Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Civil Liberties

  • Mildred Loving’s Statement

    I recommend that everyone read this statement printed in full and discussed over on Dispatches.

  • Penscola AUSCS and ACLU Reps on Kenneth Lamb’s Show

    This is of local interest along the Florida-Alabama gulf coast.

    Kennneth E. Lamb is hosting of “Your Turn” program from 4 til 6PM on Thursday 3 May 2007. Bill Caplinger of AU and Susan Watson of ACLU local chapters will be guesting. I know both of these folks, and they should be worth hearing. I won’t be able to get to hear the show myself due to conflicts.

    The show is on 1330AM WEBY.

    Personally I don’t like Kenneth Lamb’s show all that much, but Bill and Susan should be able to make their voices heard. (Come to think of it, I just don’t like talk radio. It’s a personal prejudice.)

  • Ministry and Porn

    After yesterday’s post on Moral Choices when Viewing and this follow-up that I wrote for my wife’s devotional list, I found this post via Imago Dei. I get Donny’s regular ramblings via the Moderate Christian Blogroll, but I don’t regularly read XXXChurch.

    There are a number of points in here that are worth noting, and I want to give you a couple of quick quotes:

    And despite what many Christians might think, pornographers won’t be legislated out of business. They’re too smart to just sit back and allow such things to happen. Besides, legislation will NEVER change the hearts of anyone. I can’t tell you how much it bothers me to hear the ramblings of groups such as the Family Research Council, which seem to think we can pass laws to improve “morality” in our country. That’s just not the case. God himself gave us the choice to make our own decisions. Which of us is above God?

    Donny speaks largely about the pornography industry, but I think we need to get our focus as a church on reaching and healing people, and not so much on making laws. I do fully believe Christians should be involved politically and should live out their Christian principles in their involvement. But as a church we have been given the gospel message and the task of using it to be witnesses and to make disciples.

    We don’t like that process because it takes time and effort, especially the effort of keeping on running the race and living a life of Christian witness. But going for legislation instead is a fast food approach. Sure, if I can legislate a piece of moral action, that legislation will influence more people at once than my personal witness, and it will do so more quickly. But it will not change people’s hearts. That’s the function of the gospel message.

    I must note that I don’t think it is impossible to legislate moral behavior. Obviously we do so all the time, and in many areas we must do so. In many other areas, we should recognize that such legislation will not be effective. It’s just practical stewardship of resources to apply legislation where it’s going to accomplish its goals.

    Let me close with something I read in my devotional time this morning:

    (38) And he said to them, “Let us go elsewhere into the nearby country towns, so that I might preach there as well. Because it was for this that I went forth. (39) And he went into all of Galilee preaching in their synagogues and casting out the demons. — Mark 1:38-39

    It is a characteristic of Mark’s gospel that the proclamation is followed by the defeat of evil spirits. It’s interesting also to note that Jesus was often running away from the crowds who wanted to hear him. Do you have to turn people away from your church because there are more seeking the message and healing than you can accommodate?

    It doesn’t happen at my church. Perhaps we all have some work to do–on ourselves! 🙂

  • Points of Agreement

    [Continuing my series responding to The God Delusion. The starting entry is From the Land of the Deluded.]

    It may surprise many readers to know that I have a number of points of agreement with Dawkins. Since I have blogged about many of these things before, I’m only going to give a basic list with an occasional link to other writing I have done on the subject.

    First, I accept the theory of evolution, and I even appreciate the description Dawkins gives about it. For an understanding of atheistic evolution (and I believe the adjective is not unfair in his case), I recommend The Blind Watchmaker (link to my brief review). But I also recommend it to anyone who simply wants to understand the simple power of variation plus natural selection to produce amazing things. It’s wonderfully well written and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I even understood Gould’s punctuated equilibria much better after I read it! (Gould is one of my favorite science authors of all time, but he tends to be more wordy and is easier to misunderstand than Dawkins.)

