another way we wouldn't be now in that unsatisfactory present situation. Then, besides whining about that, we try to implement corrective measures to our future ways of making decisions.

We do this to our own lives. Those with more power do this to others' lives too.

It is (or at least it seems) impossible to contradict the wisdom of such learned lessons, because you can't (seemingly) change the past and experience the effect of that chosen alternative path. But, who's to know if the alternative path hadn't had much worse consequences?

Our level of intellectual development, garnished with our over-emotional making, and with the lack of intuitive abilities, makes us try to fix the symptoms than the causes of a situation. Randomly, sometimes that seems to work, which gives us confidence in this process.

The hitler hypothesis ... If he had been killed, or if his party hadn't gotten to power, still at global level there would've been another catastrophic event, man-made or natural, that would've had similar effects. Why? Because the root cause of that tragedy was the globally accumulated thought energy potential, that needed to find a release. This is what happens, from the individual to the global levels.

Thoughts are the cause of all actions. That's what's happening now with the current pandemic, with the environmental changes, and in the lives of each one of us.

What to do? Nothing can be done overnight. But, we have to start to look into our individual thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and discover our part into creating what we dislike in this reality. Look for fear, hate, anger, and all their derivatives. Look into changing ourselves firstly, our contribution and our expectations. Control our emotions, develop our intellect, discover our intuition.

Don't expect others to fix things for us, neither on this Earth, nor from Heavens. Neither a nanny-state, nor a nanny-God will fix things for us. We should've understood that by now.

Each one of us is here-now to learn and practice assertively creating the reality he/she wants.

[BigJohn]

Originally Posted by ketzer

Anyway, let's say he was preaching something you really disagreed with and found offensive, but you are the guy who owns a fruit stand a coupletwothreetens of meters away and just could't stand to listen to it anymore. You can't move the stand as your license is for that spot and all the other ones are taken. How would your right to pursue a livelihood without being subject to what you consider hateful rhetoric play into that scene?

Some business owners do 'appreciate' somebody protesting or preaching outside their business especially if the TV stations get involved. FREE ADVERTISING - EXPOSURE!

[BigJohn]

Originally Posted by ketzer

One of the things people regret about history is that nobody tried hard enough to stop Hitler before it was too late. The question that gets posed about going back in time to kill Hitler supposes that the time traveler knows the future, but in real life we never do (well most of us anyway ).

If a time traveler went back in time and killed Hitler, what would prevent another 'Hitler' from coming forth?

As a side observation: what amazed me about Hitler was the number of women who would come and listen to him.

We only have a duty to one's self.

Originally Posted by BigJohn

Some business owners do 'appreciate' somebody protesting or preaching outside their business especially if the TV stations get involved. FREE ADVERTISING - EXPOSURE!

I suppose people appreciate many things, but that is not the particular issue we are struggling with here. Some people enjoy pickled herring at Christmas time, but that does not mean we should through red herrings at them just because we don't have anything else to give them at the moment.

Originally Posted by BigJohn

If a time traveler went back in time and killed Hitler, what would prevent another 'Hitler' from coming forth?

As a side observation: what amazed me about Hitler was the number of women who would come and listen to him.

Perhaps one would? In fact, there have been, perhaps are, and will be many more Hitlers, of many different shapes and sizes. But how far are you willing to take that argument? If you knew a lunatic was about to walk into a grade school with a semi-automatic weapon would you act, or would you say, why bother to risk my life and stop this one, another could just come along anyway?

Originally Posted by Elfin

We only have a duty to one's self.

Really? Perhaps, but one has to consider what that phrase "a duty to one's self" all includes before we build a moral code around it.

Lets say for instance that you had a neighbor who you felt certain was planning to walk into a grade school with a gun and shoot a bunch of 5 and 6 year old kids. You feared that if you reported her, the police might not do anything anyway, as you had no proof. Then the neighbor may suspect you and try to go after you first.

What does one's duty to one's self call for in this sort of situation?