I am Norwegian, so I thought I'd add a few points, which I think greatly influence the difference.
1) Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge. In Norway it is a 3 year college education, where you learn about mental illness, why people become criminals, how to rehabilitate people etc. The prison guard job in Norway, is by American standards more like a social worker. Guards spend a lot of time doing activities with inmates. They are not simply there hit misbehaving inmates.
2) The criminal justice system is largely under professional control. We don't elect sheriffs, judges etc like in the US. So there is less opportunity for populist "though on crime" politics to win through. Policies are mainly driven by professionals in the field.
3) Norwegian culture isn't as hung up on good and evil as American culture. I guess that is partly because religion has little importance in Norway. Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. The world "evil" almost never surface in any discussion. It isn't just the justice system, but Norwegians themselves aren't very interested in revenge. E.g. I've never heard a single survivor from the Utøya massacre express a desire for revenge.
I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.
>Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil.
What? Why do people say stuff like this? The Norse myths were from a millennium ago, no one has believed in them for almost a thousand years. Maybe Norway is largely atheistic now but for the majority of its recent history it was a Lutheran nation and before that the nation had a Catholic tradition dating back to 900 A.D.
Even today Christianity is Norway`s biggest religion, enjoys regular church attendance of a quarter of its population, and has half of the population declaring they believe in a Christian, not Norse, conception of God.
Clearly Christianity has some influence on Norwegian thinking.
It's also bad understanding of Christian theology.
> Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil.
No, it's mostly focused on the contrast between being a follower of Christ or not. To that end, the character of God and Jesus are elaborated on at length. So subjects like "good" and "evil" come up as a part of that. Yes, Christ is described as being intrinsically good, but the end goal isn't to:
* do good things
* be a good person
* avoid evil things
* punish bad people
...that's not to say all those things are irrelevant, but they're certainly based on trusting Christ and His teachings. To be fair, the usual cast of Flanders clones (televangelists, Westboro Baptist) get this all really wrong, but just because they're wrong doesn't mean we should get it wrong, too.
The argument was that the manifestation follows from the theology. I'm arguing that if the premises are true (culture follows from theology; culture and laws reflect that), then the originating philosophy (centered around good vs. evil) is something other than Christian theology.
> To be fair, the usual cast of Flanders clones (televangelists, Westboro Baptist) get this all really wrong, but just because they're wrong doesn't mean we should get it wrong, too.
If I had written your comment, this would have been the first line, not the last.
Obviously the GP was boiling down a more complex moral model into something simple enough for a social media comment. Whether (s)he knew enough about Christianity to know the difference between these two dichotomies is still unknown.
Being a good person and doing god things is absolutely important in Christianity. Jesus talked a lot about the need to do good: to give to the poor, feed the hungry, welcome the outcast and the stranger, etc.
During the course of history, numerous people have changed this into punishing bad people (for to varying degrees and widely varying definitions of "bad"), and that is I think one of the big ways where some branches of Christianity have gone astray. We are supposed to forgive, not to punish as harshly as possible and then some.
The Norse myths were from a millennium ago, no one has believed in them for almost a thousand years.
I can't quite see why Norse mythology wouldn't have had a direct impact on Norwegian culture that continues today. I don't know much about Norway but here in the UK we have laws that were passed 500 years ago that are still in use and that were strongly influenced by the church when they were enacted. You don't have to believe in something directly for it to influence your culture.
If you are at all interested in this topic, I cannot recommend this lecture series highly enough. I found it absolutely mind-blowing and a stunning revelation. Just give the first episode a shot.
Don't sit with your first revelation, though. Jordan Peterson is a great lecturer but he leverages that to promote a particular worldview of his own. There's a reason for the Buddhist saying 'if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.'
Please note that this is a metaphor for continually reworking your own ideas, not an exhortation to kill anyone who displays Buddha nature.
Fully aware of that and I fully agree. I am not putting him up as some sort of cult figure - he definitely has an agenda, and pushes it masterfully.
That said it is probably the best argued agenda I have ever heard. As a full-blown atheist I had never heard such a good defence - explanation, really - of religion, and it's no exaggeration to say the fellow has radically changed my thinking on the matter.
I think it is OK to not agree with someone one hundred percent but still urge any intelligent person to listen to what they have to say, if it has merit.
