Spain Deconstructs the Traditional Family

From the desk of Soeren Kern on Tue, 2009-06-30 08:14

spanish-chronicles-soeren-k.jpg

Spaniards are currently debating a controversial plan by Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to liberalize the country’s abortion law. The new measure would obligate the public healthcare system to provide free abortions without any restrictions for women 16 years and over up to the 14th week of pregnancy, and up to 22 weeks if there is a risk to the mother’s health or if the foetus is deformed. Women can also undergo the procedure after 22 weeks if doctors certify that the foetus has a serious deformity or incurable illness.
 
The new bill would reform the present law, passed in 1985, which legalizes abortion only for certain restricted cases: up to 12 weeks of pregnancy in cases of rape, up to 22 weeks in the case of severe foetal malformation, and at any point if a doctor certifies that the pregnancy represents a threat to the physical or mental health of the mother.
 
The Zapatero government says the new law is groundbreaking in Spain because it regards abortion as a right, not a crime. Equality Minister Bibiana Aído says that with the new law, “no woman will go to jail for interrupting her pregnancy.” In actual practice, however, abortion is already essentially legal on demand in Spain because the existing law is not enforced. According to the Spanish Ministry of Health, the number of abortions has more than doubled in the past decade, reaching a record-high 112,138 abortions in 2007 (the latest year for which official data is available), or more than 300 every day. At the current rate, one out of every five pregnancies in Spain will end in abortion by 2010. By some estimates, that would rank Spain as having one of the highest abortion rates in Europe.
 
The most controversial part of the proposed reforms would give girls aged 16 the right to abort without consulting their parents. The move, which has outraged Spanish voters on both sides of the political aisle, is the latest in an ambitious program of social change under Zapatero, who critics say is resolutely determined to destroy Spain’s Judeo-Christian ethical foundations, primarily by deconstructing the traditional family. Since Zapatero came to power in April 2004, Spain has legalized homosexual marriage and adoption, approved fast-track divorce, pushed stem-cell research and even granted “human rights” to apes.
 
In July 2005, Spain became the one of the first countries in the world to legalize same-sex “marriage.” The new law, which has now facilitated more than 13,000 “weddings” and 165 “divorces,” also grants homosexual couples the right to adopt children. In March 2006, the Zapatero government banned traditional gender references in legal documents relating to the family. On marriage certificates, for example, words such as “husband” and “wife” have been changed to “Spouse A” and “Spouse B.” On birth certificates, words such as “father” and “mother” are now “Progenitor A” and Progenitor B.”
 
In December 2006, the Zapatero government announced that homosexual “diversity” training would be mandatory in all schools. Also known as “Citizenship Education,” the new program requires that children from the age of nine be taught that homosexuality is the moral and physical equivalent of true marriage. It also includes lessons on “moral pluralism,” which argues that the Judeo-Christian concept of moral absolutes is inherently intolerant. Although many parents conscientiously object to what they say is a “totalitarian” move by the state to usurp the right of parents to determine the moral education of their children, the Spanish Supreme Court in January 2009 ruled that course is indeed obligatory for all children.
 
In June 2008, the Spanish parliament approved a Zapatero-inspired proposal to grant “human rights” (including the right to life, liberty and freedom from torture) to great apes, such as chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans. The initiative, which is premised on the idea that humans and apes are equal, is a direct attack on the concept of the sanctity of human life.
 
This purely materialistic view of human nature, which dominates the Zapatero government’s thinking, brings Spain’s abortion debate full circle. In defending the new abortion measures, Aído, recently speaking on the left-wing Cadena SER radio, argued that a 13-week-old foetus is not a human being. Responding to a call-in question from a radio listener, who said that a three-month-old foetus looked like a baby, Aído said: “A living being, yes. But we cannot say that it is a human being because this has no scientific basis.” And in answering critics who say 16-year-old girls should not be allowed to abort without informing their parents, Aído said: “A young girl can have breast enlargement surgery without the knowledge of her parents.”
 
Meanwhile, Health Minister Trinidad Jiménez announced that effective immediately the government will make the so-called “morning-after” contraception pill available at pharmacies without prescription, provoking accusations by the conservative opposition Popular Party that the Zapatero government views abortion as just “one more method of contraception.”
 
For her part, Deputy Prime Minister María Teresa Fernández de la Vega says the new bill is necessary to “preserve the dignity of women.” She also says it is “in line with today’s Spanish reality.”
 
