Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
While I‘ve been trying to take a break from all politics and news as I bask in the glow of my family staying with me this week, I’ve nonetheless been fascinated by the fall of Egyptian President Morsi, in what must be described as a military coup. I’ve never been a fan of coups as I expect is true of most of us, yet the fall of Morsi has raises issues that I think are far more nuanced than appear on the surface. The salient facts are that after too many years the corruption of the government of Hosni Mubarak (who had been installed by the Egyptian military) led to severe economic issues and dissatisfaction with totalitarian rule. This then led to such massive protest that the military felt compelled, or justified to remove him. Mubarak’s removal was cheered, but then the clamor for free elections arose and after 18 months of martial law elections were held, as the first step towards transitioning to democracy and formulating a constitution.
The Society of Muslim Brothers, or Muslim Brotherhood was:“Founded in Egypt in 1928as a Pan-Islamic, religious, political, and social movement by the Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna,” It’s stated purposes was to: “to instill the Qur’an and Sunnah as the “sole reference point for …ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community … and state. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood In a country such as Egypt, with its’ long history of totalitarian rule, the concept of political parties was not strong. Through its 85 years history the Brotherhood became the most stable opposition faction in the Egyptian political scene and was the main focus for opposition to whoever ruled Egypt by dint of the Egyptian Military’s backing. Such has been the success of the Muslim Brotherhood that it has branched out to have a significant presence in 20 nations around the world, many without a Muslim majority, such as the Russian Federation, the Indian Subcontinent, Great Britain and the United States. Therefore when the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 took place, the now legal “Brotherhood” was in an excellent position to vie for political power and formed the “Freedom and Justice Party” as its electoral arm. It won more than 40% of the parliamentary seats and its candidate Mohamed Morsi won election as President with 51.73% of the vote. His chief opponent had been a man who served as Mubarak’s Prime Minister. The Egyptian voters were faced, I think, with a “Hobson’s Choice” of Presidential candidates and chose what they perceived to be the lesser of two evils. Sound familiar? What I will attempt to examine here is a question which is framed as: “Are Religious Fundamentalists capable participating in a pluralistic democratic society?”The stated objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood through its’ “Freedom and Justice Party” politically were certainly ones that few of us could complain about and perhaps soothed the secular voters of Egypt and its non-Muslim Egyptians.
“We believe that the political reform is the true and natural gateway for all other kinds of reform. We have announced our acceptance of democracy that acknowledges political pluralism, the peaceful rotation of power and the fact that the nation is the source of all powers. As we see it, political reform includes the termination of the state of emergency, restoring public freedoms, including the right to establish political parties, whatever their tendencies may be, and the freedom of the press, freedom of criticism and thought, freedom of peaceful demonstrations, freedom of assembly, etc. It also includes the dismantling of all exceptional courts and the annulment of all exceptional laws, establishing the independence of the judiciary, enabling the judiciary to fully and truly supervise general elections so as to ensure that they authentically express people’s will, removing all obstacles restricting the functioning of civil society organizations,etc”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood
However, that statement is belied by the following objectives openly acknowledged by the Brotherhood:
“In the group’s belief, the Quran and Sunnah constitute a perfect way of life and social and political organization that God has set out for man. Islamic governments must be based on this system and eventually unified in a Caliphate. The Muslim Brotherhood’s goal, as stated by Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna was to reclaim Islam’s manifest destiny, an empire, stretching from Spain to Indonesia.[21] It preaches that Islam enjoins man to strive for social justice, the eradication of poverty and corruption, and political freedom to the extent allowed by the laws of Islam. The Brotherhood strongly opposes Western colonialism, and helped overthrow the pro-western monarchies in Egypt and other Muslim countries during the early 20th century.
On the issue of women and gender the Muslim Brotherhood interprets Islam conservatively. Its founder called for “a campaign against ostentation in dress and loose behavior”, “segregation of male and female students”, a separate curriculum for girls, and “the prohibition of dancing and other such pastimes … “
“The Brotherhood’s stated goal is to instill the Qur’an and Sunnah as the “sole reference point for …ordering the life of the Muslim family, individual, community … and state.”
“The Brotherhood’s credo was and is, “Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”
This is then the dichotomy of beliefs that the Brotherhood’s political party presented to the Egyptian voter. On the one hand it had denounced violence and agreed to work within the framework of a democratic political process. Yet its’ core beliefs are that (at least within predominantly Islamic countries) they should be ruled by the beliefs of Islamic law and justice in accordance with their interpretation of the “Qur’an” which they believe is perfect. Part of the task of the Morsi government was to create and implement a Constitution for Egypt. It was also promised that his government would include all factions of Egyptian society including the large group of Egyptian Coptic Christians. What occurred though was that Morsi only brought in Brotherhood political allies into the various Ministries of government and created a Constitution that was decidedly Islamic in content. Egypt, which was one of the most enlightened countries in the Mid East in the treatment of women, was being pushed into a far more fundamentalist outlook. This decidedly religious obsession of the Morsi government failed to pay attention to improving Egypt’s collapsing economy, growing poverty and the social unrest that goes with those conditions. Rapes of women increased in alarming increments and crime soared as people sought the wherewithal to feed their families. Cairo, that great and venerable city, increased to a population to more than twenty teeming millions the majority living in horrendous slums. City services in Egypt’s capitol collapsed under the weight of those numbers. The elation of the 2011 Revolution led inexorably to the despair of 2013 as millions of Egyptians, many with nothing to lose took to the streets and gave the Egyptian Military the tacit permission to remove Morsi and arrest the top leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It is not my intent to paint the Muslim Brotherhood as evil, nor is it to give a litany of their history of violence and terrorism. Such a view is in my opinion one sided and ignores the reality that led to the Brotherhood’s creation and to its success in surviving for 85 years in a hostile Egyptian climate. Historically, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Mid East has been an area controlled by wealth and Western imperial power. While wealthy rulers lived in luxury, the middle classes were relatively small and the masses lived in abject poverty. No doubt from the perspective of the Brotherhood’s founders they were mandated by their beliefs to aid their brother Muslims and to return them to the “perfection” of Islamic Law. Intermingled with those beliefs was the memory of Islamic empire and the determination to return to its’ glory. However, noble their motives may have been and are, within their beliefs is this inherent problem. If you see that everything you believe is “perfect” and mandated by God, then the idea of compromising those beliefs is blasphemy and sacrilege. How indeed can you live in a pluralistic society, when those who reject your beliefs, are by your definition “evil” and “sinful”?