    Second, while I know that many Christians have been offended by the title and the tone of the book, I’m afraid I don’t see the point. I titled my opening entry From the Land of the Deluded. Why? Is it because I believe I am, in fact, deluded? No. I just find it amusing. What is puzzling to me is that Christians are concerned that an atheist calls them deluded. If he is, in fact, an atheist, as what else could he regard them? If he is an atheist he doesn’t share many basic assumptions with them. What possible offense can his judgment have on them? I’m a believer in dialog, and I think dialog needs to be courteous. But dialog also needs to be clear. We need to know what each party to the discussion actually believes, otherwise we cannot possibly hope to come to a real understanding.

    Third, I deplore the negative stereotyping of atheists in American or any other culture. I do not believe that atheists are by nature immoral any more than anyone else. I would have no problem voting for an atheist for public office.

    Fourth, I do not believe in indoctrination. I do believe in religious education. I advocate this distinction in churches. A child should know about more than his birth faith and should have the right to make an informed choice. This means hearing about other faiths and about the option of no faith, and I would provide this training in Sunday School. Note that I don’t mean teaching from one of the little “Different Religions and How to Convert Them” kind of books, but from materials that positively present the views of the particular group. I blogged about this previously here.

    Fifth, I’m pretty happy both with the Zeitgeist commandments enumerated on page 263 and 264, and with Dawkins’s amendments to the same. It’s perhaps odd that coming from such different positions, we look for such similar things in society, but I think it is a good indication that moderation is a possible option.

    Sixth, I do believe that religious beliefs should be subject to challenge, and I agree pretty much down the line with his comments on the Danish cartoons story (p. 24ff). I blogged about it previously here.

    Sixth, last but not least, I must call attention to the footnote on page 321, quoting Ann Coulter: “I defy any of my co-religionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell.” Well, I have not read Ann’s book, so assuming Dawkins has quoted her correctly, I will say simply that I do not laugh at any such thing, nor do I regard it as a Christian attitude for anyone to laugh at the prospect of anyone else burning in hell. (Hell itself is another worthwhile topic, but I’m not going there right now.)

    When there is conflict on issues such as this, I am in favor of religious freedom. I wish I had come away from The God Delusion with the feeling that Dawkins also favors freedom, but I’m not certain. He seems to have a certain tendency to assume that he is right (not necessarily a bad thing), and to assume that he can also make a better choice for everyone else, which I think is a bad thing.

  • Diversity and Raising Children

    [This is part of my series of responses to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The parent entry is From the Land of the Deluded.]

    I truly have to wonder to what extent Dawkins is arguing in favor of freedom, and to what extent he is arguing in favor of the enforcement of his own scientific ideas. For example, starting on page 311, Dawkins tells us the story of a young boy taken from his Jewish parents by authorities in 19th century Italy because he had been baptized by a maid, and was therefore Catholic. This is truly an excellent example of something bad done by religion. We can and should deplore what was done. I think he diminishes the impact of his case by in turn criticizes the parents for being faithful to their own religious beliefs:

    . . . It would be grossly unjust to equate the two sides in this case, but this is as good a place as any to note taht the Mortaras could at a stroke have had Edgardo back, if only they had accepted the priests’ entreaties and agreed to be baptized themselves. Edgardo had been stolen in the first place because of a splash of water and a dozen meaningless words. Such is the fatuousness of the religiously indoctrinated mind, another pair of splashes is all it would have taken to reverse the process. to some of us, the parents’ refusal indicates wanton stubbornness. To others, their principled stand elevates them into the long list of martyrs for all religions down the ages.

    There are two elements of this criticism that I want to note. First, there is the assumption that the parents cannot truly be convinced of their own position. It is only through indoctrination that they could hold that position. Raised freely, they would, presumably, have agreed with Dawkins. Second, there is an assumption that going along with an irrational requirement is an acceptable option. Now on many issues I would tend to go along with something irrational simply because it was not worth the effort of fighting it. I suspect this second assumption is unconscious, that Dawkins does not, in fact, believe that going along with tyranny is an effective strategy.

    But as we continue through the book, we come to the case of the Amish (pp. 329-331), the shoe is on the other foot, and now Dawkins is going to decide for the parents just how they are to raise their children. Apparently we are to assume that the goals that Dawkins has for society are necessarily better than the goals that the Amish have. For the type of society in which the Amish wish to live, their educational system is quite well suited. But here again we make an assumption that a maximum pursuit of technological and scientific progress is the best route for all of humanity.

