One of the dominant meta-ethical methodologies today is consequentialism. The consequences of your choice determine for you the right choice. Roughly speaking if your choice would lead to harm, then it is wrong. Then, consider the following, is it torture from a consequentialist perspective, and if so why? And if it is not, why is it wrong … or is it wrong at all.

• We propose first a drug exists which prevents the formation of long term memory. If this drug is taken, no long term memories will be formed effectively and permanently erasing all subsequent memory of the events from the last, say, 12 hours.
• A torture technique, much like the infamous waterboarding is applied which causes great mental distress, “cracking” the subject but causing no organic damage, i.e., no physical harm which will be detectable the next day by the subject.
• Therefore the use of the techniques like the above coupled with the absence of memory mean that for the subject there is no way of determining that anything occurred.
• After questioning is performed and the results reported , both the subject and the administrator(s) of the questioning (the “torturer”)  are given the drug noted above. Thus neither the questioned nor the questioner have any memory of the event. For them, this never occurred.
• Furthermore, names and data regarding the subject and administrators are not kept. No video record is kept of the interrogation, just conclusions remain with all source information excised. This is to insuring that there will remain no possible (direct) data remaining of the specifics of the interrogation. This prevents the subject (or interrogator) from later viewing and discovering later that they took part this event.

So the question is, where is the harm? It is said that the act of torture degrades the torturer as well as obviously harms the tortured subject. This is in fact why the interrogator as well as subject are given the drug. Therefore with no physical or mental memory of the event, how do we locate harm to the subject? Without memory, is there harm? There is no consequence to subject (or interrogator) on which a harmful consequence can be attached. Where then is the harm located?

The only possible harm is the memory gap that remains. But memory gaps are common. About a decade and a half ago, I had appendicitis. Demoral was administered as a pain killer after the surgery. Intravenous demoral had the effect on me of preventing me from forming reliable memory of the event. Memory of small inconsequential routine days as little as a month or half a year ago fade. Human memory is not so precise that one can realistically locate as harm to an individual the loss of a half of a day in the eight to ten decades of average human lifespan. Couple that with national imperatives to solve crime, stop terror, or save lives by performing the interrogation and one has a consequentialist argument that leads one inescapably to the conclusion that this sort of interrogation is not only not harm, but an ethical good.

My suggestion is that this sort of thing is indeed actually unethical and wrong and that that there is no consequential argument that can be made against it. Therefore this can be posed as is an argument underlining a fundamental deficiencies of the consequentialism as a meta-ethical methodology.

Is this just logical nonsense? Perhaps, but I suspect the technology to implement such a program is not just a hypothetical suppostion, but that it could be implemented today, if a government so chose. That consequentialism is perhaps the dominant meta-ethic should therefore give us pause.

Comments?

I hear there are courses offered at B-school on this topic. This is odd, or a unfortunate sign of the times at best.

Business ethics are trivial. Two rules only.

1. Don’t lie.
2. Don’t steal.

Uhm, what isn’t covered in those two simple rules in the world of commerce? Why are there courses to teach how to do that?

Mr Schraub gets it very wrong, and I think on this point, he is not alone in this on the left. He (and others) love to jump on the property/marriage allusion. One wonders if that is a prime example of, to coin a word, a Vizzinism? (From, of course, the Princess Bride where Vizzini keeps coining the Dread Pirates advance as “inconceivable” and Inigo Montoya’s rejoinder is “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”)  But enough lexical silliness. To the point, Mr Schraub offers:

Property, in its simplest form, is that to which you have the right to exclusive use (and can correspondingly exclude others from). In a very real sense, that’s precisely what a closed relationship is: a mutual grant of exclusivity, reducing at least one element of another’s personhood to the level of property.

and connects that to notions about:

A lot of bloggers have taken apart the risible Dennis Prager’s sex advice column, in which he advises married women that they should have sex with their husbands even when they don’t want to.

So, what have we here simply put is that Mr Schraub connects the idea that the notion that a spouse might be advised to consent to sex when “they don’t want to” equates that same said spouse with property.

