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| 5/23 |
| 2008/9/11-18 [Politics/Domestic/Gay, Politics/Domestic/Election] UID:51135 Activity:kinda low |
9/11 http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html \_ Warning, strong libUral slant. I mean, come on: "We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage. \_ Really good article. "Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping." \_ BRAWNDO! IT'S WHAT PLANTS NEED! \_ http://yourmorals.org I thought I was a liberal but it turns out that I'm a moderate. On the 5 foundations (harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity), I am consistently in between. \_ This is an interesting test. I line up very strongly with liberals on fairness, purity and authority scores, but I have high loyalty and less concern for harm (like a conservative). I always have prefered the moniker "armed liberal" to describe myself, though, so this fits. \_ "Whether or not someone violated standards of purity and decency." How the hell do you answer a question like that without knowing what the standards of purity and decency are? \_ How *do* you answer it? Don't you think there is a standard? If not, you are probably a liberal. \_ Right, because only conservatives are decent. \_ A conservative certainly wouldn't have to ask what the standards of purity and decency are, would they? \_ Yep, they'd believe in the wrong answer already. c.f. torture. \_ If this is somehow part of your definition of conservative v. liberal, your definition needs some serious re-evaluation. \_ No, it is you who needs to do some serious self- examination. Conservatives have a legitimate reason to bash liberals for "moral relativism" and the sooner you understand why, the more you will understand about the debate. And I am a liberal, by the way, but at least I have bothered to take the time to understand what Conservative positions are grounded in. \_ So there's no moral relativism to being gung-ho about torture? There's no moral relavtivism to to treating terrorists differently if they are white and christian? You are confusing recationary xenophobia with something else. \_ Are these serious questions or are you just being rhetorical here, it is hard to tell. I see nothing in The Bible that prohibits torture, in fact there are parts that seem to indicate it is permissible. Your claim that conservatism is xenophobic precisely misses the point. \_ What does The Bible have to do with it? Torture being ok for brown and/or poor people but not for good decent folks is a fine example of having relative morals. Or do you think the republican party is going to start putting people in "stress positions" until they start talking about insider trading? \_ Don't confuse "the republican party" with conservatism. I know more than one evangelical in my family would have no problem with giving the FNM execs a serious beating. And other Wall Street types. I don't think their point of view is unusual. \_ The new testament is pretty seriously against torture. Matthew 5, and 5:39 in particular, Matthew 25:31-46, John 9:7 to take a few obvious verses. -tom \_ http://preview.tinyurl.com/3kteeh \_ http://preview.tinyurl.com/3n63ux \_ Almost all of that is in the Old Testament. And the New Testament references don't imply that it's OK for people to torture other people. -tom \_ This asinine insistence that "conservatives" have some sort of monopoly on moral certitude has no basis in reality. Some liberals have similarly inflexible morals ("All corporations are evil." "Profits are immoral." "Israel's actions in the occupied territories are war crimes." "The military should be abolished.") "Moral relativism" is a bullshit charge leveled against people who don't share your particularly restrictive morality while deliberately ignoring whatever moral code they might actually have. (Cf. Rick Santorum's assertion that legalizing homosexual marriage will lead to legalization of bestiality and pederasty.) If the question is "whether or not someone violated" MY "standards of purity and decency," then yes, that would be particularly important to me. If the question is "whether or not someone violated" Fred Phelps' "standards of purity and decency," I really couldn't give a fuck. \_ I have all the right to sodomize you as long as I have the power to do so. Yes! \_ See now, if that had been the question, there would have been no ambiguity. \_ Let's see what is the dictionary defintion of the word "liberal": # Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry. # Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded. It is not my fault that you have decided that the word "liberal" means something different than what it means to the rest of the English speaking population. The fact that "some (self-identified) liberals" do not fit the definition doesn't mean you get to twist it to suit your own personal agenda. Good luck on your newspeak efforts though. agenda. Good luck on your Newspeak efforts though. Do I really need to pull up the dictionary definition of conservative to make my point? \_ Nothing in those definitions implies moral relativism. It just implies having an open mind. Having strong ethics and morals does not mean someone is closeminded or a bigot. I don't think newspeak means what you think it does. \_ Yes, please. And while you're at it, discuss why the Right Wing Conspiracy continues to belittle people with fixed but opposing views as "liberal." *I* didn't decide on this definition or culture-war distinction; I prefer the word "progressive." |
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| www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. By Jonathan Haidt JONATHAN HAIDT is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"--a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage. But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is. I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ). For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group--college students at Penn--consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because... eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because... These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion. The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups--the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see--let alone respect--a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb? After graduate school I moved to the University of Chicago to work with Shweder, and while there I got a fellowship to do research in India. In September 1993 I traveled to Bhubaneswar, an ancient temple town 200 miles southwest of Calcutta. On the one hand, I was a 29 year old liberal atheist who had spent his politically conscious life despising Republican presidents, and I was charged up by the culture wars that intensified in the 1990s. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those tolerant anthropologists I had read so much about. My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and confusion. I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine. It only took a few weeks for my shock to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. And once I liked them (remember that first prin... |
