LikeTheDew.com

Do we all have split personalities?

Religion and politics are a toxic blend.  Who holds the moral high ground?  Political policy is shaped by ideas and innovative minds.  Policy is not formed by religious proselytizing and radical invention.  Yet components of both major political parties– one party more than the other– uses religion and the ensuing fervor behind it, to craft political platforms to recapture majority status in congress.  As a result, religious ideology is becoming bastardized– losing some of its relevance as uplifting dogma, and our personal affirmation. In politics, values and morality have morphed into a hodgepodge of mind puzzles, where what you say isn’t always what you do.  I suppose it’s all a part of the political landscape.  Nevertheless, it’s a bit disheartening.

Conservatives, some of whom consider themselves pro-life, must have a hard time reconciling the fact that in protecting the life of the unborn– they are damning the life of the born– a remarkable juxtaposition of hypocritical ideology.  Is it okay to lethally strike down the doctor who performs abortions in the name of the unborn child?  What makes this belief any less rancid than the  beliefs held by radical Muslims in Al-Qaida?  Striking a strong position for life is not solely limited to that which is not alive.  It also should be for those who follow the law, whether you agree with said law or not.

Most on the right believe in a strong defense, and when times call for it, a virile show of force.  War is not pretty or right, but it is sometimes necessary.  Yet what is the defense for mass-bombing hundreds of thousands of innocent children, and mothers whose babies have yet to be born?  Where is the justification?  How are you protecting the unborn then?  It can be argued that protection of this nation is all the justification necessary. If that is the case, you are accepting ignorance, and disavowing your pro life sensibilities.  Moral genuflecting at its finest.

Liberals aren’t immune from this type of moral ambiguity either.  As champions of the poor and disenfranchised, they often fight for policies that would protect the working poor from perceived indiscriminate abuse by the counter party.  And yet, liberals often vote against tax breaks– for small businesses and companies– that may offer the poor programs necessary for their survival.  If taxes are held down, then companies are most likely to improve upon health benefits, child care benefits, and other programs, that aim to help prop up those that need the help.  It’s hard to be a moral crusader– protecting the targets from the strike– when you wield the bow and arrow yourself.

To be morally flexible to me, is to be a contrarian to your own cause.  I know at times I’m guilty of committing the crime myself.  I’ve often wondered though about the people who scream the loudest in the values arena.  Do they see their hypocrisy?  Or is their flexibility great enough to counter it?

1. Frank Povah says:

   February 2, 2010 at 6:04 am

   Well said, Matthew – again. This particular brand of evangelical evil is also beginning to affect Australia. We see Christians standing outside courthouses demanding revenge and death to the ungodly when it was my belief that the bloke they tell us we must follow lest we burn in hellfire (in itself an oxymoron given his supposed teachings) tells them to forgive. They’re also pretty good at switching to the Old Testament to justify themselves when I thought Jesus brought new revelations to bear on it “This is what the ancestors did wrong, let’s improve on it”. Religion – the three largest Middle-Eastern religions at least – have become bastardized tools of politicians and power-seekers and there is a crying need for politicians with the gumption to cry “Enough!”. In the West we all must accept that there were societies with viable moral codes long before Moses and Jesus – indeed before Jehovah or Yaweh or whatever you want to call him – came on the scene. Me, I blame the Romans.

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2. Melinda Ennis says:

   February 2, 2010 at 8:27 am

   There is no better example of the moral ambiguity of which you speak than the conservative stance on the death penalty, while embracing “pro-life” for the unborn. And while I agree that the Dems can’t throw too many stones, especially now that they have become wallowing wimps who are cowed by the lobbyists and elections every two years, “small business” is a relative term. As defined by George Bush, I believe a small business is one under 500 employees. The true sufferers in this economy are real small businesses—-the many people I know with companies under 10 employees who struggle to survive without affordable healthcare or legal/accounting consultants whose sole purpose is to help those 500- person employers avoid paying taxes at all. But however you define small business, it was especially appalling to watch those great defenders of business (the Bush Republicans) sit on their hands and smirk when Obama called for tax breaks for small business in his state of the union last week.

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3. Frank Povah says:

   February 2, 2010 at 8:30 am

   Here, here, Melinda! And the one-person business like, I suspect, a lot of Dewers.