Property? No. No. And No. Let’s examine how this is in error. I should note, that I’m not arguing an anthropological point that no societies have treated their spouse as property. However, Mr Schraub is alluding in part to Jewish and Christian notions as suggested by his allusion to Mr Prager, which indeed I will argue these traditions support such notions as that which Mr Prager suggesting regarding sexual relations disregarding your personal desire at that time without any requirement or delving into notions of spouse as property, which is an assumption it seems that those on the left are amazingly quick to leap. Read the rest of this entry

Well, I just started reading Mr Rawl’s Political Liberalism … just starting to break into the introduction. And so far, I’m unimpressed. His writing is sloppy and careless, not that I really should complain, but this is a book by an Academic philosopher who should be more careful than an amateur blogger. However, of interest (for tonight) is this following excerpt quoted as the beliefs belonging to “comprehensive” as opposed to “political” liberalism. Three tenents are given, the second of each is the “liberal” tenet.

Is the knowledge or awareness of how we are to act directly accessible only to some, or to a few (the clergy, say), or is it accessible to every person who is normally reasonable and conscientious?

Again, it the moral order required of us derived from an external source, say from an order of values in God’s intellect, or does it arise in some way from human nature itself (either from reason or feeling or from a union of both), together with the requirements of our living together in society?

Finally, must we be persuaded or compelled to bring ourselves in line with the requirements of our duties and obligations by some external motivation, say by divine sanctions or by those of the state; or are we to constituted that we have in our nature sufficient motives to lead us to act as we ought without the need of external threats inducements?

It seems, I am not a “comprehensive” liberal because I view the latter in all of cases as fatally flawed. Let’s consider this case by case.

1. Is the upper floor of a house available to all or only to those who climb the stairs. Knowledge and awareness on a more than passing level is only available to those who practice and engage in self-examination and introspective thought on ethics and morals. That is not easy. It is not available to everyone for it is not reasonable to expect any more than a distinct minority to be conscientious. Thinking otherwise is hopelessly Utopian.
2. Well, my answer to this is a little more confused. Our moral sense and the “moral order required of us” is derived from external source (God), but alas, God (and our connection to Him, e.g., “made in His image”) is in fact human nature.
3. Well, as avidly and emphatically demonstrated by Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age, one of the major pushes by Church, State, and Academia for the last 500 years has been to civilize and make polite society. 500 years ago, the medieval Emily Posts of the Europe were encouraging the masses not to take a dump in the living room. We’ve come a long way, baby … but it hasn’t been easy or a fast road. The idea that politeness and reasonableness is “in our nature” is to deny and ignore so so so much of our history (ancient and modern) it isn’t funny.

Which movies and which individuals do I have in mind? I offer Roger Rabbit and Wall-E as a comparison and constrast between a secular and sacred (specifically Christian) Saints. I use the term ‘saint’ with a capitalized “S” normally to indicate a hero of the Christian tradition and faith. Roger Rabbit strike me for some odd reason as more a secular saint than secular hero, after all Roger represents virtues very much unlike those of Achilles, a more traditional hero. For reference, Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a 1988 movie mixing 24-frame animation directed by Roger Zemeckis featuring Bob Hoskins and a zany (a term of art) Roger Rabbit in a mystery story featuring murder, possibly adultery and of course intrigue. Wall-E is a computer animated PIXAR film which is less easily classifiable. I commend both as wonderful examples of some of the best of animated cinema.

Back in the day, in the 90s and when WFRR came out, I became convinced that Roger was saint, and at that time I was pretty much a secular fellow so it might be considered at that point that perhaps Roger is a secular not sacred version of the saint. Why did I consider Roger to be a saint. It is one of his lines in the movie, “I just want to make people laugh.” And that is indeed his (and perhaps all of “toontown’s”) mission in the movie. Bob Hoskin’s character is quite the sourpuss. Underlying the entire narrative is the “want to make people laugh” as a them. Spreading joy and enjoyment is the highest virtue, the highest calling from Roger’s (and the Toon communities) point of view. And for this, I considered Roger a candidate as a, secular, saint.

