Entries Tagged 'Ethics' ↓

More from the CIRCE conference, from a talk by think-tank veteran Barbara Elliott:

From 1901-1987, various governments took 207,500,000 lives.

The number of people killed by their own governments was approximately 169,000,000.

The Soviet Union killed 62,000,000. (Stalin alone: 42,000,000)

Communist China: 35,000,000.

Nazi Germany: 21,000,000

Today’s political discourse excoriates politicians who have ever changed their positions. True, someone who changes his tune according to his audience or the polls demonstrates a lack of principle. But it is a good thing to change positions and even principles when those have been demonstrated to be wrong. Mitt Romney was once pro-abortion, but he since changed his mind and became pro-life. Barack Obama exhibited the knee-jerk anti-war sentiments of his leftwing friends, but when he saw how the surge was working and learned a little about the progress being made in Iraq, he modified his position, however slightly. John McCain used to oppose off-shore drilling, but now, in response to the new oil prices and the evident need for more supplies, he is now for it. These changes might be dismissed as cynical flip-flops to gain votes–though since when is it a bad thing to follow the desires of voters?–but they may show a commendable seriousness of mind. One could argue that our current administration has been plagued with this stubborn inflexibility and indifference to facts.

A major problem today, going beyond politics, is that in our current climate of relativism and the rejection of reason, people are impervious to persuasion, no matter what the evidence or the reasoning is. Individuals form an idea based on arbitrary prejudice or self-interest, and it is impossible to get them to change their minds. This is not standing on principle, it’s rejecting objective truth.

Robert D. Novak tells us about the republication of a book from 1965 by Richard Hofstadter entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics (Vintage).

He described the paranoid politician viewing his adversary as “sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, and luxury-loving.” As a liberal, Hofstadter was writing about Barry Goldwater’s 1964 takeover of the Republican Party, but he acknowledged that the syndrome “is not necessarily right-wing.”

As Novak shows in his column, this style of projecting your opponents as evil, all-controlling conspirators is being increasingly adopted today by the Left.

Now just because a person is paranoid doesn’t mean everybody is NOT out to get him, but the demonizing of people we disagree with is surely a problem in today’s discourse and not just in politics. Isn’t this a serious moral problem today, preventing us from loving and serving our neighbors, including the neighbor who is our enemy but whom we are still enjoined to love?

UPDATE: Let me add some more thoughts: Of course we Christians believe that evil is real and pervasive in sinful human beings. Also that demons are real and that behind earthly woes lie spiritual powers and principalities. But human beings, however depraved, are not demons, are they? They are enslaved to the great demon, but God so loved the denizens of this fallen world that He died for them to give them liberty. Doesn’t this imply that we should look at sinners with pity and not just with hostility, lamenting their doom and hoping for their salvation?

A Ugandan pastor and AIDS worker, the Rev. Sam L. Ruteikara, writes in “The Washington Post,” no less, that Western activists are making things worse by pushing for sexual permissiveness:

In the late 1980s, before international experts arrived to tell us we had it all “wrong,” we in Uganda devised a practical campaign to prevent the spread of HIV. We recognized that population-wide AIDS epidemics in Africa were driven by people having sex with more than one regular partner. Therefore, we urged people to be faithful. Our campaign was called ABC (Abstain, or Be Faithful, or use Condoms), but our main message was: Stick to one partner. We promoted condoms only as a last resort.

Because we knew what to do in our country, we succeeded. The proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plunged from 21 percent in 1991 to 6 percent in 2002. But international AIDS experts who came to Uganda said we were wrong to try to limit people’s sexual freedom. Worse, they had the financial power to force their casual-sex agendas upon us.

PEPFAR calls for Western experts to work as equal partners with African leaders on AIDS prevention. But as co-chair of Uganda’s National AIDS-Prevention Committee, I have seen this process sabotaged. Repeatedly, our 25-member prevention committee put faithfulness and abstinence into the National Strategic Plan that guides how PEPFAR money for our country will be spent. Repeatedly, foreign advisers erased our recommendations. When the document draft was published, fidelity and abstinence were missing.

