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Originally Posted by GoddessJess
I remember in H.S History something about the seperation of church and state..now I could be wrong because history was after lunch and well I wasn't always 100% after lunch (haha) but as I grew up I kept hearing this phrase...but if America was founded on the seperation of church and state and if America was founded to get the hell away from European dictatorship and religion then why in sam hell are we still pulling laws from the bible?? And wha gets me is the selectivity of it all...we shall pull the Marriage Equlaity from the bible or laws such as te one stated in the previose posts....but when it comes to people that break laws lets just house them and pay their way...screw the fact that the bible says an eye for an eye...
I'm an all or nuthin gal...don't tell me I have to live with Jesus's followers and thei idealistic country based on religiouse beliefes and then tell me I cant shoot someone who killed one of my family members...
On the island where I grew up thats what happens..we don't have jails or overcrowding...if you kill someone we kill you back...if you rob someone you then have to support that family for 10 years.
Polotics is a bunch of shananagans(sp?) and a crap ton of lies...I hate it! and yes I vote!
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Hmmm...I'm not sure that we want to return to a society wherein if you shoot a member of my family, I kill a member of your family. In the Balkans there are interfamilial feuds that have been going on so long that there is no longer a single person alive who has even ever met the originally aggrieved party. Someone's distant ancestor did something to someone back in the early 18th century whose family took their vengeance. The family of the perpetrator, though, felt that their family member was justified so they took their vengeance. This continues on until such time as we get to, say, WW I where atrocities were spread around quite liberally. Two decades later people are still getting their revenge during WW II. Then the Cold War happens and things get squashed until the Soviet Union collapses at which point Bosnians, Serbs and Croats take up their historical feuds again. This latest round of atrocities are just fuel for the next group of feuds. As one British biologist put it "The human mind has two great sicknesses; the tendency to carry vendetta across generations and to view people as groups and not individuals". As convoluted as our system of laws may appear to be I'll take that over the system where feuds and dueling were considered reasonable ways to resolve disputes.
I'm curious, what would you replace politics with? Given that we are very diverse societies where your enlightened self-interest may not be in complete agreement with my enlightened self-interest, what other system other than politics do you suggest?
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Originally Posted by iamkeri1
Dread
I so agree with you regarding reality based politics. This lack of reality at least on the part of the republicans is a direct outgrowth of bible based politics. The world was created in six days by god - four thousand years ago. Nothing happened 125,000 or a million years ago, so we can not use information from that long ago for comparison, BECAUSE THE WORLD DID NOT REALLY EXIST THAT LONG AGO!
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I think our problem is as deep if not deeper than you state. We have a stone age brain, using a set of moral precepts created in the early agrarian period, to handle problems of modern societies. I was thinking about your post on my drive to work this morning while listening to a chapter of a book where the author was talking about worldwide demographic changes brought on by technology. What follows is dove-tailing off of both.
Take a look at our sexual mores. There is no more poignant example of the mismatch between our biology, our religiously based moral and ethical systems and modern reality. Our bodies are operating off a program where we enter puberty around 13 or 14 on the expectation that we'll become sexually active and start having babies. For all but the last 100 years that program has worked very well. Our moral systems, conceived when agriculture was relatively new and birth control was, at best, inconsistently effective, assume that people will only be sexual inside of marriage, that women will have lots of children and spend most of their lives taking care of those children, that men will control property and resources and relationships will only end because of death. Yet the lives of most of the people reading this thread have not fit that pattern and for those of us who have kids or grandchildren it is vanishingly improbable that our offspring or descendants will have lives that approximate that pattern. From gay marriage--which makes perfect moral sense in our current moral context where any *necessary* link between sex, marriage and reproduction has been broken--to our laws about abortion or birth control what is taken as the default moral position is horribly out of date. The average age of marriage in the industrialized world is now creeping up toward thirty but people are still entering puberty around 12 - 14. It is simply unrealistic that people are going to spend the next two decades being celibate, it isn't happening for vast majorities of people. Nor does it make sense for two 20 year olds who are both undergraduates to start having children until both of them have *at least* gotten a bachelor's if not an advanced degree. We need to retool our laws and moral expectations to reflect reality. The problem is that we can only do this with a stone-aged brain that will tend to be more in agreement with our Bronze Age religious systems than with our modern lifestyles.
Cheers
Aj