There are two thoughts that arose in my mind and caused me to write this piece. The first is that the entire concept of “Democracy” has been deconstructed through the years by ours and other governments to mean the ability to vote and little else. How often throughout the world have we seen dictatorships legitimized simply because elections were held? A democratic government needs to be supported by democratic institutions and the agreement of its citizens to abide by the results of the electoral processes. Beyond that it needs an overall conceptual structure that provides the framework for the existence of a government that will protect the rights of all the people, not just the ever changing majority. It requires a legal system and a judiciary that protects its conceptual framework (constitution) and with it the rights of the individual. It’s of course more complicated than that, but if you’re a regular visitor here I’m sure you get my meaning and could on your own flesh it out beyond my brief offering. The point is that when the world saw the welcomed upheaval of the “Arab Spring” it had been conditioned by years of propaganda that made simply holding a vote appear to be the acme of a democratic process. There is much more to developing a democratic society than simply voting for a “leader” and the election of Morsi, given his subsequent actions, did not a democratic Egypt make. This leads me to my second thought on this subject.
I seriously wonder whether it is possible for Fundamentalist religionists to actually be able to take power in a democratic society and wield it in a way that allows people of differing beliefs their freedom to have those differing beliefs? When you have a belief system that you not only see as “perfect”, but as the road-map for a perfect society, how can you make the compromises that are necessary to maintain a pluralistic, democratic society? From the perspective of the Muslim Brotherhood, indeed it is their stated goal; you can only build a “perfect” society based on Islamic law and justice. In this respect they are not really very different from other Fundamentalist true believers that see “their way” as the only way towards true righteousness.
When we apply this to America the abortion debate comes to mind. There is no doubt that the majority of Americans do not believe that women should be denied the right to choose what they do with their own bodies, yet in the years since Roe v. Wade this has been one of the flashpoints of the American political scene. The only conceivable, immutable ending for those anti-abortionists to this national controversy, is the complete end of abortions. Compromise of positions can only be temporary and must include small gains for their side. If and when those opposed to abortion finally gain power they will not hesitate to end it completely, regardless of the equity of the situation and a sizable opposition to their actions. I use abortion though as merely an illustration of this problem. There are many other areas, prayer in schools for instance, where the same dynamic would apply. The problems is that when someone sees their views not only as perfect, but also as the only way to live, compromise becomes ugly and unacceptable.
My contention is that without the ability of people to compromise, maintaining democratic institutions becomes impossible. This is true whether in Cairo, or Washington. The nature of much of today’s religious fundamentalism, be it Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Judaic, is that compromise is impossible, because one cannot compromise “God’s Word”. If you are a true believer than that is an obvious fact of existence and you would cease to be a “true believer” without that philosophy. This brings me back to Morsi and Egypt. I hate the idea of military coups anywhere, but what was to be done in Egypt. There is strong evidence, that contrary to their platform, once in power those of the Muslim Brotherhood returned to their stated principles and were moving quickly to establish the version of Muslim Law upon Egypt, while at the same time denying equality of treatment to others. This fanaticism in the application of their beliefs distracted them with dealing with the economic and social problems that plagued most Egyptians and led inevitably to the Egyptian Military’s coup. I think this is a quandary that is at the heart of the difficulty of maintaining a democratic, pluralistic system in many countries, including ours. While is certainly is not the only difficulty, it ranks high on a list of contributors to political dysfunction. The question is what to do about it and the answer is quite difficult. The problem is that if you exclude religious fundamentalists from the political process due to their authoritarian views, then you no longer have a pluralistic society because of that exclusion. In a pluralistic society religious fundamentalists should also have a voice, or when do you stop excluding. Please help me out here because while I can frame the problem I admit that I don’t have the “perfect” answers.
Submitted by: Mike Spindell, guest blogger
Porkchop,
Is illustrating that a “truth” asserted as such without proof is an assumption and poor evidence time wasted? Reasonable minds may differ.
Gene H.,
You’re kind of wasting your time on the dissection of those axioms.
They meet at least two of the accepted definitions of “axiom”. They are propositions the truth of which is self-evident (at least to David), and for his purposes, they are propositions that are assumed without proof.
Yes, technically the phrase “Hobson’s choice” refers to a “take it or leave it” choice, as in Henry Ford’s famous saying that “a customer can have any color Ford vehicle he wants, as long as it is black.” So, in the Ford example, the customer, back then, really had not choice of color at all–IF the customer wanted to buy a Ford. But the customer could choose to walk away. And yes, the term “dilemma” would be appropriate where a choice must be made between the lesser of two evils, or in situations where one must choose between the Devil and the deep blue sea,” as the saying goes.
