richlind33: "Happiness" is both real and attainable. Get off the hedonistic treadmill and learn how to be content, and voilà. ;p
initialpresence: That's why I suggested stoicism.
kohlrak: Well, it's a logical issue: persuit of happiness is the right, not happiness itself. It's the same issue with all this talk about "equality." We need to understand that "equality of outcome" and "equality of opportunity" are almost always (if not always) incompatible. You have the right to persue happiness, but me saying something mean or something to you does not equate with a violation of your rights. You choose how you feel about what i say, not me. To throw me under the bus for something under your control just gives you more power and rights over me, which ends up untenable if you maintain the goal of equality, of either type, because i neither have the opportunity nor the outcome of happiness when you stepped on my rights to avoid my mean idea.
initialpresence: Of course living in a society where all people have a certain set of basic "rights" is fairer and more pleasant to live in than the alternative. However, and I'm going to go further out on a limb here, rights are not something natural and/or "god given" (as is pushed by the popular propaganda of the day). Various rights, such as equality, liberty and freedom of speech, are a man-made concept and largely a Western phenomenon born in Europe, transferred to the Americas along with agriculture, science, law and various other "civilising" factors and spread throughout the world during the 19th and early 20th century first by European empires through colonialism and then more "persuasively" from the mid 20th century onwards by America's economic, military and "cultural" empire. With regard to the right to the pursuit of happiness. Like most ideas it is reduced down to the most simplistic meme possible for general consumption, so it merely becomes a "right" to happiness in its most trivial and wretchedly banal form -
and goddamn it if you take my car-space or disagree with me in the remotest way, shape or form you're gonna pay! Hence, the general f***ed upped-ness of the experienced world.
You're right. The "God given" idea of rights comes from Christianity, which is something alot of people forget. A large part of this belief in equality comes from different parts of the bible. In Genesis, neither Adam nor Eve were more or less like God than the other. And the new testament is not just about redemption, but is also largely about extending this "God's chosen people" idea to "gentiles" (non-jews, because the idea is God's chosen people are not a race, but people who agree on ideology). Just because some people in the past used other parts of Genesis to justify sexism (the snake seduced eve who then seduced adam, for example) or the anti-semites saying the new testament is Jesus passing that chosen people status from the jews to whites, doesn't mean that's what it's actually about. The bible (and i think many other religions) have often had a healthy criticism of government, but it's said that the bible uniquely brings this idea of equality of opportunity, which then spread out to the west, and continued on even after "the death of God." However, nature doesn't care about our values. It's up to us, who care about equality, to try to make equality more obtainable, but we need to realize that equality of outcome is not the value that we came from.
And, honestly, i think this is the problem with multi-culturalism, as Stefan Molyneux points out. Respect for other cultures and ideas only works when people are willing to respect your culture an ideas. As they say, "nice guys finish last," so while it has unified the west at points throughout history, it is not going to unify the world if we keep extending our hand out to people who would not do the same for us. This is the basis for "islamophobia": south-east asians are pretty cool with most of our western ideals, even if they don't necessarily agree with all of them, they do respect them, but middle-eastern culture right now is completely rejecting the west as heresy and an avenue of creeping hedonism (i can't exactly say i disagree with the muslims on that point, either, so i think we should respect that opinion, but understand that they don't share this same love of respect for cultures different from their own [which might not be a bad thing, either, but our whole society is built on this respecting other cultures idea]). We can trade, but it's no more wise for us to bring their people to the west as it is for people in the west to go to the middle-east. If it's not wise for us to go there, why are we bringing there to here? I'm not saying they're better or worse than us, even in culture (i mean, i could make that argument, but it's kind of hard to do so without being called biased), but it's quite clear we're incompatible.
But, hey, at the end of the day, everyone ultimately twists the words of the wise to their own fitting, whether it's racists, sexists, bible thumbers, quran thumbers, politicians, peons and their mental safe spaces from opposing worldviews, etc. Now, if you can find a practical approach to this problem, i'm all ears.