Wall-E too is a saint, but in a very different way. He is a hero of circumstance as well, but that just confuses matters. That is to say that while he is the person (or more accurately the intelligence) that is in the right place at the right time, making the right decisions which turns the human race around and saves the species. However that is not what makes him a saint in a Christian sense. What, for me, makes me consider Wall-E a portrayal of a saint is that seems to me connects more with some of the real Christian Saints. Wall-E is filled, seemingly ontologically, of a transforming grace. Characters in this movie, and while its been a while since I’ve seen it but I think this includes all of them except perhaps our villain(s), are transformed by Wall-E. You can identify (and likely they would be able as well) the change in them catalyzed by Wall-E. You can identify their character development with a watermark, identified by a ‘before-I-met Wall-E” person vs the “after-I-met Wall-E” person. An example of this might be the incendental contact he makes with one of the ship dwellers in passing who shortly thereafter finds himself noticing and interacting differently with his neighbor.

And this I think is a identifying difference between my perception of this sort of secular and sacred saint. The secular saint by effort and calling effects change in people in a conscious fashion. This particular sacred saint on the other hand, unintentionally awakens a fullness (or perhaps in a lest loaded “Eastern Christian term, a turning to their teleos or purpose) in those he contacts.

In a blog post, the YouTube crew has set up some new rules for "mature content".  They’re not banning it, but they are taking steps to ensure that folks don’t stumble into what they don’t want.

As a community, we have come to count on each other to be entertained, challenged, and moved by what we watch and share on YouTube. We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to make the collective YouTube experience even better, particularly on our most visited pages. Our goal is to help ensure that you’re viewing content that’s relevant to you, and not inadvertently coming across content that isn’t.

I just have to give the YouTube folks a big "’atta boy" for this.  Taking common sense steps to keep, not just porn (which they don’t accept anyway) but even "suggestive content" out of the limelight ought to be cheered when it happens.  If you really want to find it, you can, but if you don’t, you don’t have to sift through it.  This is especially true for kids; YouTube is a nice resource to have for many purposes, but it can be a minefield.

More like this please. 

Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C.S. Lewis & Aldous Huxley By Peter Kreeft / Inter-varsity Press

Back when I was in college, Peter Kreeft’s book Between Heaven and Hell was essential reading for anyone interested in apologetics. Now the book has been reissued in an expanded format. National Review’s John J. Miller has a fascinating conversation with the author on his book, how it was written, and why it’s just as revelevant today as when he first wrote it. Check it out.

In this recent post arguing for the converse of cogito ergo sum, two comments were elicited for which the response I felt was better promoted to a new post. Plus, of course, the ever present problem for the regular blogger is solved … that is on what to write? Two responses, not entirely unrelated by frequent commenter, the Jewish Atheist who first remarks:

Intelligent space aliens would discover i²=j²=k²=ijk=-1 but would likely have a completely different theology. Math equations are universal. Theological angel-pin-dancing calculations?

There are two problematic features of this response. The first is the (especially the first) Star Trek alien problem, that is all too often aliens are portrayed as humans in rubber suits. Their concerns, appearance, and their communications are all to often human with a small twist. JA elaborates:

People from different cultures on Earth come to the same conclusions about math. They differ on theology. This is because math is a formal system learned by humans and theology is just made up.Are you really denying that given an intelligent civilization elsewhere that they would almost certainly discover i²=j²=k²=ijk=-1? And that they would almost certainly have created thousands of their own theologies that bear only superficial resemblances to Earth’s theologies? If they had theologies at all?

This follows much the same vein. So there are really two questions at hand here. The first is how fundamentally immutable are mathematical truths and how much of our mathematical construction is human, or to coin it more poetically what parts of math are divine and what parts mortal? The second issue offered here is on the theological side. To put it bluntly, our interlocutor insists that theological ideas are “just made up” and specifically made up in a way that math (such as the Brougham bridge example noted earlier) is not. Read the rest of this entry

Tom Daschle is back in the news today. Oddly enough Mr Daschle’s name is linked in my noggin with a quote probably bugged me as the most wrong thing I’ve every heard a politician utter. There was some scandal he was defending another Democratic from and he said something like,

What X did was unethical and immoral, but it was not illegal.

