In a current thread on the morality or otherwise on the Pagan practice of infanticide, frequent, objecting commenter BB gives us a summary of a common prejudice of our time:
BB, 69: ” The fact that we no longer blindly accept discrimination based on the justification of freedom of conscience or freedom of religion is a good thing. Freedom of conscience and freedom of religion were historically used as justification for many acts of discrimination, including the subjugation of women and the ban on interracial marriage. How can we be certain that some of the discriminations now justified using freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are not equally unjustifiable? ” [emphases added]
The presumption of discrimination and implication that religiously motivated or linked views are to be regarded as generally lacking warrant so suspect, needs to be firmly answered. Especially, given the context of recent discussions in this blog on warrant and degrees of certainty as well as on moral truth and knowledge. Where, it turns out that our entire thought life and context of arguing, debating and even quarrelling pivot on known duties to truth, right reason, prudence, fairness, justice etc. Where, when such reaches a court room or a legislature, moral government of reason emerges through duty to justice, best summarised as the due balance of rights, freedoms and responsibilities under law.
Accordingly, I responded:
KF, 72: BB,
Do you see what you imply:
>>The fact that we no longer blindly accept discrimination based on the justification of freedom of conscience or freedom of religion is a good thing>>
This is first a dismissal of already offered grounding of moral truth and knowledge, as well as obvious refusal to seriously ponder already linked discussions that lay out legal, genetic, socio-cultural, ethical etc evidence and argument. In effect just on your sneering dismissal, we are invited to hold that once someone’s conscience and duty to God and to truth, evidence, right reason, prudence, fairness etc are at odds with your politically correct notions, agenda or imposition, such must be swept away as blind without further consideration. Moreover, this implies targetted religious discrimination on the presumption that religiously motivated or linked views can never be reasonable or responsible, being presumed to be empty, blind adherence to myths and superstitious prejudices. Given abundant and readily accessible evidence to the contrary (e.g. cf. a 101 here on in context), such is of course, plainly turnspeech, toxically loaded projection on your part.
Sorry, it does not work that way.
And, again, we see directly from you further evidence of just how far wrong our civilisation is going today.
So, that you are by your own admission blind and deaf to the shipwreck shoals ahead, we have good reason not to take your objections, dismissals and sneering at the despised, stereotyped, scapegoated religious other seriously. Save, as evidence of deep-rooted, conscience-numbing hostility.
This already explains the immediate context, an exchange on the Abortion holocaust:
BB, 63: >>Banning pederastry in Ancient Greece would have been considered a radical agenda. The Civil War was fought over the radical anti-slavery agenda. Banning child labour was the result of a radical agenda. Allowing women to vote was the result of a radical agenda. Allowing interracial marriages was the result of a radical agenda. Allowing blacks to sit at the front of the bus was the result of a radical agenda. A five day work week was the result of a radical agenda. Not jailing homosexuals was the result of a radical agenda.
The point I am making is that today’s radical agenda is often tomorrow’s concept of a just society.>>
KF, 64: >> the first established evil of our day, the central cancer sending out metastases is the holocaust of our living posterity in the womb. 800+ millions in 40+ years, mounting up at about another million per week. This has utterly corrupted our views, values and institutions until we now have the passage or attempted passage of laws to essentially abort children during child birth . . . >>
BB, 65: >> I am very comfortable with the direction civilization is heading. Abortions are on the decline, the more mysogenystic and homophobic aspects of religious doctrine are being questioned, and many of those doing the questioning are the religious people themselves. Discrimination under the false color of religious freedoms are being confronted. Violence is on the decline. Tolerance is on the increase. Infant mortality is low, life expectancy is high, education and healthcare are available to more and more people . . . >>
KF, 67: >> your response unfortunately is revealing. For example, would you have been comfortable to hear that the rate of the holocaust of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc was lower than previously? The issue is not rates (and about a million more victims per week globally cannot reasonably be deemed an acceptable rate), it is that we have distorted our civilisation and law, benumbed our consciences and are enabling the mass killing of our living posterity in the womb under false colour of law . . . >>
BB, 69: >>KF
For example, would you have been comfortable to hear that the rate of the holocaust of Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc was lower than previously?
I would definitely be comforted by that information if it was true. Wouldn’t you?
The issue is not rates…
When attaining zero abortions is a completely unattainable goal then
rates are critical. If you saw a train load of Jews heading to a
concentration camp and you had the opportunity to save only two of them,
would you not do anything because rates aren’t the issue? >>
The issue, of course, is always justice and in a civilisation full of democratic polities we are not trying to hide one or two Jews to save them from the SS and the death camps. We are dealing with the implementation — under false colour of law and through manipulating and warping media, perceptions, institutions, professions, courts, parliaments and more — of a holocaust that dwarfs the Nazi holocaust and even the Communist one. Likewise, under similar false colour, we have undermined and warped marriage, family and personal identity (destabilising the foundations of stable society) — notice how X-phobia is rhetorically used to imply that objections to such are invariably irrational [contrast the lack of serious engagement of say this on conjugal marriage and this on claimed genetic determination of sexual habituation and linked attitudes as already linked], and are now setting out on definitively pushing conscience and religiously link-able moral principles beyond the pale of the Overton Window into the zone of the despised other:
Indeed, we have set out on the path of undermining moral truth and moral government. Which implies, undermining of responsible, rational thought and freedom itself.
Therefore, I think it relevant to highlight the exchange as above. END
PS: Has any law against murder, theft, rape etc been able to reduce the incidence of such crimes to nil? Would that inability warrant us in simply regulating or trying to regulate the rate at which such happen? (It seems to me that, fundamentally, we are dealing with those who have so dehumanised our living posterity in the womb that they are desensitised to the implications of taking unborn children’s lives at will, now literally to the point of birth. If that is not an example of the real, destructive slippery slope in action with benumbing of conscience and media-amplified marginalisation of principled objections on some convenient excuse or the other as the acting ratchets, nothing is.)