I don't know about the "crime against humanity" but it's pretty hard to disagree with him on that topic. Most opponents fall back to crude insults, as you have. I suspect that a majority of reasonable people would agree that new genders do not spring into existence simply because you imagine them, and that it is completely obvious that all humans are either male or female. Labelling this simple acknowledgement of reality "transphobia" is very dishonest.
Order and chaos are just abstractions. They moment you get down to root cause analysis- There is generally some definition of good and evil you have to settle to understand why things like order and chaos exist.
incredibly common theme in many pre-Christian myth systems. the good/evil dualism in Christianity is the real aberration, despite its prominence.
one of the more credible hypotheses I've encountered about this phenomenon is that early Christianity adopted many of the positions of Gnostic Manichaeism [0] in order to absorb rival cults.
Norbert Wiener (of cybernetics fame) made a distinction between Manichaean devils and Augustinian devils-- essentially between evil as a force opposed to good vs evil as merely a lack of goodness.
Essentially the distinction is between mischief and error.
Christianity is far from alone in its belief in good and evil. The idea that there's a battle between good and evil goes back to Zoroastrianism, which predates Christianity by hundreds of years. The other Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, also have conceptions of good and evil, though they might not be viewed as being involved in a battle.
From a modern viewpoint, I fail to comprehend how Order/Chaos is not merely a special case of Good/Evil.
Biological life/intelligence, and the Earth it inhabits, is Order, an unusual low-entropy arrangement of matter; whereas the ultimate Chaos is the cosmological Heat Death.
One does not have to assume that order is good, and chaos is evil.
Within a universe of absolute order, there can be no change, and no life can emerge. Within a universe of absolute chaos, there can be no structure, and no life can emerge. Neither is good, or evil, since those are human cultural constructs, and not fundamental physical laws or universal constants. Even life itself isn't necessarily good or evil, any more than a star or dust cloud is good or evil, it's just one of the many possible states that matter and energy can take as the universe inevitably exhausts itself.
While there is some overlap of Good/Evil and Order/Chaos it's pretty easy to show how "Order" can be "Evil".
Totalitarian regimes have that name because they demand total control and react strongly to any disorder. They are generally regarded as towards the "Evil" end of the Good/Evil spectrum.
In reality the OP is right - they are different things.
> Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge
First off, this varies by state. Second, a few weeks might be an exaggeration for most states. In California at least the academy is 12 weeks long and that comes after application screening, written & physical exams, background/psych checks, and interviews.
> Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that.
It's interesting you say that. My only exposure to sagas was from reading Beowulf in school, which is a canonical example for the theme of "good vs. evil".
First of all, Beowulf - at least the written records we have of the poem - is decidedly Christian. It was supposedly written by a literate monk several centuries after Norway had been christianised.
It also isn't necessarily about good vs evil but indeed about order vs. chaos. Grendel's misdeed is not that he attacks and slaughters good and righteous men ,it is that while doing so he violates the sacred law of hospitality by attacking the king's great hall. In doing so Grendel flouts the 'natural' order and therefore can be seen as an embodiment of chaos rather than pure evil.
> I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.
yet the norwegian prison system also has its problems. especially with regards to its 'hotel prisons' being antisocial and isolating compared to other kinds of prisons. this article is on solitary confinement. norwegians have something to learn here as well.
1) Prison guard education is just a few weeks in the US to my knowledge. In Norway it is a 3 year college education, where you learn about mental illness, why people become criminals, how to rehabilitate people etc. The prison guard job in Norway, is by American standards more like a social worker. Guards spend a lot of time doing activities with inmates. They are not simply there hit misbehaving inmates.
2) The criminal justice system is largely under professional control. We don't elect sheriffs, judges etc like in the US. So there is less opportunity for populist "though on crime" politics to win through. Policies are mainly driven by professionals in the field.
3) Norwegian culture isn't as hung up on good and evil as American culture. I guess that is partly because religion has little importance in Norway. Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that. There was no evil devil. The world was divided into order and chaos not good and evil. The world "evil" almost never surface in any discussion. It isn't just the justice system, but Norwegians themselves aren't very interested in revenge. E.g. I've never heard a single survivor from the Utøya massacre express a desire for revenge.
I don't know why it is like that, but perhaps a reason is that Viking culture was very revenge and honor based. But this mentality was destroying society so authorities worked hard for hundreds of years to change this mentality.