But Spain’s real reality is that abortion, in addition to corroding Spanish attitudes toward life, is also imploding the Spanish population. According to the Madrid-based Institute for Family Policy (IFP), abortion is now the number one cause of death in Spain. By way of illustration, it says that every twenty days the number of abortions equals the annual number of people killed in traffic accidents. The IFP estimates that more than one million abortions have been carried out in Spain since 1985. As a result, Spain now has one of the lowest replacement fertility rates in the world. Even with millions of new immigrants from Latin America and North Africa, births just barely exceed deaths, resulting in what Spaniards call “desnatalidad” or the “de-birth rate.”
 
In response to Spain’s population crisis, Zapatero has launched the so-called “cheque bebé,” by which the government hopes to bribe Spanish parents into having children by paying them €2,500 ($3,500) for every newborn baby. In announcing the new policy, Zapatero (without even a touch of irony) declared: “In order to continue progressing, Spain needs more families with more children.”
 
Spanish voters are slowly beginning to take notice of Zapatero’s social re-engineering projects. During the general elections in March 2008, voters denied him an absolute majority in Spanish parliament, which is where his new abortion bill is now being debated. The bill also faces mounting opposition at the street level. Tens of thousands of people have marched against abortion in Spanish cities, and three recent opinion polls shows that most Spaniards, including a majority of socialist voters, are opposed to liberalizing the abortion law. A total of 64 percent of those surveyed in a poll for the leftwing daily newspaper El País opposed the measure. A poll for the conservative daily ABC found that 57 percent of Spaniards “totally” or “relatively” opposed the measure. A third survey, published by the left-leaning La Vanguardia newspaper, found that 71 percent of respondents were opposed to the new law.
 
Zapatero hopes to increase his poll numbers by stepping up attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. When church leaders dared to question why the state was trying to indoctrinate children with the homosexual ideology of the Spanish left, Zapatero unleashed the influential sociologist (and socialist attack dog) Gregorio Peces-Barba, who accused the church of “an extreme arrogance, a sensation of impunity and an insufferable sense of superiority, derived from the fact that they administer ‘superior truths.’” When the Catholic Church organized a poster campaign arguing that endangered species like the Iberian lynx have more legal protections than unborn babies, the socialist government threatened to review the church’s legal status.
 
As Zapatero fiddles with his post-modern “progressive” vision of morality, Spain is burning. Illegal immigration, joblessness, radical secularism, corruption, divorce, violent crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, obesity, sexual assault, murder, abortion and hedonistic utilitarianism are all up. Meanwhile, Judeo-Christian values, traditional marriage, personal responsibility, academic performance, respect for parental authority, pursuit of the work ethic, economic growth and procreation are all down. Many observers link both the cause and the effect of Spain’s societal troubles to a breakdown of the traditional family.
 

Soeren Kern is Senior Fellow for Transatlantic Relations at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group

You people are confused

Submitted by Cinnamon on Sat, 2009-07-18 09:40.

1. the traditional marriage went out of the window the day divorce was legalised.  There is no traditional marriage, only a contract to dismiss and fleece each other when one has had enough.  So if you're serious about 'traditional marriage', your campaign lies not with preventing people from marrying, but with banning divorce because it goes against the very spirit of what marriage is.  (see also: http://librivox.org/the-superstition-of-divorce-by-g-k-chesterton/)

2. We need more people to marry each other, and if gays are marrying too, all the better for society, settled people who have bonded with each other are always an asset for society.  There are millions of lonely people out there whose life would be improved by marriage, of any kind.

3. Pregnant teens, single mothers and the like are not 'traditional family' and the less of them are the better.  We used to prohibit those types of 'family' totally in the past and the moment we stopped that practice (due to perceived cruelty) we started to immediatly get into trouble (inflicting even more cruelty).

Abortion prevents many disasters here, kids that grow up outside of a normal family are always damaged themselves, we have too many of such people already who are socially 'disabled' in terms of knowing how to bring up kids and how to have relationships -- if you don't get the chance to watch how it's done, bootstrapping from first principles later on is very hard, which is why so many modern family fail half-way through -- those people lack the social tools and know-how that normal folks aquire during a normal childhood by watching their parents for ~18 years living an a way that has been honed to perfection by generations throughout the centuries.  (aka 'culture' in previous times)

4. Because the provisions for disabled kids are so woeful(since they cannot be paid for by the state it appears), an abortion often saves the family from a terrible fate that almost always damages the siblings prospects in life and destroys families financially and emotionally.
It's a terrible choice to have to make and hard enough without moral busibodies pontificating on how those folks should live their lives.  In the end every solution is a horror and everyone has to decide how much they can bear individually.

