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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8527101"><p>But knives and art are different. You can directly harm someone with a knife. You can be directly harmed by a knife. Art doesn't harm, it influences. And the line between influence and bad things in the world is hard to measure. It is even harder when you have to weigh, not just how many people go and do bad things because they got an idea from a book, but how many people didn't go and do bad things because of it, how many people went and did good things, because of it. This is a classic argument you see around religion for example. When I was young and developing a skeptical mind about religion, I remember having a conversation with my father where I pinned many of the ills of the world on it (and there were many, many I could point to), but he was also able to point to the amount of good people did, that they might not have done, the amount of people who didn't engage in war or violence, they might otherwise have engaged in, because of religion. My declaration was overly simplistic. And obviously that is a deep and complicated topic, not one we can resolve here. But I think it is a similar type of moral reasoning. And I think there is a bit of a problem with the way we use the term harm in these discussion. It is very vague. It tends to stop conversation (this caused harm, it is bad, end of story). And I think a lot of us, feel like these claims are exaggerated and not critically examined.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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