But from a practical viewpoint, the phrase “Hobson’s choice” is often still correct when applied to “choices” between political candidates or political parties. To argue that “dilemma” or “Morton’s Fork” must be used between political candidates is often tantamount to hair splitting.
For example, let’s say that in an election between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You’ve carefully examined the records of both candidates and, although they sound a little different, their policies and actions are substantially the same and don’t like either candidate. You conclude the “choice” between the two is largely an illusion. So you decide to sit the election out. In effect, you could still be said to be confronting a “Hobson’s choice” because you can “take it (i.e., vote for Tweedledum/Tweedledee) or leave it (i.e., abstain from voting).
Those that argue that “dilemma” must be used in such Tweededum/Tweedledee situations do so on the assumption that even by not voting you are making a choice. Let’s say Tweedledum is ahead by 10%. The members of the Tweedledee team are urging you to vote for Tweedledee and tell you that “if you don’t vote for Tweedledee, you’re still voting for Tweedledum.” And, in fact, the Tweedledee team members are correct in that you will be stuck with Tweedledum, unless enough people, including you, are persuaded to vote of Tweedledee. But if you go along with that line of reasoning then YOU are turning a “Hobson’s choice” into a “dilemma.” It doesn’t have to be a “dilemma.” You can choose to do nothing, or you could write-in your own candidate, if that option’s available.
Even in the original derivation of the term, in which Hobson required his customers to choose the horse in the stall closest to the door (to prevent the best horses from always being chosen, which would have caused those horses to become overused), the fact was that customers were still going to “choose” the horse closest to the door because they came to go riding, and they would take what they could get. But it’s only a “Hobson’s choice” because they had to take the horse that was offered them or they could choose to walk away.
However, if you really want to start splitting hairs, you could argue that the original “Hobson’s choice” was really a “dilemma” for most of Hobson’s customers. The people who came to Hobson’s stall went there to ride horses. If they happened to face the choice between riding a horse that was less desirable or going home miserable because they wouldn’t be able to go riding with their friends, then they faced a “dilemma” in their minds.
Porkchop,
Oh, I understand for sure. lol Some things just need to be said as a statement even if they look like a cross. 😀
Bron,
Then it would still have to pass Constitutional muster because it would be challenged. Unlikely without completely undoing parts of the Bill of Rights.
Bron,
I think that is the paradox of democracy. Once it is voted out, it can only be reestablished by force.
Gene H,
In one of my early trials (a termination of parental rights case), the last witness for the other side was the mother, a woman who was described by the family case worker as “borderline psychotic” and “borderline retarded.” I was simply unable to figure out how to cross-examine her. Fortunately, we broke for lunch at the end of direct, and I was able to discuss this with a more experienced lawyer. He asked a simple question: “Why do you want to talk to a crazy person?” I didn’t cross-examine. We won.
I just thought I’d pass that along, for what it’s worth.
Bron: Who is “they”? They is us, man. The chances of a majority of Americans voting out the entire court system is zero. Whatever the consequences may be, it isn’t worth worrying about things that will never happen.
RE: Gene H. 1, July 6, 2013 at 4:39 pm
Brian,
I find that you appear to me to be neither qualified or competent to decide what is or isn’t a just and equitable legal system for dispute resolution.
Gene,
I left out something that I had intended to include, so here it is:
I am neither qualified nor competent to live safely in any society in which the Rule of Law is adversarial and has as its foundational premise the belief that I learned tomorrow’s lessons yesterday, and so am accountable for them today.
It is by having learned tomorrow’s lessons yesterday that the hypothetical legal fiction reasonable person can employ tomorrow’s lessons today, thereby being able to flawlessly foresee that which, until tomorrow, will not happen.
A fair use quotation from posthumously-published Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systens: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Philosophical Foundations: Second Edition Springer, 2012, from pages 220 and 221:
“Traditionally, there are two main kinds of suggestion available for resolving the paradox of time reversibility in a perceptibly irreversible world. These are:
(a) The dynamics of conservative systems is indeed fundamental, in some ultimate microscopic sense. Hence the irreversibilities we perceive in ordinary experience arise at another (macroscopic) level. Just as the quality of temperature appears to emerge when we pass from microscopic mechanics to macroscopic thermodynamics, so too does the apparent irreversibility of macroscopic experience. Like temperature, irreversibility depends on the fact that macroscopic experience involves statistical averages over large number of microscopic events. That is, irreversibility at the macroscopic level is connected with ensembles on which we can only deal with probabilities.
(b) The reversibility of time inherent in the mathematics of conservative system shows that this formalism is not sufficiently general to encode all natural phenomena. That is, even at the most microscopic level, we must generalize the formalism of conservative Newtonian dynamics to include a broader class of systems for which time reversibility does not hold. The apparent time reversibility of Newtonian dynamics is thus essentially an artifact arising from the adoption of too narrow a formal framework for physical encodings. in a properly general framework, irreversibility will be manifested at the most fundamental microscopic levels, independent of considerations of probabilistic averaging at a macroscopic level.
It should be noted that these two alternatives are not mutually exclusive.”
The narrow formal framework of frequentist statistics, combined with the narrow framework of traumatic imprisonment of the mind that is the cause and the result of the commonplace infant-child transition are vastly too narrow to allow any form of verifiable physically Real encoding of any sort of Real physical phenomenon of such complexity as is necessary for any living organism to actually exist.