This to me seems to get it exactly backwards and should not be used to defend anyone’s actions. Your actions should be moral and ethical … and its always a good thing if they are also legal. But if the two are at odds, i.e., the ethical/moral and the legal are not the same, we should always choose the ethical and let the cards fall where they may regarding the legal.

Cogito Ergo Sum, the famous observation of Descartes is today in modern circles thought nonsense. Centers of consciousness and awareness are increasingly found to be fuzzy. And even beyond that modern Physics has fuzzy notions of reality as well. What is real is not particles, waves, or quanta/wavicles but wave functions, complex probability amplitudes whose collapse is some magical, ahem, not-well-understood “measurement” process. So that which I perceive as “I” may be in fact something quite different. As Descartes considered, everything I perceive about my exterior world might be fiction and not trusted. But, consider for a moment that those modern researchers on mind and conscsiousness are right. That consciousness which I perceive as “I” is a fiction. That is, that the reality of that which I perceive is not to be trusted and even the focus point of consciousness that I think of as “I” is a likely fiction.

Yet what remains, as the ancient Greeks considered more solid, is the thought about which I, err, thunk. For example, that which William Hamilton famously carved with a non-real knife on a non-real Brougham Bridge, namely

i² = j = k² = ijk = -1

That! That is real. Those ideas, those notions can be transmitted, transmuted, and touched (by mind). The quaternionic algebra is a “thing.” It is real and unlike consciousness, electrons, or my perceptions is by its ontological nature … not subject to the same sorts of questions as one puts to notions of self or the world of my perceptions.

The Christian faith is based on ideas, ideas like Trinity (the relational nature of God), Sacraments, and Theosis. These ideas are in some sense, likely, more real than we are (and as well as real as the quaternion algebra above) and as Jesus demonstrated on the third day … those ideas are real in the sense that my lunch is as well.

From my “links” page, a response to the claim that “sore losers” are at work regarding claims of racism:

From sore winners:

People have to complain about the states that did go for McCain, claiming that all the white Southerners who voted for McCain were doing so merely because of racism rather than because they think Obama’s policies would be awful.

Nobody would argue that everybody who voted against Obama did so out of racism. However, when the old confederacy is pretty much the only place in the entire country that voted more Republican than last time, it makes you wonder. Unless you’re completely blind (willingly or not) to history.

One of the confusing things for me is the claim that voting against Mr Obama on the basis of race is racism and at the same time voting for him on the basis of race is not. It seems to me either both are or none is. If race is a valid basis to make a decision for a candidate … then that necessarily cuts both ways and that it is also is a valid reason for making a decision against a candidate. One claim on the Southern voting numbers is that a lot of those white Southern voters are Scots/Irish … and they voted more than some other regions for Mr McCain on account of ethnic heritage. But that is a little off topic. The salient point is if a decision by one person based on membership in group “A” is just (or unjust), then the particulars of membership in which group is not important.

The only argument that I’ve heard suggested that this claim that the logic works “both ways” is that one group is disadvantaged. That is is only moral to prefer one group over another if the group you prefer is disadvantaged. This apparently is very Rawlsian wiki cites the “2nd principle of justice” as:

Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that (Rawls, 1971, p.303):

a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle).

b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity

This is a statement which I’ve been mulling over somewhat recently. I can’t make heads of tails of it … especially the first part. This is described as a “principle of justice”. This connects with the above in proposing that the notion that one decision based on group membership is just if it is of benefit to the “least-advantaged” members of that society (which is read as connecting specifically with that group). That is specifically, Blacks in America have had a long history of suffering injustice and therefore on account of that they are entitled in this case to be located as “least-advantaged”. That being the case, according to this “rule” then it the logic is not reversible via the “difference principle.”

Earlier forms of justice don’t take the economic or status of an individual into account, hence statues of “blind justice” and so on. The idea there is that justice is meted out not according to your membership in group or your personal status (or lack thereof) but based only on circumstance, deed, and perhaps motive. I’m unclear on why abandoning this is a good idea or how Mr Rawl’s notion of justice connects with and can be demonstrated to be “superior” to a the the standard blind one.

