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Tim Callahan Profile
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religion and politics


Though the United States has an official policy of separation of church and state - incidentally, begun with the Establishment Clause of the Contitution, for the purpose of protecting minority religious groups from the state - the fact is that religion has constantly intruded into our national policies. Even now some Republican senators want to renew funding for abstianence only programs and fought to keep birth control and abortion out of the national health care program being proposed by the Obama administration. Interestingly, to my knowledge, these same senators have not proposed to exice payment for drugs dealing with erectile dysfunction.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the religious basis for either reactionary or progressive legislation?
10/29/2009, 1:23 pm Link to this post Send Email to Tim Callahan   Send PM to Tim Callahan
 
Morwen Oronor Profile
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Re: religion and politics


Unfortunately, religion is a large part of everything humans do. You will never totally take it out of politics.
As long as you have people who think of the 10 commandments as the basis of their morality, and the basis of all law, you won't get them to see the point of view that it is possible to live totally without religion and its influence.
I'm in the process of writing a thesis on this subject. One of the things I did while I was in the UK was a sort of 'pilgrimage' to as many big churches and the towns around them to find the answers to why people want/need religion.
I came to a few conclusions that I will use as the final chapter in the work, it really is a matter of 'need' religion has become so much a part of the human condition that it would be very difficult for societies to remove it completely. I'll let you read a draft of my chapter when I get there. You can give me your thoughts on it then.
10/31/2009, 3:53 am Link to this post Send PM to Morwen Oronor Blog
 
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Re: religion and politics


That sounds very interesting, Morwen. I'm looking forward to reading it.

One aspect of religion in politics, here in the U.S., is the political organizing via the black churches. It should be remembered that the organization Martin Luther King was part of was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We must keep this in mind when considering the impact of people like the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson.

At the same time, church communities of this type, often socially prgressive in one area can be quite reactionary in another. For example the same African American church communities here in California that supported Obama in the last election and are generally in favor of healthcare reform, etc., also voted, along with conservatives, in favor of Clifornia state Propsition 8, the initiative that revoked the rights of gays and lesbians to marry.
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Re: religion and politics


Among African Americans (a lot of whom are not even African as National Geographic have discovered) are, like our native Africans, very dependent on their church in order to keep their communities stable.
One thing that Christianity has done very successfully (Islam as well) is to instill in people the idea that morality can't exist without strong belief in a deity (or deities) and strong attachments to the rituals of religion.
If you remove religion from the lives of especially the less-educated person, you also remove the incentive to conform to society's rules.
I'm very interested in this subject because until organised society incarcerated people for disobeying the law, the law was enforced by very cruel punishments and now that a lot of societies have discontinued the death penalty (and the USA is the last western country to still have the death penalty) we have over-crowded jails instead. Is it moral to keep people alive while their victims are dead or permanently traumatised by the acts of the person who is now in a protected environment with all the benefits and security that go along with being in a modern prison? According to religion it is. Christians don't kill other Christians and particularly when someone "finds Jesus" and asks forgiveness for his crime. They even let people like this out on parole while the victims and their families continue to suffer the consequences of an unasked-for act perpetrated on them.
While I'm against the death penalty in principle, I can see the value in putting down people like Ted Bundy for instance. I don't believe the death penalty is a deterrent, because people who don't care for other people's right to life also don't really care about their own, but I do think there is value to ridding society of people like Bundy permanently. The problem is morally, where do you find people to carry it out. The very act of carrying out the death penalty, makes the executioner a killer as well.
Ancient societies used to have other ways of dealing with opportunistic killers and thieves, but organised religion changed this.
Even if you don't have church and state working together, the fact that the laws of a country are based on the religious laws, makes religion a part of that country's ethics. For instance, gay marriage; if it is prohibited by a society, even if that society doesn't have religion in their politics, the basis of distaste for gay marriage is based in religion, therefore the society still used a religious yardstick for ifs decisions on what constitutes morality.
Africans have embraced the religions that developed in the Middle East in the most unbelievable numbers and because organised religion professes to provide charity to Africa's vulnerable people, it is in the interest of organised religion to keep them that way. It would cause a huge financial loss to organisations like the RCC for instance if there was no hunger and poverty in the world at all and if everybody was well-educated, like in countries like Sweden for instance where they have 100% literacy and here are some statistics from Wikipedia:

According to the most recent Eurobarometer Poll 2005,[9]
23% of Swedish citizens responded that "they believe there is a God".
53% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force".
23% answered that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force".

Those are old statistics but interesting nevertheless. It proves that despite their high levels of education, Swedes are still under the influence of religion and my feeling is that it is because they are swayed by the idea that churches actually do a lot of charitable work. Generally people believe that without the churches, Africa and the poor in South America would starve.
I don't believe this. I also don't believe that the churches' altruism is based on ethics, I believe it's based on financial gain. I honestly believe that if people insisted that they have a right to practice their religion without paying for it and if the world's governments stopped giving tax-breaks to churches and donations to churches, they would shut down and poverty would decline rather than rise.
You see, no matter how politics insists that there is separation of church from the running of the country, it won't happen until religion is made to operate in the same way that business does.
11/1/2009, 12:39 am Link to this post Send PM to Morwen Oronor Blog
 
Tim Callahan Profile
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Re: religion and politics


One thing I've noticed about people whose politics are heavily colored by religious beliefs is a tendency to cherry-pick those aspects of their religion that support their political and social views, while ignoring those that don't, then invoking those cherry-picked aspects of their religion as a way to claim a divine sanction for their views.

One exampe this sort of cherry-picking can be seen in the use of the slogan "Let my people go," by the Southern Christain Leadership Conference and by the civil rights movement in general in the 1960s. Using Moses' words to Pharaoh implied a divine sanction for civil rights. However, the Bible, Old Testament and New, has no quarrel with slavery. Nor does the Bible champion either democracy or civil rights.

