On Moderation

Moderation is for wimps.

According to Aristotle, every virtue is the median between two extremes. For example, courage is the median (or balance) between a state of cowardice (too little) and foolhardiness (too much). I've never been sure if I could buy into that, although I'm not sure if I can adequately explain why.

To use the example of courage again, I feel that courage has no relation whatsoever to either cowardice or foolhardiness, except that the latter two are a complete lack of the former. I feel that courage is similar to the virtue of wisdom (a kind of "applied wisdom"). Someone is courageous when they see what must be done, and do it despite fear, doubt, misunderstanding, whatever. Someone is foolhardy or reckless because they don't adequately understand the situation, the cause/effect and the benefit/risk of the situation, and they put themselves at risk for no good reason. Someone is cowardly because although they see clearly what what is necessary, but lack the will to overcome fear. Cowardice and foolhardiness are both incomplete versions of courage. But that doesn't mean that the cure for cowardice is an extra dose of foolhardiness, or vice versa.

OK, that was "virtue". Now for personal ideology (or "convictions", "principles" or "beliefs"). There are some who say that it's important to moderate (that's the word I'm going to use for the sake of simplicity) your ideology (again, that's the word for simplicity, but fill in with whatever you like). That you shouldn't be too extreme or fundamentalist when it comes to putting your ideology into practice. While I certainly agree that fundamentalists are almost never fun to be around, I disagree with this emphasis on moderation. Ideology and belief systems, just the same as virtue, are centered around an ideal.

Although people in the "real world" may not always live up to that ideal, it should be something that they should be able - with rigorous effort - to put into practice without serious negative repercussions. My problem with Christianity is that with the ideology of most sects, you can't put those ethics and teachings into practice on a large scale without serious problems for both adherents and society as a whole. It's sometimes a completely irrational set of commandments and principles that simply don't work in the real world when taken very seriously. That's strictly a problem with the ideology itself, not the "extremeness" of it's some of it's adherents.

"Tie it Together" analogy
Earlier I said that foolhardiness was basically courage without the wisdom understand what's best. Christianity is like foolhardiness being called "courage". Someone might say that "courage is an excellent guide, but shouldn't be practiced in extremes". That's good advice, but it misses the point entirely. There's a serious problem with that definition of courage and it needs to be adjusted. Likewise, there are some serious problems with the tenets of Christianity that need to be rectified (or perhaps thrown out altogether and start over). Watering it down, or taking the middle path when putting them into practice is merely treating the symptoms, not the disease itself.