In California, among the many state propositions up for a vote, one of the most heated is Proposition 8. In 2000, California voters passed Proposition 22, “which added a section to the California Family Code to formally define marriage in California as being between a man and a woman” (Wikipedia). In May of 2008, the California Supreme Court “ruled that the statute enacted by Proposition 22 and other statutes that limit marriage to a relationship between a man and a woman violated the equal protection clause of the California Constitution. It also held that individuals of the same sex have the right to marry under the California Constitution” (Wikipedia).

Enter Proposition 8. Here is the entire text of Proposition 8, as per the California Voter’s Guide,

Note that the California Marriage Protection Act proposes to add a sum total of 14 words to the California Constitution.

Opponents to the proposition claim that the proposition is discriminatory and that it takes away rights. One of the mantras chanted is “Don’t eliminate marriage for anyone.”

Yet, such thinking ignores the fact that the government does not sanction marriage for anyone. Typically, one cannot marry another person if one is already married to someone else. It’s also highly unlikely that a 6 year-old boy and girl would be granted a marriage license by the government. The same could be said for a 20 year-old man and 18 year-old woman, if they were brother and sister. What’s more, it’s highly unlikely that the state government in California would sanction a marriage between two adult men and four adult women. It would seem, therefore, that we already have a form of discrimination, with regards to who can, and cannot, get married. In other words, the government already eliminates marriage for some.

Have you ever stopped to consider just why the government has an interest in sanctioning marriages in the first place? I can tell you one reason that they don’t sanction marriages for… love. Nope. You’d be hard pressed to find any mention of love on an application for a marriage license. Whether or not two people, who wish to get married, love each other is really of no concern to the government.

Why is that?

It’s really very simple. The government recognizes, as just about every civilization since humans began, that the covenant of marriage is the foundation and basis for the family unit. The family unit, it turns out, is the basis for a well functioning society. And a well functioning society is something that the government is very interested in. When a male and female commit to each other, the natural and general result is a family (i.e., children). This is a process that has been the cornerstone of virtually every civilized society. This family unit by marriage commitment, it should be noted, is something that a same-sex couple is incapable of attaining by natural means. Note that as a rule, by nature, and by design (HT: Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason), marriage between a man and a woman provides the family unit which the government has an interest in regulating.

One last point to be noted is that the only “right” which same-sex proponents claim will be eliminated by Proposition 8 is the sanctioning of the government, and as I’ve shown above, this is not an inherent right. No other “rights” will be eliminated. Same-sex couples already have access to domestic partner health benefits, they already have the protection of employment discrimination laws, they can freely practice their lifestyle, etc.

So, why is there the need for Proposition 8? That, too, is simple. It’s because those that advocate same-sex marriage want not the right (which they already have) but the blessing of the government. By getting the blessing of the government, they wish to impose their behavior, as normalized, upon the rest of society – including those that would consider their behavior as wrong.

Advocates of same-sex marriage would have you believe that the issue is about intolerance. In that, they are correct, for the position they take is intolerant of any position that does not accept their behavior as normal.

Further Ref:

Jennifer Roback Morse

Stand to Reason blog

This morning I linked Brandon on the 5-d vs 2-d axis of morality used by the right vs the left in the divide we have in society. Brandon suggests, and commenter JA seems to essentially concur (and if he doesn’t I’ll hear about it right off I expect), that the purity axis is the most problematic for us “post-moderns” and that this notion is entirely rejected by the liberal. For context, the 2 axis for morality on the left is harm and fairness, and the 5 on the right are harm, fairness, in-group, authority, and purity.

But that doesn’t seem right to me. That is, I think the liberals in our midst say that they reject purity as a moral factor but in practice they do not.

What do we mean by purity? Brandon suggests:

To make a purity work as a moral category, you need the idea that people can exert a morally corrosive influence on another, and, even more, that you can be exerting such an influence, or be receiving such an influence, completely independently of any intention you may have or deliberate choice you may make.