| yourmorals.org org, where you can learn about your own morality while contributing to scientific research on moral psychology. Many aspects of behavior are influenced by moral motives. And many conflicts and misunderstandings are driven by differences in morality. But rather than simply telling you these things, we want you to see for yourself. After each questionnaire or experiment you complete, we'll give you an immediate report on how you scored, and what your score means. Registration takes just 2 minutes, and it will allow us to hold your scores for you so that you may return at any time and continue to build up your morality profile. Please note that this site requires that your browser accept cookies to work properly. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/3kteeh -> skepticsannotatedbible.com/says_about/torture.html SAB CD Get the SAB on CD What the Bible says about Torture Sometimes you just need to beat people for their own good. The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly. Proverbs 20:30 Some people should be beaten as as a punishment for their crimes. And it shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten. Proverbs 26:3 And slaves may be beaten, as long they survive for at least a day or two after the beating. If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. You may break a few bones and cause some brain damage, but it isn't going to kill them. They'll thank you in heaven for beating the hell out of them. Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell. Since he tortured the inhabitants of several cities, torture (at least in certain situations) must be okay with God. And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons, or for yourselves. Nehemiah 13:25 At times, Jesus seemed to look favorably on torture. In his parables, for example, Jesus often spoke of torturing his enemies. And his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors. Matthew 18:34 And he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and take him away, and cast him into outer darkness, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 22:12-13 The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of, And shall cut him asunder, and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 24:50-51 The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers. And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. Luke 8:28 God uses a rod to beat those who disobey his commandments. If they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments; Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their iniquity with stripes. Psalm 89:31-2 At the end of the world, God will torture people until they want to die. But he will not let them die so that he can continue to torture them. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. Revelation 9:5-6 But the ultimate use of torture, a torture a greater than which can not be conceived, is hell. The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 13:41-42 If thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. Mark 9:43-48 And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; Luke 16:22-24 The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever. |
| preview.tinyurl.com/3n63ux -> www.petetheelder.com/archives/2005/12/does_the_bible.html post at LaShawn Barbers corner about the Christian response to torture made me think: Is torture prohibited anywhere in the Bible? Barber argues that the state should be allowed to torture sometimes as part of a total war effort. She writes: Though I ve already offered enough food for thought, I figure why not roll out a banquet? To wit, I d like to bring into the picture a meme I ve recently heard from progressive Christians (progressive being synonymous with liberal in this context). is asked, often followed by trying to paint a disagreeing party into admitting that they see Jesus teachings as irrelevant to the real world the same way one asks so, do you still beat your wife? Lots of actions are banned in the Bible and the bible describes many actions that can be considered torture such as beating people with rods or whips. I have read the Bible all the way through more than once and did not remember any passages that said something like thou shall not torture or any pasages where Jesus says not to torture people. In looking for biblical passages that could either be for or against torture, I thought about avoiding passages that were obvious metaphors about God or someone else beating or torturing people. Instead I included all the passages I found interesting and leave it to the reader to judge if this is an endorsement or prohibition of torture or if any of these relate to torturing people for information. One can infer things like torturing your neighbor is bad from reading the bible (but love your neighbor as yourself Lev 19:18) or that what is ok for God to do is not always ok for man to do, but from my searches for terms such as torture, beat, whip, rod, gnash, etc. Proverbs in particular seems to favor torture and other passages advocate torture as a form of punishment. This reminds me of a conversion I had with one of my philosophy professors in college about the ethics of suicide. Although suicide is considered a very severe sin by many Christians and the Catholic Church considers it a mortal sin, there is no specific biblical prohibition against suicide. In fact, several fairly major biblical figures commit suicide without God seeming to get upset about it. Samson, Saul, and Judas all committed suicide and in the case of Samson he did it with an assist from God. However, while there are many bible passages that condemn murder, there are none that condemn suicide. A case can be made that suicide is sinful, but it has to be an implied case, not a explicit case. Here are the passages with my thoughts below them: Genesis 9:6 Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; Instead, they will become snares and traps for you, whips on your backs and thorns in your eyes, until you perish from this good land, which the LORD your God has given you. I made them take an oath in God's name and said: "You are not to give your daughters in marriage to their sons, nor are you to take their daughters in marriage for your sons or for yourselves." "Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?" The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers. "That servant who knows his master's will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked. They were not given power to kill them, but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes a man. During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; Give her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself. She will be consumed by fire, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her. cgi/698 Comments Great compendium, but I would add one caveat. I made it clear on La Shawn's blog that no one individual has the authority to engage in torture because acts of war are the domain of government. What would be interesting would be to see what the Bible says with regards to the acts of earthly government in the prosecution of war. |