Tag Archives: Human Rights

Commentary

How well do young people reason about morality?

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First, let’s take a look at this post by an atheist philosopher who explains his view on morality. (H/T Reason to Stand)

Here’s his conclusion:

I conclude that morality is largely superfluous in daily life, so its removal – once the initial shock had subsided – would at worst make no difference in the world. (I happen to believe – or just hope? – that its removal would make the world a better place, that is, more to our individual and collective liking. That would constitute an argument for amorality that has more going for it than simply conceptual housekeeping. But the thesis – call it ‘The Joy of Amorality’ – is an empirical one, so I would rely on more than just philosophy to defend it.)

A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.

Now what would happen if the entire education system were secularized by people like that philosopher?

Consider this post from secular-leftist evolutionist David Brooks in the New York Times. (H/T Uncommon Descent)

Excerpt:

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

[…]The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Recognize that view? Yes, that’s moral relativism – that’s the atheist view of morality. That is the system of morality that is rationally grounded by the worldview of atheism.

Who said this?

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

Richard Dawkins said it. That’s the morality of atheists.

Hey – let’s be clear. If the universe is an accident like Dawkins says it is, there’s no objective way we ought to act. That’s it. Right and wrong are just personal preferences for atheists – do whatever makes you feel good. And you know what? Evil makes some people feel very good. A christian theist has the worldview to say that slavery is wrong. All an atheist can say is “slavery is wrong for me“. Or an atheist can say “slavery is wrong for them in that period and in that place“. And why would they say that? The only reason an atheist can give for expressing preferences is because it makes them feel good. That’s atheist “morality”.

News

Mark Steyn on the decline of free speech

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From his blog. Mr. Steyn wonders why Americans take their freedom of speech for granted, when it is under attack everywhere else in the world. (H/T ECM via Mary)

Excerpt:

And what I found odd about this was that very few other people found it odd at all. Indeed, the Canadian establishment seems to think it entirely natural that the Canadian state should be in the business of lifetime publication bans, just as the Dutch establishment thinks it entirely natural that the Dutch state should put elected leaders of parliamentary opposition parties on trial for their political platforms, and the French establishment thinks it appropriate for the French state to put novelists on trial for sentiments expressed by fictional characters. Across almost all the Western world apart from America, the state grows ever more comfortable with micro-regulating public discourse—and, in fact, not-so-public discourse: Lars Hedegaard, head of the Danish Free Press Society, has been tried, been acquitted, had his acquittal overruled, and been convicted of “racism” for some remarks about Islam’s treatment of women made (so he thought) in private but taped and released to the world. The Rev. Stephen Boissoin was convicted of the heinous crime of writing a homophobic letter to his local newspaper and was sentenced by Lori Andreachuk, the aggressive social engineer who serves as Alberta’s “human rights” commissar, to a lifetime prohibition on uttering anything “disparaging” about homosexuality ever again in sermons, in newspapers, on radio—or in private e-mails. Note that legal concept: not “illegal” or “hateful,” but merely “disparaging.” Dale McAlpine, a practicing (wait for it) Christian, was handing out leaflets in the English town of Workington and chit-chatting with shoppers when he was arrested on a “public order” charge by Constable Adams, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community-outreach officer. Mr. McAlpine had been overheard by the officer to observe that homosexuality is a sin. “I’m gay,” said Constable Adams. Well, it’s still a sin, said Mr. McAlpine. So Constable Adams arrested him for causing distress to Con­stable Adams.

In fairness, I should add that Mr. McAlpine was also arrested for causing distress to members of the public more generally, and not just to the aggrieved gay copper. No member of the public actually complained, but, as Constable Adams pointed out, Mr. McAlpine was talking “in a loud voice” that might theoretically have been “overheard by others.” And we can’t have that, can we? So he was fingerprinted, DNA-sampled, and tossed in the cells for seven hours. When I was a lad, the old joke about the public toilets at Piccadilly Circus was that one should never make eye contact with anyone in there because the place was crawling with laughably unconvincing undercover policemen in white polonecks itching to arrest you for soliciting gay sex. Now they’re itching to arrest you for not soliciting it.