 <p>

----

 <p>

In your (laudable) Christian eagerness to be compassionate you're basically adopting the same stance that you so hate when you speak of those that pamper the islamofascists -- you're so happy to be righteous with your great idea and honourable principle which you installed in your imagined real-world paradise that you fail to see that your moral vanity is a recipe for total mayhem and hell... just look at the result of the last 100 years that Christian moral cowardice and the resulting applied hippydom has gotten us in the mess we are in now the first place.

 

(umpeenth edit: paragraphs only appear if one enters huge gaps into the text, otherwise it gets stuffed into only huge text lump!)

As to all the comments.

Submitted by Huculinka on Fri, 2009-07-17 11:25.

Congratulations, gentlemen,

you have just achieved the impossible: You convinced me that a conservative European and a fanatic imam may have a common cause after all. Well, why don't you just face it and hug your newly found ally? Torching me right afterwards for living in the reality of the 21. century AND being an atheist would be a nice touch, too. Freaks!

@Modern Day Eve

Submitted by Capodistrias on Mon, 2009-07-13 16:54.

@Huculinka

Echos from Eden. You set women back millenia, to the dawn of time. You have read 'everything' and understood nothing. Travelled the world and are lost in space. Have another beer, enjoy your bachanalia of self-love, the slaughter of innocents  tolls for thee. Their death and sacrifice will be your only hope when you come face to face with Whom you claim to be. You have nothing to say, that the world hasn't heard before.

There there...

Submitted by Huculinka on Thu, 2009-07-09 09:44.

It's not that bad, is it? Spain finally starts to look like a real European country. Giving women the right to have control over their bodies only makes the country divert from its undoubtedly muslim heritage of male-dominated mass-procreation. Giving the freedom is the basics, offering a "bribe" for still going into all the trouble of having babies is reasonable.

Also, there is nothing wrong about being gay. They are just as economically active and just as able to bring up children as anyone else. Why shouldn't they be given the opportunity to take care of a child while the same opportunity comes to every female with the first period?

National suicide

Submitted by KO on Thu, 2009-07-09 12:14.

Time will tell. But there is a disconnect in your message. You think abortion and gay rights are a sign of progressive liberation from oppression, including the oppression of Islam. In reality, such "liberation" goes hand in hand with increased submission to totalitarian state authority and submission to totalitarian Islam. You are an advocate of what, to the traditionalist, is a Gnostic rebellion against the divine order. Where you see progress, a traditionalist sees collapse. Perhaps statistics demonstrating impoverishment, crime, and a people's failure to reproduce itself will convince you that the progressive view is erroneous. On the other hand, traditionalist common sense can reassert itself and bring a people back from the brink, saving the progressives from having to admit they destroyed the nation.

Odd that you describe the right to abort a fetus, which is a genetically unique and totally distinct organism from its mother, though temporarily dependent, as "women's right to control their own bodies." If that's the case, why should birth be the dividing line? Why not extend abortion rights to the age of majority or beyond, perhaps for as long as the child is economically dependent on its mother and/or father?

I see...

Submitted by Huculinka on Mon, 2009-07-13 09:45.

... so you are convinced, that forcing a woman to give birth to just whatever comes out, is the way to protect the very existence of a democratic nation? Do you honestly think that a country filled with unwanted babies and rape victims humiliated all the way into giving birth to what they see as the impure seed of a criminal inside their bodies, is better off than one with fewer wanted babies and women having their dignity and right to choose?
Well, why don't you just say it: Islam has basically the same opinion as European "traditionalist", we just don't like it, because it's new to us, whereas our current desert-origin dogma has been around for a little longer.
Personally, I see the source of the scary abortion rate in Spain exactly in the bigotry of the traditional Spanish christian family, which prevents young women from learning about preventive measures of contraception - pretty much the same story as in Africa, isn't it?
And as for the flaming discussion on the age of a foetus, well, aren't we killing a potential every time we have sex and do not concieve? A foetus of some 3 months if age is way less sophisticated than whatever you ate for lunch yesterday. The only thing it represents is a potential to eventually evolve into a human being. The limit of 3 months has been established on a scientific basis, finding a knowledge-based balance between the rights of a woman to control her body and the rights of a potential human being to be concieved. Pretty much like we established that killing a living creature inside your house without any reason is ok as long as it is a fly, mouse or spider, but not quite ok if it is a pig or a dog. A 3 months-old foetus isn't much more than such a spider or mouse anyway.

Sophisticated

Submitted by pale_rider (not verified) on Tue, 2009-07-14 10:33.

Anything that does not have a degree in astronomy is not sophisticated. And this would-be human definitely does not look like it is into rocket science. Surely this can't be a 'human being' and even if it were it's certainly not worthy of life. Every highly educated fool can see that! Hope you enjoy your next meal and spare a thought for those poor polar bears who are drowning as a result of man-induced global warming. Boo hoo!