    Now I happen to prefer the future that Dawkins envisions on this point. He’s made queasy by the idea of letting the Amish children stay where they are. I’m made queasy by the notion of forcibly removing them and altering their culture simply because he (and in this case I) believe they would be better off. In that battle, my choice is to give up my vision for their lives and allow their parents to make those early choices.

    This is not, however, as easy of a decision as many on both sides will probably believe. Many on the Christian side will argue that we should definitely give parents the freedom to choose how to raise their own children. But we don’t do that in fact. There are many things that a parent is not permitted to do in our society, including various forms of abuse and definitely murder. This has not always been true in all societies. There is a tension here between freedom and diversity and “the best interests of the child” that will always make issues such as this one a bit difficult to settle.

    Nonetheless I find the combination of attitudes that Dawkins expresses interesting, to say the least.

  • Committed Christian Seeks Secular Society

    Easter seems to be the time of the year for a strong Christian affirmation. It’s not a time when most Christians want to be thinking about secular topics, or considering difficulties with their faith.

    But as I am fond of reminding people, Easter morning followed Good Friday, and that year in Palestine Good Friday was really not very good at all. Jesus was on the wrong side as far as those in power were concerned. He was a threat to public order and to their power, and they felt the need to get rid of him. One answer among many to the question of why Jesus had to die is simply that people who behaved like he did in 1st century Palestine were very likely to die like he did. On first read, that may sound like I’m belittling the crucifixion, but I suspect if you think about it further, you may see what I’m talking about.

    As modern American Christians, we are quite willing to go along with the Easter morning scenario, though we forget that only a few saw Jesus after the resurrection and there was no great triumph in the streets of Jerusalem proclaiming the victory of Jesus over death itself. Nonetheless, we like the idea of “showing them” and letting them know just who’s in charge. One way to get a cheer out of a Christian audience these days is to shout “Jesus is Lord!” It’s a good cheer, and I even like it. But the serious question is this: Lord of what?

    According to the gospel of John when Jesus was asked about this by Pilate (John 18:33-37), he said that his kingdom was not of this world. If it had been, he would have had his disciples fighting. And that’s the hard part. Christianity calls for the “Good Friday” attitude in us, but most of us have a good deal of trouble accepting that. What we want is the name of the crucified Jesus but the power of the Roman soldiers who nailed him to the cross.

    So why would these thoughts lead me to think about a secular society. Well, for one thing, my attention was called to it by the blog against theocracy. But I immediately started thinking about the term theocracy, and all the things it might mean to be against theocracy, and soon I was lost in definition land. So I just want to write a little bit about why I, as a Christian, don’t want a Christian government (a phrase that requires some definition as well), and why I think that’s the best thing for Christianity and for individual Christians.

    My basic understanding of the gospel message stems directly from the incarnation. I really, really believe in the incarnation as the big miracle of Christianity. It seems to me that this must form the core of our belief system. We do not merely believe in good ethics; we believe in ethics empowered by a God who reached out to us in this fashion, crossing the gap between infinity and the finite. Having done that, he called on us to make disciples, “new creatures” as Paul would have it (2 Corinthians 5:17). I believe that anything and everything that distracts us from this one point diminishes Christianity.

    Over our history we have repeatedly tried to use force to make other people believe or practice our faith. But that is precisely what God did not do. God condescended, reached down, emptied himself (Philippians 2:5-11), became one of us, took a human-eye view of things for a little while.

    I believe in separation of church and state not so much because it is a constitutional principle (and I do believe it is; many principles are named with words not actually found in the text), but because I think the church endangers itself when it takes any other power than the power of God’s sacrificial love as manifested in Jesus Christ.

    That gives us one and only one option for making this nation or the world a Christian nation–the voluntary, unforced, unmanipulated, free choice of every individual to be a Christian.

    On the other hand, it gives us a very powerful approach to all the problems of the world–the gospel of Jesus Christ. The good news that Jesus is willing to touch and to heal, that there is a way to transform lives, one person at a time. The task may seem overwhelming, but there are also a lot of Christians out there, and a lot of resources. They are just being used to maintain church buildings and keep the membership happy in maintenance mode.