In such a climate, time-honored national characteristics are easily extinguished. A generation ago, even Britain’s polytechnic Trots and Marxists were sufficiently residually English to feel the industrial-scale snitching by family and friends that went on in Communist Eastern Europe was not quite cricket, old boy. Now England is Little Stasi-on-Avon, a land where, even if you’re well out of earshot of the gay-outreach officer, an infelicitous remark in the presence of a co-worker or even co-playmate is more than sufficient. Fourteen-year-old Codie Stott asked her teacher at Harrop Fold High School whether she could sit with another group to do her science project as in hers the other five pupils spoke Urdu and she didn’t understand what they were saying. The teacher called the police, who took her to the station, photographed her, fingerprinted her, took DNA samples, removed her jewelry and shoelaces, put her in a cell for three and a half hours, and questioned her on suspicion of committing a Section Five “racial public-order offence.” “An allegation of a serious nature was made concerning a racially motivated remark,” declared the headmaster, Antony Edkins. The school would “not stand for racism in any form.” In a statement, Greater Manchester Police said they took “hate crime” very seriously, and their treatment of Miss Stott was in line with “normal procedure.”

This column is a must-read. It’s long and it’s very rewarding to those who persist.

News

Can you rely on government to defend your Christian values?

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Here is a story from the UK, and appears in the UK Telegraph. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

Last month, the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that British courts had failed to safeguard the rights of Christians who wanted to wear the cross at work, and urged judges to be more sensitive to religious discrimination.

The watchdog said it would call on the European Court of Human Rights to support the principle that employers should make “reasonable adjustments” to accommodate the religious beliefs of their staff.

However, a document posted on the commission’s website disclosed that the watchdog, which is chaired by Trevor Phillips, had abandoned the plan.

Traditionalist Christians claimed that the commission had dropped its support for religious freedom in the face of criticism from secular campaigners and gay rights groups.

The controversy erupted after the watchdog was granted permission to intervene in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, in the cases of Nadia Eweida, Shirley Chaplin, Lillian Ladele, and Gary McFarlane.

All four are Christians who are bringing legal action against the United Kingdom because they believe that British laws have failed to protect their human rights, specifically the right to freedom of religion.

Mrs Eweida, a check-in clerk at BA, was barred from wearing a small crucifix at work while Mrs Chaplin, a nurse, was banned from working on wards after she failed to hide her cross.

Miss Ladele was a registrar who lost her job at Islington town hall, in north London, after saying her beliefs meant she could not officiate at civil partnership ceremonies. Mr McFarlane was sacked for refusing to give sex therapy counselling to gay couples.

Last month, the commission promised to argue in the European court that existing laws had been interpreted in ways that are “insufficient to protect freedom of religion”. It proposed that employers should be able to reach “reasonable accommodations” with their staff to “manage” how workers manifest their beliefs.

However, the watchdog has now launched a public “consultation” on the arguments it should make and has abandoned the plan to call for a new “reasonable accommodation” principle to be introduced, arguing that “this idea needs more careful consideration”.

Don Horrocks, from the Evangelical Alliance, said the Commission had been “successfully intimidated against proceeding as they initially announced”.

“Being forced to be morally complicit in activities which directly violate people’s religious conscience involves fundamental human rights principles,” he said. “There is likely to be a deep sense of injustice within religious communities.”

The gay rights organisation, Stonewall, said it was “deeply disturbed” by the commission’s original plan to support Christians “who have refused to provide public services to gay people”.

Ben Summerskill, chief executive of Stonewall, said last night that it was “perfectly reasonable” for workers to be able to wear a “discreet” cross or other “symbols of identification” at work. “That is very different from saying ‘I wish to work in a public service but to exempt myself from delivering public services to people who have paid for them.’”

A spokeswoman for the Commission said: “Our job is not to take sides in political arguments between activist groups, it is to make sure people do not face unjustified discrimination.”

So what do we learn from this? The Equality and Human Rights Commission was created by the Labour Party, with arch-feminist Harriet Harman playing a key role in its administration. The goal of the commission was to fix unfair discrimination and other injustices. But apparently, they don’t mean discrimination against Christians. So we shouldn’t vote for parties on the left – they don’t stand up for Christians.