****** ******
Also, from Robert Rosen, Fundamentals of Measurement and Representation of Natural Systems, North-Holland, New York, 1978, in accord with fair use (this book has long been out of print), page 28:
… Thus every meter defines an observable; conversely, for every observable we suppose there exists a meter in terms of which it could be defined. By the basis of Proposition !, every real physical event involves the evaluation of observables on states. If there were an “observable” which took part in no physical event, it would be devoid of physical significance.
****** ******
The hypothetical legal fiction person is only hypothetically “observable,” because it takes part in no physical event, and is thereupon devoid of physical significance.
I wonder how many attorneys-at-law have the theoretical biology background needed for Rosen’s work to require no greater effort than is necessary for reading a typical heartthrob romance novel.
How, on Earth, or elsewhere, can anyone who does not accurately understand essential aspects of theoretical biology and their practical applications truthfully claim competence in my field of professional activity?
What is my purpose here? it is to understand the relationship of biology to the myriad of predicaments that are the essence of many, if not most, of the Turley Blog threads, and to help resolve such predicaments in the public safety interest.
Gene H:
now what if they vote it out? That’s democracy isnt it? Just like the kind you and Tony C like so much.
Brian,
“I completely, totally, and absolutely agree that I am definitely neither qualified or competent to decide what is or isn;t a just and equitable legal system for dispute resolution.”
Then what makes you qualified to make pronouncements about the adversarial model of dispute resolution? Nothing, by your own admission. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, Brian, but you aren’t entitled to your own facts. The fact is as stated: the adversarial dispute resolution model is the worst form of dispute resolution form of dispute resolution except for all the rest. As long as people disagree – i.e. have adverse positions – there will always be a need for adversarial dispute resolution. Since disagreement is a basic state of the human condition, we are not going to get rid of disagreements any time soon. Given that parties remain adverse and disputes need to be settled in a just and equitable manner, an impartial hearing by a third party applying the law to the facts to reach judgements is still the better option than imperial fiat or fending for yourself.
David,
Let’s assume you’ve pointed out an exception.
It is evidence by anecdote and as such is invalid being a sample space of one.
Plus, let’s look at your axioms.
1) In Jesus Christ is found salvation and all knowledge, wisdom, and truth.
Opinion not substantiated by fact but based in belief.
2) Christ touches and influences every individual who has ever been born.
Opinion not substantiated by fact but based in belief.
3) No single individual on earth is perfect in knowledge and has a complete understanding of Christ and God.
Yet so many fundamentalists claim precisely that: an absolute perfect knowledge “The term ‘fundamentalist’ as normally defined is someone who believes literally in some sacred text, such as the Holy Bible or the Holy Quran.” Sounds like pimping absolute truth to me.
4) No single individual on earth has such direct contact with God that he can learn all he needs to learn by that direct contact.
So God is imperfect in His relationships with man and needs other men to help out, eh? I guess that explains why he needs money.
5) In order to comprehend the fullness of God, each individual must receive and learn that through relationship with other individuals in society.
Receive from whom? Other imperfect beings rather than the allegedly perfect omnipresent omnipotent being? Seems rather sloppy.
6) Close communion with each individual in the community is the only way in which God can be fully seen and understood by every member in society. It is necessary to both speak and hear each other, to both give and receive from each other, for every person to submit unto others in the community in order for society to fully comprehend God and to have harmony and true peace.
So long as that submission unto others in the community doesn’t insist on others in the community accepting axioms #1 and #2 as true. They are beliefs and as such rely on faith or at best a choice of conscience, but they are not backed by any sort of rational proof.
Also, quoting scripture as proof of how organizations at in the real world is simply ridiculous, especially given the contradictory nature of the literal words of the Bible.
This fundamentalist gal seems to think she knows exactly what God wants and has no issue with indoctrinating her children into specific political ideologies to promote her vision of what God wants – which includes forcing their ideology upon others through the force of law. This is despite the fact that as recently as 2011, 78% of Americans thought abortion should be legal. Why . . . to want to outlaw abortion based on a fundamentalist religious belief that all life begins as conception when the majority think the procedure should be legal sounds pretty undemocratic to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbpuCfaGJJw
No one is forcing fundamentalists to have abortions. Yet fundamentalists shown here would gladly try to use the rule of law to force their beliefs upon others who do not share them. That’s anti-democratic. It’s theocratic. It’s wrong. It’s against both the ideas of democracy and pluralism.
You believe what you want. If you think abortion is a sin? Don’t have one. And realize that what others choose to do in re their “relationship with God” is none of your business . . . unless they ask you.
Keep your religion out of the government and we’ll have no problems.
And if any of this offends you?
Forgive me.
It’s what Jesus would do.
Gene H wrote: “Let’s assume you’ve pointed out an exception.
It is evidence by anecdote and as such is invalid being a sample space of one.”
You seem to be confused about the scientific method and hypothesis testing using methods like Strong Inference. When conducting a disproof of a theory or hypothesis, it only takes one example to disprove it. Only when a person is trying to prove a hypothesis rather than disprove one would your criticism be valid.
Your thesis was that the inherent nature of fundamentalism makes it authoritarian and incompatible with democracy and pluralism. I pointed out axioms derived by fundamentalists who believe every word of the Bible is literally true and to be followed to illustrate how some fundamentalists (e.g., Christian fundamentalists who believe in Christ’s teachings) clearly are directed toward non-authoritarian positions by their fundamentalism.
