So, I am so incensed about various issues this week that I don't know where to start. Shall we preamble? I want to get back to discussing things in more detail, but let me get some things off my chest to begin with......
I have been pursuing my family tree again. I am stuck with my three x great grandfather who, despite saying in each of the censuses that he was born in a particular place in 1806,remains without the attribution of a baptism. In the end, the problem may boil down to one of non-conformist records being secreted away somewhere where no one can see them. This problem confounds many an ardent family tree researcher, an impenetrable barrier to generations past. But why isn't it law to deposit these records in an archive somewhere? As things stand, records can be kept out of public view or knowledge; kept by chapels who regard documents as their own property to be kept away from us and, ultimately, lost to family history forever. (I know one such person who keeps chapel records from a deconsecrated chapel in his attic where they moulder until the day he dies when who knows what will happen to them? )It really is a scandal isn't it... and typical of the church in all its facets. Somehow the folks, who over the centuries have been born and lived and died in attendance of a religious institution, who have genuflected to it and feared it,who are the cannon-fodder, as it were, who perpetuate the institution, its life-blood and succour to its ministry, become in their death the property of the chapel, to be chained to oblivion if the chapel so chooses. Yet they are OUR relatives. Our antecedents have given them life and they have given us ours, but we have no rights when it comes to honouring them through family research. They are locked away.
We talked in another blog about the Church of England burying the dead according to a hierarchy: those with headstones have their grave-plot recorded , those without are not documented. That represents just how much we church goers over the centuries mean to them... The church is there for THEM, not for us, we are simply there to serve the continuity that the church requires and when they are done with us, they don't give a damn who is buried in their churchyards. It's that simple.Genes versus memes. Flesh and blood coming out second best to religious doctrine.
So what else am I concerned about this week? Well, how about the government's Prevent Strategy? I'll come back to this, but suffice it to say that I am incredulous at the sheer idiocy of the whole shambles. Let's apply a bit of logic: Prevent is supposed to deter disaffected youth from drifting into terrorism and reclaim those who have strayed, back onto the straight and narrow of good old British values! What a laugh! If we are so upright, why on earth are young Muslims such easy prey to radicalisation? And didn't the Iraq war have something to do with it? But we are assuming that our government is capable of thinking aren't we? Or did we know that they don't know a thing about basic psychology? Look, you have a young person who has been radicalised and you want to purge his or her mind of it. With me so far? So to de-radicalise them you have to talk to them, right? You have to find out what they think and why they think it in order to challenge them? But here's the rub: THEY can't talk to you because what they are thinking is imprisonable! ...There was a young man on the radio a few days ago who had been released from prison on licence. He was put on a Prevent program. If he had revealed what he was really thinking he would have been sent back to prison!So he kept his thoughts to himself.Now, did Prevent, therefore, his inner-most thoughts not evinced, believe that this young man had been deradicalised?! Are we to take it, then, that secret thoughts make us innocent and spoken thoughts make us guilty? Is this really the criterion whereby to judge? (It reminds me of government plans to render some mental patients guilty of crimes before they are committed and , of course, is the reason why imprisonment without trial becomes morally defensible....) So look, in this sorry little story you can see one of the many problems inherent in deeming a thought to be equivalent to an action. Let's get back to this soon.....
Next blog:Misattribution of intention.
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christianity. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 March 2015
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
Equal Rights for Some, Loss of Rights for Others.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rx7tj
We don`t have to look or think very far in order to see that freedoms for some will result in loss of freedom for others.
There has been such a drive to impose the "rightfulness" of the Human Rights Act that little thought has been given to the outcome of forcing through liberty for some people, on some issues, against the rights of others, where these issues conflict.
If we just take this down to the small scale a moment, we observe that in a family where liberality is dispensed without reserve towards children, there will be no freedom for parents (or neighbours!). Children free to keep the hours they choose, play music at x decibels and generally act in a selfish manner towards those around them, will lead to the sleep cycle of the entire household being disturbed, others not being able to hear their own conversation or listen to their choice of music and generally, a domination of child over parent !!!!!
Let`s take a few examples where the rights of one person collide with the rights of others:
People take where they can. It`s human nature. If freedoms are up for the taking, there are those who will try to force their rights to the limit. We have seen over recent decades that gay rights have become one of the most prominent quests in our society. A group that feels past injustice and wants to claim their equality with the rest of us, will push and push until they get whatever they feel they have been deprived of...and more. The question is though, whether the rights of any group with new liberties should deprive others of their rights ?