And somehow, a suspicious statistic attacking marriage appeared. The plan states that the HIV infection rate among married couples is 42 percent, twice as high as the rate among prostitutes. Our requests for the source of this statistic were repeatedly ignored. In fact, the 2004-05 Ugandan HIV/AIDS Sero-Behavioral Survey found that HIV prevalence among married couples is only 6.3 percent, far lower than infection rates among widowed (31.4 percent) or divorced (13.9 percent) Ugandans.

When Washington insiders were alerted to these scandals, the words “abstain” and “be faithful” were quietly reinserted into the plan — on paper. But that doesn’t guarantee these methods will be implemented or promoted. Meanwhile, the dubious marriage statistic remains.

As fidelity and abstinence have been subverted, Uganda’s HIV rates have begun to tick back up. . . .

Meanwhile, effective HIV prevention methods, such as urging Africans to stick to one partner, don’t qualify for lucrative universal-access status. . . .

We, the poor of Africa, remain silenced in the global dialogue. Our wisdom about our own culture is ignored.

Telling men and women to keep sex sacred — to save sex for marriage and then remain faithful — is telling them to love one another deeply with their whole hearts. Most HIV infections in Africa are spread by sex outside of marriage: casual sex and infidelity. The solution is faithful love.

So hear my plea, HIV-AIDS profiteers. Let my people go. We understand that casual sex is dear to you, but staying alive is dear to us. Listen to African wisdom, and we will show you how to prevent AIDS.

Nearly half of the states are turning down federal funding for abstinence education, turning away millions of dollars. In this article on the subject, it appears that the reason is not that these programs are ineffective in reducing teenage sexual activity. It’s that many officials just disagree with the concept that sex outside of marriage is wrong. The programs, said one official, are just “too strict.”

I would say, however, that I see a weakness in the programs. They reportedly focus on the social, psychological, and health benefits of abstaining from sex until you are married. But the main reasons against extra-marital sex are not pragmatic but MORAL. I’m sure that avoiding the M-word is out of fear of seeming religious and thus becoming ineligible for federal funding.

But morality, in itself, is not necessarily religious at all. (Christianity is not some moral code but the means of finding forgiveness for violating the universal moral code.) We need to teach children, as well as adults, to think in the moral dimension. If we avoid that and instead just re-enforce the materialistic pragmatism that destroyed our moral consciousness in the first place, of course we will not have moral behavior.

HT: David Halbrook

Outside of our hotel here in Winnipeg the annual Gay Pride parade marched by yesterday afternoon, and the journalist in me forced me outside to observe. Suggestion to the Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered community: If you want to become socially acceptable, parade in business suits or go business casual. Lesbians and transvestites, wear nice dresses. Gentlemen, wear shirts. Also trousers. Everyone, keep your leather fetish gear in the closet, if I may use that term, and try to defy, rather than confirm, the stereotypes. If heterosexuals carried on like you do, they wouldn’t be allowed to get married either.

Here is a fascinating history of international copyright law, occasioned by recent attempts to bolster it even more in light of the new techological “sharing” possibilities. Back in the 19th century, copyright used to extend only within a particular country. That meant that America, Canada, and England used to pirate each other’s authors, printing their work and giving them no royalties. That eventually changed, due to the crusading, among others, of Mark Twain, who would travel to these other nations and ask why someone who stole his bottle of whiskey would get imprisoned but nothing happens to someone who steals his writings.

The article alluded to some people who resist these laws even today, maintaining that copyright restricts education, people’s access, and whatnot. I certainly understand why people download music illegally. But I can’t see how that can be justified in any kind of moral argument. Attempts to say that stealing music or other created products are anything but violations of the commandment seem to be just casuistry (in the sense I explained a few days ago in a comment) so as not to think of oneself as a sinner. Isn’t Twain’s analogy valid? Can any of you think of a moral justification for taking an artist’s property without paying for it?

Wisconsin leads the nation in people who admit to drinking and driving. The rest of the top five in this particular list of shame are North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota. Utah has the least problem with this, followed by a number of Southern states. One reason, according to this AP article is religion:

Eric Goplerud, research professor at George Washington University Medical Center, said cultural and demographic issues probably have a role in the higher rates of driving under the influence in certain states. He said that religious affiliations in the Southeast often strongly discourage drinking, but that doesn’t occur so much in the upper Midwest.