I see... (2)

Submitted by KO on Mon, 2009-07-13 15:25.

@Huculinka: I see that you are shifting the ground you are willing to defend from an absolute right to abortion as a means of retaining control over one's own body to a conditional right of abortion in cases of rape (which usually brings in other exceptions, incest, threat to the mother's life, and deformity of the child). Those are very different arguments. I don't know the statistics, but I would guess that 90% of abortions are for convenience, viz., infanticide as a means of post-conception contraception. Restricting it with the above exceptions would save millions of lives every year.

There is no "scientific" basis for a 3 month limit; there is a purportedly rational line-drawing along a gradual continuum that is scientifically described. There is no infanticide when a couple fails to conceive because there is no infant. It is significant that you are willing to consider the degree of development as being relevant to the permissibility of abortion. That, again, is different from asserting an unbounded right. The political process can accommodate disagreements on those issues better than it can accommodate the binary opposition between the position that urges an unconditional right to abortion and the position that regards no abortion as permissible in any circumstances. (If an innocent child may be condemned to death because of rape or incest, it is only right that the perpetrator should also be killed.)

Abortion-rights advocates claim to want the procedure to be safe and rare. That is easily accomplished if abortion is restricted to specific, grave exceptions and to an early period of development.

@ Huculinka

Submitted by traveller on Mon, 2009-07-13 10:50.

-Not much more sophisticated than what you ate yesterday???
-Whatever comes out???
-Not much more than a spider???
-Potentially to be conceived as human being(that's already 2 conceptions)???
-Scientifically established that 3 months is the difference???

You don't have children I suppose and if you have I pity them.
When I read your drivel I really am disgusted with the way our children are "educated" in our schools.
Please, please do have a vasectomy or knotted fallopian tubes, it would save you a lot of disgusting processes which you couldn't understand or appreciate.

@Soeren Kern

Submitted by Monarchist on Wed, 2009-07-01 20:41.

Spanish voters are slowly beginning to take notice of Zapatero’s social re-engineering projects. During the general elections in March 2008, voters denied him an absolute majority in Spanish parliament, which is where his new abortion bill is now being debated. The bill also faces mounting opposition at the street level.

Degeneration of Spanish society is a great example of democracy in action. While you seems to compliment this political system and even come out with thesis that democracy somehow solve this problem in near future. This is classical example when somebody call white something what is black. You raised very important issue, wrote good article only to came up with something so laughable in the end. Do you realise that this supposed 'solution' literally delete any possibility to stop this leftist madness popularly called to be 'civilization of death'?

One could think that we are on the same side of barricade on this issue. But in fact democracy worshippers consist fifth column of pro-life agenda. How to rob a bank if most of your allies are so unwise?!?

<em>Believe me, it are not

Submitted by atheling on Wed, 2009-07-01 18:17.

Believe me, it are not “liberal views” that causes an alienation of the human nature. Sometimes it’s the lack of any view at all, be it conservative or liberal. But mostly it’s the strong competition for status translated in a never stopping thirst for acquiring wealth and social status. And that is by no means different for conservatives or liberals.

The difference is the means of acquiring wealth or social status.  The liberal wishes to acquire by theft of others' wallets; the conservative wishes to acquire by his own efforts.

The blissful ignorance

Submitted by Capodistrias on Wed, 2009-07-01 15:11.

of good intentions.

Peter, no malicious intent, but I am very familiar with similar sentiments of citizens from the former 3rd Reich and Soviet Union. Many of whom were/are also very warm and gentle people , but who refused to open their eyes and hearts to the real world around them, preferring the blather and mind numbing murmurings of the regimes' self-justifying mantras.

KO already stated some of my initial reaction to your post, though I had one caveat, one question that was raised by your post, and since your raised the issue , what exactly is the nature of your social welfare, charitable work? You don't volunteer at The Michael Jackson Night Care Center for Children? The Dr. Tiller Memorial Center for Medical Ethics? You perform reputable social welfare work, right?

Finally, you have recommended several authors pertaining to our discussions here, whom I have already read, let me recommend a selection from my favorite author on the topic we have been discussing:

The Book of Wisdom, from the beginning ;-)

 

Bye, bye, Spain

Submitted by atheling on Wed, 2009-07-01 04:41.

I hope they make provisions for the disposition of all their art.  It would be a shame to let it all moulder under Islamic ownership.

Communist Manifesto of Marx

Submitted by Cogito on Tue, 2009-06-30 21:23.

Contains among others these 3 requirements to realise a communist society:

1.Deconstruction of the Bourgeois concept of "Family".

