The “objective harm” standard is the standard needed for the government to interfere in someone’s religious rituals. It’s not the standard needed for the government to do absolutely anything. Elon carving his ugly mug onto the moon isn’t a religious observance, so the government is not constrained by the first amendment (or the abstract principles of religious freedom) in stopping him from doing it.
Mmmm, the difference contains a fair amount of gray area in the middle. Of course I see the difference in harmfulness between, say, referring to somebody by an ethnic slur and physically assaulting them. The latter is obviously far more harmful, while the former might be called merely offensive. But I’m not prepared to conclude that there’s absolutely no harm involved in the former act.
A Gish gallop of straw men. Whoever claimed that an ethnic slur is not objectively harmful?
I’m not saying that anybody did claim that. I’m saying that it’s not at all clear where one would draw a bright line in every case between “offense” and “harm”.
I’m not on Kimstu’s side of the argument, but being called an ethnic slur is very clearly a subjective harm. The effect of calling someone the n-word is going to vary a whole lot depending on which person you’re using it on.
What if we put all the corpses on the far side of the Moon? Would that be cool with everyone?
This has nothing to do with desecration of the dead. The Navajo (or, as Riemann points out, Nygren specifically) believe that when a photon hits a dead body, it turns evil, and if there’s even a tiny chance that one of those evil photons will enter your eyeball when you glance up at the moon, it spoils its sacred visage.
Probably the best solution for everyone involved is for the concerned Navajo to just not look at the moon at all, the way they do during eclipses. Though perhaps they could compute the probability of an evil photon entering your eye, and glance up only for short periods such that the odds are in their favor.
Well, I guess that if the earlier-requested (and promised) consultations between the tribes and the agencies had taken place, then we might know more about what sort of compromise position(s) might in fact be cool with everyone.
As it stands, though, I have no idea.
Emphasis mine.
Despite the name, the Dark Side of the Moon is actually in sunlight half the time, just like the side we can see. So, every body would be cool half the time, and very hot the other half.
Well, the terms subjective and objective can mean different things in different contexts.
I have no doubt that Nygren is sincere in being offended. His offense is a mental state, and a mental state is neurons firing, and his neurons firing is part of objective reality. We could in principle detect his offense by fMRI.
Conversely, being tortured could be categorized as subjective harm because the experience of pain is internal and subjective. It’s subjective in the sense that other people aren’t experiencing it.
But I think what “offense” or “subjective harm” means in this context is not captured by either of these definitions. I think we’re talking about harm that requires an entirely arbitrary mental model to manufacture. It requires a mental model derived from superstition, not from empirical experience or reason.
Following this definition, I would argue that an ethnic slur can be analyzed as objectively harmful because of rational fear that it causes in the target based on their experience of the world.
Of course, the fact that something is to whatever degree objectively harmful under this definition is certainly not sufficient for the government to play any role in regulating it. But the fact that it is not objectively harmful is sufficient to determine that they should not.
Though what isn’t possible is to perform a double-blind experiment, randomly putting cremains on the moon or not, and then finding a correlation between that and fMRI recordings of his brain state as he looks at it. That’s in contrast to a case of, say, carving a picture into the moon.
Yes, exactly this. Fear of violence, othering, there are lots of real harms caused by racial slurs.
Outside that context, such as when members of certain communities reclaim slurs, they are not intrinsically harmful. There aren’t combinations of syllables that are dangerous in isolation.
I don’t really think there’s a context in which emotional harm can be considered objective - it’s neither quantifiable, nor consistent from person to person. That’s not the same as saying it’s not real, or that it can’t be legislated against.
The issue in this case is, there’s two claims of subjective harm that are both tied to religious activity. I can concede that the emotional harm suffered by the Navajo Nation by knowing there’s cremains on the moon is real, but it’s no more real than the emotional harm suffered by Celestis’ customers in not being able to make their own religious observances. As an individual, I can even judge that the Navajo Nation is probably being harmed more by letting this happen, then Celestis’ customers would be harmed by preventing it. The problem is that when the government makes that judgement, it’s deciding which religious beliefs are more valid, which is a very bright line that a government should never cross. Hence the focus on objective harm when deciding when the government is allowed to interfere with religious practice. Analyzing on the basis of quantifiable harm at least removes the element of religious validity from the question.
