Talking values

By: robert 3/15/2005 4:14:16 PM (Comment On This Article)
A lot of post election punditry says that the election was "values" driven and that for that reason Bush won. One even suggested that the Democrats would have to return to Sunday school. So, what is it with values? How is it that a president that has lied, supported unscrupulous profiteering, shred the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, arbitrarily broken treaties and has set this country, which was born in a fight against imperialistic tyranny, on the road to being an empire itself, can be elected on the basis of values. I suggest it is due to a massive disconnect between religion and moral values. It is always precarious to base a value system on myth, no matter how strongly believed in. The risk is that the myth will come onto conflict with reality and drive a society to destruction in the face of reality. With this in mind let us examine just one of the values of the Christian Right and fundamentalist Catholic religions. Other examples may follow in subsequent posts.

Anti-abortion.

At root the opposition to abortion lies in the belief in a soul whose existence is totally unverifiable. This leads to the belief that the minute a sperm enters an egg a human being is created. In fact this is absolute nonsense. It is, at best, to mistake the potential for the real. Yet as we have seen, some ideologies possessed of this belief are willing to kill real human beings in promotion of their belief, and the president they support has led a massive killing spree against innocents in Iraq. So much for the right to life.

Reality-based values, following the natural progression of fetal development might require a scaled system of legal decision making in which it is acknowledged that the fetus is not a human being, but the mother is and that her well being is paramount. Furthermore, it is clear that population growth cannot go on unchecked without profound detriment to the meaning of life and the planet that supports us all. How does the value of birthing every fetus stack up against preventing a world in which violence is a rampant quest for diminishing resources and in which no one would want to or could live? These are the real choices and it is clear that the Christian ideologues insistence on birth at any social cost is nothing more than a religious belief and not a human value. It is imperative that we focus on real human beings in the context of the real world if we are to have values germane to human welfare.