2.Realising the Female Society.

3. Destruction of the Bourgeois owned means of mobility.

 

All 3 are being intended by socialists and greens throughout Europe.

 

 

book recommendation

Submitted by kappert on Tue, 2009-06-30 20:24.

Handbook of Death & Dying, by Clifton D. Bryant - gives a broad inside on death and social controversy, as well as on pre-personality pregnancy losses.

More Ignorance

Submitted by atheling on Tue, 2009-06-30 17:15.

Wow!, No doubt about it! This is the devil's work. I never saw the relationship with the "breakdown of the traditional family" and all of our problems.

"As the family goes, so goes the nation" - Confucius

@pdvh

Submitted by KO on Tue, 2009-06-30 20:04.

Your quotations below neatly epitomize the contrast between the liberal and the traditional ways of ordering human life. Obviously, the traditional order includes but is not limited to the maintenance of the traditional family. It embraces every aspect of life and offers happiness and liberty within the tragic limits of existence. The liberal view, in which equality and individual liberty are asserted to excess, disproportionate to their proper role in human existence (which they have), leads to increasing misery and tyranny because it is not consistent with human nature as it really is. The traditional order may also involve tyranny and misery, but only as a result of inherent conflicts in human life, not self-inflicted by advocates of delusions.

The article also depicts the self-limiting nature of liberal beliefs. A society that pursues Zapatero's vision will quickly destroy itself, being incapable of controlling internal and external predators, and of inspiring the loyalty needed to defend it.

This discussion illustrates on a practical level the argument about traditional and "gnostic" tendencies in Prof. Bertonneau's Voegelin article.

@KO

Submitted by peter vanderheyden on Tue, 2009-06-30 22:28.

"The liberal view, in which equality and individual liberty are asserted to excess, disproportionate to their proper role in human existence (which they have), leads to increasing misery and tyranny because it is not consistent with human nature as it really is."

I think this need some factual proving, don’t you? I really haven’t seen any increasing of misery and tyranny due to a liberal shift in a society. Besides I’ve strong liberal views my self. Yet I don’t drink; I’m not a materialist; I’m happily married for over 15 years now; I’ve got three children and I try to do my part of social welfare within the community. I feel perfectly happy, and full of energy.
Believe me, it are not “liberal views” that causes an alienation of the human nature. Sometimes it’s the lack of any view at all, be it conservative or liberal. But mostly it’s the strong competition for status translated in a never stopping thirst for acquiring wealth and social status. And that is by no means different for conservatives or liberals.

@pdvh

Submitted by KO on Wed, 2009-07-01 11:28.

On a question of social science, whether facts support the hypothesis depends on the paradigm used to interpret the facts. It takes a sort of conversion to persuade someone to abandon the liberal paradigm for the traditional paradigm. I will seek your indulgence in merely referring to California as a case study in the consequences of liberalism. The state is high in divorce, high in crime, high in numbers of illegal aliens, high in immigrants, high in taxes, and dead broke. I don't have access to statistics at the moment and would not cite them if I did, because it is not really statistics that persuade. I venture to say that if everyone lived as you describe how you live, they would be happier. But by supporting liberal policies and liberal views, you are depriving those who need encouragement to live as you live of the opportunity to benefit from such a conservative way of life. You may contribute by example to a society attuned to the divine, with your moderate and traditional life-style, but you don't contribute to maintaining it by promoting the principles that underlie it. It is not individual freedom and equality that underlie adherence to a happy, traditional life, but an orientation towards that life. Liberal ideology combats that orientation, and suggests to people that they can realize their individual potential by gratifying their desires without regard for traditional restraints. Possibly your contribution to society is more valuable than that of someone who pontificates regarding right living but doesn't practice it, but example and argument can both bring about good results, and failure to engage in either can cause harm.

To address your thought about status competition: Lawrence Auster makes good use of the concept of "right liberalism," which is founded on liberty and equality and is mainly expressed in terms of economic freedom. It is ultimately as corrosive as left-liberalism, because it does nothing to preserve traditional order. Our mainstream "conservatives" are predominantly right-liberals. Thus when you note that liberals and conservatives are equally prey to happiness-destroying status competition, I would say, (1) that status competition is inherent to all known societies, (2) all known societies develop mechanisms for preventing status competition from destroying the society, and (3) liberal society, taken broadly, meaning left- and right-liberal, erodes the mechanisms for controlling status competition by destroying the authority of tradition and the sacred, instituting a rational and impersonal system as the ultimate arbiter of social life, and dethroning the sacred as the arbiter. As Bob Dylan says, "You gotta serve someone... It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve someone." Right-liberals idolize the economy, left-liberals government. If the society is religious, it still places a higher value on fidelity to religion than on economic and governmental accomplishments, but as the society becomes more secular, the protection from status-competition afforded by religion becomes weaker. There is only the aesthetic preference for a humane ethics that stands between individuals and hatred for their competitors.