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4. Matthew Wright says:

   February 2, 2010 at 10:23 am

   Thank You Frank.

   Melinda,

   The ambiguity is really striking with your example. I wonder if they even think about that.

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5. Brenden says:

   February 2, 2010 at 4:38 pm

   This essay is so dumb it needs a helmet.

   Killing innocent women and children in Tokyo and Dresden avoided mass casualties of an infantry invasion during WWII, to cite one example of the necessity of total warfare. Had nothing to do abortion, dummy. You make a false equivalence that people who have a principled stance against abortion support the killing of doctors. Again, ridiculously stupid. These doctor-killers are fringe whackos and about everyone who supports the pro-life position would like to see them hanged by the neck until dead.

   If your into the whole scripture thing, there are very tractable arguments for capital punishment, especially in the Old Testament. There is no inconsistency with NOT wanting to kill a completely INNOCENT unborn person while at the same time wanting to kill a very GUILTY rapist-child-molester sumbitch. After a fair trial, of course. I’m hardly pro-life, but these ridiculous facile arguments need to be flagged for their staggering ignorance.

   And as for libs being “champions of the poor and disenfranchised” — that’s utter bullshit. That is the pretense they offer the ignorant as to the necessity of taking your liberty. “You need our protection, so you must render your liberty, property and wealth….” “We have a social emergency! We must tax the wealthy and create special bureaucracies to fill with our incompetent political allies to help the needy!” The left has no interest in helping the poor and disenfranchised, on the contrary, they need as many as possible to justify their corrupt policies (See “Chavez, Hugo” and “Castro, Fidel”).

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6. Mary Cantrell says:

   February 3, 2010 at 2:58 pm

   Amen, Matthew! I realized during the Clinton impeachment that lots of religious conservatives absolutely do not believe in forgiveness. Apparently forgiveness is a lot like earmarks: depends on where you’re standing. “I deserve to be forgiven but you don’t… and God won’t forgive you either, because He always does exactly what I say.”

   Melinda, I’ve written Senator Isaacson several times concerning his claim that health care reform would destroy small businesses because then they couldn’t afford it. (Naturally, he only responds with a boiler-plate letter.) I know several small business owners who already cannot afford insurance, but apparently they are too small to be considered small.

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7. Frank Povah says:

   February 3, 2010 at 5:52 pm

   But Brenden, wasn’t the Old Testament representative of the tribal laws Jesus wanted overturned? You know, the ones about vendetta and vengeance and all that. Why the west should still pay lip service to a code formulated by warring tribesmen in the deserts of the Middle east is a mystery to me. Dresden had nothing to do with avoiding allied casualties; it has been argued Churchill saw it as a way of striking at the cultural heart of Germany, thus paying them back for damage to London and other cities in England. Churchill later distanced himself from the decision to bomb.

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8. Brenden says:

   February 4, 2010 at 10:12 am

   You are wrong say Jesus sought to dismiss, revise or overturn the Torah. He considered himself and was considered by others a rabbinal scholar. If you want to dismiss the Bible as a foundational document that informs how we govern our society, go ahead. That says a good deal about your perspective. Regardless, you can read social theories of Locke, Rousseau or Hobbes for secular perspective on crime and punishment.

   Dresden was the industrial heartland of Germany. It was bombed to destroy its productive capacity to make war. The sites at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan were chosen for the same reason. Tokyo was firebombed to send a message to the Japanese that the Allies could strike the capital. Point being that it was not some petulant macho whimsy, as the author proposes, that resulted in the decision to attack these sites and the “innocent” people living there. The decisions were taken to minimize Allied casualties and win the war quickly.

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9. Frank Povah says:

   February 4, 2010 at 10:55 am

   I thought the Greco-Roman model was more the one chosen for our society. No matter. A foundational document? If I dismiss the Bible as such what does it say about my perspective. Please tell me, I’m curious. Whatever the “secular perspective on crime and punishment” as perceived by the thinkers you name, times change, the world moves on. I won’t argue about the conduct of either side during WWII save to remind you that Dresden, though indeed the site of many factories, was hardly “industrial heartland”. By February 1945, when Dresden was destroyed, Germany’s productive capacity to wage war was pretty much gone. There is, too, sound argument that Roosevelt and Churchill, nervous about the Soviets, wanted to show Stalin what he faced should he some day turn on the West. Harris, head of Bomber Command opined that any city with anything to do with the German war effort was a target. An RAF memo of January that year read: “Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also [by?] far the largest unbombed built-up [area?] the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”