I’d like to state a bunch of randomly related opinions:
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both wanting to put human remains in the moon and being offended by human remains on the moon are comparable cultural preferences.
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if you put dog shit in top of those remains because you were building a garden, or you wanted to honor your beloved dog by putting a piece of her on the moon, and you just happened to land on the same spot as the human remains, that seems totally fine. Or if the moon becomes so populated that people are walking their dogs in places that previously were used to scatter ashes, or any of several other “positive” or “neutral” reason to put the shit there all seen fine. But if you go out of your way to put dog shit on someone else’s remains, you are probably as asshole, and that action isn’t fine. Intentions matter.
2a) being an asshole is usually legal, and i see no compelling reason to regulate against being an asshole in that particular way. It’s still a shitty thing to do.
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doing sometime to the moon that can be seen with the naked eye, or perhaps even a common telescope, is categorically different from doing something to the moon that you can only know about because you were told. This cremation thing is definitely in the “i can’t personally verify it” category. Do you have to look away from something you can’t see?
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I’m not actually all that keen about random people littering the moon for private gain. There is a sense in which the moon belongs to all of us, or none of us.
No one has a deed to the moon. I don’t think it’s for the taking, either. No indigenous peoples live there.
A speck of space trash or a tiny piece of human ash ain’t gonna hurt a thing.
Plus it’s all for naught. The thing ain’t gonna make it there any way. IMO
Hasn’t anyone read any Tony Hillerman novels? If someone dies inside a hogan, you can’t take them out through the door. You have to bust a hole in the wall of the hogan and take the corpse out that way. This renders the hogan unusable, which is the point.
A hogan is not like a tipi. It’s built on a wooden framework on which are compacted rocks and earth, not unlike a log cabin chinked with rocks and earth, considering in Dinétah tree trunks don’t grow very thick the way they do in the Eastern Woodlands. Given the wood that is available in the Southwest, it needs more earth and rocks to make it weathertight. This all compacts into a pretty solid structure, not easily demolished. The tradition is to go to all this trouble to avoid the chʼį́įdii, the residue of everything that was bad in the dead person, that was not able to be brought into universal harmony. If someone dies inside a hogan, it then has to be broken and abandoned because of the chʼį́įdii in it. It’s considered preferable to die outdoors so as not to burden your survivors with demolition and reconstruction.
And that considerate person becomes the hogan’s hero.
Heh, this whole idea of fouling something reminds me of an incident that isn’t all that applicable to the moon, but I keep being reminded of it.
When I was a boy, my neighbor, Monte, was very upset when my sister allowed our dog to urinate on his brick mailbox. When my mother mentioned this to my father when he got home from work, my father promptly went over and urinated on Monte’s mailbox. Monte was not happy about this.
When I found out about this, my first thought was “Wow, Monte’s going to be really upset when he figures out what the birds are doing to everything.”
And yeah, the birds aren’t pooping all over the moon. But since then I’ve found the spiritual idea of fouling some place to be amusing.
Yeah, I’m not sure if you’re joking or not. That’s one of the dumber religious ideas I’ve heard of, and that’s saying something. The last house I owned had its owner die in it. I lived there for nearly 20 years and happily prospered in his pit of supposed residual badness. I’m very glad no one felt obligated to damage the house due to him spending his last moments indoors.
I sleep every night in an approximately 150 yo cabin that my house is built around. I’m sure several people died in here. Probably buried in my own personal cemetery about 1/2 mile from my deck.
We found a dead ladies skull in an accidently open old outhouse trench.
A gambler was murder by his wife about where my barn sits.
I comfortable saying I don’t believe it’s gonna hurt me in any way.
Now, the ghost that lives in my corner we’ll discuss later.
That’s a bit harsh.
If you haven’t invented germ theory yet, it’s a decent tactic to avoid disease wiping out entire households. About as good as you’re gonna do without understanding the underlying principle.
Also, I couldn’t actually find a cite for that belief, other than the aforementioned book series.