Letters Column: 3 hours. Not very satisfied with it on "spark" grounds, but at least it served its purpose.
Remus: ~75 minutes to write, ~105 minutes to edit. Pleased.
You will see these frequently in my work.
1. People are good.
More precisely, people have the capacity to be good. No one who is a person---a term I apply to every human I expect to meet, although I accept that it does not necessarily apply to every human in the world---lacks either intrinsic value or the capacity to express that intrinsic value.
People can "do" evil and can even "be" evil when measuring their present state, past actions, and probable future actions---but this is the result of corruption by what I'll call desire, ignorance, and incorrect ideas.*
* This is a Buddhist choice of words, mostly because I think he was thinking about the same kind of stuff and I don't want to repeat work. That said, the Buddha's thoughts differ in numerous respects from my own.
2. Truth is not the enemy
It is always okay to accept the truth. This does not prevent you from accepting other truths.
Ultimately truth cannot compete with itself. The universe does not solve down to a contradiction. (I assume.)
This does not mean that you cannot accept two contradictory truths. You can. It means that you're assuming, implicitly, that the resolution of these two truths is like the grand universal theory of physics---out there somewhere, but you don't happen to know it right now.
Truth is not importance. Something can be true and not important. Something can be important and not true. (Or at least, "not universally valid"; c.f. physics, again. It's unnecessary to tell an architect, busily engaged in calculating loads, that the Newtonian model of gravity and weight isn't 100% accurate.)
3. Moral Judgment is an Action
There are two types of judgment.
There is predictive judgment. This builds a model of consequences and judges things by the standards of the consequences they'll have.
There is impositional judgment. This condemns or exalts something with the purpose of modifying or reinforcing someone's habits of thought.
The portion of any judgment that is impositional is generally that portion that contains no falsifiable data.
People often conflate these two forms of judgment. This is a mistake. Truth is truth. Condemnation is condemnation. Praise is praise.
In general the non-falsifiable portion of any condemnation is a hostile action. The non-falsifiable portion of any praise is an act of generosity. It may be permissible to make a non-falsifiable condemnation (such as "innately sinful") but it is still an invocation of and invitation to prejudicial treatment.
Rebecca