The equality demanded in human rights law, with all its moral high ground, would steal from others long-held rights of religious practice, for example. Gay rights would demand that the church has to have gay clergy, that they HAVE TO CONDUCT gay marriages, that anything less that absolute equality with the heterosexual community is in fact a continuation of abuse of gays..
In the mission towards the enforcement of equality, Jewish schools would have to accept pupils who are not Jewish, indeed, the state, with an equal rights jack-boot, would wish to tell Jews that they may not decline the status of Jew to someone whom Judaism regards as a non-Jew !!!! Equal rights means that it is unfair not to allow a non-Jew to be Jewish !!!!!!!!!!!!!! Here we see that the state`s desire to adopt a new rightfulness would render Judaism a nonsense to Jews. It is in effect saying that society wishes to change the beliefs of Jews within their own belief system.
Humanists are wanting faith schools to be abolished, because, according to their beliefs, it is wrong to indoctrinate children into religion. For the same reason, humanists have wanted to have home education inspected with a view to preventing parents instilling religious belief into their children.
But have humanists thought about what it really means to prevent people from pursuing their religion exclusively? I think not, because within this fervour to make atheism available to all, something which humanism regards as a release from the mind-shackling of religion, is actually a practice to control what others may believe. In other words, humanism believes freedom of mind can be achieved with the abandonment of religion (this may well be true!), yet this belief carried to its conclusion, would in fact result in one mind control, religion, being overturned by another. In the end, telling people that they must think what you tell them to, is the ball and chain of totalitarianism, not the apotheosis of liberated thought !!!!
So, what we are seeing here is a new morality trying to usurp the old. The Human Rights Act is a new ideology for people to follow and is rapidly gaining the moral force of religious belief. The imposition is, "if you don`t believe the new moral code, you are a bad person". With this comes the power that any religion knows only too well, people who are non-believers are "badified", marginalised, demonised, and we see this happening to all religions in these times. Christians feel persecuted for their beliefs because they often don`t believe in the new moral law (sexual equality,etc.), Muslims are disdained because they are seen to deny woman equal rights, Jews are seen as discriminatory because they will not accept that non-Jews have the right to be regarded as Jewish !!!!! and so on.......
We can see from these examples that we cannot allow the Human Rights Act to be our new morality, a new religion that we worship without common sense or balance, because if we do we are opening the door to a new beast that will enter our societies under the cloak of "human rights", yet bring with it authoritarianism, intolerance and hatred. The Human Rights Act, untempered, gives us the opportunity to become new dictators glorying in our new goodness, and just as many of us perceive religions to do, blindly following our beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence.
We have seen how religions have been diluted so as to not offend people of other faiths !!!! We see how multi-faith wisdom seeks to diminish the differences between us and others, we are persuaded that if religion were to be homogenised everyone would feel so much like everyone else that they wouldn't want to hurt each other! Yet I strongly believe that the opposite is the case: if we lose our identities, our respective and distinct cultures, our rights to belief, and become swallowed up in a mishmash- society of diluted and sanitised, degraded and imposed beliefs, we will indeed come to despise each other for our lost autonomy. We will surely become bereft at the loss of our distinctness, and those deprived of their rights to their own religious beliefs, will become the new oppressed, the new victims, such is the course of history.
I see that the groups who are persecuted around the world at different times over millennia, for various reasons, just come and go in cycles, nothing changes. The sorts of people who are persecuted change all the time, but the fact that some people are always persecuted, remains. If we allow the Human Rights Act to influence us to create laws that persecute some people, we just create another cycle, a new set of victims who at some future date will need to reclaim their rights. Just as blacks have done, or women or the disabled.
More on this soon.........
We don`t have to look or think very far in order to see that freedoms for some will result in loss of freedom for others.
There has been such a drive to impose the "rightfulness" of the Human Rights Act that little thought has been given to the outcome of forcing through liberty for some people, on some issues, against the rights of others, where these issues conflict.