Dostoevsky is the great authority on the madness that occupies the place of abandoned religion.

By the way, the fact that status competition comes to your mind as the source of unhappiness makes you a perfect candidate for investigating Generative Anthropology. When you start reading the anthropoetics website you will see what I mean.

@KO

Submitted by peter vanderheyden on Wed, 2009-07-01 22:59.

“by supporting liberal policies and liberal views, you are depriving those who need encouragement to live as you live of the opportunity to benefit from such a conservative way of life.”
That’s the eternal dilemma, of course. It’s possible that in some cases more socially imposed rules and habits will keep people in line. If all those rules and habits are always the essential “right thing” to do, then we live in a perfect world. Giving more freedom supposes more personal responsibility and strength to achieve an harmonious existence.
But those rules are very often not “perfect”, especially in our fast changing world. In the Amazonian forest, it was a normal habit to kill a just born baby if the mother had already to many children to support. If they didn’t do it that way, they would endanger the whole family. But we wouldn’t accept this behavior anymore today.
Many Germans during the war committed what we these days consider hideous crimes. But their defense was that they only did what German society asked them to do. Indoctrinated with “general truths” about Jews, Gypsies and gay people they did only what they were supposed to do. From a conservative point of view, judging them by the “general truths” of today seems unfair. From a liberal point, judging them on their personal responsibility seems very logical. Radical Muslims, Orthodox Jews and some very radical Christians have despicable views on the place and rights of women. Shouldn’t we encourage them to the route of independent and rational thinking to come to a more harmonious society?
I know that for some the loss of fixed rules and habits will lead to a miserable life. But that’s not because teaching personal freedom is wrong. Its because they haven’t been thought the right things about how to live with this freedom. We should tell our kids it seems the easy route, but in reality it’s the other way around. It’s the more difficult of the two, because it will demand not only to live by principles, but also to create those principles yourself. In the end, it’s the most rewarding route. It makes us just more human beings and less machines. I’m not prepared to sacrifice my freedom for a, perhaps more stable, kind of society. To be totally honest, Even if I would, I couldn’t. To believe is after all not something you can do on command, isn't it?

@pdvh

Submitted by KO on Thu, 2009-07-02 11:58.

I would say the dilemma you set up between freedom and security is a false one. Your freedom is actually nihilism, based on a wrong denial of human nature and the structure of reality. It is not freedom, but a delusion that leads to tyranny because it provides no basis for people to sacrifice their desires for something higher, the divine order of reality. A conservative person like you exercises his "freedom" to live in a conservative fashion, but it only takes a tiny number of malefactors who exercise their freedom to commit gang rapes, etc., for the society to become a vast prison and battleground.

What you call unfreedom and/or security is based on the truth of human nature and the structure of reality, acknowledging that people are capable of terrible things and must be inculcated with the true sense of their place in the world, participants in the common enterprise of human life founded on obligation to the divine. That true understanding is the basis of freedom, at least, all the freedom that is available. When we acknowledge our sinful human nature and the structure of reality centered on the divine, we are free to seek out our path and fulfil or neglect our obligations. But if we say a priori that we are free to deny that we have such obligations, we are not free but dangerously wrong. That is the path of social and individual destruction.

@KO

Submitted by peter vanderheyden on Fri, 2009-07-03 09:36.

It’s a very tempting theory, you’re advocating. When there is a divine and definite truth about optimal human behavior and ethics, it exempts us from the responsibility for this behavior. But with a bit of observation of the human history we can see the frequent changes of this “divine” nature over time and cultures. This can mean two things: There is a divine eternal ethic, but we don’t know it or there isn’t. For me both of them have the same meaning: We’ll have to create it our self.
If you have read the “time” article I recommended, you will see that the holy books contain already a lot of contradiction in the way we have to treat people with a different believe. Once Bible and Koran recommend being very harsh on them, next time they preach to live in peace with them. By linking them to the period they’ve been written in, we can see that in times of distress and war the harsh way is recommended; and in times of peace and prosperity the soft way is recommended. This means that in the period the bible was written, the ethics were adapted to the circumstances. Meaning they weren’t fixed at all. Let’s be honest. If one they by some sort of disease or war, the distribution male/female would be 10%/ 90%. Wouldn’t you recommend men polygamy?
In fact, what happens is the other way around of what we think: We first define the optimal ethics for our society to live in, given the circumstances. And then we declare them holy and eternal to be able to impose them more easily and pass them trough to our children. As long as the circumstances stay the same, this is possibly the best possible of all possible worlds. But when circumstances change, this Holiness becomes a burden, and very often bitter violence is a result of the colliding forces. The “holiness” of the Koran is the reason for a lot of violence in the Middle East. There is no discussion possible, because the “Peter’s principle: First admit you can possibly be wrong, so that a discussion can follow” is unacceptable for holy businesses. True liberals don’t want to throw away all the existing ethical rules. Most of them are to the benefit of society. They just want to be able to put them into question, if possibly there are better and more adapted rules to the changing circumstances. That is surely not “the path of social and individual destruction”. In fact that’s the reason why I’m living a rather conservative life.