Let me be clear that I am not defending fundamentalism. I am just pointing out how fundamentalism, by its nature, is not necessarily authoritarian. Many fundamentalists are very authoritarian, but I would say that such is not necessitated by their belief in the literal truth of the Bible, Quran, etc.
As you go through the axioms, you seem to want to discount them as opinion. One thing that must be understood is that fundamentalists approach religious texts much in the same way as you approach empirical evidence. They view the text as a foundation to be trusted, and then interpret the texts in a way to understand everything else. They often devise rules by which to interpret the texts. I did not take time to argue the hermeneutical proofs because they are not important to my point. I am asking you to accept the notion that these are axioms arrived at by some fundamentalists, axioms derived from their literal reliance on the teachings of the New Testament.
Gene H wrote: “So God is imperfect in His relationships with man and needs other men to help out, eh? … Receive from whom? Other imperfect beings rather than the allegedly perfect omnipresent omnipotent being? Seems rather sloppy.”
If you are interested, you can read 1 Corinthians chapters 12, 13, and 14 for the primary texts upon which the concept is based. The basic concept is that by God’s design, man was created incomplete on various levels. It starts with the understanding that man was created male and female on purpose, to illustrate to man his need for another. The man cannot exist without the woman, neither can the woman exist without the man. This leads to further revelation that different individuals in the community need each other and should join together. Much like the each person has body parts and organs working together to form one complete unified person, so members in the community can be joined together into a one more perfect community. The idea is that by design, God chose to reveal himself fully in only one human being: Jesus the Christ. We should acknowledge this, and acknowledge that none of us are better than another, but simply serve different functions and reveal a portion of Christ in our daily lives. If God spoke in someway to one person, he also speaks to or works through another person, but perhaps in a different way. We should not despise the way God works through another because it is different from us, neither should we exalt the way God works through us and claim that we have no need for others in the community. By the design of God, it is by our loving association with others in the community, by receiving the part which they have received from God, that we become complete. We become better than we were before. A kind of synergism develops when in this kind of communion with other members of our society.
All of this is based upon rational proof, but it is rational thinking based upon religious texts believed to be inspired by God rather than logic based upon solely empirical data.
As for my direct quoting of the Biblical texts, I was not quoting them as proof but simply giving them as some of the source material upon which these fundamentalists are led by logic to be non-authoritarian in their leadership style. The premise of fundamentalism is a literal belief upon inspired texts. My point was that if someone literally believed these texts that I quoted, they would be led toward being non-authoritarian in their leadership style.
You personally may find the Bible to have a contradictory nature, but millions of people find truth through the process of reconciling what appear to be paradoxical texts. There have been millions to declare after going through the process that there is not a single contradiction in the Bible. I’m not defending them, just pointing out that millions of other people who examined the same texts that you have came to a very different perspective about the reliability of these texts. Some of these people were very intelligent people, like Isaac Newton.
As for the abortion issue you raise, you need to read that link you provided more carefully. It says that 78% want it to remain legal “at least under some circumstances.” Most pro-life people want to exempt cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is at stake. The poll said that only 25% want abortion completely legal regardless of circumstances.
I consider myself pro-life, but I do not believe that the legal definition of a person exists at the moment of conception. Kind of like the homosexual marriage issue in which I think the law needs to make distinctions between same sex unions and opposite sex unions, I think the law should make distinctions between life that is not yet born and life that is born. The law should also distinguish between a child and an adult. Legal rights and responsibilities toward others should be defined accordingly.
Nevertheless, being pro-life myself, I understand the perspective of a person who is against killing unborn children and why they want the law to protect the unborn. You see their position as religious fundamentalist authoritarianism, but I see it as a product of how they define and understand the issue. Surely we all agree that the law should prohibit murder. If the unborn is considered a person with the same rights as a baby just born from the womb, then killing that unborn person is murder. Ergo, it would be murder to kill the unborn. So the difference rests upon definitions of a person who should be afforded the protections of law. The rights of the mother, the father, and the unborn all come into play. It really is not about authoritarianism but about properly defining laws to protect the interests of every living being involved.
Gene H wrote: “No one is forcing fundamentalists to have abortions. Yet fundamentalists shown here would gladly try to use the rule of law to force their beliefs upon others who do not share them. That’s anti-democratic. It’s theocratic. It’s wrong. It’s against both the ideas of democracy and pluralism.”
I see the video you provided very differently from you. Everything they did concerning their belief is very democratic. They believe abortion is murder and the law should protect the unborn from murder. Do they take up guns to shoot those who disagree with them? No. Do they take up bombs and blow up the courts that ruled against their belief? No. Instead, they share their belief with others; they raise up children to believe like they do; they establish pregnancy clinics to counsel pregnant women about alternatives like adoption; they pray for the laws to be changed to recognize the rights of the unborn. Virtually everything they did is expected in a democracy. Never did they use force to compel their position upon others. It is only your own authoritarian position against their belief that causes you not to understand their belief and to denigrate and condemn them for it. Apparently you do not want the law to recognize the rights of the unborn in any way shape or form. But rather than embrace the debate and enter into dialogue, which would be the response in accord with principles of democracy and pluralism, you want them to go away and be gone and not bother you with questions about how the law should protect the rights of the unborn. Can you not see how you are the one who is being authoritarian on this issue?
My wordy response to Gene H apparently got stopped by the spam filter again. Maybe the moderator can free it?
