BASICS: DEFINITIONS | nationalsalvation.net
I have pointed out that no one EVER asks ANYBODY to define a racist when they use it as an attack. But asking for definitions is very common on the other side.
I said that I believed there is "life" on Venus. But of course that life will be, in a masterpiece of understatement, "different" from life here. The reason there is likely to be life on Venus is precisely our definition of "life" has expanded, due to the finding of extremophiles under miles of ocean in temperatures that would make boiling water, which is used for sterilization, or killing all life here, seem cool.
And THAT earthly extremophile life descended from us, or vice-versa. When I say "life" therefore, I am talking about a form that is related to us only by some common spore that was in space or which developed entirely separately. Because of this broadened definition the term "life" has a different ring today than it would have fifty years ago.
A lot of our philosophy has a similar problem with definition. Arguing over the Trinitarian Father and Son is made further complex by the fact that the very definitions which were so carefully laid out in Nicene Creed were critical to people at their time, with their definitions of things. We repeat words like "of the same substance" but we really have no idea what THEY were arguing about.
To a fourth-century Greek, "substance" was as technical a term as "quark" or "electron" is to us today. We think it sounds religious, but a Greek atheist then, and they did exist, would use the term the same way a Christian did. Scientifically, in their day, a thing was made up of form and substance, in exactly the same way that things are scientifically made up today of atoms and electrons.
A Nicene Creed composed today would be as weird to the fourth century as theirs is to ours. The difference is, they would KNOW it was odd. No one today, atheist or religious, has any idea how meaningless the creed in its old form is today. Let me hasten to add that this is the fault of theologians. We could mean the same thing without all those monomaniacal references to the same substance and so forth.
In the last fifty years we have irreversibly changed our definition of class and conflict. When I was coming up it was absolutely believed that animals held no territory, that animals were at peace with their own kind, that animals had no class system, and so forth.
So the CRITICAL basis of all our beliefs was that war, property, class and national boundaries were all purely the result of human social arrangements. However different their solutions, just about everybody agreed on that, from the eugenicists who sought to breed man into a higher form to the few socialists who were not eugenicists at the time who said that if money were abolished, all those problems would end.
Today, Marxism and PC repeat the same mantra, exactly as Christians repeat the Nicene Creed in a form that is meaningless to them. No one asks them for definitions, for a discussion of basics in the light of reality today, any more than anyone asks them the definition of racism.
We constantly hear that mankind is one. The lion shall lie down with the lamb. But what we now know about nature is that an animal will tolerate another species in its territory, but it will kill another of its own kind that trespasses.
If a liberal cites the strict gun laws in countries with low violence, no one mentions Switzerland, where they have open carry and are heavily armed, but the usual low European rate of violence. If someone talks about how peaceful the world will be when "the races," meaning all white countries and only white countries, are mixed, peace will reign.
No conservative EVER mentions the countries where that glorious mixing HAS occurred, as in Brazil. And no one who makes his living being a conservative will ever bring any of those things up.
Why not? Because to ask liberals these things would make them look SILLY. The job of a person who wants to be in "the opposition" to what is now a set of completely laughable ideas is to avoid making them look silly.