@pdvh

Submitted by KO on Fri, 2009-07-03 19:27.

Thank you for your reply. There is no exemption from responsibility in pursuing the divine order. There is responsibility for ascertaining it, responsibility for acting, and responsibility for justifying actions. The person who does these things badly is responsible for the harm he causes. He also has to live with the doubt that his actions were the correct ones. The person who imagines he can discover his own moral law is responsible for denying the divine order and neglecting the duties it imposes, and for causing harm to himself and others as a result. After that, he is responsible and full of doubt regarding whether he pursued his own program of self-determination as well as he could.

Whether the divine nature changes over time and cultures is debatable. Certainly the words and concepts and imagery men use to describe the divine vary. I don't think we can infer from that that the divine changes. It may also be that the divine manifests itself differently in different times and places and to different individuals. That also would not mean that the divine changes. However, even if the divine changes, as the living God does, it would not prove the non-existence of the divine. The Scandinavians, the Greeks and Romans, the Hindus, and the Chinese all described gods as being in some way changeable or even mortal, though superhuman. The divine does not have to exist in an unchanging Platonic heaven to be the transcendent ordering principle of human life.

The divine will or the nature of the actions needed to act in attunement with the divine order are by no means self-evident and are subject to ardent controversy. That doesn't mean we throw our hands in the air and say we have to make up all our moral obligations ourselves. We contemplate, study, and discuss, and use our reason as best we can to determine our obligations. In fact, we are not actually making them up even when we say we are: we weigh a combination of interests and duties, and prioritize one set of duties over another, and make all duties subject to an unanalyzed scheme of personal preferences. The self-governing man you posit undoubtedly applies inherited rules and values taken from religious culture and it is pure ideology when he claims otherwise.

You argue that the fact that the divine requires different courses of action in different circumstances means that it doesn't exist or is unintelligible. That is far from convincing. I guess traffic signals don't exist or are unintelligible because one minute they say go, the next minute stop? If someone tells you to wade across a stream if it is low, but to go upstream to the bridge if it is high, does that mean there is no stream? Religions are elaborate systems. Of course they give different guidance in different circumstances.

I think that optimal ethics are more likely to be announced by divine revelation than by human deliberation. They are identified as holy immediately because they come from God knows where. They are not declared holy after the fact for the sole purpose of deceiving children. Religious traditions are a constant exercise in coordinating revealed truth with current circumstances and current understandings of the world. There is full scope for discussion and discovery.

The questioning of ethical rules is well and good. It happens in the religious context, too. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in all times, especially in ours, to resent rules that impose, as all rules must, some kind of obstacle to the immediate gratification of every individual's every desire. Judeo-Christian rules that are of obvious benefit to human societies--rules discouraging murder, robbery, idolatry, blasphemy, adultery, fornication, sodomy, and witchcraft, for example--are challenged, violations are extenuated, the advantages are denied, and the divine source of the rule is denied. At some point the questioning ceases to be a good faith search for better rules in changing circumstances and becomes an attempt to abolish an existing culture and replace it with a different one. Look at abortion: advocates of "freedom of choice" are not content to say that our exaltation of individual liberty, especially sexual liberty, means we are entitled to weigh the life of an unborn child more lightly than the mother's convenience. No, they go on to deny that a baby is a baby, deny that it is separate human being from the mother, deny that concepts of homicide and murder might apply, and deny that a mother and father have any obligation to protect their unborn child. That is not a good faith search for better rule, but propaganda in a culture war. I think Profs. Bertonneau and Voegelin have accurately described the more or less victorious insurgent culture under the heading of Gnosticism.

Happy Independence Day!

@pvdh

Submitted by atheling on Wed, 2009-07-01 23:35.

In the Amazonian forest, it was a normal habit to kill a just born baby if the mother had already to many children to support. If they didn’t do it that way, they would endanger the whole family. But we wouldn’t accept this behavior anymore today.

