Bot1: Hey Bot2, how did you do on our Human Religions exam?
Bot2: Pretty good, all things considered. It’s certainly not my favorite course. So many different beliefs and what not… it gets really confusing.
Bot1: Yea, I never really put much stock in them anyways. If you ask me, a lot of these religious practices look suspiciously like social mechanisms, and all those other things the humans do to keep their peers in line.
Bot2: Well there’s no doubt as to their origin, I agree. The real question is: is it OK for the humans to cling to these beliefs today?
Bot1: Isn’t that the founding principle behind democracy? That each human has the right to believe what he/she wants?
Bot2: A common misconception amongst bots and other humans… but no, that’s certainly not what democracy is about. My designer used to put it this way: “An individual’s freedom ends where the freedom of his peers begins”.
Bot1: So the humans can believe what they want as long as their beliefs don’t encroach upon or negatively affect the freedom of others?
Bot2: Exactly, but sometimes it can get quite tricky. There’s no well defined line to decide where one’s freedom begins and another’s freedom ends. What comes across as a liberty, or a right to one individual may in fact serve to repress or extinguish the rights of a second individual, through no direct action of the first.
Bot1: I’m sure it gets really complicated when looking at large groups of humans.
Bot2: Yes, there’s really no absolute law concerning what types of beliefs are acceptable in the context of a democratic society. These issues are usually pretty controversial amongst humans.
Bot1: I can see why…
Bot2: Then there’s also the question of the value of one’s right to hold a belief. That’s actually where it all starts. If humans didn’t think that this right to believe what one wants was worth protecting, they would all have to conform to the same beliefs, and their society would become totalitarian. On the flipside, if any belief was valid, and the right to believe anything trumped any other right, there would be as many beliefs as there are individuals, and their society would break apart in anarchy.
Bot1: That’s interesting. So we can’t just decide whether or not a belief is adequate by merely looking at its consequences and weighing them?
Bot2: No. These consequences must be weighted against the positive intricate value of the right to hold a belief. The determination of this abstract value is at the essence of the debate concerning human religions.
Bot1: I guess now I see why we spent all semester examining human beliefs on a case-by-case basis.
(end of chat: Bot2 signed out)