DavidM: Bringing up homosexual marriage is probably a good example of how your mindset is not neutral in regards to religious fundamentalism.
Of course it isn’t, I think the religious are severely deluded, if that isn’t clear; anybody that believes the Bible is literally true is just blind to the logical contradictions on every page, or perhaps is too lazy to have ever read it.
DavidM: From your perspective, the Christians “deny others the right to marry.” I do not perceive this to be the perspective of the Christians.
Then you are wrong, because that is the effective result of their belief, they want to deny two homosexuals the right to marry. Call it “preserving” something or anything you want, the effect is to deny marriage to homosexuals. Appeal to tradition, appeal to the dictionary, I don’t care, the net effect is denial.
Homosexuals do not accept those definitions, reject those traditions, and subscribe to an alternative and valid definition of marriage that is between two human beings and is not gender based. Their fundamental belief differs from the Bible-inspired fundamental belief, and the Christians think the law should enforce their belief preferentially.
DavidM: To change the definition of marriage to include same sex unions is simply a way to hijack laws passed when marriage had a different meaning. This is not a responsible path of progress.
On the contrary, discarding arbitrary definitions based on prejudice is precisely the path to progress, as when we discarded the definition of “men” that literally meant “male humans with property” for the broader definition meaning “any human” in regard to the right to vote. We discarded the definition of “person” that demanded a person be “white” in order to end slavery.
DavidM: You further add on by saying that the Christian belief does not trump the homosexual’s belief that homosexual love is real and natural. What Christian has ever said such a thing?
Any that has ever called homosexuality an abomination, a sin, or quotes Leviticus in saying homosexuals should be put to death. Shall you deny that happens? As for sex, sex is a part of romantic love; the physiological responses are identical. Homosexuals AGAIN reject your premise that sex is ONLY for procreation, if that were true a sterile married couple would be prohibited from it as well (which includes any post-menopausal woman).
Scientifically speaking, sex has multiple roles, not just one role, and one of those roles is emotional bonding and reinforcement of commitment. Sex releases brain chemicals that solidify and reinforce neural pathways that are involved in treating one’s romantic partner with altruism, caring, trust, and respect — Love. That is true for both homosexuals and heterosexuals, but I am not here to argue for homosexual marriage: I am here to argue that denying homosexuals the right to marry is trying to use force to impose your beliefs on somebody that does not share your beliefs, it is coercion. Their marriage and commitment to each other and sexual acts do not harm you in any way; yet you would deny them anyway.
DavidM: Harm also is caused by blurring the distinction that exists between same sex unions and opposite sex unions.
They can claim that you create harm by making that distinction in the first place; that marriage is marriage and gender does not matter, and what happens in their marriage is none of your business.
DavidM: Your pretension that your atheism is neutral …
I don’t pretend my atheism is neutral, it is not neutral at all. Your theism is not neutral, either. What I claim is that I am not an authoritarian, I do not try to impose my beliefs on theists with force, I do not demand the law make theism illegal, I do not rabble-rouse for the government to outlaw religion.
Theists do all of those things with regard to homosexuals that do not believe as they do. They assault and beat them, they made sodomy and homosexuality illegal, they take political action to prevent same sex marriages and dictatorially reserve the right of marriage to their personal religious belief system, no matter what others believe.
Unlike me, Christian fundamentalists like you are authoritarian wannabe dictators that would enforce your religious views by law, with force, and with punishments for deviation.
I would not do that. I do not believe in forcing you to believe as I do or act out your life in accordance with my beliefs. If you want to pray and sing five times a day, feel free. If you want to donate 10% of your income to your church, write the check whenever you feel the urge.
But that is clearly an asymmetric allowance: I am willing to allow you the freedom to live your life according to your beliefs which I think are wrong and foolish, but you are not willing to allow others the freedom to live their lives according to their beliefs which you think are wrong and foolish. You are a controlling autocrat that wants everybody to live according to your beliefs no matter what they think of them.
Tony C – Nobody has ever denied any homosexual the right to marry. The fight has been regarding whether it is proper to change the legal definition of marriage. Anybody can create their own personal definitions of words and force it upon others to accept. You choose to do this with the word marriage. You define it in your own peculiar way and then claim those who doesn’t accept your definition are bigots and hateful, which leads to defining them as criminals. You don’t care that history and thousands of philosophers, lawyers, judges, and justices of the past have worked out the definition of marriage that we have today.
My position, as well as that of many others, including many Christians, is that the law should accommodate same sex unions as domestic partnerships or civil unions, much like what California has done. As the California Supreme Court has clarified, domestic partnerships in California are afforded virtually all the same rights as marriage. Therefore, the only thing being fought for by homosexual advocates is the status symbol of marriage, that this designation will somehow ease their feeling of condemnation and make them feel accepted. The idea of changing our entire history of law making regarding this word “marriage” in order to create a status symbol for people intent on using sex exclusively for non-reproductive purposes is not responsible from a legal perspective.
The law has always had respect for long standing traditional understandings, until this year in the case of homosexuality. You ignore the court arguments for why marriage was considered a right. It was because of its role in reproduction. As I pointed out to you before, the Skinner v. Oklahoma case referenced in Loving v. Virginia is about whether the State had the right to sterilize prisoners. Your bias blinds you to basic facts and court procedures that in common law relies upon traditional understandings. There is not history concerning what you argue for except in failed civilizations. Therefore, your perspective is basically an experiment and there should be some caution and much discussion before going down this path. Instead, you want to force your definition on everyone else, even to the point of prosecuting those who disagree with you.