If we just take this down to the small scale a moment, we observe that in a family where liberality is dispensed without reserve towards children, there will be no freedom for parents (or neighbours!). Children free to keep the hours they choose, play music at x decibels and generally act in a selfish manner towards those around them, will lead to the sleep cycle of the entire household being disturbed, others not being able to hear their own conversation or listen to their choice of music and generally, a domination of child over parent !!!!!
Let`s take a few examples where the rights of one person collide with the rights of others:
People take where they can. It`s human nature. If freedoms are up for the taking, there are those who will try to force their rights to the limit. We have seen over recent decades that gay rights have become one of the most prominent quests in our society. A group that feels past injustice and wants to claim their equality with the rest of us, will push and push until they get whatever they feel they have been deprived of...and more. The question is though, whether the rights of any group with new liberties should deprive others of their rights ?
The equality demanded in human rights law, with all its moral high ground, would steal from others long-held rights of religious practice, for example. Gay rights would demand that the church has to have gay clergy, that they HAVE TO CONDUCT gay marriages, that anything less that absolute equality with the heterosexual community is in fact a continuation of abuse of gays..
In the mission towards the enforcement of equality, Jewish schools would have to accept pupils who are not Jewish, indeed, the state, with an equal rights jack-boot, would wish to tell Jews that they may not decline the status of Jew to someone whom Judaism regards as a non-Jew !!!! Equal rights means that it is unfair not to allow a non-Jew to be Jewish !!!!!!!!!!!!!! Here we see that the state`s desire to adopt a new rightfulness would render Judaism a nonsense to Jews. It is in effect saying that society wishes to change the beliefs of Jews within their own belief system.
Humanists are wanting faith schools to be abolished, because, according to their beliefs, it is wrong to indoctrinate children into religion. For the same reason, humanists have wanted to have home education inspected with a view to preventing parents instilling religious belief into their children.
But have humanists thought about what it really means to prevent people from pursuing their religion exclusively? I think not, because within this fervour to make atheism available to all, something which humanism regards as a release from the mind-shackling of religion, is actually a practice to control what others may believe. In other words, humanism believes freedom of mind can be achieved with the abandonment of religion (this may well be true!), yet this belief carried to its conclusion, would in fact result in one mind control, religion, being overturned by another. In the end, telling people that they must think what you tell them to, is the ball and chain of totalitarianism, not the apotheosis of liberated thought !!!!
So, what we are seeing here is a new morality trying to usurp the old. The Human Rights Act is a new ideology for people to follow and is rapidly gaining the moral force of religious belief. The imposition is, "if you don`t believe the new moral code, you are a bad person". With this comes the power that any religion knows only too well, people who are non-believers are "badified", marginalised, demonised, and we see this happening to all religions in these times. Christians feel persecuted for their beliefs because they often don`t believe in the new moral law (sexual equality,etc.), Muslims are disdained because they are seen to deny woman equal rights, Jews are seen as discriminatory because they will not accept that non-Jews have the right to be regarded as Jewish !!!!! and so on.......
We can see from these examples that we cannot allow the Human Rights Act to be our new morality, a new religion that we worship without common sense or balance, because if we do we are opening the door to a new beast that will enter our societies under the cloak of "human rights", yet bring with it authoritarianism, intolerance and hatred. The Human Rights Act, untempered, gives us the opportunity to become new dictators glorying in our new goodness, and just as many of us perceive religions to do, blindly following our beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence.
We have seen how religions have been diluted so as to not offend people of other faiths !!!! We see how multi-faith wisdom seeks to diminish the differences between us and others, we are persuaded that if religion were to be homogenised everyone would feel so much like everyone else that they wouldn't want to hurt each other! Yet I strongly believe that the opposite is the case: if we lose our identities, our respective and distinct cultures, our rights to belief, and become swallowed up in a mishmash- society of diluted and sanitised, degraded and imposed beliefs, we will indeed come to despise each other for our lost autonomy. We will surely become bereft at the loss of our distinctness, and those deprived of their rights to their own religious beliefs, will become the new oppressed, the new victims, such is the course of history.
I see that the groups who are persecuted around the world at different times over millennia, for various reasons, just come and go in cycles, nothing changes. The sorts of people who are persecuted change all the time, but the fact that some people are always persecuted, remains. If we allow the Human Rights Act to influence us to create laws that persecute some people, we just create another cycle, a new set of victims who at some future date will need to reclaim their rights. Just as blacks have done, or women or the disabled.
More on this soon.........
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