Blue laws and other codes regulating behavior count among these sorts of ways we legalize notions of purity. For an extreme example, none right nor left, would condone public sexual intercourse or drug usage in places frequented by children. Why not? Could it be that this is a notion that this would be “a morally corrosive influence” intentional or not? Indeed it is. This is purity. This notion of purity is shared by the left in practice, but in rhetoric they deny it.

It might also be suggested that the left’s increasing sensitivity to more and more different notions of “harm” is a reaction to rejecting rhetorically and logically the other 3 axis of morality, including purity. In the context of such a lack, the remaining to “axis” need to be stretched and expanded to fill the logical gap provided by the other.

This is the 2nd and final part of my analysis of an open letter from Anne Rice. Part 1 was posted yesterday.

Abortion

Anne Rice spends most of her letter covering this issue, and she starts with an assertion that, to me, shows a lack of consideration of the history of the issue.

I want to add here that I am Pro-Life. I believe in the sanctity of the life of the unborn. Deeply respecting those who disagree with me, I feel that if we are to find a solution to the horror of abortion, it will be through the Democratic Party.

Ms. Rice does touch on these historical issues lightly later on, and I’ll hit them more in-depth then, but even looking at how the abortion issue generally falls between the parties today, I don’t see this as making sense. What I hear from Democrats are things like John Kerry with this sentiment:

I completely respect their views. I am a Catholic. And I grew up learning how to respect those views. But I disagree with them, as do many. I can’t legislate or transfer to another American citizen my article of faith. What is an article of faith for me is not something that I can legislate on somebody who doesn’t share that article of faith. I believe that choice is a woman’s choice. It’s between a woman, God and her doctor. That’s why I support that. I will not allow somebody to come in and change Roe v. Wade.

If one’s commitment to Christianity should be “absolute”, as Ms. Rice has said, there is a big problem with this statement, that is generally the line religious Democrats use when talking about abortion, and that is the canard about legislating one’s religious faith, or sometimes call ramming one’s religion down your throat. Civil rights are very much a moral issue, but does Sen. Kerry have the same problem with legislating that? No, he’s very willing to impose his view on KKK members, and rightly so. It’s right, it’s moral and it’s the law. Legislators all throughout our country’s history, and more so in our early history, based many of their decisions partly or mostly on their religious faith. This excuse is disingenuous.

Read the rest of this entry

The following is a repost of a blog post I wrote over a year ago (August 23rd & 24th, 2007) during the presidential primary season.  It was in response to an open letter by the author Anne Rice on her personal web site.  Ms. Rice is the author of the Vampire Lestat series of books, but, after returning to the Catholic church in 1998, stopped that project. 

I’ve searched her web site for the letter in question and cannot find a page that has it archived, although many of her other writings, going back to 1996, are on there.  It was copied and posted on other forums, including here, so you can read along at home.  (Warning: This is a link to the right-wing Free Republic web site.  If you fear cooties emanating from there, turn back now.)

I think the issues covered in this endorsement of Hillary Clinton for the Democratic party nominee are still relevant now, especially how it relates to Christians, how they can and should work through the political process, how Ms. Rice believes her choice of party advances that, and where I disagree with her. 

It was originally posted in 2 parts due to its length, and so it shall be this time. 

This is one of my longer posts, possibly the longest I’ve done on the blog. What happened was, I was reading an open letter from a Christian planning on voting a particular way, and as I read further and further into it, one objection after another kept coming to my mind, and one problem after another regarding the writer’s reasons kept getting in the way. Finally, I realized I’d have to just set aside some of my typical day-to-day blogging of the link-and-quick-comment type, and go in-depth into the problems I see with the author, and Christians in general, who vote Democratic for specifically Christian reasons, and especially regarding the social issues brought up in the letter. Pull up a cup of coffee and sit back.