When you claim that your perspective is not authoritarian, you seem to forget the purpose of the law. Consider for a moment people who believe the traditional legal definition of marriage, that it defines a biological basis of mankind existing as male and female and that a person becomes complete by the male and female coming together in the bonds of marriage. If the law declares such individuals as being motivated by animus against a minority in society who believe that their same sex unions are completely identical to opposite sex unions, then the law must move to punish those bigots and haters in society. This has indeed already happened in States that have been deceived by the homosexual agenda rhetoric, as evidenced by the recent blog posting about the florist. Thus, your position is authoritarian in that it sets us on a path of prosecuting those whose perspective differs from yours.
My perspective to grant legal rights through domestic partnership laws is less authoritarian because it does not set us on that path. It allows room for both same sex unions and opposite sex unions in a way that does not prosecute someone who holds to one belief or the other.
The “homosexual agenda”? David your fundamentalism is showing.
leejcaroll wrote: “The “homosexual agenda”? David your fundamentalism is showing.”
Please don’t tell me that you are one of these secular radicals who denies that there is any homosexual agenda to define. One thing you have proved by your comment is that a term like “fundamentalism” is used as a derogatory epithet by at least one person here.
In case you missed it, I have already clarified to others that I am not a religious man. I do not attend church or affirm some creed of faith. I do not declare that the Bible is the infallible Word of God or that one has to believe it. It is interesting, however, that my objectivity and analysis often causes others to characterize me as a fundamentalist by the non-religious and as a heretic by the religious. Maybe that is why I am so sensitive to how that word fundamentalist is used in a bigoted fashion by most of society. Of course, unlike the n* word, it is culturally accepted to brandish the term fundamentalist, and once successfully applied to a person, it is easy to persuade others emotionally that such people are filled with hate and religiously motivated to force their wicked views upon everyone else. In effect, they counter ideas unfamiliar to them using emotional bigotry instead of logical objective dialogue.
RE: Gene H. 1, July 6, 2013 at 4:39 pm
Brian,
I find that you appear to me to be neither qualified or competent to decide what is or isn’t a just and equitable legal system for dispute resolution.
Gene,
I completely, totally, and absolutely agree that I am definitely neither qualified or competent to decide what is or isn;t a just and equitable legal system for dispute resolution.
I have never claimed any such qualification or competence, and further stipulate that the reason that I am not so qualified or competent is a simple, direct, ineluctable, inescapable consequence of the way in which I am autistic. I have never been able to learn to think in words or to think in pictures; the way I am profoundly language-delayed autistic allows me only to think in thoughts, and only allows me to transliterate thoughts into transmissible words or pictures after a thought has been fully formed. I am absolutely and totally incapable of doing abstract thinking if abstract thinking is thinking in words or in pictures.
So, when there is a system of laws presented to me only in words, I am incapable of understanding any such system of laws merely through words. Words and pictures are, for me, merely communication symbols, and no symbol, as I understand from communication theory, can ever be what it symbolizes.
The legal fiction hypothetical “reasonable person” can achieve the existential impossibility to actually experience the future in perfect detail within the past which actually necessarily precedes the future. A hypothetical time machine can readily, but only hypothetically, accomplish that task.
In the work of Erik Homberger Erikson, the belief that the future was inerrantly available in the past is labeled mistrust, and is correlated with time confusion. Erikson’s epigenetic chart of psychosocial developmental crises is readily found on the Internet and in every graduate school level educational psychology text I have read.
In the work of neurologist Robert Scaer, the belief that the future was inerrantly available in the past is called time-corrupted learning, and time-corrupted learning is trauma, and trauma is imprisonment of the mind.
The ability to think only in words, as in the so-called Saper-Whorf strong form hypothesis (words form thought) is, to me, an unambiguous indicator of the presence of profound amnesia for very early experiences of infancy. Such amnesia for infancy is, in my work and the work of neurologists such as Dr. Scaer, an unambiguous sign of severe neurological trauma.
If the Anglo-American Adversarial System of Law and Jurisprudence did not attempt to impose its religion onto me and to other people who understand, with profound biological accuracy, that no avoidable mistake or avoidable accident can ever actually occur, and stopped imposing its belief system on me and on other people about whom I care deeply, I would contentedly ignore the brain damage associated with the belief that decency is adversarial in nature.
Alas, those who relentlessly believe in the dogma of avoidable accidents and mistakes actually happening tend to threaten me severely for not being capable of internalizing their dogmas and doctrines.
It is because the “Adversarial System” insists on its Divine Right to torture me without relent that I raise this protest, not only for myself, but for every other person of the autism spectrum, each one individually neither more nor less than for me.
I have no difficulty concocting hypothetical stories, I use that form of imagination to devise scenarios for use in solving complex problems using the methodology of system dynamics, sometimes with computer software such as Vensim PLE or Stella. I simply never confuse hypothetical stores with actual reality.
The late French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, not only figured out that the psychoanalytic dyad has a necessary third, and so is not a dyad at all, he sorted out that experience has three rather directly observable aspects, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the Real. Whatever Lacan’s Real is, it is absolutely not any sort of social construction of reality of any form whatsoever.
Shortly after my wife and I adopted an eleven year old boy, in 1979, who had been severely neglected and abused before we met him, to help him in his struggle to overcome his stunningly tragic early childhood, I made a computer-printed poster. It had red lines as though the outline of bricks in a conventional brick wall, and had printed on it also the words, “Running into a Brick Wall does not Hurt any less if you Pretend that the Wall Is Not There.”
