03 November 2006

The Post Which May Cause Bill From So Quoted To Utter Heh, and Indeed

I don't know if Bill at So Quoted should be happy or angry that the Instapundit himself is quoting Neal Stephenson.

(Here are searches of the respective websites with Neal Stephenson as a search term (Instapundit and So Quoted), Prof. Reynolds may have more in number, but as a percentage of the total output of each blogger, and also as to the quality of the mention, I think Bill shines in comparison)

(also, I seem to have only mentioned Neal Stephenson once, and it just happens to be how I earned my first Instalanche)

Either way, I agree with what the Instadude says in his post regarding the ridiculousness of making hypocrisy the greatest of all vices.

Hypocrisy is bad, but it's not the worst sins.

Even if you aren't Christian it's easy to see that we're all fallen creatures with much to atone for (though don't take this as accepting the concept of Original Sin (the Wiki on this concept is decidedly non-neutral), I find that view of humanity as pernicious as moral relativism (this Wiki is also non-neutral, but I guess anyone wanting to defend the concept of moral relativism against charges of subjectivity must recognize the inherent contradiction).

In my opinion there are intrinsic humanistic values that include forgiveness, empathy, and a recognition that redemption is possible.

Given the ideas I just expressed, to excoriate hypocrisy above all else would be, hypocritical.

1 comment:

Icepick said...

It also comes up in the comments to this post on Gene Expression.