Oh really? Ever hear of abortion? - which I'm sure you support. The only difference between the Amazonian tribes you cite and liberals like you is technology, when it comes to murdering babies. What you both share is a complete disregard for the sanctity of human life, which has been reduced to dollars and cents, as Kapitein Andre demonstrates - and is not much different from the Third Reich's policy of eliminating "useless eaters".

Radical Muslims, Orthodox Jews and some very radical Christians have despicable views on the place and rights of women.

Do please expand on this assertion. Give us some examples.

Abortion

Submitted by traveller on Tue, 2009-06-30 15:05.

For those who think abortion is normal:
A Russian female professor gynecology from whom I rented an appartment in Moscow for 2 years told me that she was risking her job checking statistics of aborted women and their cancer ratio. She came roughly to the statistics that 1 abortion came to a normal female cancer ratio, 2 abortions was already a ratio as high as 50% chance of cancer and 3 abortions was cancer at later life with absolute certainty.
When she wanted to publish her statistics she had the choice: publish and be kicked out of the university with total demonization or shut up and continue her tenure.
She shut up.

Further I would advise those who say a foetus is not a baby to find some scientific evidence when it becomes a baby, meanwhile of course keep killing for comfort.

¡Viva la muerte

Submitted by Capodistrias on Tue, 2009-06-30 14:40.

"According to the Madrid-based Institute for Family Policy (IFP), abortion is now the number one cause of death in Spain."

@Pvdh

Kindred souls in Spain?

In defending the new abortion measures, Aído, recently speaking on the left-wing Cadena SER radio, argued that a 13-week-old foetus is not a human being. Responding to a call-in question from a radio listener, who said that a three-month-old foetus looked like a baby, Aído said: “A living being, yes. But we cannot say that it is a human being because this has no scientific basis.”

(Thank you S. Kern for article.)

the devil

Submitted by peter vanderheyden on Tue, 2009-06-30 14:37.

"Illegal immigration, joblessness, radical secularism, corruption, divorce, violent crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, obesity, sexual assault, murder, abortion and hedonistic utilitarianism are all up."

 

"Judeo-Christian values, traditional marriage, personal responsibility, academic performance, respect for parental authority, pursuit of the work ethic, economic growth and procreation are all down"

 

Wow!, No doubt about it! This is the devil's work. I never saw the relationship with the "breakdown of the traditional family" and all of our problems. Sociologists of this world, stop studying! Soeren Kern has found the reason for even the smallest of our problems! Just keep married couples together and stop abortion! The rest will follow automatically.

 

 

 

RE: "Spain Deconstructs the Traditional Family"

Submitted by Kapitein Andre on Tue, 2009-06-30 09:45.

1.  On the face of it, the only contentious issue is that physicians can perform abortions on 16-year old girls without parental consent or consultation. It is curious to see an avowed socialist promote individual liberties at the expense of the community. Teenage pregnancies can burden the state in terms of costs for healthcare, social services, etc. Ensuring that pregnancies are not terminated needlessly, and that children receive proper parenting or guardianship in order that they can take advantage of opportunities for advancement (rather than burdening society with crime) are both goals in the common interest. Thus, it is crucial that these situations not be concealed, but rather brought fully into the light of the "community", in this instance parents.

 

2.  Spain's heritage is Christian. Period. Islam is clearly an Abrahamic religion, yet one does not hear "Judeo-Islamic". Moreover, Judaism is derived to a significant extent from Sumerian, Babylonian and Zoroastrian traditions. From a historical perspective, Spanish heritage would be more Islamic than Judaic, yet the Reconquista wholly and permanently Christianized Spain.

 

3.  There is no question that Zapatero harbors visceral hatred of Catholicism and the Church. Yet there appear to be substantial numbers of Spaniards with similar leanings. Perhaps Spain's recent and pre-democratic history holds the answer.

 

4.  Baby bonuses worked for Quebec, yet the provincial government also relied upon Francophone immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.

 

5.  Marriage remains unequaled as an institutional guarantor of social order and prosperity. Married couples are fundamental socio-economic units that are also the primary sources of authority and socialization for society's newest members. In fact, most state social programs are substitutes for the family, whether it is pensions for seniors, palliative care for the elderly, income for single parents, etc. Irrespective of state policies, only family members can "break" a family and force the state to intervene, whether it is one's parents banished to a care hospital or men leaving their wives and children penniless.

 

6.  Any rethink of social policy needs to factor in not only personal responsibility, but also restitution to those who have fulfilled their familial and social roles, and face ruin due to the irresponsibility or betrayal of others.