Good links
Raithere
Cheating's okay in this one. We do need a foundation for a structure to examine.
But there are matters of interpretation to consider: the interpretation, for instance, of the Secular Humanism affirmations, makes a huge difference. Consider this
Free Inquiry article from the website:
There are American states in which Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists who kill their children by denying them lifesaving blood transfusions or other medical procedures can escape the consequences of their crime by pleading "freedom of religion." Currently, thirty-nine states' civil codes include religious exemptions from child abuse or neglect charges, while thirty-one allow a religious defense to a criminal charge. In a study of 172 child deaths where medical treatment was withheld on religious grounds, it was found that 140 children would have had at least a 90 percent likelihood of survival with medical care.
The 1996 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) did not include "a Federal requirement that a parent or guardian provide a child any medical service or treatment against the religious beliefs of the parent or guardian." A senator from Indiana and a congressman from Pennsylvania, both Republicans (so what else is new?), have actually argued that parents have a First Amendment right to withhold medical care from their children. Even in those states where homicidal child neglect is prosecuted, defendants are allowed to offer the jury a defense based on sectarian beliefs not held by other religions. Why?
The author has done a good bit of framing in the first two paragraphs, leaving a few
a priori notions standing.
- There are American states in which Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists who kill their children by denying them lifesaving blood transfusions or other medical procedures can escape the consequences of their crime by pleading "freedom of religion."
This is not entirely an objective or provable statement. We might even invoke Obi Wan Kenobi: it depends on your point of view. To illustrate, another weak premise of an article that I'm reading as I go .. these are merely the first critical flags that pop up, that I need to follow up on throughout and after the article itself, as such.
- Even in those states where homicidal child neglect is prosecuted, defendants are allowed to offer the jury a defense based on sectarian beliefs not held by other religions.
And here I turn to a trusty reference:
- The Dictionary.com definition for
homicidal points back to the definition for
homicide, which in turn points back to the word
kill, and here is where we start to see a problem.
In order for child neglect to be "homicidal", it has to be undertaken with the intent to result in death. This would be the equivalent to Sparta, leaving a child on the mountainside to die.
However, what we see with the "homicidal" child neglect of religiously-persuaded parents is a different issue. The parents aren't setting out to intentionally
kill the child.
And, while I pass no judgment on the article in general, I digress now to explore certain ideas related to the larger point I've dragged this topic through.
Now, first off, though such disclaimers should be unnecessary, I do find the withholding of medical care from a child for religious reasons to be somewhere well-ensconced in the "wrong" end of the spectrum. But for reasons that should be obvious in my increasingly-nihilistic arguments, what I actually think of such parents and the results of their actions is irrelevant to reality.
I question the use of "homicidal" and "kill" by the article author one the grounds that they are politically-charged summary words, words offered in lieu of a dispassionate recital of the facts. People in general have a gray zone about the difference between active killing and allowing someone to die; the broad ethical and moral implications of prohibiting one from "allowing someone to die" include tackling world hunger and all manner of social ills that many people have already surrendered to the "necessity" of. And people in general, observably, aren't as anxious to do this as I would hope.
It is a strange gray zone, I admit. Superficially, it seems like an easy call, but for some reason it's not.
But consider, as vague juxtapositions, abortion and "rights". As it is, society places tremendous trust in parents, and also tremendous responsibilities. But the child has no "rights". The decision to terminate a pregnancy seemingly must come down to the woman's choice unless we want to rewrite America; nowhere in the Constitution does it say that children come first; rather, it says in the Declaration that all people are created equal, and the evidence suggests strongly that people find
this idea highly impractical. Children have no Miranda rights; children haven't the right to defend themselves against forced psychiatric adjustment; children's rights are invested in the parents. The best children can hope for is equality; there is no guarantee of security for a species' most important resource.
So as cold as it seems, the factual status is simple: the author is slanting the article with insupportable terminology to color the point.
However, the question for me becomes,
Can the author, or secular humanism, or free thought, or (whatever) show me the progression from A to B in such a manner as to establish a fundamentally-objective case supporting the interpretation of such acts as "homicide" or "kill(ing)"?
And yes, in the literary and poetic, I
would use words like
homicide and
kill to describe the choice of the parents to withhold medical care; I would even go so far as to use the word
torture, but in terms of Secular Humanism, I wonder how the literary and poetic reflects against the affirmation:
- We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.
I, for one, see at least the appearance of a conflict.
And you know, I'm not actually out to hold it against the article, the author, or Secular Humanism.
But there is no difference between the author's use of the words
homicidal or
kill and the religious anti-abortion protester's use of the word
murder--it's all in how you look at it.
I understand that Secular Humanism wishes to "nourish reason and compassion" (
see "Affirmations"), but I find the early leap to "homicidal" and "kill" anything but. It is, to me, as pretentious as any other, so at the superficial consideration, I'm left wondering how Secular Humanism will achieve any better a result if it's prone to this brand of consideration.
But it's not as if this constitutes a rejection of Secular Humanism. Over time, perhaps, I will build from such ideas the chain of logic that moves from A to B, and perhaps I will find an objective truth somewhere in it. While the former possibility is considerable, the latter would be a great surprise.
I know who I get along with; but I can't say for sure that I, or they, or we are right.
Elsewhere we would call them presuppositions or even accretions, and that's what they are: what criteria makes it "homicidal"? I'm quite sure that, no matter how much I might agree with those points, they will be subjective.
Since further reading might address some of these points, I should really be about that part of it. But the issues were strikingly apparent at first glance ... maybe I just caught a crappy article from a decent author on a bad day. I don't know. More data is required ... but in the meantime, I hope to illustrate that there is a degree of presumption that must be considered before certain degrees of progress can be achieved.
And the cheap-shot would be to say that at the outset, it appears that Secular Humanism is no more effective than anything else at suppressing the anti-progressive portions of the human psyche, but given the early stage of these considerations, it would be a very cheap shot. Probably cheaper than
Dumb and Dumberer.
To the other, if the cheap shot turns out to be true, what can really be said to criticize? That these are human beings, and they're not perfect? Oh, heavens ... how dare they! But that also becomes part of the point: we're humans, and we screw up in certain ways, and if we can get enough people to acknowledge such simple "realities" we might be able to have a progressive societal debate over what to do about our human foibles. And that wonderful Universal Declaration of Human Rights gets in the way of obvious "solution" ....
Or something like that.
But is it fair--in the abstract--to stake such opposition as the article author does on presuppositions? Isn't that what religious folk with their religious delusions do? And isn't that part of what many people object to about the religious folk?
:m:,
Tiassa