More recently, right-wing evangelical Christians have steadfastly championed capitalism, even though Jesus told the rich man to sell everything he had and give the money to the poor, and even though the description of the Jerusalem church in the opening chapters of Acts depicts an effectively Marxist society. Thus, since these evangelicals champion capitalism, they blithely ignore these problems or rationalize them through truly amazing mental contortions.

 In addition, thay have even used the parable of the talents (Mt. 25:14 -30) as an example of Jesus urging people to invest wisely. If you recall, the parable tells of three servants entrusted with varying numbers of talents (one talent was worth about $ 1,000 dollars) by their master as he leaves on a journey. Two of the servants invest their talents wisely. The one entrusted with five talents made five more. The one entrusted with two made two more. However, the servant entrusted with one talent buried it. When the master returned he praised the servants who returned ten and four talents, respectively. The master condemns the servant who only delivered back to him his one talent, saying he should have invested it with the bankers. He takes the one talent from that servant and gives it to servan who has ten talents, then says (Mt. 25:30):

And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; where men weep and gnash their teeth.

Since the servants who do the master's will, do actually invest their money, Christian investment counselors (!) use this as a divine sanction for investing in te stock market. Of course, the parables, by their nature, arent supposed to be taken literally, and most Christians read the talents as signifying natural abilities, which we are to develop and use in God's service; but why should pro-business evangelicals lat that get in the way of cherry-picking?
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Re: religion and politics


Very true Tim, and here are the best examples:

When you try to reason with a believer that it is possible to be moral without having to act according to the 10 commandments and that for instance, it is kinder to lie sometimes than to tell the truth and that bad parents don't deserve honor, they tell you that you can't escape the law of their god, and that you have to obey the old laws.
Then you throw some of these at them:
Exodus 21:7 It's ok to sell your daughter into slavery.
Leviticus 25:44 It's ok to own slaves from neighboring nations (I suppose paying Mexican low wages is an example of this one)
Exodus 35:2 Your neighbor must be put to death for working on the Sabbath.
Leviticus 11:10 Eating shellfish is an abomination. Tell this one to the Southern shrimp and crayfishermen
Leviticus 21:20 Eye defects and approaching God?
Leviticus on hair-cutting and touching pigskin (playing football) wearing garments of mixed fabrics and so on.
All of these don't apply they say, only the 10 commandments. This is typical of their cherry-picking.
The one thing you have to say about Orthodox jews, when they obey the law, they really do obey the law! emoticon

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Re: religion and politics


It's alway a kick when fundamentalist Christians start quoting Levitical law. Most of them are cherry-picking the laws they want enforced as a way to give their views a divine sanction. However, they ignore al of the other weird laws. In addition, as Christians, they - and the rest of us - are supposed to be free of the law.

In the 1970s California enacted a sweeping reform law with respect to regulation of sexual behavior. Basically, this law says that whatever sex acts consenting adults indulge in, in private, are legal. Thus one can't be arbitrarily busted in the state of California for having coitus in the wrong position (read that as woman on top or doggie style), indulgine in oral sex, sex between unmarried people, group sex, bisexual and homosexual acts etc., as long as everyone involved is not being coerced, is a legal adult and the acts take place in private. Thus, rape, child molestation and lewd conduct - that is, sex acts that victimize people - are still forbidden. What th law actually did was to protect the privacy of American citizens and shut the government out of our bedrooms. People basically continued to do sexually, what they had always been doing, only now without the threat of someone in jack-boots busting down their dorr and arresting them for it.

While this law was being considered in the state legislature, several right-wing fundies among either assmblymen or state senators spoke against it, liberally quoting Leviticus as they did so. I wonder if they made their wives live in menstrual huts during their periods or if they sacrificed pigeons in their local churches in atonement for the woman's sin of menstruating. Probably not. They basically just wanted to keep their options open when it came to having the right to kill gay people.
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Re: religion and politics


Exactly.
They couch their fear of something they don't understand in religious righteousness.
We have the same resistance here from ministers of religion who refuse to allow gay marriage in their churches and of course the fundamentalists who still believe that 'gay' can be cured by prayer. Hell, they believe that all mental illness can be cured by prayer, so you have serial killers and other psychopaths going about untreated because of ignorance and religious fervor. A perfect case in point is the brou-ha-ha we've having at the moment about an athlete who was born with indistinct gender. For some reason some babies' gender is very confusing and when medical workers, and especially midwives see a gap, they pronounce the child to be a girl.
This is what happened to this athlete. When I look at him/her I see a boy, But because he was declared to be a girl when he was born, and raised as a girl, everybody concerned is determined that he should remain a girl. The midwife said he was, the local tribal chief who gets to examine every child in the tribe (I think quietly getting a kick out of looking at babies' bits) declared he was a girl and that's the end of if. But the International Athletic Council called for tests.
There are no clear results of the medical tests done available yet, and why I don't know. The only result that is public is that she has more testosterone than is normal. That should be an indication that even if she is intersex, the leanings are more male than female and possibly something should be done for her to have some sort of future normal life.
There is no thought given at all to what the person in the centre of the row feels and when you see him/her in public appearances, he looks bewildered like a deer caught in a car's lights.
I feel so sorry for this person who's being dragged through this business while narrow-minded bigots just dig their heels in and refuse to concede that maybe modern science and counseling should be brought in to resolve the issue.
To me this is exactly the same as nuns who tie left-handed kids' arms behind their backs to force them to write 'right' and fathers of gay sons who take them to prostitutes so that they can be ;cured; of liking boys.
Tell me what you think.


Last edited by Morwen Oronor, 11/8/2009, 1:12 am
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