What is mercifully unspecified is what the religion of those Northern states is. According to Adherents.com, the five states with the highest proportion of Lutherans are THOSE very states (in this order: North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska).

And it is true, in something that surprised me when I became one (and later came to appreciate), that Lutherans–for all of their theological, social, and moral conservatism– have NO problem with drinking alcohol. (At least not in the LCMS, though I’m aware there are more pietistic Lutherans that do.) Yes, drunkenness and alcoholism are considered wrong, as is alcoholism, but Lutheranism posits not the slightest guilt or stigma about social drinking. Indeed, beer is often served at church dinners. (I have often wondered why Lutherans don’t promote THAT in their church growth efforts.) And yet, I have not witnessed in my congregations any major problems with this, no more than in my earlier anti-alcohol liberal and evangelical congregations down in Oklahoma. When I was growing up, we actually were in a “dry” county, and yet drunkenness was rampant.

Drinking and driving, of course, is wrong, but there is another part of the story (in addition to questions about how the survey defined the transgression–it may be that citizens in these states are, like good Lutherans, more open to confessing their faults than driving while actually impaired). The fact is, Wisconsin has FEWER TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS than the average. (I don’t have statistics for the other top four.) See this and follow the links.

What are we to make of all of this?

Barbara Walters , icon of TV journalism, has published an autobiography in which she boasts about all of her promiscuous and adulterous relationships. There was a time–in fact, it was Barbara Walters’ generation!–in which people, especially women, were ashamed of their sexual transgressions and didn’t want them to come out in the open. Now, they dish about them on talk shows, with no sense of losing respectability. This shift is culturally significant: it isn’t a matter of violating norms anymore. There are no norms to violate.

Thanks to Ball Point Blog for alerting me to the fact that my Table Talk columns are available online. I did not know that. I like writing for that magazine, since each issue has a special theme, and I, in effect, get assigned a topic. That forces me to think about things I otherwise would not. The topic for this month was “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Here is what I did with it.

The high court in the Presbyterian Church (USA) ruled that a pastor who performed a same-sex marriage cannot be censured, BECAUSE the church does not recognize same-sex marriage. Get a load of this reasoning:

The order issued Tuesday said, “The ceremonies that are the subject of this case were not marriages as the term is defined (by the Book of Order). These were ceremonies between women, not between a man and a woman. … It is not improper for ministers of the Word and Sacrament to perform same sex ceremonies.”

The church’s Book of Order says, “Marriage is a civil contract between a man and a woman,” and does not prohibit blessings of same-sex couples that are not determined to be marriages.

The high court said in the ruling that the lower court had erred by finding Spahr guilty “of that which by definition cannot be done. One cannot characterize same sex ceremonies as marriages for the purpose of disciplining a minister of the Word and Sacrament and at the same time declare that such ceremonies are not marriages for legal or ecclesiastical purposes.”

The church defines marriage as between a man and a woman. A minister marries two women. But the minister cannot be sanctioned because, according to church teaching, gay marriage is impossible. So the minister could not have conducted such a thing.

Thus, the teaching AGAINST gay marriage provides a mechanism for allowing it.

Fed to Pursue Aggressive Checks on Credit Cards - washingtonpost.com:

The Federal Reserve and two other banking regulators are set to unveil today one of the most aggressive efforts in decades to crack down on the credit card industry, prohibiting practices such as arbitrarily raising interest rates on outstanding balances.

The proposed regulations, which could be finalized by year’s end, would label as “unfair or deceptive” practices that consumers have long complained about. That includes charging interest on debt that has been repaid and assessing late fees when consumers are not given a reasonable amount of time to make a payment. When different interest rates apply to different balances on one card, companies would be prohibited from applying a payment first to the balance with the lowest rate.

Before, all the Fed made the credit card companies do was to inform the consumer of such practices. Now, the Fed will forbid them.

Even if you bemoan government interference into businesses and the economy, isn’t this a good idea? Isn’t there a moral issue here that the state does have a Romans 13 right to restrict, namely that all-but-forgotten sin of usury?