RE: [atheists-27] Attack on Women's Rights
| From: | Don W. |
| Sent on: | Friday, September 11, 2015, 2:53 PM |
Thank you for your most excellent reply on this issue. I have to confess that I am really frightened at the extent that the GOP is willing to fully commit to falsehoods that would be more in keeping with a hallucinatory psychosis. The acceptance of the preposterous nonsense called religion basically destroys the ability to think in general. This women's rights issue is universally accepted as a religious issue because everyone says that it is. I would like to suggest that religion is better understood as a general toxin that harms cognitive abilities.
The Bible does not say anything about abortion. There is a way in which this passionately held belief is a secular addition to the premises convey by their "holy texts." The underlying cognitive mechanism seems to be to maximize the disgust reaction based on a twisted notion of sanctity. Jonathan Haidt says this about this particular "moral foundation":
5) Sanctity/degradation: This foundation was shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination. It underlies religious notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way. It underlies the widespread idea that the body is a temple which can be desecrated by immoral activities and contaminants (an idea not unique to religious traditions).
It is easy to mobilize a disgust reaction with talk about removing the arms and legs of a fetus, excuse me "unborn babies." They studiously ignore the fact that there is no cognition in the fetus. There is no pain. There is no soul.
Unfortunate we are living with the irrational and out of control use of this cognitive mechanism. I would like to suggest that it has the effect of maximizing the probability of war. The current other major initiative of the political right is to attempt to disapprove the Iran nuclear deal. The diplomacy of this deal was largely a UN initiative. The P5+1 meant the permanent 5 members of the UN Security Council plus 1. The deal has already been approved by the UN. It has been approved by all our European allies. It also has been endorsed by over 90 additional countries.
There is no alternative to this deal. The right wing makes the fatuous claim that what is needed is a better deal. There is no better deal. It is a pure figment of delusional minds. China and Russia were significant supporters of this diplomatic process. They became engaged in the process after they were convinced that the US would go to war if diplomacy did not remove the pathways to a nuclear bomb. That was the narrowly defined goal of the diplomacy. China and Russia are hardly great allies with us. They have vastly different views of power and view of the moral good. We had to work within the framework of our understandings with them.
Trump argues that he would have imposed three times stronger sanctions. Again completely delusion. These were the strongest sanctions in the history of modern world. It seems that most of potential GOP Presidential nominees have already promised that they would obviate this deal as one of their first acts if they were elected. There are GOP claims that sanctions will be such that every country will have to decide whether they will be trading with the US or Iran. Frankly the likely outcome is that China, Russia, our European allies, and the rest of the world would just conclude that we have a delusional leader. We would just cut ourselves off from world trade if we tried to go down that road.
Iran has a loathsome theocracy. It is easy to demonize them and mobilized the disgust reaction that the GOP is nurturing. The problem is that since there is no diplomatic alternative. Our only alternative is war. The GOP is just selling their preposterous delusion of a "better deal." I sincerely hope that the human disasters built in acting on these additional delusions will not come to pass.
Don
Subject: Re: [atheists-27] Attack on Women's Rights
From: [address removed]
To: [address removed]
Date: Thu, 10 Sep[masked]:19:09 -0400
This is surreal. I thought that we, as a society, had already established the fact that individuals have autonomy over their own bodies and reproductive choices. The fact that republican politicians want to interject government control over choices that are best left to the individual seems pretty hypocritical to me. They are first ones to banter on about getting government off our backs.The fact that republicans are willing to shut the government down over Planned Parenthood funding demonstrates to me that they are unfit to run our country.Jim
From: "Mathew Goldstein" <[address removed]>
To: [address removed]
Sent: Wednesday, September 9,[masked]:11:26 PM
Subject: Re: [atheists-27] Attack on Women's Rights
This is now an annual ritual. Democrats have no responsibility for a Republican shutdown of government that they vote against, but Democrats will be responsible for voting to defund Planned Parenthood with no proper justification. Republican shutting down the government will be costly, innocent people may die as a result, and our fellow Republican citizens who vote in a Congress Republican majority will share responsibility for the consequences. This illustrates why active and public advocacy against religious belief is a good idea. Neither a shutdown nor a defunding would occur without the control that religious clerics and institutions have over public opinion. It does not matter that other religious clerics and institutions side with the secularists. They are not modifying public opinion away from the secular norm, which is good. But this is not a good result that can be credited to the socially liberal religions, instead it is a result of the more socially liberal religions adopting a more secular outlook. Religion itself contributes only to the bad anti-secular outcomes, it contributes nothing to the good secular outcomes that would result anyway if there was no religion. Unfortunately, too many liberals do not recognize this fact, they mistakenly credit religion in both directions, which is a conceptual failure.
On Sep 9, 2015, at 8:05 PM, Don Wharton <[address removed]> wrote:
There are current Congressional hearings directed toward abolishing women's rights to legal reproductive services by defunding Planned Parenthood. This is largely based on fraudulent videos that were heavily edited to suggest that body parts were being sold to make profit. This implicit claim is completely and totally false. There were suggestions that abortions were suggested to women because of the desire to make this asserted profit. I was listening to the CSPAN broadcast of the hearings on the issue. The Republicans repeatedly talked about their disgust at the values represented by the fraudulent videos. This avoids the obvious fact that the use of fetal tissue was approved by the Senate by a bipartisan vote of 96 to 4. The American people overwhelming support for the medical research supported by means of fetal tissue. By law Planned Parenthood is allow to recover the extremely modest costs required to preserve and transport needed tissues. There is no evidence that they have ever received more than that or violated any law in the process of harvesting any tissues for medical research. Prior use of fetal tissue research saved over 500,000 lives threatened by polio. These fetal tissues are require for current research on Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's, diabetes and many other diseases.
Of course, there is the entire range of other tropes used to demonize reproductive choice. It is quite easy for GOP Senators and Representatives to manufacture their respective reports of disgust at what happens with an abortion. Frankly the suffering and societal dysfunction that would result from legally coerced child birth would be far worse. The moral question to me rests in large part with suffering that is actually experienced by conscious entities. Fetal organisms that have no functioning nerves logically can have no feelings whatsoever. Even after nerves exist all they can do is send a signal. If there is no functioning brain there is no way to give any meaning to a possible pain signal. Approximately 60% of those getting an abortion are already mothers. They value having their children. It is just that they need to manage the number that they have so they can adequately raise their children.
The GOP suggests allocating the same amount of money to other clinics. California has explicitly declared that there is not sufficient other facilities to meet the need. Evidence is that the quality of service and the cost structure of Planned Parenthood meets the needs of the poor better then the majority of other alternatives. If Planned Parenthood funding is ended it would drastically reduce the quality and availability of a wide range of needed services. Contraceptive service reduction seems to be high on the priorities of other services that many of these anti-choice groups what to pursue. Again forced natalism is a disaster for society. We have too many children as it is. The foster home system is creaking under massive loads and inadequate funding as it is. Many of these unfortunate children age out of the system with legitimate rage against the society that neglected them.
The GOP is suggesting that they are willing to shut down the Federal government over this issue. There are a vast range of issues that are not adequately covered with this brief post. However, there does not seem to be one single claim supported by evidence of harm to justify shutting down Planned Parenthood. This is once again a case of religiously inspired madness that could create great harm to society.
Don
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