    We need to start at the bottom, just like Jesus did, with people who desperately need help and hope. The church has the ability to solve problems on a broad scale if we put our resources to work in the right way. And note that I do not mean abandon the gospel message in favor of becoming a social service agency. We need social services driven by the message of the incarnation–servant, even slave evangelists ready to take the message of Jesus and the loving touch of his current body to the world.

    For that we don’t need the power of the government. Governmental power works much like idolatry–constantly calling us to something less than we are supposed to do.

    I don’t mean that Christians need to get out of politics or lose our moral voice, though I would suggest we broaden it quite a bit. I do not mean that we should not talk about our faith. I do mean that we should reject seeking government sponsorship for any religious activities, because those activities will, without exception, become diluted.

    Let’s use our one tool. Let’s live a life worthy of the incarnation.

    PS: I posted two other Easter meditations, Continually Translating the Message and an Easter short story (fiction) Easter Morning Resurrection.

  • Protecting Rights and Fighting Terrorism

    In a comment on her blog, Laura of Pursuing Holiness drew my attention to this story in the New York Times about the posse comitatus and related material about the insurrection act of 1807.

    First let me note that I consider the posse comitatus to be a good idea, but my primary point in posting about it is not to argue that point. Go ahead and read the article and study that one out for yourself.

    But the thing that worries me primarily about all of these actions is the way that we allow freedoms to be eroded without due consideration in the face of danger. There is a strong potential for trouble in both directions. If those on the libertarian side simply argue in favor of civil liberties without looking at safety issues, then eventually safety concerns will get out of hand, and popular support for certain stronger–and potentially dangerous–measures will continue to grow. We’d like to think that we can somehow get the people of the country to stand on principle though the heavens fall, but in reality, many people will give up a great deal of freedom in exchange for security.

    Amongst those who are not so libertarian (and there are people in both these groups on the left and the right), there is often a tendency to take hold of any rule that looks like it makes the law tougher and imagine that it will, in fact, increase safety. That is also very dangerous. If you pass a tough law, and safety doesn’t result, then there’s an automatic drive to get tougher and tougher until it works. I think this is part of the reasonw why we have in the United States one of the toughest criminal justice systems in the free world, and yet we also have one of the highest crime rates.

    The question, I think, is one of effectiveness. We are coming to believe our own spin. If someone on TV says that a certain action will improve our security enough times, then we become convinced that it will. If a law has a title like “Law to Increase the Security of Air Travel” or “Law to Make Everyone Smarter” we assume that each law will accomplish its goal. But when we look into those laws we may find that very little of the bill actually has to do with the topic.

    One way these things happen is when various projects are offered to particular districts in order to secure votes on some other issue. Such things are happening right now in the Iraq war vote, as Laura notes in another post. (You can follow her links to the source stories.) You might like to think that primarily your congressman is deciding whether to support or oppose a bill on principle, but that is often not the case. Why are congressmen susceptible to such pressure? Primarily because that’s what we, the people, will vote for. The key to having a strong hold on your district is bringing home the bacon, or to be more direct, the pork.

    Now I went on that detour to make this point: Because of this complex system of dealing, and because bills are often passed with many unrleated provisions attached, it is very difficult to tell in detail just what a congressman supports. Voters guides can often be accused of partisanship precisely because they have to pick and choose so carefully. John Kerry got on the wrong side of this one with his “I voted for it before I voted against it” issue on body armor. The issue gets very tangled because of the combinations of provisions.

    It was in just such a way that the provisions that weaken civil liberties in a dangerous way were tucked into a defense appropriations bill, and passed without making congressmen stand up and be counted on the specific issue. Even opponents sometimes give up on such amendments, letting them ride through because you don’t want to hold up a big bill such as defense appropriations over a minor issue. But we elect our congressmen to do just that kind of watching.

    One of the reforms that I support in connection with this issue is the Read the Bills Act (RTBA). You can find a good blog post on the reason for this bill and its intent here. This is not my central point, although it would make it considerably easier to do the things I’m about to suggest. (Hat tip on the prior post to Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

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