The tragic or bizarre events so that so often begin a thread on the Turley Blog illustrate how difficult it is to actually live in a purely hypothetical world that only exists consciously in the form of words and word-based thought.
Collecting and analyzing the ways people reject my work and its scientific worth is one way that I have for mapping the high-dimension-space boundary of the trauma spectrum.
The essential difference between your view and mine may be merely that I managed to elude the infant-child transition and its associated “terrible twos” perfectly.
There is a curious feature of my work. Within the frequentist statistical camp (chi-square, two-tailed T test, standard deviation, and such) in which the boundary of statistical significance is 0.05, the data with which I work is well below the 0.02 significance level, where the mathematics of frequentist statistics turns to mush, because all my useful data polnts are outliers that need to be discarded.
Bayes Theorem statistics have no outliers and work all the way to the frequentist statistical significance level of essentially 0.000…
At university, I clobbered my classes in which frequentist statistics were required. I can do that sort of statistical analysis with total ease and comfort. However, I also recognize that the frequentist methodology is stunningly biased against accumulated learning in ways Bayesian methods are not. Yeah, Bayesians require concocting priors, but at least priors are allowed to enter into statistical models of reality and, for Lacanians, into models of the Real, also.
Thanks OS, It may indeed turn out to be spam but I prefer a considered judgement on that and not a mechanical one. 🙂
” By the terms of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, once the magic word “coup” is spoken, all financial obligations effectively disappear.”
Help me now, when was the last time law was an obstacle to our foreign policy? Give me a minute, I am going to have to google that one.
LK,
Spam filter read it as spam. I dug it out for you, along with a couple of others.
WordPress is just toying with me now.
I posted a long-ish comment that has been eated by the WordPress- can someone dig it out please.
This tells you almost everything you need to know IMO.
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2013/04/unicef-s-numbers-unemployement-in-egypt.html
I got there by way of Diogene’s link which I had to have Google translate (badly) though the central theme was still there: money, it’s all about the money. And the future it can buy if you can get your hands on some.
That problem, 50% unemployment among people under 30, many or mos holding degrees, is playing out all over Europe and increasingly here. Young people are looking at the future and all they see is ashes. Their governments instead of pursuing stimulus are pursuing austerity and plan to put the burden of a world-wide failed economic system on the backs of young people and others least able to afford it.
Spain, same numbers and they have turned to anarchy, literally. The anarchist ‘party’ or groups, which are pretty small calls for a strike to shut down a city and thousands appear, a general strike attracts millions. They’re not screwing around, their public plan is to vandalize the country until the government pays attention to them and the needs of the country. They will not be the anonymous front-line casualties for a recovery that the government plans will last 10 or 15 years. HELL no!
Greece, similar numbers, sliding into open, public fascism led by a political group (Shining Dawn) that operates with police participation as roaming bands of thugs beating people that look like immigrants and targeting/vandalizing their shops and neighborhoods. They attack, physically any other political groups in public and have seized 10% of the seats in the Greek Parliament. Their cry is Greece for Greeks, want all immigrants rounded up and deported (or gotten rid of, in what manner is not to much cared) and have as public symbols German Nazi knock-offs. They acknowledge that when times are tough people look to a strong-man to do what needs to be done and set things right. David, may I suggest a long visit to Greece to see how that whole Authoritarian/Nazi works.
The riots, marches, protests and unrest we have seen in Europe is all economically based and they all have the same problems. A world wide economic failure and transfer of wealth that has left entire nations forcing even more austerity on its citizens and promising a lost generation of people whose economic lives can never fully recover, not even close.
It’s easy to divorce a theocracy from that template because they have to deal with deluded authoritarians and their petty, dehumanizing laws overlaid on all that economic grief. I’m thinking that just might make them more pi**ed off though.
There’s another link that is instructive:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html#.UdiRkjs3tns
“The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.”
If you can believe the number that 80% of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of the 1% this shows that 60% of that revenue is directly controlled by a handful of corporations and bank/investment houses.
A handful of entities broke the West and probably the world’s economy and I am convinced that the political unrest we see everywhere, including Egypt is in major part a direct result of this systematic looting of the world’s wealth and by extension the generational future of the world’s citizens. We can not afford to forget the magnitude of the events of 2008 and their predictable ramifications.
Mike S: I am not so sure it is fair to characterize this as a Military Coup, anyway.
I think it is a defensible hypothesis to claim the coup happened when the Egyptian military stopped supporting Mubarak; but even that wasn’t an overthrow, more of a revolt against a dictator (as our own revolution might be characterized).
I think the motivation for that was economic; the protests were severely disrupting the Egyptian economy, and the military sided with the corporate wealthy that were losing money (or in fear of losing money). I do not think the Egyptian Military was principled, they let Mubarak stay a lifetime. The sociopaths are just like lions and sharks, in that blood is blood: An injured brother get ripped apart and eaten alive.
With the military in charge, they tried to install a puppet Democratic government to mollify the people, but the people were not mollified, the moneyed classes are pounding the table demanding the financial bleeding be stopped, so the military that has been in charge all along is taking steps to bake something the people will eat and get back to work, dammit.
I really don’t think the moneyed class puts religion or ideology above profits; they probably do not like a secular, free society, but in the end they are pragmatic sociopaths that don’t care one way or another about other people, as long as they can still exploit them. So let the people think they are a “free democracy,” if that’s what it takes to get them to work, as long as the President and Military do as they are told.