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10. Brenden says:

    February 4, 2010 at 11:40 am

    I guess the Russians didn’t have to worry about a bomber command when they took a third of Germany in Potsdam but we risk going farther afield. War and total war is a necessary, ugly business that involves the wonton slaughter of innocents — but not for its own sake nor to slake the bloodlust of over-testosteroned Bible-thumping pro-lifers, as the author suggested. War’s purpose is to defend and protect national interests from external threats, which fallible politicians often confuse.

    As it relates to the Bible, undoubtedly your hositility toward it springs from your perception of its abuse as a pretense for tyranny. But it has other uses. The wisdom of the ancients informs our moral development, from Moses to Christ to Luther and Lincoln — much as Euclidean geometry informs Newtonian mechanics and then to quantum theories. We don’t throw away geometry because we’re more evolved. Many our greatest modern leaders were steeped in the Bible and freely discussed how it informed them. Folks like Martin Luther King relied upon it. If you dismiss it, what that says about you is that you dismiss one of the most important documents that significant contemporary and historical figures use to guide their thinking. That’s pretty stupid.

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11. Frank Povah says:

    February 4, 2010 at 11:56 am

    Let’s drop the war Brenden. Your view will never be the same as mine, and that’s all they both are, a view. Who dismisses the Bible? It’a a good read but no more so than any other collection of myths and legends by which a people attempt to portray their history and the way in which they sought to order and explain their world. It just seems to me – as a reader who is neither Christian nor christianist – that there is some confusion over what role Jesus plays in its interpretation and over what bits they choose to have guide them. And to what passes as my mind, a philosophy based on an assumption of inherited guilt is off to a pretty shaky start.

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12. Brenden says:

    February 4, 2010 at 3:20 pm

    I know I won’t change any minds here. Rather my purpose is to highlight the tendentous propositions the angry left offers here with Swiss-watch regularity as a justification for your radical social revolution. Your premises are utterly false. Essays like this solely exist to paint your political opposition as retrograde Biblical end-timers bent on purifying the world of non-believers. In other words, rather than having a discussion of the real topics — say, the necessity of war, legalized abortions, personal liberty and responsibility — you load your rhetorical blunderbuss, shooting it at your ideological windmills. You merely hurl lies and insults at your opposition and declare them heretics and state enemies. You make this false appeal as a means to justify the end (confiscate their property).

    Case in point, the abortion topic. As a matter of law, the matter is settled. Fine. But the underlying issues are hardly decided. Indeed, the fact the courts legislated this outcome compounds its controversy. Rather than airing a rational, spirited defense of that outcome, you merely say, “We’re right, because the courts say!” You extend that false justification to host of unrelated issues and say the opposition believes in “myths and legends,” thus has no standing in the debate.

    It bothers you that people who have religious convictions would dare have an opinion, still worse, influence. This in a country founded by Christians who fled religious prosection and where freedom to worship is still a cornerstone civil liberty. You accuse the great mass of peaceful, God-fearing religious followers as confederates of whackos who murder doctors and proponents of endless war. To borrow a phrase, “You lie!” Like it or not, the religious left, right and middle will hold sway over political discussions. If you don’t believe or don’t care, that’s fine. But they are not your enemy and these constant efforts to paint them (and others who oppose your false utopian agenda) as heretics fall short of the mark of enlightened debate. Religious freedom of expression is as relevant topic today as it was during the witch trials.

    Your efforts constantly flogging this piffle do not cease to amuse, though.

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13. Frank Povah says:

    February 4, 2010 at 3:34 pm

    Bullshit!

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14. Matthew Wright says:

    February 4, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    Thanks for reading Brendan. As always, your insight is engaging and enjoyed.

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15. C Smith says:

    February 4, 2010 at 9:15 pm

    Brenden forget engaging Frank in discussions about religion. His so eloquent ego doesn’t allow for a supreme being especially if they aren’t from Australia.

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16. Frank Povah says:

    February 4, 2010 at 10:06 pm

    As Brenden’s Marxian rhetoric won’t allow for anything other than hidebound, hysterical hyperbole.

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