Anne Rice is a Catholic author. I’ll admit to not being too well-read, but as a Protestant my knowledge of Catholic authors is even more limited. Therefore, I’m not sure how much Ms. Rice’s views are mainstream Catholic, although whether or not they are really isn’t the crux of this post. I do want to discuss the views she espouses, and espouses quite well as an author. That she is a Catholic and I am a Protestant has really no bearing on my criticism of her recent public letter dated August 10. I know Protestants who would agree with her on these issues, so this is not a denominational thing. She professes Christianity, as do I, and we have very similar goals, as far as I can tell, on the topics she discusses, and yet we’re voting differently. Ms. Rice wrote a lengthy letter to her readers on her main web site (no permalink so don’t know how long it’ll stay on the front page) about why she is endorsing Hillary Clinton for President. The reasons she lists for that endorsement, to me, run completely counter to her list of important issues and goals. If she is truly concerned about those goals, I don’t follow her endorsement, nor the endorsement of other of my friends and acquaintances of any Democrat in the current group. I want to address the inconsistencies I see in this post.

Ms. Rice starts out with her Christian and Catholic creds, which I respect and am willing to accept. She talks about how, while the separation of church and state is a good idea, the voter does not have that prohibition, and in fact must consider their vote based on their religion.

Conscience requires the Christian to vote as a Christian. Commitment to Christ is by its very nature absolute.

I agree wholeheartedly. But, she also correctly notes, we have only 2 political parties in this country. (She believes, as do I, that a vote for neither Democrat or Republican, whether it’s a non-vote or a vote for a 3rd party, is essentially a vote for one of the two major ones, no matter how you slice it.) In short:

To summarize, I believe in voting, I believe in voting for one of the two major parties, and I believe my vote must reflect my Christian beliefs.

Bearing all this in mind, I want to say quietly that as of this date, I am a Democrat, and that I support Hillary Clinton for President of the United States.

And that last clause is where the disagreement begins.

Charitable Giving

The first paragraph of explanation deals with giving.

Though I deeply respect those who disagree with me, I believe, for a variety of reasons, that the Democratic Party best reflects the values I hold based on the Gospels. Those values are most intensely expressed for me in the Gospel of Matthew, but they are expressed in all the gospels. Those values involve feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison, and above all, loving ones neighbors and loving ones enemies. A great deal more could be said on this subject, but I feel that this is enough.

First of all, neither the religious right nor the religious left have a lock on charitable giving. At the same time, as was noted on this post regarding a study by Arthur Brooks, conservatives outgive liberals by quite a significant amount. How does this relate to how the political parties differ in their view of the government’s role in this? Ms. Rice, I believe, falls into a trap by simplistically equating the advocacy of government charity with Jesus’ admonition to the individual to be charitable. Democrats say the government should give more, so by her reckoning thy are more in line with her Christian view. However, it has always made me wonder how when Jesus tells me, personally, to be charitable, that somehow this means that I should also use the government to force my neighbor, under penalty of jail, to be “charitable”. I put “charitable” in quotes because when there’s force involved, there’s no real act of charity. How Democrat Christians get from point A to point Z on this boggles my mind. Another statistic from Brooks’ study brings this point home; People who believe the government does not have a basic responsibility to take care of the people who can’t take care of themselves are 27 percent more likely to give to charity.

On top of this, the bureaucratic inefficiency filter that we’re all forced to funnel our “charitable” taxes through siphons money away from the needy, as does the massive fraud that goes on in a big government program that has little accountability.

Conservatives believe that forcibly taking money isn’t charity, and that it is not government’s role to rob from Peter to pay Paul, and that the way the government handles this creates dependency and causes further problems, like giving fathers a disincentive to stick around. Because of this, conservatives give more of their own money to local charities where the administrative costs are much lower. The Republican party, the current home of most conservative political ideas in this country, purports to support these goals, and while they don’t always follow those principles, they have done better at this than Democrats. An expanded role of government in the area of giving to the poor is not the best way for that to happen, and as a Christian I believe it’s not moral to force others to give when they don’t want to. Again, Jesus asks me to give; He didn’t ask me to force others to.

Ms. Rice, in ticking off a laundry list of values, seems to be falling for the framing of the issue that Democrats have put forth; welfare = caring. There are other ways to care, which can have much better results.

Part 2 tomorrow.