(07-09-2017, 08:03 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(07-09-2017, 06:51 AM)taramarie Wrote: I do not know why people just do not butt out of people's personal decisions. You live by what you think is right and let others decide what is right for them. Also, do those who cry about babies being killed care about those babies once they are out of the womb? Do you care about preservation of that life as much as you care about the child being born? Btw I am not for abortion. I just acknowledge that there are many reasons why someone may actually need it and that it is none of my fkn business to be up in someone else's business.
In the old days of the Agricultural Age, it was thought possible to guess what God is thinking. Assuming you guessed right, the thing to do is make up and enforce rules which make sure everyone does as God wishes. Perhaps that was not the only style of thinking on big issues, but in general it was thought the kings, popes and such like could and should dictate what should be.
In those days the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church reflected the economic hierarchy of the time -- and one brother of the Lord of the Manor was the Bishop and another controlled the judicial process -- and the latter two typically shared the same class interest. Any serf who got out of line could be boiled alive, broken at the wheel, drawn and quartered, cast to the pigs, impaled, or whatever sadistic means of execution with torture was the fad of the day. The Pope was typically one of the biggest aristocrats who got through the hierarchy and not so much the most devout and humane clergyman. The King, himself the biggest lord, stood behind the fellow lords who supplied troops for war. So what was God thinking? Ask those who had the worldly power!
In the Agricultural Age, as with fascist or Commie regimes, one obeys or dies. In that, Hitler and Mao were much more similar than their ideologies suggested.
Quote:Come the Enlightenment, some thinkers came up with the idea of Rights, that certain decisions were personal, that you shouldn't go around forcing your opinion on someone else. Naturally, many held the feeling that God agreed with Rights, that Rights were created by God, that Rights have divine approval.
...and that reflects also a change in religious attitudes that piety was more precious than power. To be sure, the American Revolution still happened during the pre-industrial era. Maybe there was already a conflict between merchants, tradesmen, and big landowners -- or perhaps, as in New England and southeastern Pennsylvania, either the ideology or the topography favored small farms. Note well that southeastern Pennsylvania is similar in climate and land-forms to northern Virginia, where giant plantations became the norm.
OK, so the Congregational preacher of New England was not selected for social connections but instead for learning. Quaker-Mennonite Pennsylvania was the wrong place to live if one relished conspicuous consumption possible only if one has slaves or serfs to do the farm labor.
Quote:You might wish that these two basic approaches might have settled out priorities by now, but abortion is one issue among others where many still believe they know God's opinion. As the world becomes more secular, it is becoming less an issue of what God is thinking, more a question of whether one's own thoughts might perhaps matter.
Opposition to abortion and contraception are now clearly right-wing. I can see the effects on class: overpopulation means more income to landlords who can charge more if they own the apartments necessary for being close to one's work, and for those relying upon labor a copious supply of people who must compete for jobs can drive wages down, which is good for higher profit. I can see where Trump's class interests are on that... and I can also see what the class interests are for an old-school owner of a sweat-shop.
Quote:To some degree, these two ways of thought still echo today. Conservatives and especially fundamentalists might be somewhat more inclined to read God's mind and enforce proper behavior on all. Progressives are often more enamored of rights and people making their own decisions. This dichotomy is by no means a universal these days, only a trend, but it lurks behind a lot.
If one believes in God, then one believes in Him as one wants Him to be -- almost as a rule.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.