If you watched the movie, Silence, which tells the story of two 17th century Portuguese Jesuit priests who travel to Japan in an
attempt to locate their mentor who is rumored to have committed
apostasy, and to propagate Catholicism.
But, as a mental experiment, consider what would happen if we did not traverse through time in a forward motion, so that we are unable to see the hurricanes created by our various butterflies until sometime long after we are gone.
Could Christ, for example, have ever predicted the countless horrors perpetrated in his name?
But if we could instead traverse from those hurricanes back through time, to those moments, and indeed those butterflies, from whence they emanated, would we still see such actions as wise or moral?
If the priests depicted in the movie Silence, who sought only to Christianize China for God, could see the horrible toll their religion would be used to create in the opium trade, when Christian England forced the sale of such a drug upon both India and China a century later, would they still feel that their work was for the one true God, and the salvation of souls?
Would Oppenheimer have worked on the atom bomb, or would he have at least tried to sabotage it, if he knew the horrible devastation his monster would produce?
Would the German alchemist Hennig Brand, who discovered phosphorus while living in Hamburg in the 1660s, have abandoned his search for gold in the properties of urine, if he'd known that his discovery would be used to firebomb that same city three centuries later, during World War II?
But, as a mental experiment, consider what would happen if we did not traverse through time in a forward motion, so that we are unable to see the hurricanes created by our various butterflies until sometime long after we are gone.
Could Christ, for example, have ever predicted the countless horrors perpetrated in his name?
But if we could instead traverse from those hurricanes back through time, to those moments, and indeed those butterflies, from whence they emanated, would we still see such actions as wise or moral?
If the priests depicted in the movie Silence, who sought only to Christianize China for God, could see the horrible toll their religion would be used to create in the opium trade, when Christian England forced the sale of such a drug upon both India and China a century later, would they still feel that their work was for the one true God, and the salvation of souls?
Would Oppenheimer have worked on the atom bomb, or would he have at least tried to sabotage it, if he knew the horrible devastation his monster would produce?
Would the German alchemist Hennig Brand, who discovered phosphorus while living in Hamburg in the 1660s, have abandoned his search for gold in the properties of urine, if he'd known that his discovery would be used to firebomb that same city three centuries later, during World War II?
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